The Martin Schray Way

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Association of University Research Parks (AURP) Annual Meeting.  Microsoft was a sponsor of the meeting and I was one of the speakers.  It was a fantastic experience.  I was able to talk to a number of people involved in both the academic and commercial side of research parks. 

My talk was on the future on computing.  I choose not to talk about thousands of processors and terabytes of memory, but on the current discussion of Software as a Service (SaaS).  Interestingly (to me at least) as a prepared for the talk I thought that application as a service might be a better description of what SaaS is.  I also talked about the emerging trend of platform as a Service (PaaS).  I talked about SaaS and PaaS from the context of Microsoft Software + Services (S+S) strategy including Windows Azure.  My talk should be posted on the AURP web site soon.  I believe that companies:

• will choose (on-premise and hosted) by business needs, comfort levels, government regulation, ROI, privacy policy and IT governance standards
• will have BOTH (on-premise and hosted) models with a combination of on premise software as well as applications and platform as services (e.g. S+S)
  

As part of my talk i covered Microsoft BizSpark a global program that deepens Microsoft’s support of startups and organizations that support and nurture startups by providing: Microsoft software (development and production licenses), support and visibility.  There was a noticeable level of excitement that Microsoft was providing a program geared to help startups and their support network.   

I stumbled across a set of simple, short and informative Silverlight Beta 2 Release 2 videos.  They start with the assumption of no Silverlight knowledge and do a good job of building your skills and knowledge from there.

http://www.mtaulty.com/SLVideos.html

Alfred Thompson has a post on his blog pointing to some great getting started resources for Silverlight.  I have been thinking about spending some time with Silverlight and it seems these resource are just the tools I need. 

 Reinforce It V1.1 Launched

The Applications

I still love a good desktop application especially if I wrote it.  Bits and pieces of this application have been floating around on my hard drive for a while.  The zip file containing the install .MSI file can be found below.

What is Reinforce It!?  Its an application that sits in the system tray and flashes a reminder (via a toast window similar to Outlooks).  The intervals between the reminders and the reminder message are configurable.  Why the name Reinforce it?  Maybe you want to remind yourself to take a break and do some stretching (avoid carpal tunnel) or sit up straight (good posture) or even smile (show your natural friendliness). 

Download Reinforce It!

I packed the application using a Visual Studio Setup Project.  The link below contains the .MSI file to install the application as well as IronPython source for the application.

Download Reinforce It V1.1

The Technology

C#, IronPython and .NET 2.0

This application was as a learning experience and experiment of sorts.  I had C# libraries I developed to handle the message display as well windows state (minimize, hide, restore...).  I was using them in other applications.  I wanted to build the window forms applications using IronPython.  I learned a lot about IronPython in the process.  I compile the application into an exe.

The UI

1. The System Tray Icon and menu

2. The message display window

3. Configuration window

Special Thanks

I want to thank Clint Rutkas.  His blunt feedback on my (awful) UI design (not sure it qualified for the term design) really helped make this initial version far more usable and robust.  I also leverage Clint's cool delayed startup project.

Miscellaneous

Video showing how I created a Visual Studio Setup Project for Clint's delayed startup project.

IronPython CodePlex Project

My VB 2005 Book

This coding 4 fun post (Coding 4 Fun link) points at the VB 10 teams blog for 10 hidden VB 9 gems.  What are they?  Here is the list, but check out the article...

0.) Multi-targeting (e.g. target .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5)

1.) Type inference (e.g. VB automatically figures out the type you are using so you don't have to say Dim blah as Type you can just say Dim blah)

2.) If Operator (e.g. you could use the C or C# compact if format - Dim intE = if (intA = intB, intA, intB) so an if else in a single line

3.) Object Initializers - imagine being about to create an object and set a block of properties using .with all at once...

4.) Nullable - basically value types (int, float) are not able to be assigned null values

5.) LING to Dataset - You can use LiNQ to query a dataset

6.) Syntax tooltips - a picture is worth a thousand-ish words

7.) XML Namespace support in Intellisense - if you import an xml schema you get intellisense for it

8.) GoTo Type Definition - new context menu choice allows you to GoTo the definition of a type (not the declaration of the variable)

9.) Type inference for loop variables - loop control variable is inferred while within a loop

10.) Performance improvements and ... Non-blocking operations - speedy background compiler providing immediate feedback