I was passing a young, blue-haired photographer-ess who said the following to a gentleman she wanted to smile for a picture:

“Just think about Martin Fowler dry-humping my leg.”

I find I like the Ruby crowd : )

Am I the only one that find it ironic that an online paper on the merits of a new way to format text for online reading doesn’t use the technique it advocates?

The *free* Portland Code Camp is just around the corner on May 19th and 20th at the Vancouver WSU campus. Personally, I’m looking forward to the Chris Bilson talk on adding PowerShell support to your app, George Clingerman on 2D graphics in XNA (maybe it’s time to port Wahoo!?) and Stuart Celarier on NDepend. Register today!

Lutz has ported some of his .NET code to use the Silverlight 1.1 alpha, which includes the mini-CLR (or whatever we’re calling it these days : ). Enjoy.

I submitted the final manuscript for Programming WPF, 2nd edition, by Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells to O’Reilly and Associates this morning for publication. Of course, there’s stuff still to do (today we hit step 8 of 18), but this represents a major milestone in the life of any book.

I have mixed feelings when I finish a book. The last few have been especially intense, as I have a real day job on a Microsoft product-team-to-be, so it’s just been evenings and weekends. With this much work to do, you have to focus hard and the work becomes a part of you. This means that giving it up is also hard. My boys are just now becoming teenagers, so it’ll be a while yet before they leave home, but I imagine I’ll feel the same kind of melancholy I feel now — happy to see something you’ve put so much of your life into make its own way into the world, but hard to have the cord cut.

On average, I’ve been an author, co-author or a “with” on 12 books over the last 12 years. At one time, I had open contracts on four separate books. This book represents my last planned book. I’m now truly an empty nester.

So, what’s next for me in this new phase of my life? Well, I’ve already started some stuff. A couple of weeks ago, I started a little gooey shell for monad (I call it “gonad”  : ). And last Friday, I started private piano lessons (a blast!). I’d like to pick up my other hobbies again, too, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what my other hobbies used to be…

This was an email I sent to Glyn Griffiths, the final external reviewer on the WPF 2ed book before we submitted the final manuscript for copy edit and publication (and which has been posted here with his permission):

Mr. Griffiths, in chapter 7, you had a couple of comments about what happened in the 1ed of the book vs. what we’ve got now in the 2ed of the book. The first such comment was:

“The first edition of the book had ‘…selected by going backward and forward…’ which I think is better. [ed: as compared to ‘selected back and forward’]

“This is one of several instances I’ve found of improved wording in the first edition that seems to have been lost in this one. Is this because work on the second edition was started using a text base that was earlier than the final version of the first edition?”

To answer your question, the post-copy-edited version of the 1ed is in Framemaker. Apparently, ORA does have a process for getting Word documents out of Framemaker for just this reason, but I didn’t know that, so we started with our pre-copy-edited 1ed Word documents when we started the 2ed. Since so much of the 2ed prose is different than the 1ed, this doesn’t concern me overmuch, but it’s worth avoiding for the 3ed.

And now here’s my question: how the hell do you know what was in the 1ed at this level of detail? Have you memorized it so that you can do a diff in your head? Do you have it open in front of you so you can compare? I can’t imagine what powers you possess to be able to make comment such as these, but I’m happy to have you use them for good and not evil.

P.S. With your kind permission, I’d like to post your comment on my blog so that others may have a greater understanding of where Ian gets his monster intellect.

Scott came over to my house and we made up a topic (“Software: The Last Fifteen Years and the Next Fifteen Years” in two parts), but it’s really just an excuse to talk to each other and have a good ol’ time. Have a listen.

P.S. Sorry about coughing they weren’t able to edit out. Alergies…

If you haven’t already heard about Microsoft’s new high fidelity, cross-platform application development platform, you just haven’t been paying attention. Silverlight is the new name for WPF/E (although it’s still XAML-based) and does some *amazing* things.

And, if you can wait just a little while longer, you can read about Silverlight in Programming WPF (available now in Rough Cut format and for pre-order from Amazon) in an appendix by my friend and yours, Shawn Wildermuth. Shawn’s been doing a ton of Silverlight work lately, including doing a bunch of Silverlight presentations for Microsoft, so he knows of what he speaks.