A taste of development

Betterest Efforts. That is what you pay off when you render to post internet video. Its absolutely unsufferable to see to it anyone , anyplace that a video you or any Contented Delivery Network hosts will be capable to be delivered at the tantamount quality of any TV show being transmited today.

There is a reason why Contented Delivery Networks live. They survive because the internet is a betterest efforts medium. The internet will e’er be a betterest efforts medium, if only if because of Last Neutrality. If all bits are made and delivered on an adequate basis, and so there is no way to be certain that the bits gestating your TV show will be delivered with any Quality of Service assurances.

For some reason, every Internet bigot out on that point appears to cerebrate that there is some charming bullet that will heal this problem. There is a reason why Cable companies expend so much money on equipment and engineers to make up certain that your favourite TV show renders up when you interchange the channel. Those same engineers do everything they peradventure can to do certain that you make that show at the eminentest potential picture quality. Delivery is not just now about bandwidth allocation, there is an unbelievable amount of engineering that gos in catching TV signals to your screen. It dos work because those engineers command the signal end to end. Its deterministic, not betterest efforts.

Its for this reason I have changed state forth from the internet as the future of entertainment and am centered on Digital TV, whether its delivered by a satellite, telco or cable company. While its dependable that the companies proffering TV oft tread all over themselves and reach things far more hard than they should be, all of the existent innovation is happening on the Digital TV side of the ledger. Why ? Because its a stable, deterministic platform. (more…)

Jerry (no blog) has been evidencing us all about a process they use for consensus  [link from Michael ] building in some standards meetings… evidently the Quaker vote is treated everyone voting on each item as one of:

a) Prefer
b) Can accept
c) Can’t live with

The idea being that fair people will more rapidly come to a decision with they realize what people are unforced to permit and not. Looks interesting.

Several of us in my group are plumping off to do some architecture planning and I intend we will have lots of challenges around consensus – we may have to assign this to the test.

Relating Posts:
Implied tags in the IE HTML parser and how that can be interesting.
Case-Shiller index forms the bottom of the housing market expect more removed
Which Side of the Foresightful Tail Should You Initiate On?

How’d you like that for an opening up title? Did it seize your attention? Hell, your studying this far so I hazard it did. The book I’m riveting on hither is Work up Your Own.NET Language and Compiler  and delight, don’t click the link and so run purchase it. I don”t care about the 50 cents worth of referral money I’ll get if you do. I wouldn’t yet advocate the book if I paid off 50 bucks of referral money (good, money talks, so mayhap I would).

The book startles out with the basics of parsing and even expressions and all that jazz. But the extent of the code is a bunch of screen shots. We are droping a line a parser/compiler dang it, we aren’t WYSIWYGing our way through life at this point, you have to render some existent frigin code. What you terminate up with is a bunch of screen shots of many tools for droping a line a compiler, but not truly the code, unless of course you proceed snap up the CD and come out all of the code without a lick of explanation from the book. God I go for the code is good documented with comments, or you simply bribed an issue of Compiler’s Instanced and this isn’t the Swimsuit edition. I’ll let in some of my ain links at the bottom, where I present factual code for many of these processes.

OK, so you pay off to meet a bunch of tools, and what do you pay back? Well, you produce a bunch of half-assed tools (good-for-naught for the language if your kid is learning my highly technical blog… In fact, if he/she is I could utilize some interns, must typewrite 50+ WPM and be technical at C, C++, or C#). A numerical expression evaluator is the first. I conceive it is ever the first. People e’er trivialize math. Thence make sure enough you view all the pretty pictures and render to harvest some wisdom from the text. I have a numerical expression evaluator by the way, it’s sent for calc.exe and from what I can assure it has shipped since 16-bit windows. He as well makes believe an attempt at a even expression workbench. You can’t have enough of those (really I’m not being sarcastic hither, I constantly apprize a newfangled regex tool), but and so he ne’er spells anything or manifests compiler technology that utilises veritable expressions. Does he come in NFA/DFA technology? Well, he does discuss it for a few sentences. BNF format? Over again a few sentences hither and in that location. But await, another tool is what you get under one’s skin and this time it is a picture of a drop-downward menu with all sorts of truly teasing names (convert from BNF to XML, exhibit a BNF parse tree, display arranged docs, etc…). At this point use one of the pages to get the drool doing off your lip, because that is as near as you’ll make it this book to anything nerveless.

(more…)

Taking “On Going a Leader” has been really interesting, more often than not because it intimates that a central differentiator of leaders is the vision that leaders allow for, while others are contented to be aimed. Interestingly I have been passing a lot of time at work stressing to see what I should be stressing to do… I have been taking a lot of people to strain and infer what my role should be, but alternatively I should have been specifying my vision. Coincidently enough I’ve been working a vision document around developers as a core customer base…

Thinking about my career path is interesting. I began software development in grade school. I indited a math quiz program that we used for about 1 day in class. I composed some interesting stuff in mediate school; Snake Bit, a Nibbles clone – although at the time I was cloning Snake Byte, an Apple II program, and a GUI environment… although I may have indited that closer to high-pitched school… In high-pitched school I settled that I was geting into architecture and carryed several classes. Finally I made up one’s mind that I passed more time configuring and reading AutoCAD than I was learning about architecture, so I made up one’s mind to carry on down the software course.

I have fermented a bunch of fastfood/retail jobs, but the one of interest for this story is Waldensoftware. When I went out they had just been corrupted out by Electronic Boutique (at present EBX). It was interesting to view a brick and mortar bookseller like Waldenbooks execute a software store… anyhow, more on that later – the interesting note is that it was at Waldensoftware that I started talking with lots of software people. At the time Waldensoftware was a fairly book pointed store, so we let lots of factual developers in. Hither I encountered Jim Flippin. He was a steady customer.

(more…)

Microsoft’s prescribed support website is http://support.microsoft.com/. It has all kinds of resources like product FAQs, downloads, searchable KB articles, newsgroup pointers, and ways to hit people to help with your single needs or feedback.

Alas, I can’t consecrate attention to single customer issues. That’s because I work in product design and development, not customer support. Someone has to be revolved about that, or else we’d ne’er embark anything! Then, I’m moving to have to entrust your questions and comments to MS’s prescribed channels which specialize in that. Please preserve comments you put up hither worldwide and about the loader or performance.

Also see: Bloggers in the Mavs Locker Room ?

WPF’s MediaElement makes simple media playback pretty straightforward, but moving beyond the simple scenarios can sometimes raise surprising challenges. For example, I recently saw someone tripped up by the MediaElement when attempting to play several sounds concurrently.

As you’ll see, one solution would have been to use MediaPlayer instead of MediaElement. The difference between these WPF classes is fairly straightforward. MediaPlayer is the class that knows how to play media files – both video and audio. MediaElement is a wrapper around MediaPlayer that provides a simple way to connect it into a visual tree (i.e. a user interface), which in turn lets us hook it into things like the animation system or event triggers.

(Note: do not be misled by the class name. Although WPF and Windows Media Player depend on the same infrastructure for media decoding, the MediaPlayer class is not a wrapper around the Windows Media Player control. While they share codecs, the path by which decoded video gets onto the screen in WPF is significantly different from Windows Media Player.)

How would that get you into trouble when using MediaElement? If it’s a wrapper around MediaPlayer, surely you could use a MediaElement any place a MediaPlayer would work? In fact it’s not always that simple. To see why, we’ll start with a simple example.

One MediaElement

(more…)

Also see: The influence of style upon methodology…

I just noticed that the good folks at Pixel8 posted a podcast I did with them a while back.  It was a fun conversation about a bit of.NET history as well as where we are going. 

Landing Page   Download show

I’d love the hear what you think!

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/15/brad-abrams-pixel8-interview-podcast-posted.aspx

Also see: New Assembly, Old .NET (and Vice-Versa)

Also see: Debugging an InvalidCastException

Also see: Spring Web Flow features and feedback request

Got asked about a roman numeral parser during an interview. I have to say that I don’t mind when the process of obtaining employment plays into my strengths. The process was quite similar to a previous process where I wrote a spoken numerics converter. Not only that, there were many similar qualities to my int parsing routines. With that in mind I think I did fairly well. The goal at the time was to produce a routine to validate numbers up to roman numeral 30 or XXX. Didn’t take long, but in the end, I had left out many different validation techniques. I really wanted to revisit the problem since I had the code correctly written in my mind. Check the algorithms out, they should handle just about anything you can throw at them at this point. If you find issues, please feel free to submit your problems, since I’d love to solidfy things a bit more. Apparently roman numeral parsing has great application in reading dates.

Roman Numeral Parsing: Code Only: Bidirectional roman numeral parsing. [EDIT: Added alternate parsing routines and performance fixes]
Integer to Spoken Numerics: Code-Only: int/long/double conversion to Spoken Numerics
Phone Number to Words: Trying my hand at the old Phone number to Words teaser project!
Integer Parsing: DWC.Algorithms.NumberUtilities

http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers/archive/2004/10/24/247032.aspx

Also see: Trust Microsoft with Claimspace (my response pending)

With a simple extension method to ControlCollection to flatten the control tree you can use LINQ to query the control tree:

public static class PageExtensions
{
 public static IEnumerable<Control> All(this ControlCollection controls)
 {
 foreach (Control control in controls)
 {
 foreach (Control grandChild in control.Controls.All())
 yield return grandChild;

 yield return control;
 }
 }
}

Now I can do things like this:

// get the first empty textbox
TextBox firstEmpty = accountDetails.Controls
.All()
.OfType<TextBox>()
.Where(tb => tb.Text.Trim().Length == 0)
.FirstOrDefault();

// and focus it
if (firstEmpty != null)
 firstEmpty.Focus();

.csharpcode,.csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode.rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode.kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode.str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode.op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode.preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode.asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode.html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode.attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode.alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode.lnum { color: #606060; }

(more…)

Also see: The NCAA and the Hoosiers

I try to follow a coding standard for organizing my using statements. System.* goes at the top and then other namespaces grouped together like this:

 using System;
 using System.Collections.Generic;
 using System.Configuration;
 using System.Data;
 using System.Data.SqlClient;
 using System.Web;
 using System.Web.Script.Services;
 using System.Web.Services;
 using System.Web.Services.Protocols;

 using Microsoft;
 using Microsoft.CSharp;

 using MyCompany;
 using MyCompany.Web;

.csharpcode,.csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode.rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode.kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode.str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode.op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode.preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode.asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode.html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode.attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode.alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode.lnum { color: #606060; }

(more…)