If you're going to ReMix next week you might like to know that the "Ready, Steady, Speak" presentation competition pioneered at the Visual Studio 2008 Launch earlier this year in Birmingham will be held again. "Ready, Steady, Speak" is very similar to the Speaker Idol competition held at TechEd Europe each year and gives you a chance to give a 5 minute presentation and win significant prizes. Here's the official information:-

Contestants will present a 5 min session on a subject of their choice relating to Web Development or Web Design.  They will present in front of the REMIX audience and in front of a panel of judges.  If there are more than a  certain number of contestants (TBD), there will be ‘heats’ earlier in the day with the winners of the heats in a ‘speak-off’ in the evening session.  The ‘speak-off’ will take place as stated in the evening of the first day of MIX and the first prize is an XBox 360 + Goodies!  Mandatory Prerequisites:Speakers must NOT have previously presented ‘full sessions’ at DDD, TechEd, DevWeek, SDN, SQLBITS, VBUG Conference, NxtGenUG FEST or any similar such conferences.

·         Speakers must create a new session of their own with new material which can be based on existing material but cannot be a simple copy of it.

·         Speakers must limit their session to as close to 5 mins as possible (overrunning time will cause the speaker to be marked down.)

·         Speakers must not have previously won Speaker Idol or “Ready Steady Speak” UK Launch – Sorry to James Coulter J!

·         Speakers must state their desire to enter the competition by no later than COP Monday 15^th September 2008.

Desirable Prerequisites:-

·         Speakers should provide if at all possible their own laptop, but one can be provided if necessary.  The speaker should notify the organisers of any software prerequisites.

·         Speakers should have spoken previously at a User Group meeting even if only for a 10 min mini-session or ‘nugget’.  This is NOT mandatory.

Remeber, the closing date is next Monday so you need to be quick. To enter email either Dave McMahon or anyone involved with ReMix UK and they will connect you with Dave.

 

Hold the phone! Yes, Jesse Liberty, author of over 20 books, Program Manager on the Silverlight Team at Microsoft, self-confessed "Silverlight Geek" (it actually says that on his business card) is coming to Bristol. And he's going to talk on Silverlight for 2 hours! Jesse is doing a lightening tour of the UK combining The .NET Developer Network in Bristol, ReMix in Brighton and 2 events in Dublin and Belfast. On Tuesday 16th September 2008 he is in Bristol to cover two Silverlight subjects:-

Styles, Templates and Visual State Manager
1.       Introductions, Make fun of the American
2.       Modifying a toolbox control with in-line attributes
3.       Creating Styles and applying them to controls in Xaml
4.       Creating Styles and applying them to controls in Blend
5.       Reskinning toolbox controls with Templates, by hand
6.       Reskinning toolbox controls with Templates, in Blend

Skinnable Custom Controls- The Parts and State Model and Inside the VSM
1.       An introduction to the Parts and State Manager and VSM in detail
2.       Creating a Custom Control
3.       Visual States and Visual State Groups
4.       Storyboards and Transitions
5.       Inside the VSM
6.       Creating a Custom Control Contract
7.       The Template Part Attribute
8.       The Template Visual State Attribute
9.       Putting it all together.
10.     Good night and where’s the beer?

Attendance is free - you just have to be a member (which is free) and send an email saying you want to attend. If you're into Silverlight can you afford to miss hearing about it straight from the horse's mouth ? (Sorry, Jesse, British colloqualiasms sometimes leave something to be desired).

Here's another automatic translation tool from Microsoft: the Captions Language Interface Pack (CLIP). CLIP is an offline real time translator that translates whatever control is under the mouse cursor. CLIP manifests itself as a stand alone window and a tooltip (you can enable/disable both independently). Here's the window:-

Here's a cut out of a menu with a CLIP tooltip translating "New" into "Nouveau":-

At the time of writing CLIP supports translation from English (United States) to French (France) and Alsatian (France) and vice-versa but you can probably expect more languages to be added in the future.

CLIP has similarities with another Microsoft technology. Back in May 2004 Microsoft announced Microsoft Application Translator (MAT). This product was designed to translate applications on the fly. MAT was never released but I'm guessing that CLIP is using some of the same technology.

 

The .NET Developer Network are having a Summer Social event. It's a simple plan: we go to a pub and we argue debate the relative merits of WPF vs. Silverlight (and also windows applications vs. web applications). We may drink, we may eat and we may even have a jolly good time. Everyone is invited - you don't have to be a member (membership is free anyway). It's on Thursday 21st August 2008, anytime from 6:30pm onwards at The Fox Den pub, New Road, Stoke Gifford, Bristol, BS34 8RQ (0117 979 1861).

ReMix UK 08 is Microsoft's 2 day UI technologies conference for designers and developers. This year it will be held in Brighton on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th September 2008 and I'm very pleased to say that I will be speaking on the Friday. My session is:-

Internationalizing WPF And Silverlight Applications
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications have as many similarities as differences from Windows Forms applications. The same is true for WPF’s localization model. This session illustrates how to localize and globalize WPF and Silverlight applications and pays particular attention to those issues that are unique to XAML, WPF and Silverlight.

There's lots to cover here and some thinking and some decisions to be made to get the right result.

See you there.

I love FxCop. What I like about it most is that you can write your own FxCop rules. That means that when you define a coding rule in your development standard you can write a custom FxCop rule for it and get FxCop to enforce the rule. Certainly this speeds up code reviews but it also relieves us all from the dull drudgery of wading through code for the silly little things and allows us to spend our time using our brains instead.

I've been writing custom FxCop rules for a number of years and although I'm a big fan the part where I get to writing the rules has traditionally been a lot of pain. The reason is that there wasn't any documentation for the SDK - you had to work it out yourself. I wrote Chapter 13 of .NET Internationalization explaining how to write custom rules but this was focused more on what it meant to the world of internationalization than all of the details of how to write rules. Well now the pain can go away for everyone. Everyone put their hands together for Jason Kresowaty. Jason took it upon himself to write the documentation for the FxCop SDK! Microsoft didn't ask him to do it, he just did it anyway. And it's very good (you can download it here). What's even better is he wrote Introspector (available for download at the same location). Introspector does for introspection of assemblies what Reflector does for reflection of assemblies. FxCop is based on Microsoft's introspection engine (FxCop hasn't used reflection for some years now) so an Introspection tool is a godsend (or a Jason-send in this case).

Thanks, Jason, this is a big deal.

(Alternatively, if you don't want to read the docs I gave a presentation on this at a VBUG Conference and you can download a video of this presentation here and the slides here).

 

Technorati Tags: FxCop, Jason Kresowaty, Introspector, Introspection

The Visual Studio International Pack 1.0 has been released. The pack is a set of .NET Framework class libraries that extended internationalization support in the .NET Framework. In version 1.0 the set of classes all improve support for East Asian cultures. Here's what's in this release:-

• East Asia Numeric Formatting Library - Format numeric data into Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean capital style string.
• Japanese Kana Conversion Library - Convert one Kana character set to another character representation in Japanese.
• Japanese Text Alignment Library - Enable applications to render strings in Japanese-specific alignment style.
• Japanese Yomi Auto-Completion Library - Provide class library and TextBox control sample that support Japanese IME-aware auto-complete.
• Korean Auto Complete TextBox Control - Provide TextBox control that supports auto-complete and the Intellisense feature with Korean input.
• Simplified Chinese Pin-Yin Conversion Library - Retrieve Simplified Chinese characters' properties such as polyphone, homophone, Pinyin or number of strokes.
• Traditional Chinese to Simplified Chinese Conversion Library and Add-In Tool - Convert text in Traditional Chinese into Simplified Chinese or vice versa. This component also includes an add-in tool to the in VS IDE that can convert between Simplified and Traditional Chinese resource files.

Technorati Tags: Internationalization, East Asian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese

One of the new localization features in Visual Studio 2008 is the PublicResXFileCodeGenerator. In both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 you can create a resource file (e.g. ExceptionResources.resx) and Visual Studio will associate a .Designer.cs file (e.g. ExceptionResources.Designer.cs) with it. The .Designer.cs file contains a strongly typed resource class that allows you to refer to the resource entries as properties of the generated class (e.g. ExceptionResources.CustomExceptionMessage). This system works well but the class and its properties are marked as internal and consequently they can only be accessed from within the same assembly. Visual Studio 2008 allows these classes and their properties to be public. By default the resources are still internal and you can see this by selecting the .resx file in Solution Explorer and then bringing up the Properties Window. You will see a property called Custom Tool and it will be set to ResXFileCodeGenerator. This is the code generator that uses the .NET Framework's StronglyTypedResourceBuilder class to generate the code for the .Designer.cs file. The StronglyTypedResourceBuilder (and its associated command line tool ResGen) both accept a parameter to generate public resources but the ResXFileCodeGenerator sets this value to false and so the resources are internal. Visual Studio 2008, however, introduces a new generator called a PublicResXFileCodeGenerator and this generator sets this value to true. To generate public strongly typed resource classes instead of internal ones set the Custom Tool to PublicResXFileCodeGenerator.

Alternatively you can set the Access Modifier drop down in the Resource Editor to Public to achieve the same result (there are three values: Internal, Public and No code generation). It is worth knowing that this Visual Studio 2008 feature is simply a design time feature and the generated code is still .NET Framework 2.0 compatible.

Of course, it is also possible to write your own replacement for the ResXFileCodeGenerator and PublicResXFileCodeGenerator and you can download an example of this at http://www.dotneti18n.com/downloads.aspx.

Technorati Tags: Localization, Internationalization, ResXFileCodeGenerator, PublicResXFileCodeGenerator, Strongly Typed Resource Classes, resx

I started this blog just over two and a half years ago on 21st October 2005. Today "blog mark 2" has gone live. There have been a number of changes I have been wanting to make for a long, long time now and recent events have ensured that now would be that time. This new blog has much improved functionality and I'm looking forward to using it for some of the ideas that I've been holding back for a while. The blog's not quite finished yet and you can still see a few rough edges but I'll be tweaking and updating over the coming days and weeks to shape it into what I want.

 Here's to the next two and a half years.

At DDD6 last Saturday I gave my first micropresentation. Micropresentations, also known as Pecha Kucha (Japanese for "chit-chat"), are presentations of exactly 20 slides of exactly 20 seconds each. PowerPoint is set to automatically advance each slide so once you start the presentation going you have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to give your presentation and then you’re finished. I watched various members of the UK community give some very impressive micropresentations at MIX:UK 07 in London in September and thought I’d like to give it a go. I got my chance at the lunchtime slot at DDD6 where Zi Makki organises the grok talks presented by anyone who wants to have a go (BTW if you’d like to give grok talks or micropresentations a go I can thoroughly recommend it - contact your local user group or look out for DDD7).

If you’d like to see how I got on Craig Murphy video’ed all of the grok talks and my micropresentation and when these get posted on either Craig’s site or the DDD site I will post another message. But if you can’t stand the wait and you really must see how I got on I cobbled together a recording of the PowerPoint deck and a sound recording I took and made a quick video (personally I would wait for Craig’s video because you get to see some wild man excitedly gesticulating and pointing frantically at the screen). You can download the video here and if you only want the slides you can get them here.

So what did I learn from my first attempt at a micropresentation ?

• The preparation time for a micropresentation is completely disproportionate to the length of time of the presentation. The presentation is obviously 6 minutes and 40 seconds but I spent many hours preparing it.
• As you only have 20 seconds to show each point it really forces you to nail your demonstrations. I found it very interesting to take any demonstration that I wanted to give and reduce it to its constituent screen shots and add animations and graphics to highlight the essential pieces of information that I wanted to show. I am very grateful for having gone through this procedure because it really focuses the mind on being able to get to the point in the minimum amount of time, an approach which transfers to more traditional presentations very nicely.
• I used animations to simulate drawing on the screen. I like to use ZoomIt to draw on the screen to focus the audience’s attention on a particular point but obviously not only would it be not Pecha Kucha to interfere with the slides whilst they are running but also it takes valuable seconds to annotate the slide. So I added the annotations to the slides and animated their arrival on the slides after a given number of seconds that I just guessed at. Seemed to work ok though.
• I found it difficult to find 20 separate pieces of information about my subject until I started spreading subjects over slides. Pecha Kucha purists will probably be annoyed at my abuse of the format (e.g. repeating slides only changing them by the animations to illustrate new points, revisiting slides that have already be shown in order to consolidate a point).
• In the previous micropresentations that I had watched it seemed to me that one of the difficult parts of this format was in timing your speech so that it ended exactly as the slide moved on to the next point. If you ended before then there was a few seconds where the speaker is clearly waiting for the slide to move on (you can see this on at least 2 of the slides in my presentation). I thought I had a cunning plan to solve this problem. First I started looking for a digital egg timer that would count down in seconds and would reset back to 20 seconds after it hit zero. I couldn’t find one. Then Jesse Liberty suggested using a digital chess timer. I wasn’t able to find a timer that would count down and reset back to 20 seconds without a player having to press the "done" button so I simply set my timer to 6 minutes and 40 seconds. I reasoned that if I needed to look at the timer then it didn’t matter what the minutes digit showed or indeed what the tens of seconds digit showed because it would be very obvious to me whether I was in the first 10 seconds or a slide or the second 10 seconds of a slide. What I needed was the very last digit and seeing that it was, say, 3 or 4 seconds would tell me how close I was. I liked the theory. I practised using the digital chess timer and found it to be very helpful. Come the live presentation I set the timer on the desk and started it going as I started the presentation. I didn’t look at it once. Apart from the fact that I didn’t want the distraction the presence of the audience made me realise that I had to be looking at them and not at the timer. Tried it, didn’t like it, moved on.
• Something that I desperately wanted to get right was the ending of the presentation. I wanted to end exactly on the 6 minutes and 40 seconds mark. I didn’t. I ran over by 4 seconds. I was disappointed with myself for this. The presentation had ended and there was this black screen and I was still talking. Admittedly it was only 4 seconds in a presentation of 6 minutes and 40 seconds but I think ending your final word on the final second of the presentation is very impressive and I will strive to get this right next time.

So what do I conclude from this ? It was fun. It was a lot of work for such a tiny amount of time. I thought people enjoyed watching the spectacle of someone being put under real pressure (I didn’t mind it either). I also thought people appreciated the basic point of Pecha Kucha: you have to make your points clearly and move on; there is no messing about and there is no delay and there is no digressing - you make your points and you get off. If you’re up for the challenge I have to say that I can recommend it.

Technorati Tags: Pecha Kucha, Micropresentations, Extension Methods, DDD6, DDD, Grok Talks, Craig Murphy, Zi Makki