By Kevin Hoffman  I'll keep this blog post short and sweet because the more I think about it the more I get close to the verge of exploding.
Here's my situation: I had Visual Studio 2008 Professional installed. From scratch, clean install. Everything works great, all is good in the Microsoft world of .... Aug. 24, 2008 11:00 PM Reads: 572 |
By Kevin Hoffman  An NDA is something that you volunteer for, it is willful act, you must choose to agree to the terms of the NDA. No one is forcing you to do it, there are no guns pointed at your head. If you do not like or agree with the terms of the NDA, then do not sign it. However, if you do choose... Aug. 24, 2008 05:10 AM Reads: 574 |
By Kevin Hoffman  I don't need to go into too much detail here about what exactly REST is - I know that most of the readers of this blog are well versed in Web Services technologies and architectural patterns. The thing that I want to cover is that REST is an architectural decision, it is not a protocol... Aug. 24, 2008 04:30 AM Reads: 807 |
By Kevin Hoffman  So how does this relate to MobileMe? MobileMe is, according to Phil Schiller's keynote, 'Exchange for the rest of us'. What this means is that using MobileMe, you will receive push contacts, push e-mail, and push calendar notifications. This will work with any MobileMe-aware applicatio... Jun. 12, 2008 04:00 AM Reads: 5,462 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 differ from P2P network to ... May. 23, 2008 03:15 PM Reads: 11,974 Replies: 3 |
By Kevin Hoffman To quickly recap from the previous article, a peer network is a logical graph of computers (or applications, depending on your abstraction level) which are connected in some way. In a pure serverless peer network, there is no single designated machine in the network that holds more or ... May. 23, 2008 08:00 AM Reads: 2,083 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 TV with a 1080i HDTV si... May. 19, 2008 06:00 AM Reads: 8,347 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 get something that is ... May. 16, 2008 03:00 PM Reads: 7,120 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 specifically, Apple's im... May. 16, 2008 02:15 PM Reads: 5,282 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 themselves in response t... May. 2, 2008 05:15 PM Reads: 2,879 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 after having played a... Apr. 26, 2008 07:15 PM Reads: 7,033 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 2.0 than I can in Flex... Apr. 21, 2008 05:45 PM Reads: 14,019 Replies: 4 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 VS 2008. There is a ... Apr. 13, 2008 11:00 AM Reads: 21,138 Replies: 23 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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, but you want to becom... Apr. 4, 2008 04:30 AM Reads: 14,234 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 before, just because ... Mar. 30, 2008 05:30 AM Reads: 12,280 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 an entity model and n... Mar. 29, 2008 05:30 AM Reads: 4,242 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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, what we thought was wrong... Mar. 25, 2008 11:15 PM Reads: 12,100 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 be prepared for m... Mar. 20, 2008 02:45 PM Reads: 18,125 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 to installing the SDK, ... Mar. 14, 2008 09:45 AM Reads: 5,631 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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't make sense on the... Mar. 6, 2008 04:00 AM Reads: 5,144 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 Apple employees aren't ta... Feb. 28, 2008 06:30 AM Reads: 6,622 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 Silverlight 2.0. Silverli... Feb. 26, 2008 09:45 PM Reads: 9,518 Replies: 7 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), c... Feb. 26, 2008 08:00 PM Reads: 6,888 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 to say before attem... Feb. 25, 2008 04:45 PM Reads: 4,209 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 hardcore details) be able to ... Feb. 22, 2008 06:00 PM Reads: 6,366 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman There were a total of four Macbook Airs on display, as well as a bunch of other shiny things that I wanted to touch. At first, I wasn't really all that interested in the MBA. I had previously done some number crunching and determined that for me, the price-per-feature was too high to j... Feb. 20, 2008 02:15 PM Reads: 3,628 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 nutshell' books. Back in... Feb. 16, 2008 07:15 PM Reads: 12,879 Replies: 7 |
By Kevin Hoffman So here's my precarious situation: I'm writing some sample web applications for the iPhone. Every once in a while, I poke around using Ruby on Rails, but by and large my web development lately has consisted entirely of the ASP.NET MVC framework CTP. I also don't own a PC anymore - I ow... Feb. 5, 2008 03:45 PM Reads: 7,749 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 JavaScript can then directly ma... Jan. 31, 2008 05:15 AM Reads: 4,708 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman OK OK, so I admit I'm already running version 1.1.3 of the iPhone firmware. While I think it's fantastic that I now get the ability to add web icons to the home screen, and that the home screen has multiple pages, I usually spend my first few minutes on a new version of the firmware lo... Jan. 18, 2008 03:30 PM Reads: 8,571 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 amount of screen real... Jan. 17, 2008 11:15 AM Reads: 7,959 Replies: 3 |
By Kevin Hoffman I plugged in the iPhone and now I've got several episodes worth of 'The Universe' that I can watch in the palm of my hand while I'm on the train. I'm sure everybody reading this has already realized how cool this ability is, but I'm new to the whole video conversion thing. So with the ... Jan. 17, 2008 11:15 AM Reads: 6,604 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman Who am I to break with the tradition of spinning wild flights of fancy in the spirit of Apple lovers everywhere and calling them predictions? Just about every site on the net that is even remotely related to technology is now fully caught up in the buzz and hype and has posted their pr... Jan. 14, 2008 08:30 PM Reads: 22,161 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman In the past, I have downloaded the behemoth Virtual PC images that Microsoft provides for the Orcas CTPs. When I was confronted with the choice of whether I wanted to download the Orcas image (which is a 5.3GB dual-layer DVD image) or whether I wanted to download the Virtual PC image (... Jan. 14, 2008 08:15 PM Reads: 12,272 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 little nervous... after a... Jan. 10, 2008 05:15 PM Reads: 7,563 |
By Kevin Hoffman Basically Volta's tier splitting feature is designed to make it so that you can build your application early and then figure out where the services need to go when you're done. This allows you to profile your entire application on a per-method-call basis all in a tight integrated syste... Jan. 8, 2008 08:45 PM Reads: 6,471 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 to obtain the critic... Nov. 29, 2007 09:45 PM Reads: 20,497 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 controller and a regular con... Nov. 29, 2007 05:15 PM Reads: 17,341 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 supported native 3rd part... Nov. 10, 2007 10:45 AM Reads: 27,988 Replies: 4 |
By Kevin Hoffman  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 problems that it's probab... Nov. 9, 2007 09:00 AM Reads: 8,779 Replies: 4 |