I think this question is really suited to two kinds of people:

1. Criminally insane.  Reckless to a point considered, well, imprudent.   You lick the top of 9V batteries; you chew on tin-foil.  You cut your toe nails with a Leatherman.  You bank the farm on a technology that is still moving because pain is your friend.
2. People who may ship a product before .NET 3.5 ships.  .NET 3.5 has some new technologies that I am going to want to use.  Three that are immediately relevant are: new Active Directory bits, System.AddIn, and the goldern haired child, Linq.

These are bits that (esp. Linq) I want to bake in.  Right now I don’t want to code up bits that I know I am going to have to rip out soon in order to replace with the richer platform.

My ship dates are uncertain… if the product name is anything to go by Orcas is at least 6 mths away.  The real question in this post is how to mitigate the risk of being ready to ship before the platform is, and what to keep an eye on.

Please feel free to leave a comment or email me if you have clues for the above question

IIS 7 & Longhorn Beta 3 already has a Go Live license.  I believe them when they say it is good quality, and I believe them when they say it may still change.  Is a similar license something that we may see for .NET 3.5 as more betas or CTP’s become available?

Update:  Feb 27 2008 is looking like the launch date for SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 & Windows 2008.

One of Sydney's better book shops can'twon't sell me their only copy, but they abound on Amazon...

so is it that the dead-tree-copy version is not profitable, or... is it that the bricks and morter re-seller model for dead-tree-copy is the business problem?

What do you think?

In UX terms, Dell's web site is pretty good.  Three and a half stars in my book.  However, I don't know about you, but I think the following post-purchase survey question should be select all that apply, rather than select one.

I just saw this question come up while my sister just ordered her new Dell Inspiron and I had to screencap it...

But Mr. Dell, I cried... What do I choose if I want to use it for MySpace, biological research *and* missile technology research...

I have been noticing that CodeRush / Refactor Pro! are playing up every so often my shiny (well, dusty) new Vista PC.

The symptoms are minor, but annoying when you have your fingers trained   Basically Smart Cut / Intelligent Paste stop working.

Turns out, the solution is on the Expert options:  Startup \ Re-register CodeRush commands with Visual Studio on next startup.  Easy!

...Then you can have all your pretty refactoring graphics back!

It became clear to me during my last blog post on the .NET landscape that it was going to grow into more than one post. 

Framework Versions

One fact that is important to note about the graphic in that post, and it was the catalyst for me making the drawing, is that the .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 frameworks do not supersede .NET 2.0 but augment it.

What I mean by this is if you were to look into your %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0 folder you do not get a new System.Data.Dll or System.Web.dll.  Instead you see the folders for:

• Windows Communication Foundation (Including Windows CardSpace)
• Windows Workflow Foundation
• Windows Presentation Foundation
  

If you look in your %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5.xxx\ (still beta at time of writing) the main thing to note here is a new csc.exe and vbc.exe.

So what do you get with .NET 3.5 & Visual Studio 2008 (codename "Orcas")?

• Managed AddIn Framework (System.AddIn & System.AddIn.Contract) ...also the CLR Add-In team blog.
  
• An AD/ADAM wrapper (System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement)
• A WMI 2.0 Managed wrapper (System.Management.Instrumentation)
• Peer-to-Peer API's (System.Net.PeerToPeer & System.Net.PeerToPeer.Collaboration)
• In ASP.NET there is ASP.NET AJAX, asp:ListView, and the LinqDataSource. (System.Web.Extensions)
• Improvements to WCF and WF (System.ServiceModel.Web & System.WorkflowServices)
• ADO.NET Entity Framework (System.Data.Entity)
• New Crypto algorithms and support for Vista's Next-Gen Crypto, which replaces CryptoAPI. (System.Security)

Update:  Please also check out Daniel Moth's whole bunch Orcas posts, and his run-down of the new bits.

...and last but not least, the golden haired child, LINQ...

• LINQ to Xml (System.Xml.Linq) and LINQ to SQL (System.Data.Linq) ...also ScottGu's posts here, here and here are some of the best you'll find)
  

...and for everything that I have missed, or is not in the beta bits yet, grab the Orcas overview whitepaper.

What is .NET 3.5 going to do to 3.0?

It seems it has to do with Green Bits and Red Bits (source: Daniel Moth).  In other words, .NET 3.5 will also include SP1 for .NET 3.0 and SP1 for .NET 2.0.

When I started playing with LINQ, I needed to get some clarity on this in my mind, so in the spirit of Linnaeus, Mendeleev and Gell-Mann, I put together a graphic that showed the generations of the various bits, and after talking with friends thought it was worth sharing:

Update:  Daniel Moth has a better graphic for the same data on his blog first.  Shame, not an image map.

Mohammad Adil Akif also has a version in his blog.

...This is the blog version - the original form was a Post-It note.
...And in the spirit of Web 0.9 (which came before Web 2.0 the graphic is an image map

I know there is much more coming, like the Dynamic Language Runtime, Domain-Specific Language tools, Silverlight, and so on.   I've also chosen not to call out the versions of Team System, both in the interest of clarity.

Today's post is about a nifty little trick that I have seen done with search text boxes on sites over the years and I decided that it had to be in my toolbox too.

What we are going for is a search box that looks like this when the page loads:

...and looks like this when the user clicks into it:

This technique seems to mostly be applied to search boxes, and I can see the benefit in that.

The post that follows is the amalgum of many VS-A's

To get this done, it is a bit of CSS to style up the inactive and active state for the text box, and a tiny bit of Javascript to tie it together.  I'm using the term active and inactive not in any technical sense, just to describe the two styles that are applied to our text box in response to the user activity.

(assuming the rest of the page is a drab #f0f0f0 in colour...)  These are the two style rules that we are using in the images above:

.inactiveSearchBox
{
    background-color: #f0f0f0;
    border: solid 1px #ffffff;
}

.activeSearchBox
{
    border: groove 1px #d9d9d9;
    background-color: #ffffff;
}

The markup for the input box is then as follows:

<input type="text" class="inactiveSearchBox" id="SearchStrng" 
   value=" Search Here"
   onFocus="this.className='activeSearchBox'; if(this.value==' Search Here')this.value='';" 
   onBlur="if(this.value=='')this.value=' Search Here';this.className='inactiveSearchBox';" />

As you can see it all happens in the onFocus and onBlur events of the textbox.  When the text box gets the focus it sets the class to be our activeSearchBox style and clears our standard text.  The onBlur event restores the default value if the user did not enter anything and sets our style back to the inactiveSearchBox style.

Glossary:

VS-A, n. View Source, followd by an "Ah!". 
See also: VS-****.

Listening to:  Former co-workers

You can do this today, like in 10 minutes...

OpenSearch is a format for describing how your site is searched, and optionally for adding Search elements to other formats like RSS. 

Auto-discovery of OpenSearch description documents is done via a link in your HTML head like so:

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="My Site" href="http://www.mysite.com/open-search.xml" />

The OpenSearch xml document is interpreted in the browser to add extra search providers in the integrated search function as so:

The contents of the file can be short or it can be long.  A bare bones example may be as simple as this:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8”?>
<OpenSearchDescription>
   <ShortName>My Site</ShortName>
   <Description>Search My Site</Description>
   <Url type="text/html" template="http://www.mysite.com/search.aspx?terms={searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

The spec gives another simple, and one much more detailed example document.  The IE blog also goes into some detail... but in true internet fashion, View Source is the quickest path to an example

Security?

The bad news is, as of current browsers at time of writing (IE 7.0.6000.16473, Firefox 2.0.0.4) it seems controls are quite lax around what search template you can include, I had no problems setting the URL in the search template as being a completely different site!   

While it would be completely hilarious to posion someone's search bar as a prank with the following three facts...

• IE stores the search settings here: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes
• FireFox stores them in the filesystem: C:\Documents and Settings\<winprofile>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<mozprofile>\searchplugins
• (sounds like google, not work safe)

I would ultimately like some control here.  I can't see anything in Group Policy for enforcing/allowing/denying new search providers.  I'd like to add one to all PCs for my internal Sharepoint site for example.

DasBlog

Tangentally, If you are looking for the file to edit to add a new link url to a dasBlog site it is:

\dasblogce\themes\*\homeTemplate.blogtemplate

Listening To:  Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation

OK, let me lay it out for you a la the Lost secret clues...

• Frank was interviewed on CSharpZealot.com. So was I.
• Frank is going to Play!  A Video Game Symphony tonight, as am I.

Thinkaboudit people, when have you seen us both in the same room?

The similaraties (*caugh* both of them) are really just too numerious to ignore!