Last year, for RubyFringe – the offbeat conference for Ruby programmers hosted by the local Ruby heroes at Unspace – I wrote a series of articles about Toronto for people who were coming to the conference from out of town. In the series, I pointed out places of interest near the conference hotel (the Metropolitan downtown) and little tidbits of information that might be useful to an out-of-towner.

This year, Unspace is holding another conference for Ruby programmers. This time, it’s going by the name FutureRuby and once again, I’m posting a series of articles that collectively will make a quick little Baedeker about Toronto for the non-locals attending the conference. My hope is that even people who’ve live in this city all their lives will find it useful and entertaining.

Upon arriving in Toronto, you may notice a certain funk hanging in the air. The strength of said funk will vary from block to block and will come from one of two probable sources.

Probable Source Number One: Gene Simmons’ Man-Musk

The first probable source of the smell lingering around town is Gene Simmons. Yes, that Gene Simmons. Gene has bedded many women:

• His current long-term partner, Playboy Playmate Shannon Tweed
• The woman with whom he cheated on Shannon in that video that popped up on the internet last year
• Former live-in partners Cher and Diana Ross
• “Over a thousand women”, if his interview on NPR is to be believed

While his Rock God status helped him land the ladies, I believe that what really draws them in his the musky aroma he exudes.

Gene will be in town on the FutureRuby weekend in his capacity as Grand Marshall for the Honda Indy, which will take place around the Canadian National Exhibition, a short drive west of the conference hotel. An event featuring fast-moving, big, throbbing machines needs a grand marshall to match, and who could fill the role better than he?

The Honda Indy will run from Friday, July 10th through Sunday July 12th, and it might affect you in the following ways:

• You may be exposed to Gene Simmons’ man-musk.
• It may take longer than usual for you to get downtown if you’re flying in from Toronto’s main airport, Pearson International Airport, on Friday. Lakeshore Boulevard, one of the major roads leading into town from the west, will be used as part of the Indy track and will be closed.
• You will hear the echoes of race car engines all weekend. It’ll be a constant hum in the background during the day – not too annoying, but I thought you might want to know what that sound was.

Probable Source Number Two: The Garbage Strike!

The even more probable source of the smell is the garbage. As of today, Friday, July 3rd, the strike by Toronto’s municipal workers is in its 11th day. It affects a number of services, including Parks and Recreation, services at City Hall and garbage collection. There little to no smell downtown, but as you go to neighbourhoods where food makes the lion’s share of the trash, such as Kensington Market (where Sunday’s post-FutureRuby party is taking place), it sometimes gets a little ripe.

If the strike goes on for another week and into FutureRuby:

• Consider yourself warned about some potential stink.
• If you’re from out of town, walking around the city and have some trash, please don’t litter or stuff it into our Saran-wrapped garbage cans; hang onto it and dispose of it at your hotel.

How Will I Get to FailCamp if the Ferries aren’t Running?

FailCamp, one of the events associated with FutureRuby, takes place on the Toronto Islands (Queen City Yacht Club on Algonquin Island, to be precise). The problem is that the island ferries are run by the striking city workers and are out of commission.

Worry not – Queen City Yacht Club has provided the use of the Algonquin II, a launch that can shuttle almost 50 people back and forth between Toronto Harbour and FailCamp.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Manning Publications have a great variety of books on .NET development. There’s the stuff you’d expect, such as books on C#, ASP.NET and SharePoint, but they’ve also produced books on IronPython and IronRuby (not many books on these languages), functional programming is both F# and C# and doing brownfield development and building DSLs using .NET. Many of their books have helped me get up to speed with .NET development, and I’m currently working my way through The Art of Unit Testing.

Another great thing about Manning Books is that they’re available in both paper and electronic form. This is great news for me, as I have disk space aplenty, but I’m running short on shelf space. There’s also the fact that while technology-specific books are useful, their shelf life is rather short. I’ll still buy paper editions of books that are longer on theory and technique, but when it comes to specific versions of languages, libraries or frameworks, I’ll take the ebook version.

One more great thing about Manning Books is that they’re generous with the discount codes. Their discount codes are often for 33% to 50% off the regular price, and they announce them on their Twitter account, @ManningBooks. If you’re looking to build your tech library and save money at the same time, you should follow them.

(Just so you know: Neither I nor anyone at the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft have any kind of arrangement to promote Manning’s books. I just like their books, and getting a discounts on them is a bonus.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

SharePoint Saturdays are free events where you can learn about SharePoint from architects, developers, and other professionals who work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (a.k.a. MOSS). Filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & Microsoft MVPs, they’re day-long events covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics.

On Saturday, July 11th, Toronto will have its first SharePoint Saturday at Microsoft Canada Headquarters (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, Mississauga – off Mississauga Road, just north of the 401). The event is free of charge, open to the public and your chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint. The day will start at 9:00 a.m. with a short introductory keynote and sessions will run to 4:30 p.m.. Lunch will be provided and there will be numerous giveaways throughout the day.

There will be three primary content tracks, with each track consisting of five presentations lasting about an hour and ranging from introductory, 100-level content to highly technical, 400-level "expert" sessions. The speakers will represent a broad cross-section of the community and will offer a variety of different perspectives and points of view.

SharePoint Saturday Toronto is a great opportunity to learn, share and network. If you’ve been meaning to learn or expand your knowledge about the SharePoint platform, you should be there!

For more details, visit the SharePoint Saturday Toronto site.

If you were at last year’s FailCamp, you might remember the best story of FAIL of the evening, which involved warming up some “body lube” in the microwave oven for a little too long, after which hilarity ensued.

Here’s how Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, the originators of FailCamp, describe their vision of the event:

We believe that it’s time to give our personal fail some tough love and talk it out over beer!

Join us for a brief, rousing introduction followed by camaraderie, beer, and show-and-tell. We’ll present a little about failure through the ages, mining your personal suck, maybe some science, pithy quotes from people you may or may not respect, and share some failure stories of our own.

Then it’ll be your turn. If all goes to plan, you may even win in our friendly “race to the bottom” for the most public, most expensive, or most ridiculous Story of Fail.

FailCamp returns next Thursday, July 9th and once again, it’s the warm-up act for Unspace’s Ruby programmer conference (going by the name “FutureRuby” this year), which takes place on the weekend of July 10th through 12th. Just like last year, FailCamp will once again provide a forum for you to share your greatest and most pathetic stories of FAIL, and hopefully how that failure taught you some important lessons and made you a better, wiser, more-careful-with-the-lube person.

Me, presenting at last year’s FailCamp.

Once again, I will be hosting FailCamp. I’ll start the evening with a couple of stories of failure, including a couple of Keyboard Cat-worthy ones of my own, after which I’ll open up the floor to you, the audience, to share your own stories of FAIL. Once we’re all thoroughly embarrassed, DJ Barbi will spin the wheels of steel and we’ll dance our shame away.

There are some tickets left as of this writing:

• For FutureRuby attendees, there are 4 free tickets to FailCamp remaining.
• For those of you who are not attending FutureRuby but would like to catch FailCamp, there are 19 “Pay What You Can” tickets left.

If you want ‘em, go to the FailCamp registration page and get them before they disappear!

My one-slide summary of how things went terribly wrong in the movie Deliverance
(The link leads to the “Squeal like a pig” scene from the movie – you might not want to watch at work).

FailCamp will take place at the Queen City Yacht Club on the Toronto Islands (Algonquin Island, to be precise). Your printed ticket stub is good for a free ferry ride from the Toronto docks to the Yacht Club, where we’ll have some finger food, the Yacht club’s kitchen and cash bar will be open, and the evening should be full of surprises.

What better way to close an article about FailCamp than the Keyboard Cat video starring “Pinky, Pet of the Week”?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

You’ve got to hand it to ObjectSharp: when they do a parody, they pull out all the stops:

Next Thursday, June 9th – exactly one week from today — ObjectSharp will host Silverlight on the Silver Screen, a presentation on the upcoming revision of Silverlight, Silverlight 3, along with Expression Blend, SketchFlow, Windows 7’s touch technology, Microsoft Office SharePoint System (MOSS), Visual Studio 2010 and Team System. They’ll cover all sorts of things, including:

• How to design user interactions with SketchFlow
• Integrating rich applications using SharePoint and Visual Studio Team System
• Building rich line-of-business applications with Silverlight and .NET RIA Services
• Tying together rich media and advertising with the Microsoft platform
• Touch tech with Windows 7 and WPF

There’ll be something for you, no matter which of the “Three Ds” – designer, developer or decision-maker – you are!

Silverlight on the Silver Screen will take place at the Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond Street West, just west of  John) on Thursday, July 9th from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m..

Registration is free – all you have to do is visit the Silverlight on the Silver Screen registration page to sign up. I’ll see you there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

31 Days of SIlverlight is a series of blog posts posted through the month of July by Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg (yes, the same guy behind the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever, which was covered in the previous post).

For each day in July 2009, Jeff will post a fairly in-depth article on his blog covering some aspect of Silverlight development. He says that they’ll be “100- to 300-level in difficulty” (introductory to upper-intermediate) and will provide enough information for someone new to Silverlight could start from scratch building the examples.

So far, he’s posted two articles, both with plenty of examples and downloadable source code:

1. Mouse Events in Silverlight
2. Silverlight Screen Transitions

These first two articles are packed with information; with them alone, a Silverlight newbie should be able to build a HyperCard-like application or “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style game without much trouble. At this rate, by the time July is over, there’ll be enough material published in the series to make a decent book or course. I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of 31 Days of Silverlight!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever is a new puzzle site aimed at programmers in the same vein as web-based puzzle challenges such as notpron, Rankk and Python Challenge. Created by Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jeff Blankenburg, “TDPE” consists of a sequence of 30 web pages, each one with a puzzle that when solved will take you to the next one. Each puzzle provides the necessary hints to solve it, although some of the hints are tucked away in not-so-obvious places. Some puzzles can be solved with a little programming skill, some require a little knowledge of computer programming theory (although a little Binging will do) and some can be solved with a little logic and lateral thinking.

Jeff has offered a prize to the first fifteen people who complete the The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever (only those who complete it will know how to prove it). Judging from the Twitter account for “TDPE” and tweets with the #TDPE hashtag, not all the prizes have been claimed yet.

I managed to power through the first 29 puzzles while watching Ghostbusters on TV yesterday, but the very last one has me stumped. As others who’ve been flummoxed by this problem have said on Twitter, I’m sure I’m overthinking it.

Can you beat the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever? I’m sure you can, but you might want to do it after work. Let me know how you’re doing in the comments!

Creative Commons picture courtesy of Rene Erhardt.

Happy Canada Day! Have a safe and fun holiday, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

There’s a Guelph Coffee and Code taking place tonight at the Albion Hotel. Cory Fowler has the details at the Coffee and Code blog.

[Creative Commons photo courtesy of “macinate”.]

The Ottawa IT Community Awards Night takes place tonight (Tuesday, June 30th), and if you want to attend, you’ve got until 4 p.m. to register!

It’s hosted by these four groups:

• OttawaSQL.net
• Ottawa .NET Community
• Ottawa Windows Server User Group
• Ottawa Code Camp

The event will honour the partners and members of the groups who helped make 2008/2009 another great season for developers, IT pros and DBAs. It’ll have free food, some great competition and draws for prizes,

It takes place at the Yuk Yuk’s in downtown Ottawa (292 Elgin Street, under Hooley’s) and runs from 6:00 p.m. until about 9:00 p.m.. If you’d like to attend, you need to register.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Introducing LearnHub

LearnHub’s home page.

If you’re a student applying to colleges and universities and are looking for help with the process, you should try LearnHub. Based in Toronto, LearnHub is a social learning network that helps students to prepare for standardized tests, assists with finding places to study abroad and provides career counseling. LearnHub’s site has hundreds of thousands of pages of free content, including the world’s largest bank of questions that appear in the GMAT and SAT standardized tests. The site has a large following among students worldwide, particularly in India, and has partnerships with 25 universities to recruit domestic and international students.

With those hundreds of thousands of pages, LearnHub needed to provide a way for students to find what they’re looking for. They provide a search function, and it’s powered by Bing.

The people at LearnHub are part of that sector of Toronto tech that’s into Ruby on Rails, open source and founding startups. Founders John Philip Green and Malgosia Green are a husband-and-wife team who are known for building web applications for education and have been active members of Toronto’s tightly-knit open source tech community since the earliest DemoCamps. John caught Rails fever after trying it out and decided to rewrite a major application using it. The core development team of Wesley Moxam, Carsten Nielsen and Libin Pan are fixtures of the local Toronto’s on Rails scene; a gathering of local Rubyists doesn’t feel complete without them.

So what are they doing, using Bing?

Site-Wide Search

The main room at LearnHub’s offices. Management are to the left, developers to the right.

In the beginning, they went with their first instinct, which was to use Google. “We launched in March 2008,” said co-founder John Philip Green, “and we needed to provide site-wide search, so we went with Google. We signed up, and for a few hundred bucks a year, we got a search function that covered about 5,000 pages. It seemed like a pretty big number, and we thought that would be more than enough to cover our site.”

They soon found that the results weren’t what they expected. “We weren’t getting good results. We’d use our site-wide search to search for something that we knew was in our site, and it wouldn’t show up in the results.” The same search would work just fine if you did it from Google.com, but not from their Google-powered search function. “The results just weren’t relevant, and we also had a limited number of queries,” John said.

The main room at LearnHub’s offices. That’s management in the foreground, developers in the back.

LearnHub’s page count grew quickly and beyond the 5,000 pages covered by their arrangement with Google. “Going up to a bigger package was expensive;” John said, “it would have cost a couple thousand for 50,000 pages, and we were already at hundreds of thousands.”

“We could’ve gotten the functionality for free, but that’s only an option when you show ads in the search results, and the ads that showed up were for our competitors.”

LearnHub’s sales team.

There was another problem: Google’s site search returned its results as a web page. In order to make LearnHub’s site-wide search’s results page have the same look and feel as the rest of the site, they had to stick the Google results in an iframe. “And even then, what was inside the iframe didn’t match the rest of the page,” added John.

They started looking at other options for implementing LearnHub’s site-wide search, including running their own spider. “We really didn’t want to do that,” said programmer Wesley Moxam.

Enter Bing

LearnHub developer Wesley Moxam.

While looking around at search options, Wesley found the Live Search API, which is now known as the Bing API. “It was free, well-designed and spits out JSON,” he said. “Google requires a JavaScript interface or SOAP, and SOAP libraries in Ruby are painful.”

“It took a day to implement and get it up and running,” said Wesley, “The entire switch-over project happened over three days, with us working on it on and off, while we were doing other tasks. Best of all, we get consistent results – the results from the API are the same results you’d get if you just used the Bing site.”

“Bing’s API is simple and straightforward. You call it, you get the results, you take those results and use them how you like,” he continued. “It’s good. It’s hard to explain good software; good software is inherently simple.”

Here’s a screenshot of a LearnHub search results page for the search term “accordion” – and yes, the word appears on a handful of Learnhub pages!

LearnHub’s search results page for the term “accordion”.

LearnHub have benefited from using Bing to power their site-wide search, and they’ve decided to share the wealth. Wesley’s working on refactoring the Ruby library he wrote to act as a wrapper for the Bing API and open source it for anyone to use. It should be available later this summer. He’ll announce it when it’s released, and I’ll announce it here.

The Bing API

It’s easy to harness the power of Bing in your applications, whether for desktop, web or mobile.

The first step is to get an AppID, which is a string that uniquely identifies you as a registered Bing application developer. Go to the Bing Developer Center, sign in with your Windows Live ID (which you can get for free) and follow the link to created a new AppID. You’ll be asked to supply some very basic information about your application and to review the Bing API’s Terms of Use. If you provide the information and agree to the Terms of Use (which I summarize in plain English below), you’ll get an AppID.

Once you have an AppID, you can start experimenting right away with the Bing API. All you need to do is start typing URLs with the format below into your browser’s address bar:

http://api.search.live.net/xml.aspx?AppID=<AppID>&query=<SearchTerms>&sources=<SourceTypes>

where:

• <AppID> is the AppID assigned to you
• <SearchTerms> are your urlencoded search terms
• <SourceTypes> specifies the type(s) of search results you want. The different sourcetypes are explained in the table below:

The default format for results is XML, and that’s the format you get when typing in API calls in your browser. You can also have the results returned as JSON or SOAP if you prefer.

You can find out more about the Bing API in the Bing API section of MSDN.

Bing’s Terms of Use, Explained as Simply as Possible

Here’s a quick explanation of Bing’s Terms of Use for those of us without a law degree. It’s adapted from the Bing documentation and provides a quick summary of what application developers using the Bing API must do and cannot do (besides the obvious "I promise not to use the API to plan a terrorist attack, run a drug smuggling ring or help the band Nickelback take forceful despotic rule of planet Earth").

What you must do:

• You must display all the results you request. No filtering!
• You must display your results in the context of a user-facing application or website.
• You must display attribution to Bing in a manner compliant with our branding rules. Currently, you may determine the specific manner in which you display attribution. A link to http://www.live.com with the query echo is a suggested example.
• You must restrict your usage to less than 7 queries per second per IP address. You may be permitted to exceed this limit under some conditions, but this must be approved through discussion with the folks at api_tou@microsoft.com.
• If you interleave data from any source other than the API with data from the API, you must clearly
  
  differentiate the respective sources. (Yes, you can interleave Bing results with other data!)

What you cannot do:

• You cannot use API results for search engine optimization (SEO). In particular, using the API for rank checks is explicitly prohibited.
• You cannot display advertisements in positions other than the mainline and sidebar.
• You cannot change the order of the results the API returns from a SourceType other than Web. (In other words, you can re-order results from standard searches for web pages!)

Bing Your Apps!

From there, the sky’s the limit. The Bing API is very straightforward and easy to use, it costs nothing to use it, and as someone who’s been using Bing as his default search engine since its beta period, the results it provides are great. Go forth and Bing your apps!

This may not really be of interest to anyone but me and StatCounter, but earlier today Global Nerdy hit the one million pageview mark for 2009. I’d like to thank all you readers who keep coming back for more; I promise I’ll make it worth your while!

(And if you happen to run web ads, feel free to drop me a line. I have a readership!)

Here’s a screencapture of the my StatCounter page for Global Nerdy:

Marc Stiegler

I met science fiction author, software developer and computer security guy Marc Stiegler at the first incarnation of O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference in 2002, but I’d been acquainted with his work prior to that. I’d heard of his programming language called E and had read his science fiction novel Earthweb, whose plot could be grossly oversimplified down to the summary “Twitter saves the world” (it’s a little bit more than that, but I think it conveys the idea nicely).

Marc’s Final Exam

However, when I think of Marc, what comes to mind first is the final exam that he gave to students at his “Future of Computing” course and published online in 1999. In it, he posed a set of problems and asked them how a specific set of proposed web technologies could be used to solve them. The course and exam have a very strong sense of “technology trumps legislation”, an idea that was surfacing in the late 1990s.

In the exam, students had to pick 5 out of 11 problems that Marc posed and then explain how any combination of the following technologies could be used to solve them:

• Unforgeable pseudonymous identities
• Bidirectional, typed, filterable links
• Arbitration agents
• Bonding agents
• Escrow agents
• Digital Cash
• Capability Based Security with Strong Encryption

(If some of these ideas are unfamiliar to you, don’t worry. They’re not important in the context of this article, and you can always Bing them.)

Here’s a selection of the problems posed in the exam. Remember, this exam is from ten years ago!

1) Searching for a decision analysis tool on the Web, you find a review in which the reviewer raves about a particular product. You buy the product and discover it just doesn’t work. You desire to prevent this person’s ravings from harming anyone else–and you desire to prevent the product from disappointing anyone else.

4) You start receiving thousands of emails from organizations you don’t know, all hawking their wares. You want it to stop, just stop!

5) You wish to play poker with your friends. They live in Tampa Florida, you live in Kingman. This is illegal in the nation where you happen to be a citizen. You want to do it anyway.

6) You hear a joke that someone, somewhere, would probably find offensive. You wish to tell your precocious 17-year-old daughter, who is a student at Yale. The Common Decency Act Version 2 has just passed; it is a $100,000 offense to send such material electronically to a minor. You want to send it anyway–it is a very funny joke.

7) Someone claiming to be you starts roaming the Web making wild claims. You want to make sure people know it isn’t really you.

The Final Question

The most compelling question on the exam is the final one. It required a far more extensive answer than the other ten – so much more extensive that Marc actually suggested that it might be better not to answer the question in the exam, but to at least think about it:

But…if you can answer Question 11 in your own mind, even though you choose not to write up that answer for this examination, then a most remarkable thing will happen: you will walk out of this class with something profoundly worth knowing.

Here’s that final question:

11) You live in North Korea. Three days ago the soldiers came to your tiny patch of farmland and took the few scraps of food they hadn’t taken the week before. You have just boiled the last of your shoes and fed the softened leather to your 3-year-old child. She coughs, a sickly sound that cannot last much longer. Overhead you hear the drone of massive engines. You look into the sky, and thousands of tiny packages float down. You pick one up. It is made of plastic; you cannot feed it to your daughter. But the device talks to you, is solar powered, and teaches you how to use it to link to the Web. You have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; you can talk to thousands of others who share your desperate fate. The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter.

The final question really stands out. Unlike the other questions in the exam, this one really pulls at the heartstrings, and it sparked a lot of discussion among geeks back around 1999 and 2000, in settings both online and real-life.

Iran and the Final Question

If you follow the American news cycle, the mental distance between North Korea and Iran is a short one; both are countries in the “Axis of Evil” (a term invented by a Toronto guy, by the way) run by repressive regimes and working on their nuclear weapons capabilities. What if we changed the final question’s setting from North Korea to Iran?

Unlike North Korea, Iran’s people have access to technology and communications with the outside world (there’s a recent Daily Show segment in which Jason Jones finds people in Iran who know Jon Stewart’s George Bush “I’m the decider” schtick). They don’t need to have Marc’s hypothetical iPhones delivered to them in care packages; they have things like Twitter and YouTube at their disposal. So I propose another slight modification to the final question: What if we changed the hypothetical hardware into actual working software like Twitter and YouTube?

(It’s another “software, not hardware, is really the trick” situation. Just as we found out in Terminator 3 that SkyNet was really software, it turns out that what might save Iran was social networking software, not portable internet-accessing hardware dropped by parachute.)

With my two suggested changes, it becomes very apparent that we’ve moved from theory to practice. The people of Iran are taking Marc Stiegler’s final exam, and they’ve picked its most difficult question.

Let’s hope they pass.

Better late than never! Here are a couple of pictures I shot at the Metro Toronto .NET User Group in late May, where I presented my walk-through of ASP.NET MVC, Canada’s Next Top Model View Controller.

Colin Bowern opened the session with some quick announcements about upcoming events as well as other .NET user groups in the Greater Toronto and surrounding areas:

He then introduced me, and I got started with my presentation. I did a quick walkthrough of the basic concepts behind MVC (that is, the Model-View-Controller design pattern), after which I introduced a special guest who I brought along with me: Paul Doerwald. Paul’s a Ruby on Rails developer, and he gave the audience a quick demonstration of building a Ruby on Rails project from scratch:

Bringing in a Rails guy to speak in front of a .NET crowd was a little unexpected, but I thought it was important to show them the inspiration behind ASP.NET MVC, whose creators acknowledge Ruby on Rails’ influence on their framework. I think that they benefited from this outside perspective, and it worked on Paul as well – he was impressed by the size of the crowd, the nice settings (the Metro Toronto .NET User Group has a nice arrangement to use the conference rooms at the Manulife office building), the extent and organization of all the .NET user groups in the Toronto area and even the male-female ratio (while the women were still vastly outnumbered by the men, the percentage of women at the User Group was still high in comparison to some open source gatherings).

Much of my presentation was a walk-through of building the basic structure of the NerdDinner application featured in the book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and online at NerdDinner.com, with plenty of additional commentary by me, explaining in further detail why things were done a certain way. I encouraged the audience to download the free chapter from the book and actually build the application themselves; after all, the best way to learn is to do.

I had a wonderful time presenting in front of the very attentive and appreciative crowd at the Metro Toronto .NET User Group and would like to thank the audience for watching, Paul for helping out and the organizers for inviting me. I’d love to do it again sometime!

As for ASP.NET MVC, watch this space for more articles and code examples!

The scene at the big communal table at the May 29th Coffee and Code.

There’s a Toronto Coffee and Code this Friday! For details, see the Coffee and Code blog.

Yes, the demands and schedule of my job as Sith Lord at Microsoft have kept me quite busy, but it doesn’t matter because I live in the “Hooray!” zone, as shown in the Venn diagram below:

For more information, see the LifeHacker article titled The Road to Happiness in Your Work Lies in the Hooray! Zone.

The covers will be coming off our next generation of user experience tools and technologies on July 9th. That’s when Microsoft will be unveiling Silverlight 3, which gives you the all the goodness of RIA (Rich Internet Application, although you can use Silverlight to make desktop apps as well) with out the PITA (Pain In The Anterior regions).

To help promote Silverlight 3, we and our pals at ObjectSharp will be co-hosting Silverlight on the Silver Screen live at the Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond Street West, at John Street) in Toronto on the morning of Thursday, July 9th from 9:00 a.m. till noon (and yes, the event is free). The ObjectSharpies are early adopters of SIlverlight and have forgotten more about it than most people will ever learn. As seasoned pros, they’ll share their stories and wisdom about the next-gen version of Silverlight, as well as associated tech such as Expression Blend, SketchFlow and the touch technologies in Windows 7.

Joining them will be my friends from the DPE team, who’ll be there to talk about the opportunities offered by Microsoft’s “UX3” platform – they’re a great way for your development team and business to stand out in the crowd and give your customers a great user experience.

And yes, the accordion might make an appearance.

As I said earlier, the event is free and takes place on the morning of Thursday, July 9th. All you have to do to attend is register at the Silverlight on the Silver Screen page!

This would be a very good time to remind you, the Gentle Reader, that Global Nerdy is my personal tech blog and that the opinions expressed within are mine and mine alone. They are not necessarily those of my employer, Microsoft Canada, nor its parent company, Microsoft Corporation, nor or any other Sith Lords, Stormtroopers, Family Guy monkeys or any other agents of evil in the employ of said organization.

You’ve probably heard the buzz in TechCrunch: Here’s how a properly-coded HTML email, where HTML is used for content and CSS is used for presentation, appears in the version of Outlook that came with Office 2000:

And here’s the same HTML email, with the same properly-formatted HTML, as rendered by the current version, Outlook 2007. It uses Word as the rendering engine, and Word will be the rendering engine for the upcoming Outlook 2010:

I understand why the empire wants Word-Outlook interoperability, which is why Word was chosen to be the HTML rendering engine for Outlook. But Word’s HTML renderer isn’t standards-compliant, which is why Outlook renders HTML in such a janky way. Outlook relies on old tricks such as using HTML tables for layout and other non-recommended ways of building web pages. IE8 plays by the rules, why doesn’t Outlook?

In my opinion, this is wrong. It runs counter to the spirit of interoperability, the embrace of open source and the following of standards that has accompanied the “sea change” within Microsoft (and it’s this sea change that help solidify my decision to join the company). I believe that it is in both Microsoft’s and the industry’s best interests for The Empire to be more standards-compliant.

(Besides, I just came back from presenting at a “Building Accessible Web Sites” conference where I told the audience to write compliant HTML. Damn right I’m going to push for everyone – Microsoft included – to do just that!)

That’s why I’m encouraging you to sign the Twitter petition to fix Outlook’s HTML rendering at FixOutlook.org. Outlook 2010, along with the other parts of Office 2010, is in beta right now, and Microsoft is soliciting opinions. This is the time – tell them to fix Outlook!

Another guy who shares my belief that netbooks are a transitional category that will eventually get absorbed into what we consider to be notebook computer is Engadget’s Michael Gartenberg, who wrote in a recent post titled Netbooks, R.I.P.. Like me, he believes that netbooks are not a whole new category of computing device, but the smallest, cheapest end of the spectrum of devices we call “personal computers”:

While some perceive the netbook as a new product category — a class of device that’s never existed — I would have to beg to differ. A netbook is merely a laptop with the pivotal axis based on price first and foremost. In other words, "how much computer can I build for $300-500?" (which is about the average selling price of most netbooks).

Like me, he also believes that the kind of computer you can build on a netbook budget is encroaching on the territory owned by computers we consider to be in the “laptop” category:

At the end of 2007 a netbook (or laptop you could build for about $300-$500) had about a 7-inch screen, a tiny keyboard, about 4GB of storage, half a gig of RAM and no Windows OS (that Windows thing adds to price). Purists argued that the max screen size for a netbook was 7-inches. Fast forward to today: that same price point will deliver you a 10-inch screen or so, a gig of RAM and perhaps 160GB of storage. It also gets you a copy of Windows for the most part. By year’s end, we’ll see vendors offering 12-inch screens, full keyboards, and 300GB of storage. And they’ll be called netbooks. But that doesn’t matter, does it?

And once more, like me, he believes that between the mobile phone and laptop, there exists the “Zone of Suck”:

The cellphone and laptop represent the core part of a user’s mobile experience. With most consumers willing to carry two devices total, there’s not a lot of room for ‘tweener devices.

My hope is to eventually see the gap between phone and laptop vanish; where phone portability and laptop power meet and “phone” and “laptop” are just different aspects of the same device. I’d like to see the day when it’s a mobile phone when used on its own, but a laptop or even desktop when you plug it into a docking station with a keyboard and monitor. Now that’s a whole new category of machine, with a whole new category of uses.

Alan Turing is the man. He developed the concept of the Turing Machine, which helped helped solidify the concepts of the algorithm and computability, came up with the Turing Test, broke German WWII ciphers, worked on one of the earliest true computers and has earned a place as one of the Giants of Computer Science. He’s been honoured with a computer language named after him (although he’d be appalled at the language itself).

Alan was gay at a time when being so was considered to be a mental disease and acting so was a crime. His career ended when he was outed and was convicted for gross indecency. He was given a choice between imprisonment and chemical castration; he chose the latter. Not long afterward, he was found dead at his home, apparently from suicide.

For his work, which created that field that is my work, my hobby and my passion, I’d like to wish Alan Turing – whom I call “Big Gay Al” as a nickname of endearment – a happy birthday. I salute him with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!