Channel9 has a nice video of Scott Garvey, a Microsoft Smart Client Evangelist, talking about what’s a smart client and what’s not. Scott also discussed some examples of smart clients, e.g. eBay for "power sellers."
For me, things boil down this way: if it’s something I’ve got to spend significant time in, I really want it to be a smart client, otherwise I’m going to get frustrated. For example, Outlook Web Access is great for occasional use from any PC under the sun, but if I’m using it for more than 5 minutes, I’m guaranteed to press a hotkey like Ctrl+A and get nothing like I expect, forcing me to find my laptop so I can get some real work done in Outlook.
According to Rich Salz’s reading of the WSDL 2.0 spec (Rich makes a living selling hardware to make XML smoke, so I think he knows), the following is legal WSDL 2.0:
As I think I've said before, as the capabilities of our UI platform expands, programmers are going to need to know a lot more about user experience and graphic art. Towards that goal, I offer a recent post on Slashdot that provides advise on how programmers can bone up for the latter. Anyone got any ideas about the former?
Eric Lippert an SDE somewhere in the VS05 effort describes ZBB:
“Zero Bug Bounce (ZBB) day is the day on which, even for a single instant, every bug in the database is either (a) postponable to the next release/version, (b) fresh — discovered within the last 48 hours, or (c) not fixable right now.”
My question is, why not count the bugs in the last 48 hours? Are those somehow less valid than the bugs found 49 hours ago? And what’s with 48 hours itself? Why not 36? Or 72? Pathetic product team wannabes wanna know!
Business Desktop Deployment Framework: all you’d ever want to know about deploying Windows in an enterprise so that you’ve got a suitable platform on which to deploy smart client applications
Since the Smart Client DevCenter now has a Content Strategist (me), expect to see regular releases of articles and samples exploring smart client-related technologies, including but not limited to Windows Forms, the Compact Framework and Visual Studio Tools for Office.
And don’t hesitate to send Jonathan or me your complaints and suggestions. We don’t put this site up for our health, you know; we do it for you!
I love the idea of outsourcing to rural parts of the country because a) I like keeping jobs in the US if possible (although I’m not a protectionist by any stretch of the imagination), b) it gives the under-employed more choices and c) it’s another step toward my dream employment environment.
I see a future where people are listed like books on Amazon with ratings, reviews, descriptions (aka resumes), prices and availability, to be placed into a shopping cart to form ad hoc project teams based on the needs of the project and not on the locale of the participant or something as restrictive as “employer.” I admit that I this article is only a small step and may not even be in the direction I’m hoping for, but as I’d like to live in a rural area (central Oregon) and still get to do interesting work at reasonable pay, I’m more than happy to read into things.
I really like giving short little vignettes imagining an audience; I didn’t think I would
The preparation for recording a screen demo is the same as a real demo, i.e. I want to make sure I know what I’m going to demo before I do it
The preparation does not include lighting or another person to run a camera or a microphone, which means that I can do it on a whim at 5am on a Saturday morning
My built-in mic at normal speaking volume works great
Capturing a particular screen doesn’t work very well because I’m likely to move between windows without knowing that I will ahead of time. Instead, I should capture a region of the screen, ideally something not too large so that it fits well in a video window
Medium quality may not be good enough. I did 13 minutes at medium quality, which resulted in a 3MB file and good audio, but the screen itself was nearly unreadable. Maybe the screen itself was too big?
Stop other apps before capturing a screen, otherwise you’re bound to get slowdowns in the capture, particularly in the audio
Talking in my kitchen at normal volume for 13 minutes will waken my wife (sorry, sweetie)
So, while I wasn’t happy with the results, I’m very jazzed about the medium. Expect to see more.
