Well, Erin and I got married on Saturday. Its such a relief to have
that day over with, it had been consuming so much of our time, and its
incredibly stressful in the days leading up to it. The day was
tons of fun, its much more fun to be at your own wedding rather than
someone else’s :). We’re leaving tomorrow afternoon for two weeks
in Germany, I’ll blog little posts when I get the chance from internet
cafes or the hotel lobbies, see ya!
If this internal criticism keeps up, recruiting is going to get more difficult.
Scoble always says that Microsoft is looking for great developers all the time,
but has problems getting enough of them, and if the next generation of developers
loses touch with corporate Microsoft and flocks to Google (which, ironically, has
the same properties that used to attract people to Microsoft) Microsoft could potentially
be in a bit of trouble, and no amount of AOL stock or reorgs is going to help.
So I came into work today, and I
had a new voicemail. I’ve only been at Magenic for a little over
a month now, so I haven’t gotten a voicemail until today, honestly, I
haven’t even set up the greeting or anything. So I entered my phone
password to check the voicemail and it said that I had 7 new messages
and 1 new voicemail. I was kind of confused, I mean whats the
difference between a message and a voicemail? So I listened to my
new voicemail, deleted it, and then the phone said that it was going to
give me my 7 new messages, at which point it started to read my emails from the exchange server to me!!
I mean, how cool is that!? It did a pretty damn good job of it
too, I was following along in Outlook for awhile and it didn’t miss
much, it even recognized acronyms and spelled them out rather than
trying to prounounce them as a word. Maybe this is old stuff, but
I’ve never even heard of it, so I was pretty impressed. It stuff
like this that makes your day 
I found this firefox extension, Flash Block,
the other day and its fantastic! It replaces any flash item on
the page with a small “Play” button, when you click the button, the
flash item gets enabled. Its great because it retains the flash
items size, so the pages don’t get all screwed up, but this way you can
avoid all those annoying ads and selectively show the ones you actually
want to see.
On the front page of VS 2005, there is a window that contains a news feed.
This feed is simply an rss feed from Microsoft with news about visual studio in
general. If you look in the options of VS, this feed is customizable, which
makes VS a really simple news aggregator, for one feed :) Its kind of cool
to see your own blog inside of VS though, here’s a screenshot of my VS startup window,
with my blog as the news feed. And below is a screenshot of the options page
where you can customize the feed url:
God, I was crying and sobbing because I was laughing so hard at work
when this article came around on an internal mailing list, ya know,
that kind of laugh where you’re trying your hardest to not laugh
because you’re at work, whew, good stuff……..
I think the PDC is a great thing and all, and I’m certainly jealous of
everybody that gets to go, it sounds like a blast, but is it just me,
or is all the blogging about it a little nauseating? I can’t even
count the number of blog titles that I’ve seen that go something like
this “Microsoft Announces LINQ project……”. I especially like
the people who write these posts a day or two after its been announced,
when the first person who posted about probably did it from their
laptop within a good 30 seconds of the announcement, and another couple
dozen in the minutes following. With the advent of blogging
becoming such a high visibility information stream, the PDC blogfest
must be a marketers wet dream……..
Based on this forum thread,
you cannot programmatically set the View (or ViewGuid) on a Document
Library in Sharepoint. I’ve been having a hell of a time trying
to do the exact same thing that the guy talks about, but based on the
response from the Microsoft employee, it cannot be done. Dammit.
I can only hope that this post helps someone else out before they go
effin’ crazy.
I’ve recently been introduced to Sharepoint here at work. I must
say, I’m impressed with the out-of-box features. Lists, forms,
custom fields, reporting, filters, document storage, etc. are all great
things to have, and the user interface is excellent if you’re using IE
and it degrades gracefully if using firefox (you lose a lot of cool
dhtml though 
).
Something that I wanted right away was a custom workflow engine.
Basically when list items get created, updated, or deleted, I want to
be able to inject my own rules engine that can execute custom business
rules based on the action. Suppose I have a list that represents
bugs in my software product and I want a new task to be created in my
Outlook whenever a bug is added to the list. You can’t currently
do that with the standard Sharepoint lists. Now, there is some
built-in functionality. There is the notion of “alerts” whereby
you can subscribe to receive emails when items are added, updated, or
removed from the lists, but thats rather simplistic. I don’t want my
inbox filling up with junk, I wanted a task to be created! All I
really want is programmatic access to those same “alert” calls, just
give me a simple “ItemAdded”, “ItemUpdated”, etc. events on the list,
it can’t be that hard to do as Sharepoint already supports sending me
emails! (I can’t believe that I just used the phrase “it can’t be
that hard to do” cause I HATE it when people say that shit)
After scouring the internet, I have come to accept that it cannot be
done. I’ve heard that this is a feature that is coming in a
future release of Sharepoint, which is good to hear. The
interesting thing to note is that there is a special type of list in
Sharepoint called Document Libraries. These are essentially lists
of files that you can upload into Sharepoint. These lists DO have event handlers.
Not only do they support insert, update, and delete events, they even
have move, copy, check-in, check-out, and cancel check-out.
Another interesting tidbit is that the class that represents these
Document Libraries in the Sharepoint API, SPDocumentLibrary, inherits
from the plain old list class, SPList. The SPList class contains certain properties that define what code to run
for these events that Document Libraries expose. So you have an
instance of the SPDocumentLibrary and you can set these properties so
that your custom code can execute for the given events. Guess
what happens if you try to set the properties for just a regular SPList
instance: NotSupportedException. Fantastic. They were so close,
but alas, we will wait for a future release
When Google Maps was released,
people raved about its interface, myself included, and on their
stunning use of dhtml to give the user a very rich experience.
However, there is one part of their interface that annoys the hell out
of me. I’m a big fan of tabbing through the form elements on a
page, I find it easier than using a mouse, and you never know if
pressing the ‘Enter’ key will submit a form or not. In the case
of google maps, after you enter an address into the textbox at the top,
you would think that pressing the ‘Tab’ key would bring focus to the
‘Search’ button directly to its right, but you would be wrong, the
focus goes to a little, tiny link for “Help”. Every single time I
go there I always end up trying to tab to the button and then realizing
that its not gonna work for me. Its the little things I guess 
