I was super-excited to learn that Andrew Grant was able to run the Photo Handler unmodified on Windows Home Server . This is actually one more reason for me to put Home Server on my to-buy list. I shoot thousands of pictures a year and only upload the very best on Flickr . But the reason why I enhanced Dmitry 's handler to make it my own was that I wanted photo publishing to be as simple and as fast as possible, and a natural part of my workflow. Today I'm using a small web server that I built and that sits in my basement so that I can just dump photos on the server using a simple share but using Home Server for that would just rock. Anyway, if you have a Home Server and want a lightweight way to publish your photos, this is for you: http:/...(read more)

Billing is obviously a very important concern, after all Litware has to get paid! As described in Part I, Litware is looking at two models for Billing: • Subscription based: (For example: $X/tenant/month up to 5 seats/tenant + $Y/month for additional seats) • Usage based: $Z/"Submitted Resume" In our imaginary scenario, we'll assume that Litware billing requirements are easily met by NWH billing capabilities. NWH Billing system supports these two modus operandi and offers rich customization, reporting, tax considerations, etc. So, for the purposes of this exercise, NWH Billing is state of the art. But the question is: how does NWH Billing know what and when to bill? or in other terms, how to "glue" LitwareHR to the billing system? And, more...(read more)

I just noticed that they posted the full keynote from Teched 07... I encourage you to watch the whole thing (especially the first few minutes on the Back to the future gag where Microsoft makes fun of ourselves a bit).. The Silverlight demo is at 1:19... there Jamie Cool does a very compelling demo of Silverlight, shows off some applications and just a bit of code. Enjoy! Read More......(read more)

A quick update to my MSDN Search Gadget (a small sidebar gadget that lets you search for developer content on MSDN right off your desktop)... Read More......(read more)

Just got a copy of this new book on ASP.NET AJAX and it looks great. It should be because Matt is the Development Manager for ASP.NET so he deeply understands the product. He has also worked on several other books and I can personally attest to the fact that he can indeed form complete sentences. Professional ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Enjoy Read More......(read more)

This tool window provides a tree hierarchy view of all CSS selectors available from the current page. Users can navigate and find CSS style definitions in source code with this tool window. Developers can change the layout of the tree view with the Options button. The first three context menu items will categorize the CSS selector in different ways. The next three context menu items will modify what the tree show - all Styles available to the current page, styles that have been used somewhere on this page, or styles used on the selection, if a control is selected in the designer. The tool window provides top level nodes for style block(s) in the current page and external style sheet in cascading order. Inline styles will not be displayed in...(read more)

On-Boarding is the process of bringing the application to the operation. It's everything that needs to happen for hand-off of the app from the ISV to the hoster. In the scenario described in the previous post , I mentioned that Northwind requires ISV to package the application in a specific way. The intention is of course to automate the process on their side as much as possible, avoiding as many manual steps as possible (no phone, no e-mails, nothing...) NWH calls this a "Hosting Pack" and it will typically contain: The collection of assets that need to be installed in their data center (code, files, images, db scripts, etc). Everything needed to run and install the app A description of those assets, their relationships and other important...(read more)

Ego post... :-) Software company celebrates 25 years I moved to Cambridge in 2001 from Toronto to work at Lotus, but the company has had roots here for 25 years.

Yesterday the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit team released an updated version . You can download it from the http://ajax.asp.net web-site, and run samples built with it on the online samples page here . The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is a free download and contains more than 40 additional AJAX controls and components that work on top of the core ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release. In addition to having Microsoft developers contribute, the project also has more than 15 non-Microsoft contributors adding great features and controls. You can download either a binary version of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to use (just add to your toolbox and you are good to go), or you can download the source for the project itself and tweak/extend it if you want (all...(read more)

I had a great time this morning with Sam and Mai-lan from the IIS and Windows Media Server teams. Together we demo'ed some cool new stuff in ASP.NET including: Expression Media Encoder asp:Media UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress AutoCompleteExtender and TextWaterMarkExtender asp:History - Finally control over the back button! Profile Service Bit rate throttling in IIS7 - which allows web site vendors to control the wasted bandwidth due to drop off while still preserving a great initial experience. Live Streaming with Windows Media Server - this is a very cool demo where we use Expression Media Encoder to encoded some video live from a webcam, push it to a WMS server which then makes it available to HUGE numbers of folks for live viewing.. anyone...(read more)

Chung Webster gave a great talk at TechEd today about how to use Silverlight and ASP.NET today... in it he built up a very cool PhotoViewer appwith some great panning and zooming effects, FileUpload, Networking all from managed code in the browser! Download the full source code ... Enjoy Read More......(read more)

In its current version, LitwareHR is focused very much on the challenges an ISV faces while building a SaaS delivered app: multi-tenancy, configurability, etc. In the last few weeks I've been working on exploring the implications of hosting LitwareHR on a hypothetical hosting platform. The goal was to twofold: identify changes that have to be made in LitwareHR code base to support specific hosting scenarios and explore the interaction points between hoster & ISV. I've published some of this work already in previous post which focused on Provisioning. As described there, externalizing Provisioning required changes in LitwareHR, but it was pretty straightforward because it was functionality well encapsulated. But of course Provisioning, as...(read more)

Felix made me cry for the second time this morning!

Oh, cool, I just learned that if I work fast I can have a blog post of mine featured prominently in Kathy's talk at TechEd, DEV318 - Windows .NET Client: Building Rich Client UI with the “ Acropolis ” Framework. Here is a video I published this on Silverlight.live.com with Jame's Live Writer plug in . var AppNameWrapper7eae9594a5194777aadbe764470e4953 = document.getElementById("AppNameWrapper7eae9594a5194777aadbe764470e4953"); CreateSilverlight7eae9594a5194777aadbe764470e4953(); Also, we have on line docs! I love being able to link to exactly the part of the framework you are talking about... plus they are easier to find with your search engine of choice.. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa139638.aspx A few suggestions: Walkthrough...(read more)

On Monday I gave an overview talk called "A Lap Around Silverlight" at TechEd in Orlando. You can download the slides of my talk here (warning: due to images the download is 12Mb). You can also learn more about Silverlight from my Silverlight blog post here . One of the things I did during the talk was to demo a bunch of cool applications built with Silverlight. Below are pointers to a few of the cool ones you can check out on the web today (note: install the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha to run them): Silverlight Airlines Sample This was a demo I coded on-stage in my keynote at MIX, and demonstrated an on-line trip scheduler application: You can watch a video of me walking through how to build it here (double-click on the video to watch it full-screen...(read more)

Well, after taking the red-eye from Seattle last night I made it to TechEd in time to get some really good feedback. I feel lucky to get to drill into two different areas of feedback... the web space with ASP.NET, AJAX and Silverlight and the client space with WPF, Cider and Acropolis. In the web space... I had on my conspicuous Ajax Experience shirt partially to see if it would server as fodder for an interesting conversation. It did! On the ride from Dallas to Orlando I talked with the owner of a set of careerHR web sites... many of them are in ColdFusion and he is looking for how to revitalize them... I gave him a private showing of the demos of my talk at TechEd and the Ajax stuff really resonated with him. He was exited about how he could...(read more)

One of the most effective ways to make text stand out is to use colours. This is easy to do using keyboard shortcuts.

One for the Admins... Lotus Advisor: Cool IBM Lotus Notes 8 Admin Features by Terrance A. Crow This article discusses new features for: a) locking out web users after some number of unsuccessful login attempts b) a new tool to move databases from one server to another, without having to tell users

Download the new Lotus Connections screen saver. Thanks Craig.