This is what Don Box’s 12-year old son thought a good last minute costume would be when trick-or-treating the Indigo halls of Microsoft suddenly seemed an imperative. I guess this is the consequence of having a life-sized cardboard cutout readily available…

Don Box
Personal Email
Tue 11/2/2004 6:12 PM

When I first read about MaxiVista, the thing that really got me interested was that it gave me two things that I really want from my Tablet PC. The 1st is to be able to use a slate-only Tablet as a 2nd monitor for my laptop so that I can continue my addiction to keeping my whole life on a laptop, but still be cool like the other kids (I’ve so far avoided multi-monitor setups because I love my laptop too much and I was afraid of the conflicting addictions).

The 2nd thing I get is a result of the first, i.e. if I’m going to use the Tablet as an adjunct to my laptop, then I shouldn’t worry about a generation sometime in the future where Tablet convertibles can replace my laptop, but just get the best slate I can find and enjoy it as a remote viewer/editor of info via file sharing and terminal services.

If you have a device you’d like to turn into a 2nd monitor and you don’t yet have MaxiVista, Scott Hanselman’s posted a 30% off MaxiVista coupon.

Mark Levison of Databeacon talks about the first commercial-grade .NET No-Touch Deployment application to be deployed over the internet (at least, as far as he and I know). I asked Mark what his motivations were for using a smart client instead of a web app. These were his reasons:

1. “Integration with Desktop – export to excel, word, send to mail recipient, etc.
2. “The user never has to wait for a round trip to the server. Once the application is up and running everything is done locally, the user is never left waiting by a suddenly slow internet connection.
3. “Our application gets a full blown window with its menu and toolbar, we’re not stuck inside of IE.
4. “Uses the clients CPU do all of work. Our application is graphically and sometimes computationally intensive, if we did all of this work server side, we would eventually run into scaling problems.”

Congrats Mark and Databeacon. This is but the beginning of much greater things to come.

NOTE: I don’t know if this was exuberance at making the instructions for running the sample easy or not, but you should absolutely not “[u]se the Microsoft .NET Framework wizard to grant full trust to trusted sites.” Trusted or not, you should not award any code any more permission than it needs. For instructions on how to build an MSI setup for configuring a NTD client for just the right amount of permissions until you can use ClickOnce (which handles permission elevation much better than NTD), you can read this article on the topic.

My Windows Forms partner in crime, Mike Weinhardt, pointed out to me this morning that the Windows Forms team has posted their way cool Windows Forms 2.0 samples, including:

• Design Mode Dialog - Mike Harsh
  This is a sample dialog component that allows any form to go into “design mode” at runtime. This component highlights the new, easy to consume, designer infrastructure APIs in Whidbey and has the same usage pattern as other common dialogs.
• Stock Quote Chart Generator - Joe Stegman
  This app uses the sample asynchronously polls a web service for stock quotes and charts the results over a customizable time period.
• MSN Messenger Clone - Scott Morrison
  This is a Windows Forms app that emulates the functionality of MSN Messenger.
• Internet Explorer Clone - Joe Stegman
  This is a Windows Forms app that looks like Internet Explorer 6 and uses the new WebBrowser control.
• Windows Forms RSS Portal - Joe Stegman
  This is portal type application that aggregates RSS feeds asynchronously.
• Outlook 2003 Clone - Joe Stegman
  This is a UI front end that has the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook 2003.

It was very cool to see into some of the internal MS product team processes:

• How ASP.NET 2.0 is moving through it’s final throes
• Testing ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer
• Some terminology collected across different teams
• A real, live bug triage meeting

This stuff is very cool because even internally, if you’re not on a product team or if you’re on a different product team, it’s useful to see what other product teams do.

This just makes you want to drop everything and sign up for a product team, doesn’t it? MS is hiring…

It started off innocently enough. I corrected Tom when he tried to put down words like “pils,” “Rome” and “trool,” even giving him a letter or two to help him make his words (he’s only 9, after all, and this was his first game of Scrabble). Then, I ran out of ideas and we needed long words to get into the empty spaces, so I put down with “faxer” (someone who faxes). After that, it was all down hill into “roddy” (someone with a lot of rods), “naped” (the flip of hair across your forehead), “soapic” (very soapy) and, my personal favorite, “oifbath” (good for sores on your skin), all the time fighting to keep a straight face.

However, when I busted Tom for putting down “zin” (“double” in “Tom language”), he started pointing the finger at “trux” (Latin for multiple vehicles), looked it up in our unabridged Webster’s (I’ve got to get rid of that thing…), called his mother to double-check and the whole thing came falling down around my ears. My visions of Tom in his 30s calling me from a party complaining that “glev” wasn’t actually a kind of rock have been dashed.

Still, while I am proud of my son for catching onto to my “creativity,” luckily there are all kinds of other, more subtle lies that I’ve told him that are set to trigger in my retirement years, sure to motivate him to call, even if only to curse my name. : )

I just got an email from Netflix letting me know that they’re lowering my monthly fee from $22 to $18. The only thing vaguely "marketing" about is that they used $21.99 and $17.99. There was no upsell. There was no limitation of service at that new lower price. There nothing additional I had to do to get the savings. When's the last time you got that kind of service from a vendor? I love Netflix.

125 attendees and speakers from 6 countries (US, Canada, England, Malaysia, Netherlands and Peru), 21 states and 60 companies, ranging from vendors to expert practitioners and even a few poor souls trying to learn XML. 24 hours of talks and events spread over two days. 44 bloggers and 247 blog entries about the event itself (not including warm-up to the event or my own blog entries), nearly all of which were over-whelmingly positive, including one eWeek piece and one entry from Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems that called me “a charming, welcoming, amusing guy.” (I didn’t pay him a cent, I swear! : )

 

In general, day 1 was dark and brooding, shouldering the brunt of the vendors who knew the technology inside and out and were feeling the pain of the downsides that they felt were holding them back. Day 2 was filled with hopeful stories of practitioners able to take what the vendors have given them, mix it with for their own secret sauce and really make it shine.

 

My very most favorite talk was Whitney Kemmey from the DOD with his unexpectedly captivating look at mixing XML with 10-year old technology and his endless submarine pictures, although Jeff Barr from Amazon continues to mesmerize me every time he takes the podium. Also, I really dug Doug Purdy’s enthusiasm and forthrightness. Oh, and when Neetu Rajpal shut down Don for derailing her talk, I fell in love.

 

Inexplicably, the DevCon seems to just get better and better. I blame it on the community willing to listen to a variety of sources to hear what’s really going on, some of it good and some of it that needs some work, whether it’s from professional speakers or nervous amateurs, for-profit vendors or seasoned practitioners. Thanks for letting me participate.