Channel 9 - Discussions by NateFurtwangler

Coffeehouse - Japan: Only 6% Next Gen Consumers Want Xbox 360

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 03:25:54 GMT

That number doesn't surprise me since Xbox never really took off in Japan like it did in America so they are probably more excited about Playstation 3 as of right now.

Microsoft will have a chance to show the Japanese what the Xbox360's all about this week at the Tokyo Game Show (Japanese E3) so maybe that will change things a little bit. The PS3 sounds great on paper but I doubt it will be playable at TGS, while the X360 will be for sure. Playing is a lot more exciting than speculating.

I, too, would be interested in hearing from any Japanese C9'ers about how they percieve the Xbox and Xbox360 (or Microsoft in general) especially compared to the PS3.

Coffeehouse - Bill Gates' video - one thing I think he has wrong...

NateFurtwangler — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 15:24:17 GMT

MisterDonut wrote:

Great video, so far..

One thing, though, I think he's off the mark (and I think others might agree, or Bill needs to elaborate on) is that the vision of Students without textbooks (or better yet, with tablets) that Bill spoke of as a software problem isn't totally a software problem.

I'm of the belief this is as much of a hardware problem as a software one. People can curl up and study a good book. Kind hard to do that with a tablet in it's present form (yes, I own one and love it). Software is great, Microsoft. But hardware can be a limiting factor, as I'm sure you all are aware.

Also, convincing people to use new technology is very difficult as well. Maybe Bill address this, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

Anyone agree? Or Disagree?

Again - a shout out do Bill G - Thanks for making my wife's scholarship a reality! (ok.. I'll be quiet now..)

I think Bill G was speculating about the future. Of course, Bill's speculations mean quite a bit more than just any old speculations, he's in a position to make things happen.

I agree that the Tablet PC will evolve over the next 5-10 years, especially as voice recognition becomes common place. Right now most TabletPC's are of the convertable type to allow for the use of the keyboard. With near-perfect voice recognition the average user would have no need for a keyboard.

I think the TabletPC will either evolve into or give birth to a new generation of computers similar to the "slates" seen on Star Trek. They would be smaller than a magazine, light, and perfect for electronic media (books included).

As far as curling up with a current tablet to read a book, thats exactly what I do with my textbooks this semester (I scanned them in, since publishers havn't realized a need for electronic versions of their books). But you're right that it's not as natural or comfortable as it could be.

Tech Off - Decent menu in Avalon

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 18:38:18 GMT

footballism wrote:

NateFurtwangler, I just get a "Net Timeout Error" Message when I try to open the link you provide in Firefox, please fix it.

Hmm, just tried it in IE and Firefox, worked fine for me. If you're still having trouble with the link just go to www.natefurtwangler.com and its the 2nd or 3rd item down.

Also, it's up in the sandbox here on C9 (probably a page or two back)

Tech Off - Decent menu in Avalon

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 15:03:16 GMT

footballism wrote:

As an extra question, I think the default look and feel of menu in Avalon is quite ugly(some sort of traditional windows look and feel), how to spice it up? for example, if I wanna have the menu in Avalon displaying in Windows XP style, how can I achieve this?

I recently made a Radial Menu in Avalon which of course is quite different in both style and function from a regular "traditional" menu, so you might want to check out the code for that too if you plan on getting in much deeper than a simple skin. It's in the Sandbox here on C9 too.

Coffeehouse - C9 Zero Tolerance - 3 strikes you're out?

NateFurtwangler — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 02:11:24 GMT

Rossj wrote:

I actually think Jamie is right. I don't think it is so much the foul language, but that you have to wade through tons of crap to get to the interesting bits.

If you haven't seen a change in C9 in the past few weeks/months then you've probably not been here long. Ask anyone who has been here over 6 months whether the C9 forums are now better or worse than before, I think most answers will be negative.

C9 is losing valued contributors with interesting and relevant things to say because children are allowed to treat the forums as their personal playground, with no boundaries on the amount of abuse being dished out - see the thread where Orbit threatens to set someone on fire for example.

As for Jamie winning a debate, it is starting to be a long time since I've seen one on C9, so he hasn't had the chance - they may be there but they get buried beneath a lot of crud, insults and general childishness.

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now.

I agree with you Rossj, there has been a serious lack of intelligent discussion here on C9 as of late, one of the main reasons I havn't posted much. I still check out the forums almost every day and in the past I'd usually make a few replies to interesting topics, but well...it just doesn't seem like there has been very many as of late. Although I can't really say I've contributed much in that department lately (been busy with school starting back up) so maybe there's other reasons for the lack of interesting discussion besides obnoxious posters.

As far as banning goes, I think the current guidelines that Charles uses will work for the most part. No good forum is free of obnoxious posters though, it comes with the territory.

Coffeehouse - blogs / scoble and channel9

NateFurtwangler — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:38:53 GMT

Jamie, I like your idea of having a blog for a profile. Right now my profile links to my blog on Blogger but I see no reason why I couldn't post all that stuff on a C9 blog.

Plus I'm looking for a new free blog host since Blogger doesn't support RSS (It does, however, support Atom).

To be honest, most of the time I read Robert Scoble's blog posts are when they are referenced from a C9 discussion anyway...makes sense for him to make this place his home!

Coffeehouse - Tablet PC Demo

NateFurtwangler — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 01:07:51 GMT

600 page books dont go away in college either However, you have to own the book to scan it so unless you buy your books for highschool I wouldn't recommend it.

Coffeehouse - Tablet PC Demo

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 19:40:20 GMT

>>Check out The Student Tablet PC blog. Tracy Hooten, one of the two students who runs the blog, recently posted a comparison on how to do this with both Acrobat and Microsoft Office Document Imaging (included with Office like a lot of cool utilities most people never seem to discover).

Actually thats where I found out about book scanning. I heard about the Student Tablet PC blog from your podcast! I went with Microsoft Office Document Imaging because I don't like using pdf files (they always seem so slow and have bad ink support). Like I wrote before, basic details can be found at my blog but check out the Student Tablet PC Blog for detailed explainations.

Just for a quick reference, my first book was 300 pages and took about 2 hours and was 16megs when finished.

XiXoria: It fell out of my bag so there was nothing protecting it. It landed in the upper left corner so I was worried about the LCD being shattered but it was fine. Like I said, it only had a small scratch on the paint on the corner. I'd say it was about a 4 foot drop on to cement. Maybe I'm just lucky but I'd say thats pretty durable.

Coffeehouse - Tablet PC Demo

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:56:28 GMT

I have had a Toshiba Protege M200 since January and love it. Its perfect for the student.

Some tips that I've come up with:

-Use OneNote to record lectures. It links your notes to the lecture. i.e. if at 15:20 into the lecture the instructor is talking about Dijkstra's Algorithm, I write "Dijkstra" and when I put the stylus over the word i can click play to hear the lecture at that point.

-If you have a scanner, scan your books! Its not as hard as it sounds, see my blog for details. Once it's scanned you can read/search/annotate it all on your tablet without ever having to carry books around.

-Get a convertable if you can, I do lots of programming so having a keyboard attached is a must.

The M200 is very durable too. Mine fell out of my bag when I was walking from class and landed corner-first on concrete. There is a small scratch on the paint but other than that you'd never know it happened. Not that it will ever again. (ALWAYS make sure your bag is properly zipped! )

Tech Off - Unified GUI...

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 17:42:36 GMT

I wouldn't worry too much about professional applications as there will be interoperability between Avlalon and Windows Forms. Just because it's written in Avalon doesn't mean it HAS to look unique, it could still use all the standard windows forms controls and regular windows.

However, I agree that there will be a slew of lower-budget, smaller applications that will make me want to barf when I see them. At the same time, with a good, creative designer on the team there could also be a slew of lower-budget, smaller applications that will amaze me with their visuals and intuitive interfaces.

Tech Off - .Net vs. C++ :: Cast your vote!

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 15:44:30 GMT

There's no reason to vote for one or the other, atleast without a context.

As far as .NET making less capable, lazier programmers, I think thats not true at all. A programming language should not determine the characteristics of a programmer, it's just a tool. Perhaps you could argue that .NET allows lazier, less capable programmers to write (bad) software easier, but it has no affect on good or even decent programmers.

C++ is the language of choice for all CSE classes at my school (Michigan State University) so I get lots of exposure to that. Thats the main reason I choose to do projects on my own in .NET, giving me exposure and experience to both C++ (from school) and .NET (on my own). I think both have a place in software engineering.

Besides, techinically you can program in C++ under .NET so the question doesn't even make sense.

Tech Off - HELP: WinFX over LH7074

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 18:22:50 GMT

According to my Google results, that book was published in January 2004, and therefore is outdated. Avalon and the XAML syntax it uses has changed quite a bit since then. Make sure any examples you are looking at are no older than May 2005 since thats the last release of Avalon with major syntax changes (particularly in styles). Older examples may work, but they may be outdated as well.

Tech Off - Xml Question

NateFurtwangler — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 06:14:21 GMT

PaoloM wrote:

Processing any file incurs in an overhead. The issue is to define the acceptable tradeoff between performance hit and easy of maintenance/compatibility.

People use XML because it's very very simple to parse Xml documents in every system using standardized techniques. Yes, it's a bit slower, but then raw binary sector read from the disc is faster than anything else

Agreed, it all comes down to interoperability, if there's a chance that another program or machine will be using the same data as your application (or data used by your application) then XML is a good choice because chances are whatever technology that the other program uses will also have XML support making it easier to integrate your data. If you create proprietary file formats it may be easier to process but it becomes much more difficult to share data, especially when you consider the existing technology and standards (XSLT for example).

However, XML isn't the solution to everything and unless your going to be injesting data and/or sharing data a proprietary format could very well be the best solution.

Coffeehouse - Avalon (WinFx Beta 1) "Digital Ink" samples / TabletPC SDK

NateFurtwangler — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 19:20:17 GMT

I have WinFX Beta 1 RC installed on my computer, is there a point to upgraded to WinFX Beta 1? Did they change/fix anything or just re-name it to go along with Longhorn Beta 1?

Also, while using WinFX Beta 1 RC and VS 2005 Beta 2 I tried using Stylus events such as "OnStylusEnter" with an Ellipse but got no results (no errors either). I have a TabletPC with the latest TabletPC SDK installed but I thought Avalon itself had native Ink/InkEvent support? Do I need to be running Longhorn (Vista, whatever) to use Avalon's Stylus events or am I mis-using it to begin with? Or maybe it's newly supported in Beta 1...

Sorry if thats a bit off-topic but it reminded me of my Ink attempts with Beta 1 RC

Tech Off - XPath support in .NET1.1

NateFurtwangler — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 16:31:27 GMT

According to Dare Obasanjo (worked on System.Xml classes) .NET will not support XPath 2.0

Here's why:
http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo/archive/2004/05/13/131166.aspx

The Sandbox - Custom Control for Avalon: Radial Menu

NateFurtwangler — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 19:16:18 GMT

Here's a custom control for Avalon Beta1 RC that can act as a radial menu, or even just a radial container for that matter. A basic explaination and the source code (along with the control's .dll) and a couple more pics can be found at my blog: Nate Furtwangler

I've provided a demo for those of you who can run Avalon Beta1 RC applications, it's definitely better to see it in action.

As with any experimental project, there are a lot of things I would do differently now and if I had more time. Also, I found a couple limitations within Avalon (property triggers can't initiate an Action and event triggers can't set properties) which affected the way I did a couple of things, although I've recently learned that most of my gripes have already been addressed in the next version of Avalon, so thats good to know.

The control does not have to expand to a full 360 degrees, that is user defined as well as the Radius and StartingAngle (the Demo binds these 3 properties to sliders so you can play with them and watch what happens on the fly). With such customizability the control could be used in a corner, an edge or anywhere else.

I think I'm going to write a Code Project article on how I made it so people who want to make custom Avalon controls will have a tutorial to follow. I had a hard time finding much info on the subject that wasn't extremly basic or vague.

Tech Off - With RSS coming in LH/WinV - how about "posting" tool ?

NateFurtwangler — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 05:23:13 GMT

I agree, I used to use WordPress when I had my webserver running but due to circumstances (moved, no longer have a static IP) I can't have my webserver up. And since I'm on a college budget I use the free Blogger.com for my basic blogging needs. But if your serious and have the resources by all means look into WordPress or if your really ambitious take a look at Community Server (formerly .Text) which has even more features, but is not as easy to set up in my opinion.

Coffeehouse - Beta Lemmings

NateFurtwangler — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 05:13:28 GMT

JScript wrote:

If "lemming" brings to mind blindly following the leader over a cliff, or whatever: an urban legend (therefore, terribly ironic); what would be a more appropriate term for that behavior... "beta-tester"? ("Lemming" isn't actually in my thesaurus.) Really though, why the resounding fanfare (for no apparent reason)?

Well there are a number of reasons people want to beta test so badly.

To name a few,

a) New technology is exciting and seeing it a year in advance is a privilege

b) A developer can start learning the technology before its released so when it actually is released they are ahead of the curve

c) Developers could start a large project during the beta phase and when the product leaves beta and is released the project will be nearly complete. A few minor tweaks and its ready to go.

d) Some people actually want to help create a better product and beta testing is active involvement.

There are more but those are the ones that I usually think about.

Tech Off - With RSS coming in LH/WinV - how about "posting" tool ?

NateFurtwangler — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 15:44:43 GMT

I also use Blogger. Con, but they don't support (yet) RS.... I believe MSN spaces does.

Tech Off - Avalon questions/suggestions

NateFurtwangler — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 18:48:59 GMT

I recently found out that Microsoft knows about the first issue and has an item to address it, so maybe we'll see it possible in the next release.

The second issue (conditional values in triggers) seems less important but I think it should still be considered.

Tech Off - Avalon questions/suggestions

NateFurtwangler — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 16:59:51 GMT

I have a couple of questions about Avalon and XAML and if they aren't possible I'd like to suggest the concepts to the Avalon team.

1.) I've been looking for a way to set a property after an event in XAML but havn't been able to find anything about it (all EventTrigger examples use Actions which run timelines). I'd like to be able to do something like this:

EventTrigger>

The reason why I cant just use some code-behind function is that it's inside the default ControlTemplate of the default Style for a custom control, so I can't call any functions, just XAML.

2.) Is there a way to use conditional values for Triggers? i.e.

<Trigger Property="Expansion" Value=">.5">

...

Trigger>

I don't want Value=.5 because then the setters applied by the Trigger only last for as long as Expansion is exactly .5, i want it for greater than .5. This would be useful for anything being animated where you want Setters applied past a certain point in the animation, not just at one single instant.

Both suggestions seem obvious to me which is why I was wondering if there wasn't already a way to do it. Any ideas? Otherwise, why have they been omitted?

Tech Off - LH RSS Features [should be managed(!)]

NateFurtwangler — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 20:12:30 GMT

mVPstar wrote:

The problem with making the deeper components managed is the fact that managed code requires unmanaged code somewhere along the line. The CLR I don't believe is managed in itself or that would just be analogous to a black hole. The CLR doesn't run too deep into the system so it requires other components to run. That said, the deeper components (way past the CLR) end up being unmanaged because they can't target the CLR.

In order to get a system that is completely managed, some sort of modifications to the hardware must happen, which is something that the world is truly not ready for.

I could be wrong. I don't really know much about .NET.
mVPstar

You're absolutely right, any managed code must be run by the CLR "virtual machine", which is itself a program not written in managed code.

I know the WinFX programming models were built on .NET but I'm unsure of how the core technologies were written.

Tech Off - LH RSS Features [should be managed(!)]

NateFurtwangler — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:17:11 GMT

I would be surprised if any RSS API created by Microsoft is not managed. Both Avalon and Indigo are built on the .NET Framework, so whatever they do with RSS will most likely do the same.

But at this point I havn't heard or read anything officially explaining what the Longhorn RSS API will be like, other than the features it will offer (common list, common data store, and the sync engine)

There is a question on the LonghornRSS Wiki asking if it will be written in .NET or if it will be part of WinFX but there is no answer yet.

Coffeehouse - Avalon people's blogs:

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 20:36:24 GMT

Woops, I mixed up my Avalon bloggers! Thanks for clarifying for me Adam.

Ryan Dawson wrote an article about custom controls in Avalon which I had been looking at recently along with Chris Anderson's AvPad in order to better understand creating custom controls. I mixed the two up. But what I wrote before was still about Ryan Dawson, he provides great information on Avalon.

Coffeehouse - Avalon people's blogs:

NateFurtwangler — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 17:34:36 GMT

Wow, you've even got my brother on the list! I also have Ryan Dawson's blog on my list, although it's a "Longhorn Blog" he has had some of the best Avalon information I've come accross (he made AvPad).
I see you have him in your feed list but not up on the Wiki.

Unfortunately Longhornblogs.com seem's to be down right now...

Here's his blog URL anyway: http://www.longhornblogs.com/rdawson/

He's definitely worth a mention on the Wiki.

Edit: Ah, I see he's already on the Wiki under "General"