Andy Weston's Blog

I went to a hands-on lab about WP7 yesterday put on by Microsoft here in indy and I walked away all excited about how easy it should be to put a phone app together now with all of the tools being so familiar.  Visual Studio and XAML, very similar to WPF and Silverlight.  Cool stuff.  Here are some good WP7 resources posted by Dave Bost.

If you find yourself managing a lot of different types of connections to a lot of different machines you might want to take a look at the Remote Desktop Manager by Devolutions.  It does a great job of organizing your sessions into a tree and tab layout.  Check it out.

Have  you ever downloaded a giant *.iso image file of a DVD and wanted to just use it without having to burn it to a disk first?  Check out Virtual CloneDrive and you’ll be able to just right-click the .iso file, mount it, and it then works like a new drive letter on your system  … and the sheep icon is classic!  Clone, get it?   LOL

When you were a kid did you ever want to peek at your Christmas gifts before the big day?  That’s how I feel about the gift that is VS2010 … I’ve been dying to try out the pre-releases that have been sitting under the tree for some time now but I’ve somehow managed to resist the temptation to peek.  There has been such an overload of cool microsoft technologies launched over the past 2-3 years that I’ve just been reading and waiting for VS2010. 

Here’s a good overview of it in … The Making of Visual Studio 2010 

Can’t wait for the sugar-plums on April 12th! 

Silverlight 3 is now available for download  from MSDN.  It seems pretty crazy that MS was able to add so many features so quickly, the last release was less than a year ago.  I haven’t explored all the new features yet but the first thing I plan on looking at is the new Expression Blend 3 which has a tool called  SketchFlow that lets you protoype and share mockups of programs easily.  The bonus with this approach is that you can iterate designs quickly with higher level stakeholders without spending tons of time engineering code.

Here’s a nice open source charting solution that I’ve been looking at for Silverlight … http://www.visifire.com .  It also works for WPF.  I like the Microsoft Chart Controls too but VisiFire gives you animated Silverlight graphs in a clean way.

Corel Painter is becoming my favorite drawing program for animation.  Not only does it have all of the realistic brushes that you’d ever need, it includes a movie editing mode that lets you paint animation frame by frame.  It doesn’t include any features for keyframing like you would find in animation software but it does give you everything that you would need if you wanted to sit down with a stack of paper and a pencil and create a flip-book style of animation.  There is an onion-skinning mode that let’s you see through the paper to the previous couple of frames so that you can judge  the timing.  Here’s a sample that I created in about 20 minutes …

A team at Infragistics has put together a great collection of visual design patterns for piecing together user interfaces called Quince.  The sample explorer itself has a really nice look to it and it shows off some of the fancy things you can do with Silverlight.

If you have ever wished that you could compare the schemas on two databases to see what the differences are, look no further than xSQL Object … http://www.xsqlsoftware.com  I tried the free version and it worked great, the full versions look even better.

I discovered a nice tool recently that helps you target, market and analyze the keywords and effectiveness of your websites … it is called Web CEO.  It has tools for helping you find good keywords to focus on, for example, it calculates an index called the KEI which represents a ratio of the popularity of a keyword or phrase to the number of competing websites that use it.  This helps you pick specific phrases that have a high enough popularity yet have a low enough competition to be worth going after.  It has other tools for scanning your site and submitting it to search engines too.  Check it out.