JCooney.NET

“You smell that? Do you smell that? Melted computer hardware, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of burning plastic in the morning.”

As has been my want recently I was using my notebook (a nice new Asus VX1) at the train station on the way to work. When the train arrived I closed the lid, and placed it in the zip-up protective cloth sleeve that it came with, before placing it in my laptop bag. A few hours later I went to retrive it, but I immediately knew there was something wrong. The protective cloth bag was hot on the outside, quite hot and when I un-zipped it there was the smell of melted plastic. The laptop chassis was very hot, too hot to comfortably touch in some places. Some of the keys down one side were slightly warped and it wouldn’t power on. I let it cool down for a while and called the manufacturer. Although it is relatively new (purchased mid-August) they said it would be a case of repairing rather than replacing. This was bad news - I had 3 upcoming WPF presentations later this week and early next week and I’d be without my hardware-accellerated eye candy (and thus might have to deliver some meaningful content instead). Worse was the thought of on-going wrangling with the manufacturer as various components began displaying thermal-induced oddities of behavior. After it had completely cooled down I tried powering it on a few more times, but with no luck. Then (and anyone who is looking for proof that I’m an optimist and not a grumpy b*stard, here it is) I tried plugging the power in, and it booted. Not only did it boot, everything worked perfectly. Wanting to pich myself to prove I wasn’t dreaming I fired up a couple of applications, compiled and ran a few things, all without issue. After running a few Atwood-endorsed hardware tests I was reasonably satisfied everything was OK. Here’s a picture of the slightly warped keys just to prove I’m not making the whole thing up.

Now I’m left wondering what I should do next (aside from shutting down every time when putting it away)? With the recent spate of battery recalls and house fires being attributed to notebooks you can’t be too careful. A friend suggested I use speedfan to try and ascertain the maximum temperature it reached. I’ll be carefully keeping an eye out for stories of ASUS VX1’s catching on fire, or battery recalls.

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I’m still searching for a WDDM driver for my Geforce Go 7400 that will work under Vista RC1. For those who haven’t been initiated into the joys of laptop video drivers for vista it goes something like this. Vista’s Aero Glass, flip 3d etc require hardware accelleration to work. Because they’re now a fairly core OS resource Vista needs special WDDM drivers so it can virtualize these video resources if necessary (the same way the OS virtualizes main memory if required). »

I’ve been working with WPF fairly regularly (3+ nights per week) for around 1 year now and documenting a few discoveries along the way, but I’m still on the learning curve. Maybe not a serious productivity-damaging curve like Karsten talks about (although I’ve been throught it), but still a curve none-the-less. This week I’ve been looking at the typography and document creation/editing classes like RichTextBox, FlowDocument, Figure, Floater and a plethora of others. I find it very easy to imagine a time in the future where entire books will be devoted just to FlowDocument and its children, such is the depth of the API. I’m about half-way through Petzold’s “Applications = Code + Markup“ and I’m regularly finding classes that were previously completely unknown to me. This can be a little un-nerving - it seems like as soon as you start to feel comfortable with the API something new comes along that opens up new possibilities, but also makes you realize how much you still don’t know. It seems this doesn’t just affect regular developers - in the comments of this CodeProject article WPF program manager Rob Relyea says “I just learned last week about .You should try that out and compare. I was surprised to discover InkCanvas had done this.“ The comment is dated from the start of this month. If program managers who’ve worked with the platform since it’s inception are continuing to discover cool things, you can bet there are plenty of happy discoveries and “aHa“ moments to come for those prepared to make the effort.

All this is not just idle IL speilunking - I’m working on a WPF “content creation” application in my spare time that I’m hoping to release a beta for soon, with a final release in the “Vista timeframe” (and that nolonger means “some time in the far future” either like it once did). It’s no Max or NewYork Times Reader, but it aint notepad either.

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Recently I started working on some ASP.NET UI with moderately complicated javascript, and I thought I’d give Aptana a try. Aptana is a (relatively) new IDE for dynamic javascript-based sites, built on top of Eclipse. To cut right to the chase I think it is a GREAT IDE for javascript development, with pretty much zero learning curve. The intellisense which shows if the method/property you’re thinking of calling is supported in various browsers (see screen-shot below) is a compelling feature. »

WPF RC1 (to co-incide with Vista RC1) was released earlier this week. I haven’t updated LearnWPF with a “getting started” guide because the “cider” designer for VS hasn’t been released yet but if they wait much longer I’ll probably go and post something anyway. In any case I’m psyched that my new favourite framework is nearly shipping. I’ve been writing 3-4 hours worth of WPF code every night this week, and having a blast. »

I went to a presentation by Ron Jacobs at the SDNUG last night on his view of what a software architect is, and what they do (apart from the obvious - draw lots of boxes on whiteboards). Having worked on some larger projects its become apparent that architecture can make a huge difference, not only in the success of the project but also to the experiences (both good and bad) of the developers working in that project. »

This evening I commited my 600th change to my personal subversion repository. That doesn’t sound like much, but commits in subversion are atomic and can incorporate multiple file changes (so the number is totally meaningless?). I switched to SVN from CVS about 3 years ago for my personal stuff, and in that time it has been great. Apart from a few issues figuring things out at the start I can’t think of a single time its let me down. »

I’m blogging this from the exhibition hall of Tech.Ed 2006 Australia on day 2. My second round of WPF talks are over and its time for more quality time “hanging out with other geeks”. Hilights thus far include meeting the secret geek and drinking the free coffee. »

I’m attending Tech-Ed 2006 somewhat vicariously – unfortunately because I have “a lot on” I didn’t think I would be able to attend the full event, and had kind of ruled out attending. That was until I heard Andrew Coates from DPE was looking for people to fill out some speaking slots for the developer cabana sessions. Unable to resist the lure of talking about WPF to a technical audience I signed up to deliver a few developer cabana sessions. »

I’m going to be presenting two short “cabana” sessions on WPF at Tech.Ed 2006 Australia, specifically I’ll be talking about XBAPs and Data Templates. The sessions are only 20 minutes long, so my usual long preambles about “great experiences” “unified graphics programming models” and “compelling business reasons for spinning text boxes” will have to be heavily curtailed. These will be in addition to some talks by Arik Cohen from the WPF team on the Friday. »