Sean Gerety

Cool Office 2003 beta feature

I just found a cool new feature (I think it's new) in the Office 2003 beta.  When you are attaching photos to an email to send it to the folks, you can resize the image instead of sending a half meg file.  There are 3 options:

Small:448 x 336

Medium: 640 x 480

Large: 1024 x 768

You can access this option by viewing the attachement options or it will pop up when you right click "send to > mail recipient" on an image file.  Very nice feature, kudos to the Office team.

CSpot Party Images Loaded!

While we're sitting here waiting for a database update to finish so we can go live with a site, I'd thought that I'd upload the images from the CSpot party.  Check out the Image Galleries.

Listening to "Brick house" by Wild Cherry

Niue gets WiFi

Niue gets island wide WiFi.  But the big question is...

Do they have an IT industry?  When can I move!  I see boat drinks and C# and many support calls to Dell for sand in my laptop (not my keyboard, because I use one of these).   

SPOT and Mercedes

Well, today I thought that I was going to go "See SPOT run".  Unfortunately the real thing was not there, but I did get to see this presentation and get some details. 

The watch itself is very much like a PDA, you pay about 60 dollars a year for the service.  Service is provided in about 100 cities to start with, and I would imagine more later.  The SPOT watch receives information from an unused portion of the FM signal (that's what the rep told me).  A watch goes from $100 to about $300.  It looks pretty interesting and I'll definitely take a look at the real thing this fall. 

The watch will provide the following services:

1. Time - with a variety of face styles
2. News
3. Weather
4. Stocks
5. Calendar - updated from Outlook
6. MSN Messenger messages
7. Dining Info - Coming Soon
8. Sports - Coming Soon
9. Movie Finder - Coming Soon
10. Traffic - Coming Soon
11. Games - Coming Soon

I will say the best thing about the event was sitting in a Kompressor and getting to ride on a track like I was in a Bond movie.  That was very cool.  Now if I could only afford one of those beauties.  I'll throw some pictures up on Monday.

Free Visual Studio .NET 2003 Posters

Web fonts

Has anyone used this before?  http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3/

I'm interested in using a font (Bell-Centennial) for data dense displays, that is not part of the base font toolset. 

Smart Personal Object Technology (SPOT)

I was invited to an event where I'll get to drive some Mercedes on a speedway, slalom and a wet course.  How they picked me to do this I don't know!  But I'll also get to look at a SPOT device first hand.  I'll post details next week.  Hopefully I'll get to post pictures.

Sean

Object Query Language

While I'm at it on things that I'd like to see, why don't we have an object query language in C#? I can't tell you how much I dislike walking the object model in search of properties that I need. Why can't I just do the following?

Create a collection, nodeset or dataset and pass my root object with an XPath style query that returns all of the items I need?

Instead, I have to walk the dot "." hierarchy.

RootObject.GetPropertyValue("employees").SubObject.GetPropertyValue("employeeNum");

And then iterate through all of the objects to find each one.

So what I’d like to do is use XPath queries on object graphs?   So maybe I can do something like this using the XPathNavigator to query an object graph.  I’ll have to try it and then I’ll have to profile it to see if the overhead is going to kill me on performance.  Or Hmmm, maybe I'll get something like this in X#.

More to come…

Sean

Don Box on How the CLR passes XML

A nice piece on how the CLR passes around XML in an AppDomain.  He covers a wide variety of crunchy XML goodness from performance to best practices.  Enjoy!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20030603XMLDB/manifest.xml

CSS needs an XML implementation

Why hasn't the rest of the CSS caught up with the rest of the XML specifications? There should be an XML spec, ala XHTML.  So if it sounds interesting read on.

Premise:
CSS should be an XML Spec. I'll call it CSX (Cascading Style XML) for now.
General thoughts:
1. With the advent of XHTML, why is CSS a non DOM spec? If I can parse my XHTML document, why not CSS?
2. CSX could use XPath to address which elements the styling would be applied too.
3. Or the XHTML Dom elements could use the CSX namespace and CSX element to attach styles. This would most likely be the best method.
E.g.