Painful coding

Do you know its really hard to code anything while you are in pain?
A lot of 'geeks' suffer from RSI at some stage, others just deal with debugging mutlithreaded programs. Me? I deal with Chronic Headaches. All day, every day.

At the moment I'm trying to setup a debugging enviroment so I can step through a different POP Library to see how I can access the message body effectivly.
It isn't a hard task by any means, but with headaches, everything is 'blocked'. It's like UAC - only the way Apple describe it in the 'I'm a PC and I'm a Mac' ads.

For example, I know I need to:

• go to my Start Menu
• fire up Visual Studio Orcas
• make a New Project
• Add the DLL's for the POP Library
• Add the bits of code I need for the actual POP connection

But when I actually go to do that, this is what happens:

• Go to the Start Menu
• Remember I need to fire up an application…but…what application was it?
• Oh, thats right, VS, thats fired up now…great, cannot for the life of me find the New Project button…I mean, I'm looking at File -> New, but there'….oh, there it is.
• Project type? Crap, I know this one, why isn't it jumping out at me…WPF App, that'll do.
• DLL's….dammit, I know I downloaded them somewhere…

and so on and so forth.

Thats all before I get to the actual applicationg programming part, where I have to think about algorithms and whatnot. That's becoming increasingly difficult to do as I live with headaches. Maybe I should give up programming and go into media, since people have been calling me a 'graphics artist' lately anyway…

Sigh, this bites, I'm going to lay down.

Busy busy

A design project (ugh, I guess I'm becoming a devigner), Uni commencing this week, as well as more wedding preperations, I have very little time to be blogging (hence why two(…well…three now) posts were pushed out s'morning).

Should be back in a few weeks :)

Engagement Party: Cake

The earth is made of cake and chocolate
And Id be icing if I could
Live in a dream
In your stream
Live in a dream

I like cake
I like cake
I like cake
I like cake

Okay, so that wasn't too good, unlike the cake at my engagement party.

Due to chickz0r's mother being unwell recently, it came upon chickz0r and I to construct it. Now, as a few of you know, I actually enjoy decorating cakes. For chickz0rs 19th birthday, I baked a Skull cake (no photos, they got lost :(), and for 20th, I baked a Stargate cake (that was interesting to do, I had very little time to do it before the guests arrived! Photo sucks by the way).
For Christmas', I tend to make Faux Christmas Puddings. I happened to once make a gingerbread house for the neighbours, but photos of that are MIA.

Thats really about the limit of my baking/decorating, I'm still very much in the learning stage.

Keeping with the theme of general funness with the engagement party, we decided we wanted a castle cake.

Recipe's

Cake

Ingredients

• 1 1/3 cups self raising flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 125g butter, softened
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cups caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2/3 cup water

Method

1. Preheat oven to moderate.
2. Grease (and line) pan.
3. Sift flour and cocoa into medium bowl, add remaining ingredients
4. Mix until all smoth and a lightish colour
5. Spread into prepared pan.
6. Bake in moderate oven until cake is cooked.
7. Stand cake in pan 5 to 10 minutes; turn onto wire rack to cool.

This is a really easy cake to make, but it tastes rather good (and is fairly hard to mess up!) - its not too 'light' but not too 'gluggy' for a chocolate cake. It has become my 'defacto' for chocolate cakes that I make.

Caramel Filling

We had planned to go with a slight modification of the Caramel Sauce Recipe on SimpleRecipes', just swap plain/white/whatever sugar for raw/brown sugar. It didn't work out. Twice. So we ended up just using four cans of Caramel Top'N'Fill

Icing

Butter Icing and Fondant icing - ye standard recipes, you can find them yourself. I was told a lot of icing was made. Butter icing first layer, fondant the second layer.

Unfortunately, the noise made by the bridesmaids when they invaded the kitchen drove me out, so it was left to Ryan (best man) and chickz0r to ice the cake while I went and finished our costumes.
Ryan isn't exactly a cake-friendly person. He eats cake, and thats about it. That being said, he did a fantastic job of icing it, and even enjoyed himself to boot!

I came in at various times, and it was a mammoth effort of icing. I think they went through four packets of icing sugar, and it took about three or four hours to get done.

Each tower is sponge log (scroll? You get them from the supermarket). Parapets are icing squares.
The most surprising thing about this was that the towers stayed attached overnight. That alone was a feat in itself.

Overall

The cake tasted and looked fantastic.
Super proud of Chickz0r/Ryan, and super happy with how the thing turned out

Moving from PHP to ASP.NET

PHP

PHP is for many people (when it comes to 'web languages') their bread and butter, for others its what they started it before moving on to bigger and better things.
This is a combination of cost, ease of learning/use, and availability of the platform.

PHP wasn't the first web language for me (funnily enough, "Classic" ASP was, but thats only because thats what my free webhost offered at the time), but I've spent a substantial amount of time working with it. I've created blogs, forums, as well as a myriad of other 'scripts'.

My choice of "LAMP" (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) as my platform has been pretty simple: cost and availability of material.
Finding a webhost that offers decent amounts of storage and bandwidth for a small price (unemployed disabled student here…) is really easy. Finding the learning material for PHP is even easier, as not only does any search enginge turn up huge amounts of results for free PHP tutorials, but it was what 90% of my friends were using at the time. However, while developing a reasonably large site by myself (ANZGW), I began developing my general programming skills (such as realising when OOP would really come in handy) and at the same time, I began to notice some of the downfalls of PHP.

1. OOP in PHP sucks. PHP5 improved things (both what was available such as method/attribute visibility and performance) in OOP substantially, but unfortunately, it still sucks. The biggest problem with OOP in PHP, to me, is the lack of method overloading (yes, I'm aware of the ways to can achieve it, but its messy).
2. Despite all the hardwork that was done with PHP5, there was one massive flaw in PHP they failed to address: incosisitent naming of functions. I understand the reason they kept everything named the way it was (compatibility), but its a nightmare to try and remember all of any languages inbuilt functions when there isn't a common naming convention.
   What do I mean? Well, say you want find the position of a character in a string, you use strpos(). That part is easy to remember, string is str, position is pos. strpos()!
   What if you then want to replace part of a string? Going by the previous logic, it'd have to be strreplace(), right? Wrong. Its str_replace()
3. There isn't a decent IDE out there for PHP. AptanaIDE, NuSoft's PHPEd, Zend Studio, etc all suck. Most of the time they're slow to launch, have a poor interface, run slowly (since they're mostly multi-platform, they're written in Java,which means they loooove their horrible GTK-esque themes on Windows).
   If you've ever used one of these products, and the 'Intellisense' wasn't horribly slow, I'd say you're lucky. For me, they'd usually take several seconds to popup, which in that time, I can type the entirety of the function myself.
   It got to the point that all I could use was Notepad++ which only has syntax highlighting, but is fast and more stable than the others.
4. No Namespaces
5. Caching/compiling/whatever you want to call it isn't the default.

ASP.NET

It just so happened that my next project I was playing with was going to be a desktop application, .NET sounded a lot better than learning C++, so I went with C# as I like its general syntax more than VB.NET.
The first thing that hit me when playing with .NET was the IDE. In a word, wow. Easy to use, incredibly fast Intellisense…just wow.
The next thing as I started to get a bit further into my program was that it was a proper programming language, compared to the 'work in progress' which is PHP.

In the last week or two I've started to move into ASP.NET (only 2.0, not 3.0 for now ;)). WebControls - especially databound WebControls - are just so amazingly simple to implement (at least basic implementation) yet so effective. The default is a two-tier application (aspx and its code behind file)…I think I'm in love!
I can programmatically access controls? Wow.
Master pages in addition to themes mean I don't have to implement my own theming engine (for now, at least. I've heard reports that Master Pages don't go far enough), or more importantly and unlike PHP, I don't have to implement somebody elses and learn their weird template tags.
I think the two controls I've just thought 'cool' to so far are the Wizard and GridView controls.

Don't get me wrong, there are a few things in ASP.NET which don't seem…right.

• MasterPages can't set the theme. I felt that was incredibly dumb that it has to be set per page, but just creating a class and making every page inherit that was enough to solve that problem.
• ASP.NET AJAX in Orcas has been declared a core component, but I still have to add the handlers to the web.config manually. I don't understand why Orcas can't automatically add that in when I drag down a ScriptManager object.
  IIS7 also requires changing the application pool of the website to "Classic.NET Application Pool".
  Without those two things, you get "Sys is not declared" in your browser.

PHP vs ASP.NET

One of the most interesting things in the "PHP vs ASP.NET" debate (religious war almost…) is the learning curve.
If you're looking at ASP.NET or PHP to learn, and you have some programming background (preferably with C/C++ style syntax), you'll see PHP and after a few minutes you'll know how to output a variable, or do a myriad of other things. PHP starts off very 'easy', and you feel 'in power', partially because there is but a single PHP file.

ASP.NET on the other hand, looks incredibly daunting, as you don't just have to figure out C#/VB.NET, you have to figure out these 'WebControl' thingies, as well as where you can actually put your code, how it interacts with the presentation layer, etc.

However, after that initial hurdle, there is a lot less of the 'hack/script' approach there is in PHP when you get to the more advanced concepts like OOP, because .NET is built to be an OOP environment.

Apart from the learning curves, I think the next big problem people have when deciding PHP or ASP.NET is the cost.
PHP is inheritable notepad (or basic text editor is what I'm getting at) based. ASP.NET, because of its complexities from the begining of its cycle, thrives in a proper IDE - thats why Visual Studio exists. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2005 can cost a lot, depending on what version you get.
However, there is a very feasible solution to this: the Express versions of Visual Studio are free.
For some reason (PHP Fanboy cloud?) I just wasn't aware of them, but they do exist, and aren't horribly crippled or out of date.
There are also other IDE's, such as SharpDevelop, but I personally like Visual Studio, so I'll stick with that.

Apart from IDE costs (or lack thereof), ASP.NET really requires IIS/Windows Server. If you do a quick comparison, Windows Servers are much more expensive for what you get (I'm talking about the shared webhost environments, which is all I can afford/need at this stage).
My .NET hosting is with NetLogistics, who also happen to have Linux hosting. On their most basic plans for each (which both cost AUD$19.95/month), you get the same bandwidth/disk storage, but on the Linux plans you get more domains available to you.
Not a big deal, but if you look at other hosts (US in particular), Linux shared hosting can net you gigabytes more storage/bandwidth for the same price of any .NET host.

The solution isn't as clear cut as the IDE issue. Yes, Mono exists (gives .NET to Linux), but it does have some limited features, and the uptake of Mono is disappointing to say the least.
While the differences are minimal (the libraries you include), you can't develop for both Mono AND "Microsoft" .NET. Although I doubt it will ever happen, perhaps mod_dotnet needs to be created by Microsoft, but from a business point of view, that cannot be incredibly attractive.

Conclusion

Overall, I think there is probably a place for both PHP and ASP.NET.
ASP.NET seems to be a bit of overkill for smaller sized projects (or for things that simply don't need OOP). That doesn't mean PHP can't be used on large projects - there are many frameworks which improve its maintainability when it scales, its just…it probably will never scale as well as ASP.NET.
I'll probably develop in both. ASP.NET while I can (although, I'm still very much in the learning process, so I may discover something I don't like), and PHP when its the only option because of time/money/server resources/etc.

If you intend to learn ASP.NET, check out Programming in ASP.NET Third Edition, its a fairly straight forward book which while it assumes you have a decent C# knowledge, doesn't actually require you to be a .NET expert.

I cant make this stuff up…

Valkyran says (9:19 PM):
Anyway, i'm off to fix a broken magical scepter.
Valkyran says (9:19 PM):
Then, turn into Sailor Valk.
Valkyran says (9:20 PM):
FIGHTING HETROS BY DAYLIGHT
Valkyran says (9:20 PM):
WINNING HOMOS BY MOON LIGHT

I'm not sure if I need to get new friends or not..

Engagement Party: Costume (Cardwave)

As mentioned, our (chickz0r + me) engagement party was a costume party with the theme 'something from your childhood'.

As most geeks my age would agree, Transformers rock. The choice was fairly easy.

So, I present, Cardwave:

(Again, using Will's photos rather than my own, as Chickz0r has the decent camera ;))

Cardwave is my tribute to the Decepticon Soundwave.

Due to time constraints, I didn't get to finish Cardwave.
Some of the notable peices that are missing are anything below the waist (the 'Transformer' belt they all seem to have - which I've dubbed 'Crotchular Protection, Legs), as well as completed painting - the day before the party I ran out of paint (at ~9pm), and given the party was at midday, I didn't fancy the fumes of spraypainting it on the day.
Cardwave is also lacking his shoulder canon (that got left at home, I didn't figure out a good way to attach it), and eject button (its…sort of there, just really crappy).
The hands are also done really badly - they're all fleshy!
The 'face guard' part of the helmet also isn't correctly trimemd, which resulted in the helmet trying to pop itself off half the time (which was rather uncomfortable)

Construction

Materials

• Cardboard. Lots and lots of cardboard (free)
• 1mm thick Sheet Styrene (High Impact PolyStyrene, AKA H.I.P.S.) which goes under the name 'Plasticard' in some parts of the world. ($30 for 2.4m x 1.4m x 1mm)
• Hot glue ($5 for the gun, $9 for a bazillion glue sticks)
• Masking tape. Way too much masking tape (~$5 for three rolls)
• Paper mache (Discarded news papers + ~$5 worth of PVA Glue)
• Spraypaint (Purple $7, Blue $7 , Silver $3, Yellow $3. )
• Goggles. (50c from Mitre 10)
• Perspex Sheet (Front of the 'tape deck'. Found it under the house, so 'free')

Construction Process

I didn't really know where to start from, or how to go about constructing a cardboard costume, so I went for the age old technique of 'sticking stuff together and seeing how it looks'.
For the most part it worked well, but it did require an excessive amount of test fitting. The worst case of this was when I was home alone, tried it on after putting the shoulders and sides on, then found myself stuck - unable to move further in or out of the costume. In the end I managed to pickup a knife sitting on my desk and I cut arm holes in the side of the costume, but that was a scary time.

Once the cardboard was tapped together, I was a little worried about the structural integrity of the joints, as well as any potential ripping off of the masking tape as I put on/took off the costume. I decided to do a layer or two of paper mache to the insides of the joints. This gave me the benefit of extra 'joining' strength, as well as making the inside of the costume relativlty smooth, meaning it didn't catch on my clothing.

The helmet was constructed in several phases.
First was the very basic "upside down U" look, where two peices of cardboard covered my ears, and curve was added at the top.

Getting some detail!

Detail was next, so Soundwaves two 'ears' were added. They joined fairly easily onto the existing 'ears' that I had, as well as the rest of the frame. One of the peices of cardboard I used was a bit thicker and heavier than the rest on the frame, so that had to be ripped off and replaced so things were a bit more symmetrical.

Next I had to figure out a way to make the face guard easily removable. In the end I made a 'sliding' system, which locked into some cardboard grooves I created in the helmet.

At this stage, I will admit, I was little worried. The costume didn't look 'great'. It looked like your regular cardboard costume (ie, crap). However, after that came styrene. I've never worked with styrene before, so like the rest of this adventure, it was a bit of guess work. The end result, I feel, was well worth the 'risk'. The styrene finish looked fantastic.

At first, I tried creating 'sleves' if you will, that slid over the existing cardboard sections, then just gluing that down. Unfortunately, the cardboard wasn't cut well, some was different thickness, some joints required extra tape, etc…and it would have been too much effort to get it all done like that.
Instead, I ended up cutting squares of styrene, and just gluing it on with a glue gun. If you're working with anything thinner than 1mm styrene, be careful what glue gun you use. Mine is a 65w Arlec Glue Gun. Not fantastic quality, but it really heats up the glue….so much so that the styrene melted somewhat, but more importantly, nearly burnt my fingers through the styrene.

What was done before I left…

Some of the cutout styrene was painted already, some wasn't. Since I was running out of time, I glued on what I could, then departed for Chickz0rs place.

Ryan rocked up the night before with my costume, styrene, paints and some tools.
I got to work and painted and cut out what else I could, painted with what little paint I had left, and went to the party the next day.

Next time..

Next time (if ever!) I do a costume like this, I'll get all the cardboard first, and cut it into manageable sizes, rather than just cutting up various size boxes along the way. The biggest change I'd make would be to get all the same thickness/strength cardboard; that would save so much time/effort.

I love the effect the styrene gives, so I'd use that again, but much thinner. 1mm may seem tiny, but its a pain in the rear end to cut quickly.
0.25mm would be my best guess at a good thickness to use.
I guess if you didn't want to use cardboard at all, 1mm (or even 1.5->2mm) thick stuff would be strong enough to make the entire costume out of. Adhering it (so that its actually strong enough to stand up to a bit of pressure) may be a problem though.

Finally, I'd actually draw the thing up/measure it to my body properly. The helmet (which was done nearly last) was so easy/quick to do because I had the measurements…and funnily enough, it worked first time.

'Till all is one!

I will finish Cardwave, I'll buy more paint, I'll file down the corners, I'll glue on more Styrene, and I'll even make some legs for him.
When thats done, I'll get many more photos (although, the quality of Will's EOS20D really shows up compared to our S3 IS. I'll just try get good lighting..)

Soundwave Superior, All other costumes Inferior

Engagement Party: Awesome

I r teh Queen of teh World, *hick* 

The engagement party was a blast. Chickz0r and I were (still are) exhausted, but we had a lot of fun.A special thanks to all those who worked behind the scenes to make this a possibility (decoration, food prep and serving, etc)

Will got some fantastic shots from the day. If you look at the photos, you may remember back to a previous post where I showed off the invitations to the party.
It was a costume party.
The turn out was actually better than I expected, so that was great to see, but apart from just a great turn out of people, many of those who came along were dressed up, which was even more suprising, yet fantastic to see!

I came as Soundwave (Transformers), and Chickz0r came as a Valkrie (Norse mythology). Her costume looked fantastic, and it was only put 'all together' at the very last moment (only one trial run…the engagement party!). Unfortunately, our costumes weren't exactly the most comfortable, so I had to remove mine, while she got away with just removing the breastplate from her costume.

Ryan (best man) came as a Plastic Toy Soldier, my mother came as a hippie, there were an assortment of pirates, and many more.

Thank you for all of you who came along to celebrate with us, you were all so generous with the mountain of gifts we got!

ReMIX07

Why it's time to rethink & ReMix

On the frontiers of the Web, the boundaries are blurring: between developers and designers; between advertisers and publishers; between software and services; between media and technology; between TVs and PCs; between producers and consumers. The old order is getting a little mixed up.

ReMix is Microsoft's conference for cutting-edge web professionals designing and building next-generation experiences through Silverlight.

With capabilities never experienced before, Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web while bridging communication gap between designers and developers.

(from http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix07/about.aspx)

Held at Crown Palladium Promanade, ReMIX07:AU was an interesting event, Will and I tagged along to various things together.

Day 1

• "Registration and refreshments"
  8:00 am - 9:00 am

  Wow. Early morning. Sucked. Will and I went to the wrong place thanks to me, but we got there eventually.
  There was food, I think, but nothing that stood out too much

• Keynote Address
  9:00 am - 10:30 am

  Finula Crowe - product manager for Microsoft Australia, and a lovely lady in general (we spoke to her at WebJam) - opened the keynote, then handed over to Brian Goldfarb - Group Product Manager in Redmond (I think?).
  It was amusing to see that despite Finula having a very thick Irish accent, the crowd responded to her as if she was 'one of us', but as soon as the American Brian stepped on, people tuned out a little.

  Brian talked about how Microsoft provide a platform rather than just a product. That is, .NET.
  Then on to how the platform has to change to keep up with users changes. No longer is all your 'computing' done on a computer, but its also done on an Xbox360 (through XNA), on a mobile phone (.NET Mobile Edition), and through the web browser (ASP.NET and now, Silverlight).
  Overall, I found Brian to be a bit boring - Will agreed, but probably because it was the exact same speech/slides as what he presented at MIX. Maybe its how American's generally talk slower than us aussies, but he just seemed to be slow moving throughout his presentation.

  Shane Morris who followed with demo's of the Expression products quickly.

  Lucas Sherwood from Lightmaker followed showing off some of Lightmakers endevours with Silverlight (and I think WPF). This was probably the most interesting part of the keynote for me. It was fantastic to see what is actually achievable with Silverlight/WPF, rather than "oh, its so awesome, you can do so much, let me show you my hello world/flickr carosel".

  I'm fairly certain somebody from @WWW presented something, I just can't remember who/what. I think it was the National Geographic video website powered by Silverlight which had a guy drinking from elephant dung.

• Lee Brimlow
  Rapid Fire Design & Prototyping in WPF
  10:45 am - 11:45 am

  Lee showed off his adventures in WPF, starting with his very first attempts just by using Expression Blend as if it was Flash. This included some three dimensional stuff, animation, video, the ‘must have’ Flickr example, etc.
  Then he moved onto the examples where he played with XAML/proper classes, some physics, speech API, lists.

  Overall, while his presentation was done well, it was a bit boring and slow moving. It would have been nice if he had of showed how he achieved some of the cooler things in Blend (Yahoo WPF client anybody?).
  For me, there was nothing new in this presentation – I’ve played with WPF, both with XAML and through Expression Blend..

  The complaints about ‘AllowTransparency’ that Lee had, I’ve already blogged about.
  I was a bit disappointed and disheartened by this first presentation, as it wasn’t what I was expecting from Lee (since I read his WPF Blog). I don't really think it was Lee's fault so much as I think the hour long sessions weren't enough to properly cover the content. An hour and a half to two hours would have made most of the sessions 'better'.

• Morning Tea
  11:45 am - 12:00 pm

  I can't really remember much about what food was there, apart from Morning Tea on Day Two. That is to say, most of it was fairly 'blah', and in small quantites.
  For essentially a geek conference (thanks Blaman…), the food was lacking.

• Laurence Moroney
  Rich Web Applications with Silverlight, XAML and Javascript
  12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

  Unlike the first session I attended, this was a more ‘developer’-centric presentation.
  Unfortunately (for me), Laurence covered Silverlight 1.0, not 1.1 (which is the cool .NET version, rather than Javascript. This is the reason there isn't many notes, plus, anybody reading things blog as probably already figured out what Silverlight is from MIX).
  In a nutshell, Silverlight is cool because its ‘object oreintated’-ish; it handles enough media – WMV7/8/9, VC1 (think HD), WMA and MP3; said media is handled very nicely behind the scenes with buffering/downloading as well as bandwidth optimisation (so it won’t buffer too much unless the user really needs it) and most values are normalised for working with them nicely.

• Lunch
  1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

  The food served was the same served both days, and the same served at the Cisco Technology Day which was in Crown Palladium. Sadly, it was much better at the free Cisco Tech Day - more food (~4 tables rather than two), and the nachos were warmer and less soggy.

• Lucas Sherwood
  Switching to WPF and Silverlight
  2:00 pm- 3:00 pm

  Continuing on from his quick demo in the keynote, Lucas showed off two applications - one WPF, one Silverlight - and talked about his company's (Lightmaker) experience - that is, being thrown in the deepend on several fronts.

  The programs he showed were really nice 'looking', unfortunately the WPF one (The Olympic Social Network) failed to get past the login screen.
  The Silverlight application Lightmaker developed for Orlando Magic was really neat looking. So neat that I've started playing with Silverlight 1.1 myself, and a demo of that should be up within the next couple of weeks (I've got a dozen blog posts to get through first…)

  Lucas stated a few times how he's a developer not a presenter, and yes, he occasionally did exactly what I do when I present is shuffle back and forward and talk fast, but I have to admit, he had one of the best presentations (minus the grand exceptions) of the conference.

• Steve Marx
  Vista Sidebar Gadgets
  3:15 pm- 4:15 pm

  This was in the smallest room, so the presentation had a much ‘closer/personal’ feel to it.

  Surprisingly, Steve was the first to use Internet Explorer. Not the only one, but the majority of presenters used Firefox, which was interesting.

  I've looked at Sidebar gadgets a little, so there wasn't anything hugely surprising for me.
  Sidebar gadgets are HTML/Javascript. They have certain restrictions on them - sizewise as well as capabilities. They're really insecure (no way to encrypt sensitive data). They can host Silverlight data, as well as making AJAX calls.

  Its good to see that there are some 'forward thinking' parts to Sidebar gagdets. For example, in the Gadget.XML, <permissions> tag current does nothing (its set to 'full'), but they are hoping to add more security into it later, as well as potentially expanding it (speculation, but maybe an iGoogle-esque webportal where you can drag gadgets from your sidebar to your portal - and visaversa).

• Afternoon Tea
  4:15 pm - 4:30 pm
• Phil Beadle and Dave Glover
  Orcas for Web Developers
  4:30 pm - 5:30 pm

  Phil and Dave had an interesting session on some of the new web developer based tools available in Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), particularly looking at XHTML/CSS tools, as well as Javascript Intellisense/etc. These features made Expression Web seem a bit pointless - look down to the Expression Web session coverage to see what I mean.

  Overall, good presentation, those two looked like they had a lot of fun.

• WebJam & Galactic Circus festivities
  5:30 pm - 10:00 pm

  I thought WebJam was crap to be honest. I wasn't in the actual tiny room they were presenting in, so all I had was 3x massive TV's and horrendous audio feeds to go by.
  Apparently they had no net connection there, and since its WebJam, that kind of messed things up a little.
  Sat down and mostly talked to other ReMIX attendee's, which was good…the people of ReMIX (attendees, presenters, and general staff) really made the experience great. Nothing like seeing Frank run like crazy ;)

Day 2

Unfortunately, I was so wrecked after day one (I didn't get home till 11pm or so!), I didn't bother bringing mums laptop with me on day two, so I didn't write that many notes/can't remember too much of it.

Day two, however, saw me bring along my Foam Blue Monster.

Nick Hodge snapped that photo while Will and I were playing Gears of War on the Xbox 360's setup. Just for the record, I won most of the games ;)
I'll get some better photos of the Blue Monster when I get home.

• Keynote
  I rocked up half an hour late because I slept in till 7am. 10 minutes before my train was supposed to leave.
  The crowd seemed mostly asleep when I arrived anyway.
• Joseph Cooney
  WPF Fundamentals: Developing Rich Interactive Applications

• Michael Kordahi
  Designing with Microsoft Expression Web: Today and Tomorrow.

  I attended this mostly because the other two sessions running at the same time didn't really appeal to me, and that we were to receive a free copy of Expression Web (xWeb)For what its worth, Michael did a fantastic job of promoting and trying to sell the product. The truth is though, I don't think anybody was impressed enough to want to go out and buy this, or switch from whatever they were previously using.It would be fair to say this is a direct competitor to Adobe's Dreamweaver and while its a huge step up from Frontpage, xWeb still seems to be a long way behind.

  A few of the very bad points are:

  • xWeb doesn't support any other server side languages other than ASP.NET in v1 (v2 is meant to add PHP).
  • xWeb doesn't have Intellisense for ASP.NET (C#/VB.NET etc), so you're extremely unlikely to want to do any 'backend' code in it.
  • Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) has most of its big selling features like HTML/Javascript Syntax highlighting/Intellisense. And if you remember Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Expression Web Edition (try saying that a few times…) is free, and xWeb is "worth" $550AUD…well..
  • The Expression range is trying to be both for designers and developers. If thats the case, why does xWeb have the worst interface out of the suite? All of the other Expression products have a unified black 'I'm-dark-and-sexy-therefore-I'm-a-designer-tool' appearance to them, but xWeb is stuck in Office 2003 mode.
  • Doesn't support any versioning/source control
  • Won't open VSProj files like Expression Blend does

  It did have some good points, like being able to drag-and-drop CSS, as well as the decent WYSIWYG code generation, but nothing that was a really big selling point for somebody who can figure out XHTML/CSS, which aren't exactly the hardest things to learn.
  xWeb WYSIWYG editor won't make it easier to create fantastic/unusual XHTML/CSS appearances, nor does its code view have anything that things like Notepad++ doesn't have.
  If anything, if you're a WYSIWYG person, its fantastic. It generates standards compliant code. Thats about it though.

  The other thing to note was Michael is a funny guy, and had a fantastic presentation (Standards compliant code gets the chickz!). Its just a pity his subject sucked so very much.

• Panel: Web 2.0
  On the panel was Cameron Reilly of Podcast Network, Ben Barren from Gnoos, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb, and Michael Kordahi with Brad Howarth of lagrange communications moderating.
  I didn't write notes for this panel - for the audience it was intended for most of the information and discussion would have already been done to death. "Web2.0 is not just a technology, its an idea", "Australia lags behind", "Corporations lag behind", etc.

  Cameron Reilly was very distracting - he was very overconfident to the point where he seemed arrogant. I won't call him arrogant as thats unfair, I haven't met him or talked with him personally, but when he blamed the lack of "Web 2.0" development in Australia on the 'audience' because we weren't willing to take the risk of mortgaging our houses, quitting jobs, etc to fund startups…well…he seemed a bit arrogant. Plus, the glasses that he wore really made him look 'Bono-esque'.

• Steve Marx
  Go Deep With AJAX.

  Will fell asleep during this one. Steve's presentations aren't too bad, but he has a bit of a monotonous voice, it was late in the conference, and the stuff he covered was pretty boring.
  "What is AJAX?", followed by Microsoft's implementation of that through ASP.NET. Yeah, I learnt a little about what controls were available in ASP.NET AJAX, but thats only because I haven't played with ASP.NET yet.

• Closing Panel: Designers are from Venus, Developers are from Mars

  This panel was made up of Lee Brimlow, Gerry Gaffney of Information and Design, Philip Beadle of Readify (Phil is a hilarious guy. He loved his Javascript work, as well as colouring things red - a true developer), Adam Kowaltzke of Avanade and Shane Morris as Moderator.
  This panel was 'funnier', but by this time we were all mostly asleep (just because ReMIX was drawing to a close, not because they were boring.)

  The panel talked about 'designers vs developers' and 'designers + developers', both how it has been in the industry, and how it is changing, as well as roles that are popping up so it becomes 'designers + devingers vs devingers + developers' - an intermediate role which can do both, and is able to translate for both sides.
  I'd like to consider myself a devigner, but I'm not so sure if anybody else would ;)

  I'm sure this was a better panel than what I'm able to blog about it, but as stated, we were all tired by here and just wanted to get home.

Overall…

ReMIX07 was a lot of fun. All of the presenters seemed to be very passionate about what they did/presented, which is a good start.
The presentations were of pretty good quality/design, although it wasn’t hard to tell the difference between ‘designers’ (or ‘devigners’ I guess) and ‘developers’ presenting.

Next year, it really needs free WiFi setup, as well as more powerpoints to recharge laptops. Those with laptops want to be able to fire up their computer, get to a Microsoft portal where we can download the slides (and maybe even the examples) so that we can compile whatever is on the big screen on our own computers - just so we can see it really work.

It wouldn’t hurt if they had fewer sessions that went for longer so they could cover the content a bit better.

I wouldn't complain about better 'free software'. MIX in Vegas got Expression Studio (and a 'unique' cover for each attendee no less) and Vista Ultimate (and random other goodies like a pen and memory stick). By comparison we got Expression Web, which is fairly hit-and-miss product.
I'm not trying to suggest that the only reason I went to ReMIX was for the free stuff, but its hard to get excited about Expression Web when the major session on it made it seem pathetic (which backed up my thoughts on my previous trial of Expression Web). If they had of given us Expression Blend, on the other hand, I would have been ecstatic as its a fantastic product.

Nick Hodge has a good round up of many ReMIX blog posts for those who are interested.

My apologies for posting this a week late, I've been a tad busy (more blog posts to follow, at around one per day or three). I also took a whole stack of photos, but not many of them turned out too well, so I've skipped them.