I had my first on 10 experience today (I was following the links to the PhotoSynth stuff) and I have to say, I instantly fell in love with Laura Foy. I know that Erica Wiechers (of The .NET Show and MSDN TV) has a huge geekboy fan base (and it was fun to work with her @ MSDN), but Laura’s interviewing style and her personality made me subscribe to her interviewer-specific RSS feed on 10.

In fact, Laura makes me wish I did something besides developer-related stuff. What do I have to do to be interviewed by Laura Foy?!?

P.S. I wanted to title this blog entry “Laura Foy is a major babe,” but Laura is a fellow Microsoft employee and that would be inappropriate. Also, the whistling and cat calls would be way out…

Imagine your vacation photos displayed in 3D and linked together, both around a space and zooming in and out. Now imagine everyone’s photos linked together in this way. What you get is PhotoSynth:

• PhotoSynth Demo and Overview Videos
• PhotoSynth architect interview on Channel9
• PhotoSynth on 10

Worth checking out.

Folks are having enough issues with their Qtek 8500 phones that they’re starting to want to trade them in on IMate Smartphones, which are the same HTC hardware but different software. Issues include (for me):

• phone not ringing on all incoming phone calls
• phone not providing notification of pending voicemail
• heavy bluetooth interference
• fuzzy pictures

Yesterday, I used Stork’s instructions to turn my Qtek into a Smartflip and have not had any of the problems except for the bluetooth interference.

The real problem is that, unlike with PCs, phone hardware manufacturers don’t actually support their phones. If I buy a Dell, they’ll provide BIOS and driver upgrades. If I buy an Qtek, they send me to the cell provider for a fix who, of course, doesn’t have the Qtek 8500 on their list.

With the flexibility of phones these days, they’re just like pocket-sized PCs and there’s a lot more innovation going on with them then with my PC right now. I used to get excited about my new laptop; now I get excited about my new phone. However, this situation about who you’re supposed to buy phones from and get support from is completely messed up and needs to change.

This spoof on Microsoft’s college recruiting practices was recorded long ago (back with the XBox was new), but it has recently surfaced again, so I thought I’d share. Enjoy.

I just realized that Avalon is getting a book treatment unlike any other topic in my memory:

• “Essential WPF,” by Chris Anderson, architect on the MS WPF team
• “Applications = Code + Markup,” by *the* Charles Petzold
• “WPF Unleashed,” by Adam Nathan of ”.NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide,” *the* book on .NET interop and the correspondingly wonderful pinvoke.net.
• “Programming WPF,” by Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells. Ian’s depth of knowledge of graphics — down to the hardware — continues to amaze me.

User and GDI had Petzold. Win32 had Rector. MFC had Prosise. COM had Box. Indigo’s got no big names I’ve yet seen, but Avalon gets Anderson, Petzold, Nathan *and* Griffiths?!? It’s going to be a bloodbath in the market, but the readers are going to benefit. Why couldn’t I have picked a lightweight topic, like, oh, I don’t know, ASP.NET 2.0? : )

I have to say, I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed Portland Code Camp yesterday. I had planned on skipping the sessions (except my own), instead monkeying for Rory as my entertainment, but that went out the window when I got there and saw the session list. I very much enjoyed Scott’s PowerShell presentation (Tab completion and PowerShell Analyst — wahoo!), as well as the RoR meta-programming and IronRuby sessions, but easily the best talk I saw was Jeff Berkowitz’s Poker Bots for Fun and Profit. The set of legal, ethical, technical and algorithmic issues he covered as awesome. The coolest thing I learned about was the Poker Academy, which is a poker tutorial program that lets me build my own poker bots to test my strategies. Fabulous!

My own session was co-delivered by Chris Tavares (recently of the Patterns and Practices group), and we spent 90 minutes pumping the audience for their feedback about building distributed applications under Windows, including what their scenarios are, what sucks and should be fixed, what’s good and should be kept and what solutions they propose. I have to say, it was fun to be on the receiving end of the heat instead of the giving end for the change and to be in a group that hopes to solve such problems (the Connected Systems Division owns Indigo, BizTalk and Workflow). Thanks, attendees, for the great list and for not throwing anything but insults (and so politely, too! : ).

In addition to the free sessions, there was free food, free entertainment, free wireless and free air conditioning. I miss the single-track benefits that you get with the DevCons, but other than that, the Portland Code Camp is now in the very short list of conferences I won’t be missing in the future. Thanks to Jason, Rich, Stuart and the rest of the organizers. Highly recommended!

Here’s the thing I don’t get about the next-gen ”DVD Wars.” When I moved from VHS to DVD, I got much higher quality output and random access to content. Given that DVDs are already letterbox, what do I get moving to an HD DVD format? Is the quality that much better? Are there other features I get that I’m going to really want? The only feature I wish I had was the ability to easily burn the main content of my DVDs to my computer for random access like I get w/ music today. Will the next-gen formats support that?

The Book

Welcome to the home page for “ATL Internals: Working with ATL 8 (2nd Edition),” by Christopher Tavares, Kirk Fertitta, Brent Rector and Chris Sells, available from Amazon.

The Source

The code samples for this book is available here.

The Errata

Soon you’ll be able to see and report errata for this book, which will help us improve future printings.

The Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 01 — Hello ATL
• Chapter 02 — Strings and Text
• Chapter 03 — Smart Types
• Chapter 04 — Objects
• Chapter 05 — Servers
• Chapter 06 — Interface Maps
• Chapter 07 — Persistence
• Chapter 08 — Enumeration
• Chapter 09 — Connection Points
• Chapter 10 — Windowing
• Chapter 11 — Controls
• Chapter 12 — Control Containment
• Chapter 13 — Hello ATL Server
• Chapter 14 — ATL Server Internals
• Appendix A — C++ Templates
• Appendix B — ATL Classes and Headers
• Appendix C — Moving To ATL8
• Appendix D — Attributed ATL
• Index