Well I made it back to Boston last night. I have to say, this might be the most exhausting work trip I have ever been on. Unfamiliar beds, time zone changes, being out of my eating and fitness routines, struggling with language issues, they all take their toll. I am not sure how Sales people do this all the time!

Microsoft earlier today announced a new product called "Microsoft Surface". If you haven't checked out the online videos of it yet, I highly recommend watching them here . It is one of those products that looks and feels like it comes from a science fiction movie - but it is actually real. Popular Mechanics also has a good article (including their own video) of how it works that you can read and watch online here . One of the really cool things about Microsoft Surface is that the table UI experience is built entirely using WPF and the .NET Framework - which is a great statement about the power of what WPF provides. If you are interested in learning more about programming WPF, there are two great books out there that I've been recommending to...(read more)

Life From Redmond Webcast TOMORROW ! Join me with Todd Anglin from Telerik as Todd demonstrates building your own custom Forums application from scratch using Telerik RAD Controls. He says he’ll do it in 60 Minutes !!! [Click HERE to register for the webcast.] Read More......(read more)

I ran into an interesting project this morning called reCAPTCHA. In the spirit of distributed computing solutions, such as folding@home, it tackles a difficult problem by splitting it up and farming the pieces out. What makes this interesting is that instead of having computers solve the problem, people do.

ReCAPTCHA actually tries to solve two problems. The reCAPTCHA project pipelines the unrecognizable words from a book scanning OCR effort into a freely available web service for verifying your humanity, a CAPTCHA. Instead of each CAPTCHA puzzle being a necessary but regrettable waste of human effort, reCAPTCHA harnesses this otherwise lost resource. How brilliant is that!

The web service looks very interesting to me. I'm due to revisit a submission form soon that contains a CAPTCHA that I wrote several years ago that I know has been broken. The system contains a very extensive blacklisting system, so the weakness of the CAPTCHA has never been enough of a problem to warrant its replacement, but I'm curious to see what difference this service will make.

I am pretty excited about Teched '07 June 4-8th in Orlando (if you are not already attending, you can still register). Here are a few of the sessions that I think will be very cool. WEB319 - A Lap around Silverlight - Scott Guthrie If you are making it to TechEd, you have got to come see Scott give an overview of Silverlight... Even if you have been closely following Silverlight.net, you will get a ton out of this.. Scott does an excellent job of explaining the platform in a fun and excited way! WEB318 - Creating and Delivering Rich Media and Video on the Web with Silverlight, Expression Studio, and Windows Server 2008 - Brad Abrams (and co) I am going to give an evolution of the session I gave a Mix on how to take advantage of Silverlight from...(read more)

Glenn posted about two new projects on CodePlex : WCSFContrib SCSFContrib These two projects are there to allow the community to post contributions, extensions, modules, etc that others can use. They compliment Enterprise Library Contrib , which Tom has already posted about . Enjoy. Read More......(read more)

In Part 1 of my LINQ to SQL blog post series I discussed "What is LINQ to SQL" and provided a basic overview of some of the data scenarios it enables. In my first post I provided code samples that demonstrated how to perform common data scenarios using LINQ to SQL including: How to query a database How to update rows in a database How to insert and relate multiple rows in a database How to delete rows in a database How to call a stored procedure How to retrieve data with server-side paging I performed all of these data scenarios using a LINQ to SQL class model that looked like the one below: In this second blog post in the series I'm going to go into more detail on how to create the above LINQ to SQL data model. LINQ to SQL, the LINQ to SQL...(read more)

A lot has already been written and photographed about last week's "independently run, Lotusphere like event" ILUG2007, but I wanted to take a moment a provide my own recap.

Marvel versus DC comics parody commercials

I customer email me asking how to iterate the values of items in the AJAX Control Toolkit ReorderList Sample. Thanks to Shawn Burke for the hints. Here is how you get to them. Assuming an Item template that includes 2 label controls….. 1 Protected Sub Button2_Click( ByVal sender As Object , ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button2.Click 2 Dim l1, l2 As Label 3 Dim i, max As Integer 4 5 Label3.Text = "" 6 max = ReorderList1.Items.Count - 2 7 For i = 0 To max 8 l1 = CType (ReorderList1.Items(i).FindControl( "Label1" ), Label) 09 l2 = CType (ReorderList1.Items(i).FindControl( "Label2" ), Label) 10 Label3.Text = Label3.Text + " " + l1.Text + " " + l2.Text + "
" 11 Next i 12 End Sub Read More......(read more)

Glenn is opening up some discussion about what we should build in the next release of WCSF . We have some ideas, but we want to hear from you. Please post your ideas, requests, and replies to Glenn's blog . Read More......(read more)

June is going to be a really busy travel month for me. I'll be presenting at the following events if you are interested in attending and stopping by to say hi: TechEd 2007 in Orlando on June 4th and 5th : I'll be doing a Silverlight talk and two ASP.NET and VS "Orcas" talks. Click here for more details about the conference. ReMIX 07 in Budapest, Hungary on June 11tht : I'll be doing the keynote at the ReMIX conference as well as presenting Silverlight breakout talks. Click here for more details about the conference. ReMIX 07 and DevDays 07 in Amsterdam, Netherlands on June 13th and 14th : I'll be doing the keynote at the ReMIX and DevDays conferences as well as presenting ASP.NET "Orcas" and Silverlight breakout talks. Click here and here for...(read more)

Check out your referral logs.. notice a pattern? If your logs are like mine, a HUGE percentage of your hits are coming through a search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN)... Here is 3 minutes worth of referral logs from my blog... In a world where a good percentage of your content is dynamically created and displayed in Ajax or Silverlight, how can you enable search engines to find your data? Well, a bunch of folks across the web have been doing some thinking on this. Jonathan Hawkins recently did a session at mix on the topic and posted some thoughts. Nikhil also discussed the issue in his talk at mix and posted some interesting techniques as well. ASP.NET Futures CTP has features to enable you to have multiple code driven dynamic sitemaps. This can...(read more)

This post contains a writeup of an Ajax pattern I demonstrated at one of my MIX07 talks around improving the indexability of Ajax and Silverlight, and in general RIA applications as part of an SEO effort... Read More......(read more)