Code / Tea / Etc.

Word 2000 VBA (Wrox) Source Code

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 07:04:40 GMT

A few weeks ago someone emailed Channel 9 looking for me, hoping to track down the source code for an old book of mine (Word 2000 VBA). At the time I couldn't imagine that I'd be able to find it, but I found a set of archive CDs that I've made over the years and voila, there it was.

Anyway, in the interest of feeding the internet search engine monster, the source code (in a zip) is attached to this post for anyone who might be looking for it. Download it from here: http://duncanmackenzie.net/Media/Default/BlogPost/Attachment/2556-1.zip

Books, Recommendations, and Amazon

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:48:50 GMT

I really like to read. I read almost every night and I have since I was a little kid, so I’ve gone through a lot of books. Lately though I’ve noticed a new trend in my reading; I’m reading books that no one recommended to me. Well, no person recommended them to me, I guess it is all Amazon at this point.

Normally, and this goes back to the first time I read the Lord of the Rings, the Belgariad, or the many books of Piers Anthony, someone would mention the book to me and I’d go find it at the book store or the library and I’d be set. For years, this is exactly what would happen, going through Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Terry Goodkind, etc. but recently I found myself buying two different book series that absolutely no one had ever talked to me about before.

The first was a set of two books (with hopefully more to come!) by Peter V. Brett; The Warded Man (aka The Painted Man, his first novel) and The Desert Spear. Both of these were excellent, the kind of books that I gave up many hours of sleep for because I couldn’t bear to stop reading. Shortly after, due to Amazon’s decision to show it to me I suppose, I read the debut novel by Patrick Rothfuss; The Name of the Wind and then pre-ordered his follow-up the moment it was available. So, both series are by new authors, completely unknown to me and between the two of them they are some of the best writing I have ever read. I’ve just finished reading The Name of the Wind for the second time as a matter of fact… which is not unusual for me, I don’t want to even try to guess at how many readings of Dune I’ve gone through, but still it says something since it hasn’t been very long since my first reading of Rothfuss’s books that I felt compelled to go through them again.

I think this shift, from all my reading flowing from word-of-mouth suggestions to finding books through the algorithms of Amazon’s recommendation engine, is due to two things. One is that such a system never existed when I was a kid, your friends were the only source of “if you liked that book, then you’d probably like this book” suggestions around. The second, which is a bit sad, is that as far as I can tell almost none of my friends read. We discuss movies, TV shows and video games all the time, and many recommendations are made, but books almost never come up. I won’t go on and on about this, I probably already sound like an old man at this point, no need to take the leap into “the problem with kids these days…”

In a little bit I think I’ll make another post that goes through the various books I was a big fan of over the years. They are, for the most part, all pretty popular books in their genres so it won’t be a great list of new books to run out and get, but so many of them are excellent that they deserve to be discussed.

Three Cups of Tea is a great book...

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 23:47:25 GMT

One positive side to being stuck at home for two weeks is that I was able to do a fair bit more reading. For the most part, I read magazines and watched movies, but my wife also brought me the book “Three Cups of Tea” about Greg Mortenson’s work in Pakistan building schools for the children of poor rural areas. Mr. Mortenson, an avid mountain climber, ended up spending time in a small village near the base of K2 in Pakistan, barely making it down alive after a failed attempt to reach the summit. Spending time with those people made quite an affect on him and from that point on he was on a mission to build schools and otherwise help out the people of that area. The book is great reading, dealing with exciting events, perilous adventures and important issues … all taking place in an area of the world that is completely foreign to many of us. Check it out, read more reviews or buy it here “Three Cups of Tea” in paperback from amazon.com.

Responding to feedback on Oxite

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:40:52 GMT

Hey folks, many of you are familiar with the commotion that occurred around Oxite’s initial release. For various reasons, Oxite received a lot of attention from developers, bloggers and press… mostly because it is by Microsoft and it contained a lot of buzz-words that people care about (the two biggest being Open Source and CMS… and of course, the aforementioned ‘Microsoft’). This attention was a surprise to us, but it was mostly positive to start with so we were fairly happy. Even all the positive attention was a bit of an issue for us though, as people repeatedly compared Oxite to other products. Most of these products are much larger (SharePoint and Wordpress for example) with much larger feature sets, and with years of development and maturity behind them. Overall this was a PR issue for our team, we had to explain to people that we weren’t trying to compete with SharePoint or Wordpress (or Umbraco, BlogEngine.NET, Graffiti, etc.) … we were trying to show that it was possible to create standards compliant semantic markup using Microsoft’s web technologies.

A little bit later, various people in the ALT.NET community noticed that this project was using ASP.NET MVC and claimed to be a good example of Test Driven Development. Both of those facts put this firmly in their realm of expertise. We had made mistakes in both areas though, both around architecture and messaging. What happened next was both impressive (great to see such a large reaction from a relatively informal association of people) and completely disheartening (as the development team receiving the feedback) at the same time. The vast majority of the criticism was completely accurate and most of that was presented in a very professional manner. We really appreciated feedback that tried hard to be useful without any overly dramatic statements, but we read all the feedback, regardless of how it was presented.

Processing all that feedback, trying to understand the overall issue and the individual specific items that people were concerned by, took us some time. Luckily we had the help of Rob Conery at that point, to come up with a professionally presented list of specific issues for us to look at. Using his refactoring of Oxite to learn from, combined with lots of great blog posts from Chad Myers, Ayende, Javier Lozano and others, we started work on rebuilding Oxite to reflect the feedback we had been given. We worked over email with Chad, Javier and others as we went, and arranged a couple of code reviews with Phil Haack and Eilon Lipton from the ASP.NET MVC team and with Jonathan Carter and Jason Olson on the DPE side of Microsoft. In short, we did a lot of the things that we should have done the first time around.

Some people believe we should have taken the site and the source down at that point and put it back up when we were ready for this next release, but I decided that we would do our refactoring right there in the public source repository on codeplex. I understand the arguments either way, but decided that doing our work in public would show anyone who was following the project and trying to learn from it that big changes were afoot and that they needed to stay up to date with the source.

So now, here we are again, with an updated release, toned down messaging and without any big PR push behind the project. You can read about Oxite’s architecture here, and you can follow the blogs of Erik, Sampy and Nathan for lots of useful information, and of course you can go to codeplex if you want to check out the code yourself. I hope that you like what you see, that you understand that we are learning many of these concepts as we go, and that we are very open to feedback. We know there are still some issues with the code, Sampy touches on some of them in his post, and for many of those we have a plan for improvement. I also expect that there will be decisions we’ve made that some people will disagree with, but I’m ok with that… let us know what you would have done instead (no, we aren’t asking you to fix it, just let us know or point us at a better example) as we are always learning and considering new options.

Newly updated Oxite release available

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:55:02 GMT

Erik pushed out a new release to Oxite today, the first since January 5th. This release is an important one, because it reflects a great deal of changes made in response to internal and external feedback about our initial release.

From the release notes:

We made many improvements, some based on community feedback, and added new features in this release:

New Model, Services and Repositories

Dependency Injection (Routes, Controllers, Services, Repositories, etc)

ActionFilter Registry

Better test coverage

New validation class added

Improved background services architecture

Projects cleaned up and consolidated

Views cleaned up

No more *.cs or *.cs.designer for views in web project

Now works in a sub directory

New admin dashboard

New and update (from last version) SQL scripts included

Many other small features, improvements and bug fixes

A lot of work went into these changes; they were the primary focus of Erik, Sampy and Nathan for the past 4+ weeks. Unity was implemented to provide Dependency Injection, xUnit was used as the test runner to remove a dependency on the higher level SKUs of Visual Studio, and a great deal of work was put into restructuring our data layer to completely abstract the Linq 2 SQL code from our actual objects. Like most software projects, there is always more work that could be done, and we will be making changes and additions as we continue to use this code for our work projects and for our personal sites.

If you are looking for more about Oxite, the discussions, issues and wiki pages on Codeplex are a great source of information and you can always post a comment right here and ask me your question

Chatting today amongst the EvNet team

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:41:00 GMT

Aug 29

10:20 AM

Duncan M.

source code formatting checked in

Duncan M.

http://localhost/posts/Sampy/PAX-Day-3-In-…

Aug 29

10:25 AM

Duncan M.

I started out with overflow-x:auto ... which would add a scroll bar (at least in FF3), but then I went with white-space:pre-wrap; ... but IE doesn't like that :)

Aug 29

10:55 AM

Duncan M.

Nathan, can you send me the link to those pre-wrap alternates?

Aug 29

11:00 AM

nathan h.

http://users.tkk.fi/~tkarvine/pre-wrap-css…

Aug 29

11:05 AM

Duncan M.

thanks

Aug 29

2:35 PM

Duncan M.

I wonder if we should consider using this site to create/embed polls? http://www.polldaddy.com

Aug 29

2:45 PM

Erik P.

I've noticed a lot of people starting to use js includes and other stuff for polls, comments, ratings, etc.

Duncan M.

yep

Erik P.

For us, I think it's a matter of integration. Is it something we care to tightly integrate into our system to do custom queries and views things like that or is it something we just want to throw in? For polls, not sure which way is better. What do you think?

Duncan M.

I'm interested in the http://disqus.com/ comment system as well ... but not for our core sites

Duncan M.

For polls, I don't think we'd want to do anything with the data that is user specific

Aug 29

2:50 PM

Duncan M.

I think they really just want to put it up on the site, gets lots of interaction (including non registered users) and then discuss the results

Aug 29

2:50 PM

Erik P.

Then I think those external things is a good idea. :)

Erik P.

is = are

Duncan M.

the ideal type of intergration I could picture with something like polldaddy.com would be to associate a discussion with it somehow (like making it an entry) so that we could show the poll on the home page (sidebar?) and then have a 'click to discuss' option

Duncan M.

this could be manual even, just create a forum thread about the poll, embed the poll in that thread *and* on the home page, and then put a link below the poll on the home page to the thread

Best description of twitter I've seen

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:07:00 GMT

From Dave Winer:

The flow there is pointless. It's like trying to make a baby by having sex with a rock. First, it's hard to get excited. And second, no baby.

Marvel Digital Comics, not perfect, but worth the money!

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:38:00 GMT

A month or so ago, I went looking to see if there was any way to read back issues of Marvel Comics online… and discovered a complete site around providing exactly that service. With a subscription to the digital comics section, you can view any issue of any series that is available on their online catalog; I sat down a couple of nights ago and read through issues 1 to 100 of Ultimate Spiderman for example.

The viewing experience (it appears to be based around some customized version of Adobe’s PDF reader) is acceptable to me, although it sometimes renders text out in odd fonts (obviously not the ones used in the original printed version) and its coolest feature ‘Smart Panels’, that lets you view the comic one panel at a time, instead of one or two pages across your screen, sometimes shows you a view that has cut off parts of the various bits of dialog. So far, the best experience for me has been viewing two pages at a time on a large wide screen monitor like my laptop’s 1920 x 1200 screen. The text is all readable, the rest of the art doesn’t look too cruddy from scaling, and I don’t run into the various bugs of the ‘Smart Panels’ system… and this is the closest in size and format to reading an actual comic, so it works out on many levels!

I’ve been reading a bunch of comics nearly each and every night… from ones that I read as a kid (like old issues of the X-Men, probably the only series where I had a ton of issues… well, other than owning the full run of ROM: Spaceknight and the Micronauts!) to all the new ones that I have never read at all (the Ultimates, Secret War, the Civil War series, M-Day, etc…)

The one major flaw with this system though, and this didn’t stop me from buying a year’s subscription but it might be a deal-killer to you, is that there are often gaps in a series you are trying to read. That 1-100 of Ultimate Spiderman that I mentioned earlier, well it is actually issues 1-3, 6-7, 14-15, 19-23, 31-34… and so on. Storylines stop right in the middle, then pick up so far ahead that it can drive you crazy! I’d like to hope that they are working on fixing this, but the cynical part of my mind wonders if it is on purpose, to encourage you to buy the print version of the comics… I hope that isn’t the case, it would really lower my opinion of Marvel :(

If you love Marvel comics you should check this out… maybe you’ll love it enough to pay for it, or maybe not… but I think it definitely worth a look.

The new and improved Channel 9 has shipped!

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:27:00 GMT

When I joined my current team, it was called the Channel 9 dev team, because Channel 9 was the big site that they had built and was the center of all of their efforts. You certainly wouldn’t have known that from how we spent the last two years though :)

We built a whole new code base for a video blog site and launched a new site (Channel 10) on that code, bringing some of the video style of Channel 9 to a new audience. We often discussed, as we shipped out revision after revision of the Channel 10 home page, that our next goal would be to ship out a new version of Channel 9… all moved onto that new code. Things didn’t go according to plan though, and we shipped out VisitMix.com, Channel 8, and TechNet Edge (for IT Pros) before we were really given more than a moment’s peace to start planning out the work to deploy Channel 9 on a new code base.

When it did become time to plan the channel 9 deployment, it turned out that, while the new code base was a major improvement in many ways, the feature gap between what was already available on 9 and what the new code could offer was substantial. Now at least a year and a half had gone by since I joined the Channel 9 dev team, and we could see a long road ahead of us to get the next version of Channel 9 shipped; all the while, new features, bug fixes and UI changes for the other channels kept coming up and mixed priorities from above meant that we still had to devote most of our time to those properties. Finally, at the start of this year (2008), I was asked to start laying out a firm plan that would get Channel 9 v4 (as we took to calling it) shipped. As part of that, we gained a new focus on channel 9 and were able to finally prioritize it above some of the day to day needs of our other properties. We weren’t completely focused on the task, but we finally had the ability to say no to most things that would pull us away from C9… progress began to be made. At the start of May of this year we shipped out a beta version of Channel 9, and by the end of the month (June 2nd to be precise) we did the final switch over, made the DNS change that pointed channel9.msdn.com at a new set of web servers, and v4 was officially launched. Over the next week or so, we were bogged down dealing with a wide variety of bugs that didn’t turn up during our own testing or in the beta, but the site stabilized and is now running fairly well. We still have bugs, but the old site had bugs that had sat for months, so I think we are in pretty good shape. You can see a picture gallery of the various Channel 9 home pages that were envisioned or deployed throughout the past few years, including the new one… and a similar gallery representing the many home pages of Channel 10 that we shipped over the course of just a few months.

version 3, C9 when I joined the team (shipped August 2005)

new, v4 (June 2, 2008)

all in all, I’m very happy with the site we shipped last week and very impressed with the team behind it all… it has been a busy couple of years, but it is nice to have tangible (if you can consider the web tangible) results that you can point at when you are thinking about what you’ve accomplished.

At home, recovering from surgery

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:31:00 GMT

It has been a crazy past few months for my health, or at least the appearance of my health.

For about 30-something years now, I’ve had problems with my tonsils. This has included one or more bouts per year of tonsillitis, quite a few cases of strep throat and a ton of colds that just seem to end up hitting me as sore throats and lasting way longer than it seems like they should. All standard symptoms of someone who needs their tonsils removed, which is what various doctors have been telling me and my parents for the past 30-something years :)

When I still lived at home, and this decision wasn’t up to me, it turns out that my grandfather (who was a pediatrician) disagreed with how quickly most doctors would removed tonsils, so whenever a doctor would suggest that I have mine out he would suggest that we just wait and see if the problem went away on its own. The problem of the moment would always go away, even if it was due to come back in a few months, so we kept that cycle up for many years. Eventually, I became an adult and it became my problem… and it wasn’t long before I ended up noticing the pattern of illness hitting my throat and headed into see a doctor. Canadian healthcare is great if you need something and if you don’t have the money to pay for it, but that benefit produces a system that is generally short on resources. When you go into a Canadian doctor, in my experience, with something that isn’t absolutely necessary (even if it would be a good idea in the long run) then they are likely to suggest you not bother with the procedure, that you try a prescription instead or just waiting it out. That lack of enthusiasm, combined with my own lack of confidence about what I needed, led to many more years without my tonsils being removed. Over the past few years in the US medical system though, I’ve had so many different doctors look at my throat and straight-out tell me that my tonsils really need to come out, that I finally decided to do it. I made the appointment and on Tuesday of this week, they were removed. Now I’m stuck at home, recovering, with a very sore throat and some great prescription pain killers…

What makes this whole experience a bit confusing to my co-workers is that I’ve also been going through a completely different and unrelated medical problem at the same time. For reasons that aren’t completely understood, the hair on my head has started to fall out… rapidly and in big patches. This is a medical condition known as alopecia areata, essentially partial hair loss. This isn’t a sign of any underlying health problems, but it sure looks like it is… and people don’t really seem to believe you when you tell them that it is just a weird type of hair loss and that it isn’t anything to worry about. Combine that problem, which eventually led to just shaving my whole head to avoid looking all patchy, with scheduling some time off for some upcoming surgery and people start looking at you like you aren’t going to make it through the summer.

Fun stuff… but in both cases it is temporary and I’m happily recovering… maybe I’ll even manage to have my hair grown back in over the next few months.

Sunburned at a Chess Tournament

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:58:00 GMT

Well, this certainly isn't something that happens all that often, but after spending all day at a chess tournament (at Wellington Elementary in Woodinville) on Saturday, I ended up with a sunburn on my face and arms! It turned out to be a really nice day, which was good, since the waiting area for parents and kids (where the parents spend up about 6 to 7 hours, and the kids spend all the time between matches) was outside. Never seen that before, and it was cold and wet enough when we arrived that I was pretty unimpressed with the idea. In the end though, it was very sunny out there ... and it certainly gave Connor a lot of fresh air between his matches (which were inside the school gym).

Another chess tournament this weekend, last one before the state championship

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:42:00 GMT

A new father-son activity for Connor and me has been to go to chess tournaments, spending a few Saturdays throughout the year in some school gym. Starting last year, we started to play chess at home and he enjoyed it so much that we decided to enter into the Shelton View Elementary school's chess tournament in the Kindergarten category. He did well and had a lot of fun, so it has become the hobby of choice around our house. The best thing about taking him to a tournament is that you can't really tell from his face whether he has won or lost when he comes out of a match, he always seems to be enjoying himself regardless of the outcome. Tomorrow's tournament is the last one before the state competition (which he qualified for and we decided to attend as well, since it is in Redmond this year), so I expect a lot more first-time tournament players will be attending in the hope of winning 3 out of their 5 games and qualifying for state.

Sidebar Gadgets for Channel 9, Channel 8 and more

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:32:00 GMT

We recently had Donovan West (LiveGadgets.net) build us a set of sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista. These gadgets use the RSS feeds from each site and let you see all of our new content as it gets posted, then (using Silverlight) you can even play our videos right there on your desktop.

You can check out the gadgets (for Channel 9, Mix, C8, Edge, and on10.net) by clicking on the appropriate image below:

Using my Xbox Live data service?

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:01:00 GMT

If you've written an app, private or public, using my data feed of Xbox live info I'd really appreciate it if you'd let me know. This isn't a required 'sign-up', but I want to start to keep track so that I could possibly create a page listing all the sites using it, and it may also be useful to be able to contact folks if I need to make a change or take the service down for an hour or so. Just comment on this post, or drop me a line at duncanma@microsoft.com.

New Xbox Friends Gadget released and a Silverlight Gamercard Generator

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:05:00 GMT

Adam Kinney, Silverlight dude and my colleague at work, has released an updated version of his Xbox Friends Watch gadget and a new standalone gamercard gadget for your website that uses Silverlight 2.0.

ImageShack Toolbar causes incorrect results from ASP.NET's browser checking code

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:09:00 GMT

We recently updated a few of our web sites with code that would provide a 'nicer' experience for browsers that were not compatible with the ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX) scripts we were using. For some reason though, a few users who were running a fully compatible browser (Firefox 2.0.0.*), were seeing the no-script experience. We were puzzled, but one of the users figured out that their ImageShack toolbar might be causing the problem. Sure enough, after I installed that same toolbar myself I was able to test and confirm that it truly is causing the confusion.

Using a little test page, http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/services/browserinfo.aspx (feel free to use it for your own testing), I received the following results for Firefox 2.0.0.11 on Vista before installing the ImageShack toolbar.

Request.Browser

.Type: Firefox2.0.0.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 2.0.0.11
.Browser: Firefox
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

After installing the toolbar, I get this:

Request.Browser

.Type: Mozilla1.8.1.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 1.8.1.11
.Browser: Mozilla
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

Note the version change and the change in Request.Browser.Browser, certainly enough to throw off our atlas-compatibility check. I haven't figured out the appropriate fix for this yet, but it is nice to at least have one possible explanation as to why valid browsers are sometimes seeing our 'no script' experience.

Code Metrics in Visual Studio 2008 and the EvNet project

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:24:00 GMT

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I thought it was neat that I could right-click the main project (excluding all our client script and HTML) that runs behind on10.net, pick code metrics and see cool #s like "23,442 lines of code" :)

Lately though, I've seen us reducing that number while adding features, so this might the highest result I'll ever see for this project :)

The Viewport Meta Tag and the iPhone

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:55:00 GMT

I've been fiddling around with mobile interfaces for both my personal site and for the various sites I work on (http://on10.net, http://channel9.msdn.com, amongst others) and I noticed the use of <meta name="viewport" content... /> on some other mobile sites. A quick search and I found a great discussion of the viewport meta tag on furbo.org (the apple developer site provides the same info in a more reference format). Turns out this simple meta tag helps Mobile Safari determine how best to scale your site for the smaller screen of the iPhone (relative to a desktop that is). I don't have an iPhone, or an iPod touch for that matter (I gather the experience would be similar... if you don't want to get a full blown cell account I'd suggest the 'touch' for testing purposes), although I found a great testing site for the iPhone (best viewed with Safari 3.0 on your desktop).

Looking for good examples of Mobile Interfaces

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 04:39:00 GMT

I'm part of a dev team that builds blog/forum software and I've been thinking about mobile interfaces lately... so I'm trying to find a good example of site like ours that provides a good (enjoyable, useful and usable) mobile interface... one that will work across a variety of browses. It seems 37 Signals is thinking about the same thing these days and they've made a blog post looking for exactly the same thing I am, examples of good mobile interfaces. I'm looking for sites that are some combination of text and video blogging and are usable via a relatively modern phone. I found a lot of the comments to that post to be completely unhelpful... because they were focused on sites that are specific to the iPhone! Building an interface for the iPhone is not a bad idea, but I certainly wouldn't try to do that until after we had a good general purpose interface for a much wider variety of mobile devices. I did find a few interesting sites though, from the comments and from another site (Brian Cantoni's list of good mobile sites at http://cantoni.mobi/):

http://mobile.seriouseats.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
http://bbcriver.com/ (seems like it would benefit from some paging, but I could be wrong... is one big page better on a phone than paging?)
http://m.joystiq.com/

Of course, all of these map well to the home page of our site(s) (like on10.net or Channel 9), I wonder if there are any good examples for a web forum? I'm pretty sure that a lot of our users would like to be able to view Channel 9's Coffeehouse on their mobile device, and off hand I don't know what the ideal experience for that would be.

On a related note, Brian Cantoni (the author of that list of good mobile sites) has a great series of blog articles about testing your web applications across all major smartphone platforms.

Trying to open a file into VS 2005/2008 ... never works from Explorer

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:26:00 GMT

So I have a file on disk, web.config in this case, and I right click and pick 'open with | Visual Studio 2008' ... and I get this:

Windows cannot find 'C:\projects\9\web.config'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.

[OK]

VS 2008 opens, but no file. If I then pick the file from File | Open it works fine... what the hell? As far as I can remember, this was true with VS 2005 and it has annoyed me every day...