Kevin Hoffman, editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's "iPhone Developer's Journal" is one of the most popular "iPhone" and "Silverlight" bloggers on the Net. Kevin has been programming since he was 10 and has written everything from DOS shareware to n-tier, enterprise Web applications in VB, C++, Delphi, and C. He is coauthor of Professional .NET Framework (Wrox Press) and co-author with Robert Foster of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed. Kevin authors "The .NET Addict's Blog" at ".Net Developer's Journal" (dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com).
Kevin Hoffman's Review of
Iron Man
I took the advice of a
friend of mine and
steered clear of the
'normal' movie theaters
and went a little out of
the way to go to a DLP
movie theater. The
experience of comparing a
regular movie theater to
a DLP movie theater is
like comparing standard
def analog T...May. 16, 2008 03:30 PM Reads: 2,232
During my last trip to
Best Buy, on a whim I
picked up a DVI-to-HDMI
connector (male DVI,
female HDTV). This little
doohickey plugs into the
side of my Macbook Pro
and then I plug the HDMI
cable into that. I run
the other end of the HDMI
cable into the HDTV and I
...
It seems as though
whenever I bring up PNRP
and its benefits, I am
immediately inundated
with a list of questions
or comments indicating
that Microsoft is
re-inventing the wheel
and that PNRP has already
been implemented before
in the form of ZeroConf
and, more sp...
CLINQ v1.1 has been
released. Some of you may
have already downloaded
some of the new builds,
but here's a rundown of
what the new release
includes: Support for
Continuous Aggregation.
Now, in addition to being
able to have your result
sets automatically update
th...
Peer networks are really
just logical graphs of
computers, or, in many
cases, logical graphs of
connected applications.
The physical topology of
the peer network, means
of communication, and
weighting of the edges
are all
implementation-specific
details that diffe...
You remember back in the
early days of video games
when there wasn't enough
capacity on the carts
themselves to support 30
hours of gameplay? What
was the solution to keep
you playing? They made
the games unbelievably
freaking difficult. Try
playing Kid Icarus now
...
Silverlight 2.0 is a
freaking phenomenal RIA
development environment
and I would actually, at
this point, put the
development experience in
Silverlight 2.0 above and
beyond Flex. I can do
more faster and have it
look better and run more
efficiently in
Silverlight ...
Silverlight 2.0 kicks ass
and I can't wait to start
dropping more hardcore
blog posts regarding it.
Scott Guthrie's tutorials
are a fantastic place to
start. The issue I have,
however, is that all of
the tutorials assume you
have installed
Silverlight 2.0 tools for ...
If you're like me, you've
probably been spending
every waking moment you
have eating, living, and
breathing the iPhone SDK.
Since March 6th, that's
pretty much all I can
think about once I get
home. So, what do you do
if you want to learn how
to write iPhone apps, b...
I want to thank everyone
who showed up to share my
enthusiasm for the iPhone
as it is, what I believe,
the mobile development
platform to target. I
also want to thank those
people who tolerated my
evasiveness and lack of
detail during the SDK
session. As I've said
...
So you're building your
data-driven application
and you've got an ADO.NET
Entity Model that
represents an abstraction
around your database.
Maybe you're even pretty
savvy and you've used
inheritance and some
filters to enhance the
entity model so that it
really is...
During the Q&A period
after one of my sessions
at the iPhone Developer
Summit last Thursday,
there was someone there
from Microsoft
Competetive Intelligence.
She asked myself and some
other folks who were
lingering nearby to
describe, in our unbiased
opinions, wha...
This session will provide
attendees with an
overview of the iPhone
SDK, including discussion
of the App Store, Apple's
planned distribution
channel for SDK
applications. Keep in
mind that the contents of
the SDK and experiences
while using it are
covered under NDA...
So, to start with, I need
to preface this blog post
with a notice: The
contents of the SDK as
well as the experiences
that occur while using
the SDK are confidential.
Yes, I am one of those
crazy-weird people who
read EULAs and license
agreements. When you
agree t...
Ever since the iPhone was
first displayed, people
have been wondering if
there was going to be any
kind of Flash support for
the iPhone. Initially, I
think the response from
Jobs was 'maybe', but I
took that as a 'nope'.
There are hundreds of
reasons why Flash doesn...
I love reading about how
these people have inside
sources. If an inside
source within Apple was
leaking information like
that, that information
source wouldn't be
working for Apple much
longer. No matter how
close these friends of
Apple employees may be,
those App...
Anytime you can create a
blog post about the .NET
Framework that also
includes borrowed
half-quotations from Lord
of the Rings, you've got
to take that opportunity.
Like pretty much every
other RIA developer, I am
sitting back anxiously
awaiting the arrival of
Sil...
Silverlight 2 includes a
rich set of built-in
controls that developers
and designers can use to
quickly build
applications. This
upcoming Beta1 release
includes core form
controls (TextBox,
CheckBox, RadioButton,
etc), built-in layout
management panels
(StackPan...
I was reading news feeds
when I read a blog post
that included some quotes
from Bill Gates. Bill was
quoted as saying that
Windows 7 will make the
keyboard and mouse far
less important than in
the past. We've all heard
that crap before, it's
typically what Bill used...
The DreamSpark program is
one of the newest
initiatives to come out
of Redmond that are very,
very un-Microsoft-like.
I'll talk about another
later in this post. It
appears as though
University and high
school students will, at
some point (I don't know
the hardcor...
So is O'Reilly actually
condoning the hacking of
the phones? O'Reilly has
had a long and
prestigious history as
being the ultimate source
for *nix manuals,
including many books that
became so dogeared I
actually bought multiple
copies, including dozens
of 'in a nu...
In a typical AJAX
application, your goal is
often to have the user
click something. In
response, JavaScript goes
out and (through the
magic of XML HTTP
Requests) obtains data
and potentially modifies
data on a server as well.
Using the returned data,
the JavaScrip...
Think about this: If I
wait a couple weeks until
I can lay hands on one in
a store before ordering,
a shiny new Macbook Air
might arrive just in time
for the iPhone SDK,
giving me the perfect
iPhone development
machine since the iPhone
GUI doesn't require the
same...
Since I purchased my ADC
subscription in January,
it's coming up on renewal
time and I thought I
would take a few moments
to reflect on the past
year from the perspective
of a newbie Cocoa
programmer. When I showed
up to the Leopard Tech
Talk in 2007, I felt a
lit...
My money is on targeting
iPhones and WM devices
until Android actually
shows up live and in the
wild on more than 500,000
devices. Also, don't be
fooled about the Android
developer challenge.
That's not $10million in
prize money, that's a $10
million bribe in order ...
There's a couple of
things that I like about
his sample, and a couple
of things that worry me.
First, I like the idea
that there's an Ajax
controller. I hope in the
final bits it's simply
called Controller and
they don't make you
distinguish between an
Ajax contro...
I want to counter a lot
of the press and blog
comments stating that the
release of the SDK is a
reversal or some kind of
about face. If anybody
had done their homework,
they would know that
Steve Jobs himself stated
that he wanted to create
an environment that
sup...
So I went to go re-watch
Scott Guthrie's video
illustrating the new
upcoming MVC
(Model-View-Controller)
framework for ASP.NET
when I noticed that the
content is in
Silverlight. That's fine,
MS is trying so hard to
push Silverlight as the
answer to the world's
p...
My own personal install
of Leopard seems to be
having periodic trouble
completing a shutdown on
the 17' MBP. Annoying?
Yes. Worthy of posting
something inflammatory
such as 'wrong with
Leopard's spots'?
Doubtful. So, in looking
at eWeek's Microsoft
Watch's latest ...
So it seems as though a
few minutes after I wrote
this blog entry, Google
put forth the
announcement about
Android, a project named
after the company they
purchased a while back.
Google is essentially
spearheading an open
source project that is an
open SDK for mob...
Now that Leopard is out
and everyone is, I
suspect, feverishly
reformatting their
laptops and desktops to
install the retail copy
of Leopard, developers
can finally start sharing
their Leopard code
samples. Rather than me
sitting around making up
stupid reasons wh...
Leopard introduces a
bunch of amazingly
powerful new controls,
but one of my favorite
new controls is the
NSCollectionView. This
control works a lot like
the FlowLayoutPanel if
you're familiar with
Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF). It
essentially is a layout ...
