By Kevin Hoffman If you take a look at the success of the Nintendo Wii, you'll see an innovative device with an incredibly compelling user interaction design (the Wiimote, nunchuck, steering wheels, fitness pads, etc). The device itself has what the industry might actually refer to as 'last gen' hardwa... Sep. 7, 2007 12:30 AM EDT Reads: 27,572 Replies: 5 |
By Kevin Hoffman So yesterday I was happily catching up on my RSS feeds when I noticed that there was some Apple buzz. I took a look and saw some photos of the new iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone that can only use WiFi instead of EDGE and obviously has no phone in it. It's quite impressive-loo... Sep. 7, 2007 12:30 AM EDT Reads: 23,407 Replies: 9 |
By Kevin Hoffman While I'm not at the point where I can divulge any of the official Table of Contents yet, I thought I would put up a quick post letting people know that I'm still alive. You may have noticed that my post count is a little low lately. I have a pile of code samples that I want to write (... Sep. 6, 2007 09:45 AM EDT Reads: 6,652 |
By Kevin Hoffman First off, it might be worth it to note that there is a Silverlight 'Quick Start' for performing this task. The problem is that the Quick Start sucks. It actually tells you to go off and follow the directions for creating a basic ASP.NET Web Service - which is wrong. In order to do thi... Sep. 5, 2007 09:15 PM EDT Reads: 18,495 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman The first principle is fairly obvious. The application has to be useful for someone to want to use it. Not only should it be useful, but it should be compelling, interesting, and it couldn't hurt to follow some of the new design styles and ideas floating around in the Web 2.0 space, in... Jul. 27, 2007 10:45 PM EDT Reads: 17,281 Replies: 8 |
By Kevin Hoffman I was writing some code where I needed to create an instance of an object and then set some values for properties on that object. Seems like a pretty easy task, if you know the class type (and have a reference to it) at compile-time, but what do you do if all you have is a string repre... Jul. 26, 2007 10:45 AM EDT Reads: 5,734 |
By Kevin Hoffman The previous CTP of Acropolis felt bloated, slow, and the development was tedious. I kept telling myself that the suffering is for the greater good because a composited, loosely coupled, building-block style application will be easier to maintain and easier to upgrade and be more relia... Jul. 25, 2007 10:45 AM EDT Reads: 7,886 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman As you probably know, Silverlight is Microsoft's new RIA technology platform. It purports to provide a single development platform that will allow you to deploy WPF-like rich applications to multiple operating systems through multiple browsers. For example, you can write your XAML and ... Jul. 24, 2007 06:45 AM EDT Reads: 12,472 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman Tools like Astoria are a fantastic tool by which we can expose data in a way that jives with the vision of the semantic web. The problem is that there are business concerns to exposing data on the web, not the least of which is of course -how do you charge people for that data? How do ... Jul. 22, 2007 09:00 PM EDT Reads: 14,113 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman What I really like about Bonjour isn't that you can use it to discover nearby iTunes libraries for music sharing (that's how iTunes actually does use Bonjour) or that you can use Bonjour to discover nearby printers (also a legitimate use, that's how I discovered my HP scanner-fax-print... Jul. 20, 2007 10:00 PM EDT Reads: 10,288 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman In short, unless my findings are incorrect, Silverlight, as it stands now, with no support for data binding, service consumption, or basic UI controls, is a worthless steamy pile. I just took a huge step in Flex's direction. Jun. 29, 2007 05:00 AM EDT Reads: 37,444 Replies: 14 |
By Kevin Hoffman  So I was watching a bunch of video clips from the Transformers movie the other day (pretty much what I do every evening...) and I got to thinking : it would be ridiculously cool to have a Transformers MMO. If you think hard about it, it could have everything that a gamer could ever wan... Jun. 26, 2007 07:15 PM EDT Reads: 11,983 Replies: 3 |
By Kevin Hoffman I have been poking around inside Acropolis for a little while now and have been attempting to make it work for some sample, proof-of-concept style apps. Basically whenever I get a new technology in my grubby little hands, I don't stick to 'Hello World' apps, I try and simulate a real-w... Jun. 22, 2007 07:15 PM EDT Reads: 9,154 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman You think that everything is going your way today, but you're wrong. Happily listening to your music- noise-cancelling headphones blotting out the screeching whine of nearby co-workers- you are unaware of the impending doom. You're kicking ass and taking names, the code is compiling, p... Jun. 20, 2007 08:45 PM EDT Reads: 7,426 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman In case you've been living under a rock, or you don't spend all day hitting Refresh on Microsoft sites waiting for new stuff to come out, Acropolis is a new framework currently in CTP (Community Technology Preview) from Microsoft. Basically Acropolis is a framework providing support fo... Jun. 20, 2007 12:45 PM EDT Reads: 8,741 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  Recently, I posted an article that basically pointed out that online journalist Mary Jo Foley had posted an article that was really a bunch of sensationalist clickbaiting, claiming that Leopard was ripping off Vista. Anybody that uses 'Cupertino, Start your Photocopies' and 'Leopard lo... Jun. 19, 2007 10:30 PM EDT Reads: 7,252 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman The crazy people are far more interactive in SF than they are in NYC. Most of the crazy folks in NYC just kind of talk to themselves and generally mind their own business. Their San Francisco counterparts actually step in front of you and attempt to engage you in conversation about the... Jun. 17, 2007 10:30 PM EDT Reads: 7,495 Replies: 3 |
By Kevin Hoffman OK. Bottom line here is I'm dissapointed. I've considered Mary Jo's articles to be unbiased and relatively objective in the past. What I'm looking at in her article is basically a piece of imflammatory nonsense. If she had taken the time to do some more digging, she would have found th... Jun. 17, 2007 08:00 PM EDT Reads: 13,560 Replies: 4 |
By Kevin Hoffman At this point, it feels as though Acropolis is a layer of abstraction on top of WPF itself. Basically when you build an Acropolis (I'm going to call it AFX , since that's a crapload easier to type, and all the controls are prefixed as 'AFX') you get an Application and a main window. In... Jun. 10, 2007 01:15 PM EDT Reads: 11,298 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman I found the entire event to be surreal, like an out of body experience. I'd never been in a make-up chair before, and I'm really an 'in the trenches' kind of developer - I've never much aspired to be on TV, but I also won't turn down the chance to discuss things that I am passionate ab... Jun. 5, 2007 07:00 PM EDT Reads: 16,608 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman If you just add the name 'Kevin Hoffman' to the list of people who will be on that panel, the article will read correctly. I am going to be discussing Silverlight during the panel. Keep in mind that I don't think any of us are there to shoot down or laud any one particular technology, ... Jun. 4, 2007 07:15 PM EDT Reads: 15,139 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  So I have decided to retire my Sprint PPC 6700, a device that runs Windows Mobile 5.0 and has simultaneous access to voice networks, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Sprint's broadband (EVDO). I frequently used this phone as a wireless modem and connected my laptop to the internet on the train. T... Jun. 4, 2007 12:30 PM EDT Reads: 7,983 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman Anyway, I think this is a pretty slick idea. A company new to the whole 'Web 2.0' thing can simply go to Intel, get their shiny 'Web 2.0' box, and get off the ground. At least that's the partyline. The key to Web 2.0 isn't the technology enabling it, its the people using it. If your or... Jun. 2, 2007 05:45 PM EDT Reads: 11,272 |
By Kevin Hoffman When I first started learning Cocoa I ran across a design pattern that I had seen implemented a few times before but I had yet to see it labelled with a name. This pattern is called the Delegate design pattern. Coming from C#, I found this initially confusing because in C# the concept ... May. 15, 2007 05:15 PM EDT Reads: 9,965 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman Lately there's been a lot of buzz about Orcas. You keep hearing about Silverlight and the Entity Framework and Jasper and Astoria and who knows how many other code names. One of the things that you don't hear about is PNRP. Why? I haven't the faintest idea because this is some of the c... May. 12, 2007 12:45 PM EDT Reads: 7,389 Replies: 3 |
By Kevin Hoffman The short of the story is that Silverlight 1.0 applications don't support code-behind, they don't support making plain XML calls back to a web service (despite some other people's claims to the contrary, 1.0 will not let you do this!), and there is no real two-way binding (though you c... May. 2, 2007 11:15 AM EDT Reads: 8,469 |
By Kevin Hoffman Microsoft has been getting a lot of press lately. From the announcement of their decision to Open Source some of the Dynamic Language Runtime (the tool that powers the IronPython thing in Silverlight) to the announcement that the ADO.NET Entity Framework will not ship as part of Orcas ... May. 1, 2007 03:00 PM EDT Reads: 13,237 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman I'm sure this is old news to pretty much everybody, but I just wanted to take a minute to post my feelings on this subject. According to multiple sources, including one blog post (and associated comments), the designer for the Entity Data Model will not ship with the RTM version of Orc... Apr. 24, 2007 04:45 PM EDT Reads: 6,622 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman I have a rather unique perspective on persistence tools because I have probably tested and developed in just about every conceivable environment for rapidly creating data-bound desktop applications, including some that called themselves '4GL' and were basically code generators that wou... Apr. 18, 2007 03:45 PM EDT Reads: 18,153 Replies: 2 |
By Kevin Hoffman If you're as new to Core Data as I am, check out this video tutorial, I found it extremely useful. I have been able to produce the currency converter sample in OS X Tiger and I was fairly pleased. I was surprised by how much of the plumbing took place in the NIB and how little took pla... Feb. 7, 2007 02:45 PM EST Reads: 2,542 |
By Kevin Hoffman What people should be striving for is the happy middle point, not one of the extremes. We shouldn't be throwing crap out the door and then hoping to just patch it later (what if your patcher is crap??), but on the other extreme, we shouldn't have 3-year development cycles that are so h... Nov. 22, 2006 11:15 AM EST Reads: 6,822 |
By Kevin Hoffman So, this fantastically modern new operating system that is designed to provide us all with the ultimate in gaming experiences isn't worth jack [censored] as it stands right now. I installed and attempted to run every game I have, and I ran them in compatibility mode, I ran them in forc... Nov. 21, 2006 10:00 AM EST Reads: 9,626 Replies: 5 |
By Kevin Hoffman The current rage is all about community building and social software, especially using the Internet (I refuse to call it the web) as the backbone for such community building. I think devices like the Wii represent the next step in social software. If you've been reading this blog for a... Nov. 21, 2006 09:45 AM EST Reads: 10,553 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman  I have been guilty of underestimating the power of Features. It wasn't really until I started digging deep into the bowels of the new Features and Solutions system in SharePoint 2007 that I finally started to realize how pervasive this stuff is. At first glance, it's extremely easy to ... Nov. 2, 2006 11:30 AM EST Reads: 12,333 |
By Kevin Hoffman If you have read enough of my blog entries, you know that when I encounter a new technology, the first thing I ask is, 'That's great, but can I game with it?'. The answer to WF is of course, yes. Nov. 2, 2006 11:30 AM EST Reads: 6,503 |
By Kevin Hoffman To be honest, my interest in AJAX-ified applications has actually waned quite a bit. Lately I've been so assaulted by overly interactive applications that I much prefer the subtle interaction best. I like it when sub-portions of the page refresh, and I get things like collapsible panel... Oct. 29, 2006 07:30 PM EST Reads: 6,246 Replies: 1 |
By Kevin Hoffman The first, and my favorite, redeeming quality about Windows Vista is the File Explorer breadcrumb. This new feature allows me to see exactly where I am within the hierarchy of the file system. Windows XP 'sort of' has this - you can turn on an option that lets you see the full folder p... May. 31, 2006 09:30 AM EDT Reads: 7,325 Replies: 3 |
By Kevin Hoffman By now you've probably already created your first 'Hello World' application using one of the languages in the .NET Framework such as C# or VB.NET - or perhaps you've even managed VC++. The .NET Framework allows all kinds of different languages to utilize code written in various other l... Jan. 1, 2000 12:00 AM EST Reads: 10,884 |
By Kevin Hoffman By now you've probably already created your first 'Hello World' application using one of the languages in the .NET Framework such as C# or VB.NET or perhaps you've even managed VC++. Jan. 1, 2000 12:00 AM EST Reads: 11,473 Replies: 1 |
Kevin Hoffman, editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's iPhone Developer's Journal, 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. Hoffman is coauthor of Professional .NET Framework (Wrox Press) and co-author with Robert Foster of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed. He authors The .NET Addict's Blog at .NET Developer's Journal.
