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Darren is conducting some Vista training around Australia, and in preparation is doing a serise of posts over at TechTalkBlogs to whip the salavating masses* into a Vista frenzy. One of my favourite features in Vista is (not surprisingly) WPF, and recently this missive from Darren on that very topic caught my eye. On the whole I couldn’t agree more - Microsoft’s marketing and evangelism of WPF has focused on the “oooh, shiny“ factor far too much, at the expense of features people will actually use every day like data binding, simple styling and the great text editing and display capabilities of WPF. »

I just love the name. Via lifehack. »

Once when I was a young adolescent I saw a documentry which still resonates with me today - it was the story of Canadian stunt-man Ken Carter. Ken spent around 1 Million dollars between 1975 and 1980 attempting to jump the mile-wide St. Laurence seaway between Canada and the United States in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental. Being the young geek I was I was able to do the calculations and at the beginning I was certain that there was no chance in hell that Ken would make it. The movie was a long and entertaining one, and as I watched a kind of “suspension of disbelief” set in. By the middle of the movie I remember thinking “he’s spent all this money…surely he’s done the math…maybe he can make it”. As the movie reached its dramatic conclusion - Ken is stalling, the financiers of the stunt think he’s lost his nerve and one of Ken’s “friends” jumps in the car to attempt the jump - I thought they had an even-to-good chance of making it. The stunt ended badly - to quote this site which was the best source of information I could find regarding the stunt:

The bumpy ramp prevents the car from hitting the requisite 270 mph, going only 180 as it launches into the air. The wind immediately tears off its paneling as its parachutes halfway deploy. The car flies a paltry 506 feet, far short of a mile, and crash-lands in knee-deep water. Powers [Ken’s Friend] breaks eight vertebrae, three ribs, and a wrist. The footage is spectacular.

Some projects are like that stunt - when you start on them you think there isn’t any possibility of them ending happily, but resolve to do your best and fix what you can. Doubt exists in the back of your mind -  maybe your initial assesment of the project was all wrong, the problems you saw were illusory and things are actually much better than they seem. If things really are that bad then no sane person or organization would take on the project. Suspension of disbelief sets in, and part way through you’re thinking thoughts like “yeah, we can integrate those back-end systems pretty easily” or “as soon as we iron out those bugs in the Foo system, and slap a bit of UI on all that great back-end funcionality we’ve written we’ll be almost done”.

But in reality you’re not “nearly done” - your just closer to crashing a Lincoln Continental into knee-deep water with broken bones, far short of your goal. Don’t ignore reality - I don’t believe (and this is stretching my memory of those youthful days) that Ken’s rocket powered car ever reached the requisite speed to make the jump when they were trialing it. If you’ve only addressed x requirements in your last few iterations, your chances of tackling 2x or 3x in the next one are about the same as Ken’s were.

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Here’s a sneak peek at the app Deepak and I will be buildling on-stage at CodeCamp Oz on Monday. It is an RSS reader that reads a list of feeds from an OPML file, and displays the postings from the selected feed. All in about 60 lines of C#, and about 150 lines of XAML. It would be about 5 lines of C# except that we needed a custom converter to display the HTML as plain text, because unfortunately the Frame control (which can be used for displaying HTML in WPF apps, like an embedded IE window) can only read HTML via a URL or from the file system. »

I heard an ad on the radio (quaint, no) today from a local muffin/cookie franchise saying that if I bought one of their coffees and it wasn’t the best coffee I’d ever had the next one would be free. Right. It is inconceiveable that said local muffin franchise could make a coffee that I would even consider paying for, let alone the best one that I have ever had. This DID however raise the question in my mind, what is the best coffee I’ve ever had? After giving this some thought I’ve provided a short list:

1. Tazza d’Oro, Rome, Italy: I’ve had a few double espressos there and have never been disappointed. Great crema, very strong. Great flavour, and not bitter.
2. Sant’Eustachio, Rome, Italy: Very nice double espresso, but they serve it sweetened by default! Great flavour, very strong and not bitter. Prepared behind a secret screen!
3. Not sure of the name, but in the ritzy arcade that runs off the square where the Duomo is situated in Milan has a shop that serves pretty nice coffee.
4. Grind, Brisbane, Australia - Grind, a small hole-in-the wall cafe in the Elizabeth Arcade in Brisbane used to serve a great double espresso that was extremely strong with a very nice flavour. I believe they changed their name and are now “under new management“ which is a shame.

My thoughts on getting a good coffe (and by that I mean double espresso or higher) from an unknown coffee shop is:

1. if you ask for a double espresso and there is even the merest flinch or hint of aprehension as to how this beverage might be prepared consider cancelling your order and leaving.
2. if in any way they equate “double espresso“ with “long black“ then DO cancel your order and leave.
3. if they ask how to prepare a double espresso DO cancel your order and leave.
4. If you’re not hearing the periodic sound of the grinder while you’re waiting to place your order then think twice.

Now back to that muffin chain and their “best ever or its free offer” - Assuming I purchase a double for $3.00, its no good and I ask for the next one to be free. The way I see it I’m still paying $1.50 for coffee that is probably worse than what I can make at home for about $0.50 or less per cup.

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I was looking over the proposed items in the architectural track for Tech-Ed 2006 Australia and this one stood out “How to Get Your Grandmother Building Missile Defense Systems” - it looks like Martin’s idea for a tech-ed talk is in with a fighting chance. Seriously, who wouldn’t go to a talk with a title like this? »

I recently finished working on a fairly long-term project at Microsoft Australia. It was my first project at MS, working with a great team and by all accounts the project was a great success. We never missed a single milestone, and had very few issues when we went “into production”. Now that I’m starting on a second project at MS with a different team I’m looking back at the first one to try and analyze what we did well, and what we could improve on. »

Proof that not all bugs are ugly, annoying, productivity-wrecking tear-your-hair-out time-wasters. All of these photos are quite beautiful. »

My colleagues at readify continue to launch new community-related innitiates all the time. In roughly the last month Mitch started a Monad community site scripts.readify.net, Clarke started dotnetdownunder (still waiting for good things to appear there) Rocky (with a little help from some friends at Microsoft) kicked off TechTalkBlogs and I started my WPF community site - LearnWPF. Yesterday I heard that Derrick Buckley has started a Microsoft infrastructure user-group in Sydney. »

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