CurtBlog

(This is a cross-post of a recent post I did for Clarity’s blogs). For the past couple of weeks I’ve had a chance to take a closer look at the process of building Metro-style apps for Windows 8.  Since I have a long background in web development, I was curious about using the HTML/Javascript approach.  I was curious how much of my existing skillset I would be able to leverage. I suppose it’s a bit hard to tell, since there is still a whole lot of new stuff to figure out.  It’s both easier and harder than I expected. CSS Experience: If you already are proficient with CSS, it will certainly serve you fairly well when writing Metro-style apps.  I find CSS styling much more intuitive than trying to style things in a XAML environment, but then again I’ve been doing it for years.  The tools now make it very easy to see exactly what styles are being applied at different spots in the DOM. On the other hand, the new proprietary “ms-grid” system t... [More]

This is going to be a bit more of a techie post than usual, so tune out if that isn’t interesting to you.  If you like technical discussion, I've also put this post on my work blog and there is a lot of other good information over there from my colleagues on Microsoft development, including Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and other newer technologies. One of the consequences of being on a project for a few years is that you tend to get really good at the specific technologies needed to write the best applications for that project.  And you tend to miss out on some other stuff, unless you want to spend all your weekends keeping up.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but I find that hard to do consistently.  So I wanted to check out some of the new web development technologies coming down the pike and I thought I’d start with Html 5.  Html 5 often seems to be poorly defined or mean different things to different people.  The spec is kind of like... [More]

My website was getting a bit long in the tooth, so I finally got around to doing some updates.  I've been playing around with a new layout for a few months that I found on one of the open source CSS template sites.  I ended up using one from Demus Design and I really like how it turned out.  A few technical notes, for those keeping score at home: Under the covers, I'm running on ASP.NET MVC2 now.  I started migrating over to MVC when some of the first previews came out.  It's been interesting to watch how far this framework has come just since I started playing around with it less than 2 years ago.  It was freakishly quick to get my simple pages working. I converted my site over to C#.  I originally started in VB.NET quite awhile ago, but lately I've been solely working in C# and really prefer it now.  It was a pain to have to remember how to do certain VB.NET things on my personal site, so I just switched it over.  My site is simple en... [More]

After a fairly long run with WebHost4Life, I finally got tired of them constantly messing stuff up and have mostly completed a move to Re-Invent. It was a toss-up between them and DiscountASP, but Re-Invent is celebrating their 8th year anniversary and offering hosting packages that are just too good to pass up.  Plus, I was going to try to use SQL Server Express, but just couldn't figure out how to work it in a hosting environment for Community Server so I really wanted a SQL Server 2005 database available.  So far I've found they don't offer quite as many features as WebHost4Life and things aren't quite as automated, but the price is better and they seem to be on top of the latest Microsoft stuff, already offering features like Silverlight and .NET Framework 3.0 features.  We'll see how it goes.  It's a shame about WebHost4Life as they were awesome when I first signed up.  But the last couple years have seen them steadily go downhill in the expertise and time... [More]

Got to give my 2 cents on the Atlas framework for the CMP media folks, specifically in relation to the June CTP