Update: An interesting article linked to from "cognitively cognate" sets up stage with the following scenario, Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, US, and colleagues wanted to know how people from different cultures group non-identical sounds....

Scenario: You finish building a great ASP.NET application, have everything tested and working right on your local system, are taking full advantage of the new ASP.NET 2.0 Membership, Role and Profile features, and are ready to publish it to a remote hosting environment and share it with the world. Copying the .aspx files and compiled assemblies to the remote system is pretty easy (just FTP or copy them up). The challenge that confronts a lot of developers, though, is how to setup and recreate the database contents - both schema and data - on the remote hosted site. Unfortunately there hasn't historically been a super-easy way to accomplish this. The good news is that this week the SQL Server team published the release candidate of a new SQL...(read more)

C# offers a nice syntax for LINQ. While it is not quite possible to use the same syntax in script, the concepts do carry over, and the interesting constructs can be implemented. This post provides a couple of examples, and a quick reference for the relevant script APIs that come into play... Read More......(read more)

One of the core skills of a Program Manager is to build consensus. Microsoft (like many knowledge-worker driven IT companies) is not a top-down organization. For the most part, projects, ideas, directions are taken on through a consensus building exercise at one level or another. While this can be frustrating and slow at times, it does a very effective job at weeding out bad ideas and honing good ones. So how do you go about getting an idea to stick? Because Microsoft is an organization of people, it is more than push-a-button-get-an-answer. You have to work with and through people with all their wonderful idiosyncrasies, creativity, passions, hopes and fears. As a PM, you are often asked to build consensus with folks that are much more senior,...(read more)

If you are an ASP.NET AJAX developer, I recommend you grab SP1 of VS2005… Not only does it include tons of bug fixes, but it also includes the first round of basic support for ASP.NET AJAX in Visual Studio… If you are having formatting or incorrect validation (those red underlines) issues using ASP.NET AJAX then you will love SP1. Go grab it today: Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) There are of course tons of other support as well… check out Omar's post about Visual Studio 2005 SP1 released - details about changes in "web tools" area Read More......(read more)

Mobile email is no longer reserved for corporate executives and IT departments need to plan for the next wave of mobilization.

A majority of enterprises are now involved in the mobile revolution but a good portion of them do not have an appropriate mobile security strategy in place to negate mobile-specific security risks. In this column, Jack Gold offers solid advice to proactively thwart many security threats.

... Uhh, since when were they in competition with one another? mikechampion's weblog As a 10 year XML veteran, and informal minister of propaganda for the "XML Team", aren't I supposed to leap to XML's defense? I just can't summon...

From my own viewpoint, and in my own opinion** here is the list of what I believe to be the 10 most influential people or groups of people in the Information Technology sector in 2006. Please feel free to add/subtract/multiply/divide...

So many voices have expressed their thoughts on Adobe’s new icons so far and one of the more noticeable one from users is that they all thought it was some temporary place holder art. When I first saw the splash screen and application icon of Adobe Photoshop CS3 my thinking pattern was that Macromedia had its influence in the branding process: the idea of using different colors for each application and the way the splash screen is organized.

Adobe chooses to go with a two-letter mnemonic

The color association that is carried throughout the product's desktop brand and primary imagery makes total sense to me. The absence of illustrative elements as we saw in previous versions needs really getting use to. If you look in the Dock, most icons are like pictures and visually very detailed so it's like they are all shouting "choose me, me". Adobe's new icons are so basic and stand out instantly even in a crowded Dock. That's a thing Macromedia always had with their icons, you could immediately tell they belong together. Jason Santa Maria said:

"Plus, baking in the action of having to read the icon just to decipher it adds an unnecessary step."

As much as I respect Jason I'm not agreeing with him, because it's only two letters and I personally immediately see the "Ai" just by looking and not by a literal read. It was much harder to differentiate the previous ones, in fact I more than once confused ImageReady with Photoshop. The natural look didn't have any meaning other then being pretty to use as marketing collateral.

Talking about typography, the font used in the icons was created by Robert Slimbach, known from typefaces like Adobe Garamond, Adobe Jenson, Myriad (co-designed with Carol Twombly) ...

You might wonder why Acrobat Reader hasn't "Ar" as icon or "Pd" or something, just to take the same line with the rest of the products. The curvy triangle is so well known that it's obvious they kept using it for the icon. I think if the other applications had a similar icon over the years, they would have done the same. Since there are none they decided to use a two-letter mnemonic 'nickname' system as their primary identifier.

Why the re-branding was such a big challenge

While this color-wheel beautifully presents the approach in the entire re-branding, I think it fails in bringing the message across on how it will tie together as a whole. The idea is great though but the color-wheel is very overwhelming, taking away all the attention and the icons are scattered over the place. People seems to fail to grasp the bigger picture. It seems that most just want to make it look pretty because the app is giving these possibilities, but it's more than that, it's about problem-solving too. It's a major undertaking to revamp and re-brand both Adobe's and Macromedia's apps as one brand, we're talking thousands of icons.

Thanks to John Nack I had the opportunity of asking a few questions about the new direction to Ryan Hicks, Sr. Experience Designer at Adobe.

1) Did you had any idea in what direction the�response to the new icon would go?

The debate that has risen up around iconography and the merits of what we've done taken in a broader context�is impressive.�The new direction is a bigger change than I think anyone in the public would have expected from us, change on that scale is going to be hard and of course there are those who will rise up and scream heresy.�Honestly, we have been living with the icon system internally on our own machines for so long now that it's a bit hard to remember what the big deal is. We're as varied and hardcore a user group as will be found anywhere, we've found the stuff just works. Done.

2) The horizontal folders is that a hint of what is coming in Leopard�:D, or what was the thinking behind that?

Hints of Leopard? Not exactly. The "flat" folder is reflexive of the overall approach we've taken in the iconography throughout the desktop (document icons, module icons, etc), which is driven by the work in our application UI's (check out Acrobat 8 in particular). Simple and clear, though you can definitely see that approach in Apple's UI work as well. It's a focus on function, but executed with an exquisite elegance

What we had in the CS2 days were elaborate 3d-rendered icons for documents and things which looked nice at really huge views but reduced to little puddles of pixel mud at the small sizes.�Arguably it's the 16px and maybe 32px icon view that are the most prevalent, so it's those sizes that we focused on in creating our technique for rendering the figures. The new bits look simple, and in contrast to the 3d-style work out there they are, but there's a lot of nuance to give them richness that scales to the larger sizes.

3) Not sure if you can reveal this yet but I wonder if the minimal look will also be�reflected in the package design?

Yeah, I can't give anything away here. The desktop icons are tiny extractions – you could call them "pixels" if you like – from the much larger packaging art.

Well I hope Adobe will let me show packaging for the suite when the time is right because I strongly believe it will help people understand. So I'm going against what most people think here, Adobe's design team has created a concise and coherent unified language. The new style is very contemporary and it's more solid and refined in my opinion.

In the end major changes always takes getting used to, it's so different from previous versions. There will always be people thinking "what have they done now?". I didn't have a "whoa!" reaction myself the first time but it grows on you.

I just learned that my thinking was right, the design was done by the design team of the former Macromedia. I knew it :p

Looking for possible databinding options which would bind(map) a xml instance doc(which conforms to some pre-defined xsd) to a PRE-EXISTING java

Podcasts are recorded voice lectures, interviews, or discussions ranging from a few minutes to about an hour long. ?Hopefully you are familiar with both the Taking Notes and IBM ShortCuts podcast series.

IBM has been podcasting internally (meaning inside the company for our employees) since about the middle of 2005. ?I just reading a story on our intranet that said we've now passed one million downloaded episodes! ? We have over 750 podcast series, and close to 4000 recording currently available. ?They are all RSS enabled, so people can subscribe to the information they want.



Does your company use podcasts to convey information to your employees, partners, or customers?

As many of you may heard Visual Studio 2005 SP1 was officially released several days ago. There have already been a couple of blog posts announcing the release from ScottGu and Soma . One item of feedback I saw on those posts was a request for more information about the actual fixes in SP1. I'm writing this blog post to provide more information about the SP1 fixes in the "web tools" area -- specifically those pieces of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Web Developer 2005 Express used to target ASP.NET. I'll also include a list of bug fixes we made to "web tools" so people can have more detail into what was fixed. NOTE: the information here only pertains to "web tools" in Visual Studio 2005, and does not represent everything that was fixed in SP1...(read more)

Creating XML languages that are compatible and extensible is a difficult problem. This week David Orchard argues for a theory of compatibility in which he describes some of the conditions for creating compatible XML languages.

An announcement of a new O'Reilly conference that will be of interest to XML.com readers.

Thanks for reading my blog this year. I think I am taking a blogging break for the next week or two.

One of the questions I'm often asked is whether it is possible to run an ASP.NET web-site project as a top-level root "/" site using the built-in VS web-server and the VS 2005 Web Site Project model. By default, when you open a web-site as a file-system based web site project and run it, VS will launch and run the built-in web-server using a virtual app path that equals the project's root directory name. For example: if you have a project named "Foo", it will launch and run in the built-in web-server as http://localhost:1234/Foo/ What a lot of people want to-do instead is to just run the web-site as http://localhost:1234/ or (if port 80 isn't already in use): http://localhost/ Doing this can make site navigation and url handling logic much simpler...(read more)