New Car

So last week I bought a used 2005 Mustang GT Convertible from a friend. I have never had a car with a standard transmission so for the last week I have been learning how to drive stick.

So first off I love the car. It is sonic blue, and has less than 5000 miles on it. The car has only been driven in summer so it has not seen snow or salt laden roads. I love the power the car has although I have yet to take over 80 mph. If I were to upgrade anything it would be the stereo. I am thinking about swapping out the shaker system and putting in something with navigation and Sirius compatible. I really miss my satellite radio.

I might upload some pictures to my website of the car, so check back if you are interested in what it looks like.

Mix 07 SilverLight

So Mix 07 main theme was Silverlight and how to use it.

Silverlight is a new Web presentation technology that is created to run on a variety of platforms. It enables the creation of rich, visually stunning and interactive experiences that can run everywhere: within browsers and on multiple devices and desktop operating systems (such as the Apple Macintosh). In consistency with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), the presentation technology in Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (the Windows programming infrastructure), XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) is the foundation of the Silverlight presentation capability. (This was taken right from Microsoft)

So think .Net version of Flash.

So what does this mean to me.... Well since most of the web site projects I work on are internal or B2B I really never needed flash so I never wanted to invest the time into learning it. That said the fact that version 1.1 Alpha supports .Net, Ican take advantage of Silverlight since I know .Net. So that leaves the real question of will I use it?

The answer of that question is tough. All the examples that were shown to us were very cool uses of the technology. The thing is though all the demos were for sites that were more customer oriented. I am not saying that some of the things cant be brought into my development, for example I could see doing some interactive menus, similar to this. Or even maybe something like this.

I will be thinking of ways to try and use this technology more in my applications. What I wont do is use it just for the sake of using it. So if anyone out there can think of some possible uses of Silverlight let me know.

Project Euler

At work we are always discussing programming languages. Grant Challenged James to write some Haskell code and somehow they got to talking about Project Euler problem one. You can see in James' post more information on how he solved the problem. I will add Dan's, Geoff's, and Grant's answers once they post them.

Since his solution was one line, I decided that he is just like the old Perl hackers of the 90's. :) Just kidding James.

Anyways I decide to make my example complex. Overkill is never good, but hey I was on a roll. First I created a console application. In the solution I created a class called Calculator. This class had a public method that took two int types and a List. The first was a lower limit and the second was the top limit. It also took a List which are the multiples the user wants to sum for. This method then did the work and returned the sum of multiples.

Here is what the total class looks like....
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace ProjectEuler
{
class Calculator
{
private int lower;
private int upper;
private List multiples;

///

/// This method will calculate the sum of multiples below the toplimit, but starting at the lower limit.
///

/// the starting number
/// the top limit
/// the multiples to sum
/// the sum of multiples
public double GetMultiplesSum(int lowerLimit, int topLimit, List passedMultiples)
{
lower = lowerLimit;
upper = topLimit;
multiples = passedMultiples;
return CalculateMultiples();
}

private double CalculateMultiples()
{
int curNumber;
double sum = 0;
for (curNumber = lower; curNumber <>
{
if (IsMultipleOfList(multiples, curNumber))
{
sum += curNumber;
}
}
return sum;
}

private bool IsMultipleOfList(List multiples, int currentNumber)
{
foreach (int multiple in multiples)
{
if (currentNumber % multiple == 0)
return true;
}
return false;
}

}
}

The console app then just created a calculator and then called the GetMultipleSum method. the app then displays the answer.

Here is that code....

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace Projec
tEuler
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
double sum = RunCalculation();

Console.WriteLine("sum = " + sum.ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Please hit a key");
Console.Read();

}

private static double RunCalculation()
{
Calculator calc = new Calculator();
List multiples = new List();
multiples.Add(3);
multiples.Add(5);
return calc.GetMultiplesSum(0,1000, multiples);
}

}
}

I could take this the next step and add a gui or ask the user to add multiples and ranges, but I really don't have the time.

Mix 07 Orcas

So One of the better sessions I went while at Mix 07 was on Orcas. Orcas is the next version of visual studio. The tool takes a big jump from VS 2005.

Here is a quick list of things I found interesting and exciting.

• multi compiler support.
• What this means is that it will compile 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 code. So you wont need to have multiple versions of Visual Studio installed. So if you have a client who is doing 2.0 and one doing 3.0 work, you can use the same tool for both code bases.
• Smart intellisence of .JS files.
• the ide will figure out what your javascript vars are.
• the ide will now support break points and debugging of JS files.
• AJAX .net is included in the templates.
• LINQ support is also included in the ide.
• LINQ is pretty cool, they showed some pretty basic examples.

Mix 07

I am back from Mix 07 and boy was it fun.

In this post I am just going to recap my trip and the conference. In following post I will talk about specific things form the conference.

The conference was in Las Vegas and it was held at the Venetian. The Venetian is nice and they do a good job of taking care of you. The hotel rooms were very big and pricey. They were running $259 with the conference special. Each room had three areas, a sleeping area, a living room/work area, and a bathroom.

The first thing I did was check into the conference. I was given a bag of swag and directions to get some more. All in all I was impressed with what I got. I think there were full copy of vista ultimate, Studio express, orcas and some other things like a notebook, a pen, and memory drive.

The keynotes were very entertaining. The sessions for the most part were informative and well planned and presented. I will discus the opening keynote along with information I got from the breakouts in future posts.

Microsoft hosted a Silverlight part at Pure. They sprung for all the drinks and food. It also included a show by the Pussycat Dolls. At the show I met a project manager from Microsoft that worked on the .Net CLR for Silverlight.

As for the Vegas part of the trip, well I don't have much to tell. I did gamble some, and I ate well. I learned a lot and had fun what more could you ask for?