Got myself a sweet new (2nd hand) Digital DLR yesterday as my birthday gift for myself

It's a Canon EOS 20D Bod. Barely used. I thought that there wasn't a bundle of point in buying the newer model... it really only offered a Bigger screen on the back to which I say BLAH... it's an SLR!

I'm currently using my nasty old Sigma 28-200 Superzoom and my “Every Canon Shooter Must Have One” 50mm F1.8 on it.

Now I have to decide on another Lens.

Current Candidates are:

Canon EF 24-70 F2.8 L
This is a nice fast lens. L spec is nice. Is an EF lens so if I get bitten by the bug I can carry it across to a big sensor camera like the 1D MarkIII or 3D/7D/5D (yes... you know they coming!!!!0

Canon EF 24-105 F4 L IS
Not as fast as the above. But, longer Zoom range and Image Stabilized. Currently my top choice. Is still an L spec lens and F4 is not terrible... only 1 stop above the 2.8.

Canon EF-S 18-55 F2.8 IS
So in many ways this combines the best features of the above. Fast lens WITH Image stabilization. Arguably the lower bottom end is well suited to my 1.6 crop camera. But... it's as much as the above and a non L series lens (read plastic!!!) and being EF-S I can't take it across to a bigger sensor later....

I am torn..

Share your thoughts!

So we've been beavering away here @ Intergen for a couple of months putting together a fantastic sample around OpenXML. It's basically a bolt in to Excel that lets you parse and process IIS log files. We'll be releasing it up to Codeplex soon, but, I'm looking for a few keen people to test it and give us some feedback now.

If you are a person who runs IIS and would like to have a look at the pre-release code. Let me know in the comments and I'll get in touch.

It's been quite exciting working with the new Office Open XML file formats. Having kicked around in this industry for a while I've seen quite an evolution in how I've dealt with generating documents- where we once had to wrestle with crazy DDI APIs we can now simply manipulate good ol’ text files. XML , simple and verbose as it is, is kind of a holy grail for document manipulation as it means that we can do it with all the tools we've been using for internet based development for many years- while still maintaining document integrity using the meta-model support offered by XML schema. Office was never really geared up for automation on the server, it worked, but was dangerous, whereas smart developer folk can do server side XML processing in their sleep.

The XML approach has a few key benefits as I see it.

1.       XML is easy to work with on ANY platform.
We’ve got tooling to manipulate XML on pretty much every platform you can think of. From Windows to Linux to a smartphone to the Microframework embedded devices we’re working with. The packaging format (basically it’s a ZIP file) is also broadly supported across most platforms.

2.       It’s X as in eXtensible
This means that you can easily take the Open XML document and emit some of your own custom data into the document. This was possible in a few roundabout ways in Word in previous versions. But now we’ve got a common approach across all the Office tools, AND, because it’s an Open standard we should see much broader support from other vendors- e.g. There is Open XML support on the iPhone.

3.       It’s a standard (ECMA standard and submitted as an ISO standard)
The best thing about Office Open XML being standardized is that changes will be far more predictable and controlled. If an ISV or Integrator like Intergen, or a Government Department commits to building tooling to manipulate documents they have some reassurance that it’s not going to be obsolete when Microsoft (or some other dominant market player) decides to change their proprietary format. It’s unrealistic to assume that there can ever be *one* document format for all applications- we have ODF, PDF, HTML and countless other formats available already. For me the key benefit of standardization is that it allows smaller companies like ours to enter the market with confidence that they are not subject to the whim of the dominant player.

So my good friends Simon 'Skip' Gardiner and Sam Hazledine and I have been working on a new venture called MedRecruit.

We went live with our new look site yesterday.

http://www.medrecruit.com

It's a Medical recruiting company... so if you have any doctor friends then tell them to give use a yell.

Check out this Silverlight Site that shows off some short and sharp how toos for Silverlight and Blend\

http://www.nibblestutorials.net/

It took less than a day for someone to hack Safari.... ouch!

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/11/Safari-for-Windows-released-and-hacked-in-a-day_1.html

This site is proudly blocked by the Great Firewall of China....

I guess I'm jst a little too subversive for them.

Test your own site here:

http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/test/

Say you've got some code with line numbers

1: using System;
2: using System.IO;

...

1430: else if (1==0)

blah blah...

And you want to strip out the line numbers.

This regex: ^[ 0-9]*\:

will do it for you. THanks go to the new regex building in Orcas

So we've had a team @ Intergen hard @ work for the past 6 moths putting together a fantastic new service offering that we're going to take global.

It's called ActionThis and it's basically a platform for getting things done. I can't say much more than that in terms of detail... but in the abstract here's a few things it is (grab your Buzzword Bingo Card)....

• It's web 2.0. It has AJAX, simple graphic elements and all that Web 2.0 jazz.... yes. It looks like sex!
• It's Software as a Service with a twist... think more Picasa meets Flickr meets Live Spaces... but in an entirely different problem domain... that I'm not going to tell you about.
• It's going to be a platform- you'll be able to build stuff that bolts into ActionThis and help people get stuff done.

I'll probably dribble a bit more information out here before we begin yelling from the rooftops (i.e. go public with an announcement) but, if you want to be the first in the know and the first to get your hands on the bits... you should head to http://www.actionthis.com/ and sign up for our Beta news...

http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2007/05/03/silverlight-vs-flash-the-developer-story.aspx

This is a great run through of some comparisons between Flash and Silverlight.... My hope is that Jesse can provide a bit more detail around Flex vs .NET 3.0 at some point too....

So I'm looking to hire more talented designer/developers/UXEs... that is people who have great design ability but are also able to think about the code impacts of their designs- i.e. ho can we take that design and make it into great Silverlight/WPF and AJAX experiences..... Ping me an email... chris@kognition.co.nz

If you're just a fantastic designer I'd love to talk too!

So URI based services are super popular right now. REST/POX etc...

SOme great stuff coming in .NET 3.5 to do this really easily by basically allowing URI based access into WCF services. Includes things like the ability to push back raw binary data across the HTTP stream.

This allows .NET developers to QUICKLY do 'Webby' style web services.

All these bits are there to be played with in the Biztalk Services SDK. Basically they have branched off a good chunk of the new .NET 3.5 Beta 2 bits and shipped them in this SDK.

The blog to watch on this is Steve Maine- he's the PM for Web Access features in WCF.

http://hyperthink.net/blog/

There is more great stuff around this in the Biztalk Services SDK. Particularly ServiceModel.WebClient namespace. This is basically client side stuff for easily accessing URI based content.

SO the new web response has a generic GetBody method... so you can do

response.GetBody<

Just saw a cool piece of tooling that shipped with the BT Services CTP yesterday.

It allows you to copy a piece of example XML to the clipboard.

Then go Edit > Paste XML as Serializable Type

It then infers schema and does an xsd.exe all under the hoods and pastes in a serializabl .NET type.

It's a batch file in the tooling directory.

So to get it RIGHT NOW go and grab the Biztalk Service SDK.

This SDK is Biztalk in name only.... it's a far more broadly applicable to general distributed .NET development.... This is definitely something you should be downloading if you do WCF dev.

I'm in a Software Design Review around Biztalk Services and Web Programability. It's being announced to us a s a small (about 15) group... and we're allowed to blog it...

So I'll be blogging live Updating this post....

Web Programability with Steve Maine

How can we program against the web.
How do we wite programs such that they can be programmed as part of the web.

Stuff that shipped already

Stuff shipping in Orcas

Stuff that is more experimental (some not blogable)

Talking about processes to get an abstraction over URIs... effectivly URI templates per Joe Gregorio.
This is available in System.UriTemplate (Orcas bits)...

Two directional abiliy to map name value pairs into and out of structured URLs.

Still need to use HTTP andlers to process tis sort of stuff in IE.

Orcas now has a [WebGet] attribute for WCF service operations and effectivly creates a templated URI space for that operation.