I read Old Man’s War today (no better way to avoid writing than to read). I enjoyed it very much. I’m off to check out the author’s web site now.

Rich is tired of me blowing off the local nerd events, so he set up something he knows I can’t stay away from: an afternoon showing of Fantastic Four. I’m an FF fan from way back (every time Don signs his emails ” ’nuf said ” I get a little tingle of nostalgia). I’m been loving the Ultimate Fantastic Four trade paperbacks (that’s what adults call comic books that have been collected into a bigger, more expensive book).

I don’t have much hope that this movie will be any good, but the Brothers Sells and I can’t not go. Feel free to join us! Rich has picked the 12:25pm showing on Saturday, July 9th, at the new Century 16 Cedar Hill Crossing theater that I love, just to make sure there would be no way I could say “no.” Plus, I’ll be deep in the throes of finalizing the Avalon book chapters that day (along with every other day this week — what a way to burn vacation days), so any excuse to avoid the writing will be good. Come one, come all!

I was helping a colleague work through a .NET COM interop issue. He’d found my article on the topic (“Hosting Windows Forms Controls in COM Control Containers”), but couldn’t get it to work. He’d set the Register for COM Interop setting and adding the Guid attribute to his .NET type, but nothing was registered at build-time.

The problem was that, unlike VS03, the wizard-generated AssemblyInfo.cs has the assembly-wide ComVisible attribute set to “false” which causes regasm (the command-line version of what VS is doing to register your .NET assembly with COM at build-time) to skip the registration of all of the .NET types in your assembly, defeating the purpose of the Register for COM Interop option pretty thoroughly.

The trick, of course, is to set ComVisible to “true”.

The Grid is by far the most useful, powerful and general purpose layout tool in Avalon. As a demonstration of that, Amir Khella, a Microsoft PM on an Avalon-related team, plays with the Grid to build a fish eye effect, duplicating the behavior of the scaling OSX toolbar with 8 lines of C# code. He then goes on to implement the trick in 2D to scale images as you mouse around. Cool stuff.

Scott Guthrie says:

“What we’ve set out to do is to make it dramatically easier for anyone to build AJAX-style web applications that deliver rich, interactive, and personalized experiences. Developers should be able to build these applications without great expertise in client scripting; they should be able to integrate their browser UI seamlessly with the rest of their applications; and they should be able to develop and debug these applications with ease.

“For this work, we’ve been working on a new project on our team, codenamed ‘Atlas.’ Our goal is to produce a developer preview release on top of ASP.NET 2.0 for the PDC this September, and then have a website where we can keep updating the core bits, publishing samples, and building an active community around it.

Then Scott says:

“We see Atlas as the best way to write a whole new generation of richer, more interactive, more personalized experiences in browser applications.  Avalon is the next generation presentation model for Microsoft, and will let you build the richest user experiences on the Windows platform. Avalon will deliver phenomenal graphical experiences that use the latest in media integration and hardware acceleration. And Avalon will also let you provide persistent, immersive experiences that go beyond the browser.

“Of course, when you’re building Avalon applications, you can reuse the programming model investments you make today with ASP.NET and Atlas. For example, the ASP.Net Building Block Services and Client Building Block Services will also be accessible from any Avalon client. This model gives you a smooth path to the next generation of applications.”

And then I say:

“Cool!”

I’m going to be spending my July 23-24 weekend at Reed College attending (and hopefully participating in) the Portland Code Camp. The manifesto speaks to me:

“Code Camps are (1) by and for the developer community; (2) always free; (3) community developed material; (4) no fluff — only code; (5) community ownership; and (6) never occur during working hours.”

Code Camp is looking for speakers and attendees. Come one, come all!

I can’t believe nobody* blogged about this today! Isn’t this the beginning of most sci-fi horror movies?!? By the end of the movie, all of the scientists die and only one good-looking male/female pair are left, having barely averted the Apocalypse (no one every expects the Apocalypse…). Since I identify with the scientists and barely know anyone good looking enough to survive, I’m not so sure reincarnating dogs into zombies is such a good idea…

*by “nobody” I mean “nobody” I read, of course — I sure it was all the news amongst the “dear diary” set : )

You have to stand on one foot, wait for 48 hours and wave a dead chicken over your monitor, but assuming you have the foot and the dead chicken, it don’t cost nothin’ to download the latest beta of Monad. Enjoy.