danielwoolston.com

I’ve been working my way through All 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1 while coding. During tonights episode, Avenger 2.0 (season 7), I caught a glimpse of some fly by code and had to share. The premise of the episode is that they’re building a software virus to spread throughout the universe. I found it funny that the code that Major Carter was feverishly white boarding is simple filewriter code that could easily be copy/pasted from the web. Is it sad that I did a quick code-review of the content?

I’ve been a pretty faithful user of youtube, but lately there’s been buzz about vimeo. So I’ve uploaded the same source video to both sites for comparison:

YouTube:

Vimeo:

Private Lessons with Coach Joe from Dan Woolston on Vimeo.

Many thanks to the crew of Apollo 11! 39 years ago today, our country landed a few brave souls on the surface of the moon. Lets hope their endeavors were not in vain and that courageous, adventurous humans will continue to seek out the last haven of longevity - space.

or brilliantly insane:

So I’m reading the news one final time before bed and I come across this article about Russia claiming that there is no need for the United States to have a missile defense system to protect against Iran as they consider that threat ‘unlikely’. And how ironic that the ‘Breaking News” topic deals directly with their statement.

So yeah..Russia is full of crap. Except for my friends from Russia..they’re o.k. Everything else…crap.

I’ve been demo’ing my side project to a few friends lately and I’ve managed to impress a few of them with the flash component of the site. Its a key component to the overall ’selling’ point of the application and I really can’t say much more than that out of fear that one of you endeavorous types might run with the idea despite the patents pending. I’m anxious to begin posting details of the upcoming beta, but I have to restrain myself.
I did however want to mention to my fellow dot netters that working with flash and building a client side interface has really been exciting. Sure there were times that I sincerely hated Flash and anyone associated with it. And there were times when i just wanted to quit the project entirely. But I made it through and reflecting on what the application has become leaves me with a sense of gratification that only a software developer can know.
I was able to build a pretty detailed information pipeline between Flash, JavaScript, Ajax to server side C#. JSON became my bestest buddy for a good chunk of the work and fortunately for me, JSON parsing isnt that big of a deal in ActionScript 3.0. I was quite pleased at how smooth the process became.

In hindsight, it would have been an awesome experience to build my component with Silverlight, but I’m pretty sure that it would have taken me twice as long to get the results that I have with Flash. Not because Silverlight isn’t as powerful as Flash, but the support organization and availability of Flash help, tips the scale in their favor when factoring in adoption. I can build something in Flash quickly, knowing that a majority of the issues that I’ll face have been dealt with and blogged about before. With Silverlight…not so much. Maybe next year, after the project has launched beyond Beta and things calm down, I’ll recode the Flash piece into Silverlight but for now I’m pretty happy with it just the way it is.
After launching to Beta, I’ll return to the blog to discuss the Flash/.Net interaction process. Soon my friends…very soon.

*yawn…so tired…lets make this quick….*

I thought I’d pop back on to the site to let everyone know that I’ve not forgotten the blog.
I’m insanely wrapped up into my side project right now and I’ve been throwing an ungodly amount of time and attention into it. I can’t really say much about it, except to say that we hope to change the face of youth coaching across the country. And we’ll do that with software. Thats the mission statement of sorts and it really does sum up what we hope to accomplish. I’m hoping to see a beta release early summer with a limited group of users and then roll out to production before the fall hockey season kicks off.

Balancing this with a full time job, 2 kids (1 of which starts summer hockey tonight) and a gazillion other hobbies is not easy. And fortunately I’m not alone in my endeavorous activities.
I found that there is a huge community of developers out there, actively pursuing another level of coding and contribution well outside of their normal 40 hour work week. And thanks to twitter, I’m able to talk with them and follow their struggles and achievements on a daily basis.
If you’re not using Twitter, you really are missing out. Its microblogging and in the I.T. world its responsible for bringing together and enabling a very large community of coders to communicate, bond and contribute. Its AA for geeks but in 140 characters or less.
If you do sign up (www.twitter.com), add me at www.twitter.com/danwoolston

As I launch Beta for the side project, I’ll be sure to pop back here to brag about its features and hopefully pick up some feedback along the way.

O.k. I’ll admit it. In the past I have been known to bad mouth SharePoint sites for their sheer lack of style and web 2.0ishness. But seriously people..this product is coming around. Many devs/analysts out there still picture a SharePoint site as being your stock intranet MSFT blue portal:

 While its functional and great for intranet, the stock portal is not a good fit for a public facing website. And the cool thing about Sharepoint is that you not only have the integration and content management points of the API, but with a little talent and patience, a skilled designer can really deliver a top notch product:

So if your SharePoint site is ugly…its your own fault.
Thanks to Lawrence Liu (www.twitter.com/LLiu) for posting these awesome examples of what SharePoint can do when approached with an open mind!

I’d love to see more examples of outstanding SharePoint implementations, so email me or drop a comment!

-dan

I wanted to throw this out there to those of you who haven’t dropped into Microsoft’s Learning portal in a while:
There was a time when I really thought that the MSFT Learning site just plain sucked. The content was old and crusty and the interface/searching was clunky. But I have to say that lately its been pretty cool. The paid courses aren’t that bad for pricing (compared to AppDev) and to be honest..There is a lot of free stuff in there. For instance…Currently they’re running free access to the 3.5 Framework and Visual Studio 2008 courseware. This is 6 hours of video that they typically charge for but currently is free. Once you’ve activated it, the license will last for a year.
So head over and dig through the site. Learn something. New skills pay bills.

-daniel

Just finished the 1st of 4 videos on Sharepoint 2007 For Developers, available for free at www.dotnet-u.com.
This first hour was an overview of sp topology and security by Joshua Carlisle and it went pretty well. It was a pretty fast paced webcast that was seriously drinking from the firehose. I did come away from the video with more questions to investigate and some tasks that I’d like to accomplish on my own with Sharepoint. I have a Win2k8 vpc with MOSS2k7 ready and configured (basic config) that I’ll be using in the next few days to follow along with the various resources that I’ll be diving into. I really wish that I had a virtual environment to reproduce a small enterprise setting. A dedicated sql ’server’, a sharepoint web ui server, a dedicated sp services server and even some BizTalk for good measure. Its been my experience that 90% of the headaches are in configuration and I’d really like to start nailing down a variety of configured installations at home. Any ideas?
Tomorrow I’ll be moving on to the ‘Whats New’ Video as well as the ‘Core Concepts’ webcast. I’ll then return to my Microsoft Learning path to begin .doc and clinic expedition.