MIX and LoadingPivotItem

MIX was a lot of fun this year, and in my phone performance talk one of the more interesting components I demonstrated was one that I built called LoadingPivotItem. I have unfortunately not been able to share this out yet as the version I have isn’t quite production-ready for most folks to begin using, and I want to cleanup that source.

Stay tuned, sorry I know a lot of people were excited to start using this component.

AZGroups ScottGu Day

I had a great time in Chandler, AZ on Fri 4/22. The 8th annual “ScottGu Day”, the morning had a great set of demos and presentations by Scott Guthrie. After lunch, I got on stage and covered the Windows Phone for a while, followed then by Mark Russinovich who presented on Windows Azure. Lots of info on that day!

Thanks to everyone who came. It was great spending a brief day in Arizona, the temperature sure was nice compared to Seattle and everyone was so friendly. Even better there was a stop to In-N-Out Burger on the way to the airport…

A Niney award for the Silverlight Toolkit

The event isn’t online as far as I know, but before the attendee party at MIX 11 this year at the Marquee Nightclub in Vegas, was the first annual “Nineys” awards. Similar to fun tech award events like the Webbies, etc., it was a lot of fun. Especially seeing the segment on “remembering tech that is no longer with us from 2010” – including the KIN and Microsoft Money. Good laughs.

I’m happy to note that the Silverlight Toolkit won the best CodePlex project award, and I was present to accept the award on the team’s behalf. Thanks to the community for supporting us, everyone was happy for the recognition.

Checking in with Erik Meijer

Erik Meijer runs a fun show, ‘Checking In’, on Channel 9. You can check out the video “Checking In: Jeff Wilcox – Writing the WP7 App Platform in C# and C++” – posted on 4/20. It’s a whole hour long, so get the popcorn out and prepare to hear my wonderful monotone voice!

4th & Mayor

I’ve unfortunately been so busy between work, family, and other commitments that I just haven’t had time to update the app in a while. Hoping to get to that at some point. I am planning to start blogging about some of how I built it, including some of its source. It’s also currently the recommended client to download on Foursquare’s site, which is cool. There’s also a post by someone at Microsoft who works with Foursquare that may be interesting.

Hope to post more soon! April sure was busy.

It’s a familiar crowd: many of the brightest from across the company have been joining the ranks, and a lot of the classic Silverlight Toolkit team members are a part of the effort.

The focus of this blog won’t be changing much at all – I continue to be involved in Silverlight Toolkit, the Silverlight Unit Test Framework, and anything else I can get my hands on.

For years I’ve used the InsertTagSnippet plugin by Coskun Sunali to help me write posts – but on Windows 7, it doesn’t work well without running Live Writer elevated due to the location where it stores and modifies the snippet data file.

I’ve updated the code to use the local app data folder instead.

If you use the plugin and want to give this a try, uninstall the current version and grab it here. It includes the updated Ms-PL source.

Hope this helps. I’ll see about getting these changes into the CodePlex project at some point.

I am sorry that all has been quiet on the blog front for a while, as summer rolls around we always find a way to keep busy with a strong set of work items, feature work, and sunshine in Seattle.

Silverlight testing: what’s in the pipline

I’ve been working feverishly to get ready a large set of awesome Silverlight test goodness. The first part of that release is starting to happen, so look forward to:

• Updated Silverlight 2 test framework release (released 7/1/09)
• Updated Silverlight 3 test framework release
• Command line automation support for the test framework, including build server integration
• Code coverage for Silverlight libraries and applications

Part of the reason for the delay on the automation and code coverage support is that it’s really important to me that the release is of the right quality to be useful. Inside Microsoft, I’ve released these components and a lot of teams have been helping me to improve the quality and usefulness of tools such as code coverage.

Since I’m not able to dedicate a lot of time to supporting the test framework (it isn’t really my job!), having high quality releases helps save everyone time.

What else I’m working on

I’ve also been taking on some new and interesting challenges, some of which I’ll be sharing on this blog this summer.

• Advanced packaging and source preparation for the Silverlight Toolkit
• Authoring the setup experience and toolbox integration for the toolkit
• Helping out the IIS Smooth Streaming client team to make some awesome improvements to the Silverlight media experience

I’m part of Silverlight now!

At Microsoft, every few months we “re-org” enough that teams change names, but really roles and responsibilities rarely morph that much. In case you’ve ever been handed my business card, you’ll notice a distinct lack of job title, team name, or even group name:

With that, I would like to just share that I’ve joined the larger Silverlight development team, and hope to continue to make Silverlight a world-class leading web platform for application development!

Thanks for reading this far. If you’re in the US, have a great July 4th celebration!

I really would like to thank each and every person who’s been able to use the tool. I really appreciate the feedback and conversations many of us have had to work to make improvements over the years (Wow, has it been so long?!).

What’s this all about?

Each year, Microsoft holds an Engineering Forum, jam-packed with sessions and talks much like an industry conference, focusing on everything from the core engineering disciplines to trustworthy computing and everything inbetween.

During the forum, a select set of awards are given out to a select innovations, recognizing teams and individuals for their successful engineering feats helping the company to ship safer, quicker, and better all-around software to the world. The criteria is challenging, nomination count very high, and the selection process intense.

Although the test framework wasn’t selected as a finalist, it did receive honorable mention, which is enough to make me happy.

It was also great hearing a little bit from some of the senior engineering leaders inside the company, including Ray Ozzie and Jon DeVaan.

A lot of great tools, processes, and accomplishments have been recognized over the years, and the bar is high, with great tools like Script#, Nikhil Kothari’s famous C#/JavaScript tool, as well as Brad, Krzysztof, and Michael’s FxCop (now built into Visual Studio).

I hope that, with some of the plans I have in place for the framework, that maybe someday it’ll be a finalist for a future award of this nature – there’s a nice shiny crystal award that would look great on the bookshelf!

What’s the Silverlight Unit Test Framework?

The Silverlight Unit Test Framework is a simple unit and functional test system specially designed for Silverlight, building on existing desktop unit testing knowledge and metadata. You’ll find the test framework inside of the Silverlight Toolkit’s source code package, and in use in a lot of places.

Thanks for everyone helping to make this a success!

Gravatar and Identicon support in comments

I’ve updated my blog’s theme this weekend to support Gravatars. These are nice, and as long as you post using your e-mail address (that isn’t shared with anyone, don’t worry), a hash algorithm is used to retrieve your central avatar from Gravatar. A simple Identicon is generated if you haven’t set one up yet.

Setup your avatar online
Learn more about adding Gravatar support to your apps

Improved moderation settings

I’ve tweaked the WordPress settings, so once you participate in the community by posting at least one comment, your future comments will appear immediately.

Twitter

I’m using my Twitter account more often, for better or worse. I’m less concerned about remaining purely professional there, so for that reason, I’ve decided not to include my live Twitter stream on this blog. But if you’re into it, it’s a fun way to have conversations.

Thanks for being part of my community, and the Silverlight community in general,
-Jeff

I’ve been hearing so much about the higher-end Solid State Disks that are out there on the market. Like a virus, it is slowly infecting more and more people. This past week, I made the jump and picked up an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD drive to replace the 10,000 rpm Raptor drive in my primary workstation at home.

So far, it’s been worth every penny – and then some. I did some reading before making the jump and was skeptical; effectively this Intel MLC drive offers write speeds along the same lines as a 10K hard drive, but with random read speeds around 250 MB/s. Goodbye defrag!

Anyway, the experience for so many of the operations that I do daily (disk-bound builds, multi-tasking, exploring the jungle that is Outlook) is just an insane improvement.

Since I’m installing a new build of Windows 7 every few days, I’m getting pretty familiar with application setup dialogs.

Here’s my unscientific take (watching the Windows clock) on application install times. They’re installed over my gigabit home network, from a local file server – obviously these are not typical results:

Of course, this is on top of a very powerful Intel workstation (45nm extreme proc, 1333fsb, DDR3). Anyone out there have good or bad experiences with similar hardware? Is this a new wave of innovation and developer efficiency?

Yes, this is the infamous “Jeff hardware budget” that is a little unrealistic. I sure do hope that the prices come down soon so that I can swap out all my old-school hard drives with SSD… but this hard drive does cost as much as a Netbook.

Here are the 10 most popular Silverlight-related posts from my blog over the past year, according to Google Analytics. If you missed any of these, now’s a great time to catch-up!

1. Silverlight 2 unit testing
March 31, 2008

This post walks through the unit test framework for Silverlight, and adds simple test cases to Scott Guthrie’s chat sample application.

2. Silverlight unit testing
March 3, 2008

The introductory post to the Silverlight unit test framework, giving a sneak peak at the framework before the tutorial and walkthrough (#1 above).

3. HTML Controls for Silverlight
October 5, 2008

A look at an interesting concept for creating client-side HTML controls, similar to ASP.NET, powered by C# and Silverlight 2. Since this original post, the complete source code to the described controls has been released along with the Silverlight unit test framework source code, under an open source license.

4. Silverlight unit testing video
March 20, 2008; Updated 1/4/09: Video player updated to the Expression media player.

A fun, quick look at the Silverlight unit test framework, and a recap of the MIX ’08 conference. This was a first attempt at piecing together footage using an Aiptek A-HD camera; unfortunately, the audio was a little muddied.

5. Visual Studio unit testing basics
August 16, 2008

Learning about the Visual Studio unit test framework metadata; the metadata is present in the Silverlight unit test framework, too.

6. Silverlight unit testing templates
June 6, 2008

Downloadable templates for easily creating Silverlight test projects in Visual Studio 2008.

7. Test framework source code released
November 2, 2008

Announcing the Silverlight unit test framework’s source code release, as an open source Ms-PL release alongside the Silverlight Toolkit.

8. Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 release
December 9, 2008

Announcing the 2nd release of the Silverlight Toolkit, what’s new, an direct links to individual controls, themes, and sample apps.

9. Building a highlighting AutoCompleteBox
November 18, 2008

Creating a great auto complete experience by highlighting typed characters in words, similar to what IE and Firefox do. Powered by the AutoCompleteBox control and a quick simple highlighting text block control.

10. The missing guide to the AutoCompleteBox control
November 24, 2008

A comprehensive reference on the Silverlight Toolkit’s AutoCompleteBox control that I developed.

Enjoy these resources!

Last year we took Silverlight from a simple plugin & a brand name to a complete platform powered by .NET.

With a tough economy, the pressure is on to actually deliver value and make sound investments, and the open source work that we’re doing at Microsoft on the Silverlight Toolkit definitely is a good value.

I’d also like to take a minute to thank the thousands of subscribers and site visitors. I always welcome your feedback and post suggestions.

Jeff Wilcox’s RSS feeds

Last year I delivered a large set of tutorials, Silverlight guides, and overall I’m very happy with the content. I’d like to take this chance to present three key RSS feeds for my blog, in case you’re doing some RSS reader housekeeping.

Recent posts RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JeffWilcox/ 

Silverlight-only RSS:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/JeffWilcox/Silverlight/ 
This is the RSS feed that is syndicated on the http://www.silverlight.net/ homepage and this Microsoft feed. This is a good subscription choice if you’re less interested in other technologies and topics (Apache, PHP, Seattle weather, you name it)

Recent comments RSS:  http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/comments/feed/ 

Silverlight Toolkit team RSS:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/SilverlightToolkitTeamMembersBlogFeeds/ 

Site updates

If you visit my web site, http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/, or click through to individual blog posts, you’ll notice that I spent some time in the month of December to refresh the visual design, styles, and functionality of my site and blog.

The pages have a true #fff white background now, archive pages and other pages list more topics, have excerpts, and the blog remains advertising-free.

Best way to deliver code snippets in blog postings?

Back in May, I announced that I was moving from screen captured code to JavaScript-enhanced post <pre /> content.

I’d appreciate it if you could share any comments on the format, I’m open to spending some time changing the process again. The experience today is a simple <pre /> text block for RSS readers, and when viewing the actual post web page, JavaScript powers value add (syntax highlighting, additional options, clipboard features).

Disclaimer reminder

Just a reminder to those that subscribe to these feed: as reproduced on all blog and site pages: "The content on this site represents my own personal opinions and thoughts at the time of posting, and does not reflect those of my employer in any way."

Powered by…

Finally, thanks go to WordPress, the best web publishing platform out there. The recent upgrade to WordPress 2.7 went great, and the product just continues to improve.

This blog is powered by:

• WordPress 2.7
• LAMP stack; PHP 5, MySql, dedicated Linux server hosting by ServerBeach

And produced using:

• Microsoft Windows Live Writer
• Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium

If you’re using the November release, I strongly recommend that you upgrade – we’ve worked hard to ensure that we’re making positive incremental improvements, and you will find a lot of nice functionality in this release. There are not any new controls in this release.

The CodePlex site is the place to go to request new features, vote on suggestions that others have, and view additional information. We also run a forum and are diligent about following up on your questions.

Controls

The following controls are in the "Stable" quality band, you should be able to use these and enjoy the experience for many releases to come:

• AutoCompleteBox (promoted!)
• DockPanel
• HeaderedContentControl
• HeaderedItemsControl
• Label
• NumericUpDown (promoted)
• TreeView
• WrapPanel

These controls are in "Preview" quality band:

• Charting
• Expander
• ImplicitStyleManager
• Viewbox

Don’t let the "Preview" designation scare you off – I am using the charting and data visualization controls on several of my projects today and enjoying ever minute. It was really easy to pick up and learn.

Themes

There are new themes, similar to those you might find in Office and various Windows operating systems. You can view them here.

New sample explorer

We’ve combined the two sample projects into a single:

The new sample application also supports deep linking, so if you’re interested in a specific component, click away!

The links below go directly to the individual control pages and scenarios in the sample app:

Controls

• AutoCompleteBox
• DockPanel
• Expander
• TreeView
• ViewBox
• WrapPanel

DataVisualization

• Column
• Bar
• Pie
• Line
• Bubble
• Scatter

Input

• ButtonSpinner
• NumericUpDown
• UpDownBase

Theming

• Theme Browser
• ImplicitStyleManager

I’ll be following up with a few posts over the coming week covering new features, applications, scenarios, and of course the list of changes in the AutoCompleteBox control.

Hope you love it. At this price point (free), I hope that you’re able to share this with all of your developer friends this holiday season. Let me know what you think of the progress we’ve made, and the overall Silverlight Toolkit experience.

Toolkit blogs

Instead of banding together to create one über-blog, we’re posting through our own blogs to maintain our own voice, tone, and technical themes. Instead of subscribing to a ton of new feeds, you can just subscribe to the syndicated Toolkit Team blog. Easy. Cool.

The following resources are great. Really great. And might introduce you to a few of the toolkit team members along the way.

Toolkit favorite: TreeView

So many people have wanted a TreeView for Silverlight, it’s super important.

Beatriz covers our TreeView control: expanding items (part 1, part 2). In case you find yourself in Malmo, Sweden, a week from today, you should definitely check out Beatriz Costa’s talk at the Øredev Conference (her talk is on "Data-driven applications" on Nov. 20: details here.

Silverlight in Style

Mehdi is half-program manager, half-design guru. He’s created great coverage on Silverlight themes: part 1 is an intro, part 2 jumps into simple color modifications of the themes that we’ve already shipped, part 3 is awesome, and then he just came out with this: very crisp-looking Silverlight charts that look as good (better?) as Excel!

Jafar Husain covers the ImplicitStyleManager and Theme Containers. In a lot of technical detail. You can’t make this stuff up!

David’s chart builder

One of our esteemed senior devs, David gets enough blog traffic as it is. But I should point out that he built a nifty chart builder that is always fun to use. He also has a link listing with a ton of charting resources.

The real gems (maybe not too Silverlight-related) on his blog are:

• Creating ISOs
• Making Silverlight Xap’s smaller
• Stop using the buttons on your mouse forever

Silverlight/WPF stuff and Charting

Ning Zhang‘s blogging about Expander and Viewbox. He also did a nice write-up about dependency properties, first for WPF, and then Silverlight 2.

Justin covers those expected controls

If you’re doing WPF development and moving to Silverlight projects, the toolkit is making up some of the compatibility difference. Here’s some core controls from the toolkit that WPF developers use every day:

Viewbox
DockPanel
WrapPanel

Hope this helps. Oh, looks like David had a similar idea tonight – here’s his post that’s informing folks about the latest Silverlight Airlines build and surface demo.

Tonight I wanted to take some time to share some of the work I’ve been doing in the Silverlight space, a list of some upcoming blog posts and technologies I’m hoping to cover, and then links to some good, current resources on Silverlight.

Earlier today I posted a few quick technical postings:

• Value converters and data binding in the Silverlight data grid
• Fluxcapacity’s FJCore source being available, allowing client side JPEG resizing in Silverlight

What’s in the pipeline for Silverlight test developers

A lot of recent feedback I’ve heard from people around the world has helped me to plan the next set of improvements for the unit test framework.  Thanks for all the suggestions and questions!

I don’t have any public timelines for these right now, but do want people to know that I’m working hard to at least get prototype-quality bits prepared that I can write about.

Unit testing fx update
The test framework’s source code is being updated to better conform with design guidelines that Brad and Krzysztof would approve of… this also includes implementing a few oft-requested features:

• Support for grouping & tagging tests, so developers can run specific sets of tests easily.
• Refactoring and renaming parts to make the framework more discoverable and easier to learn.
• Implementing support for a test service that allows out-of-process communication with the test framework, on both Windows and Mac.

Continuous integration support
The test service for the framework enables the use of a console test runner script.  As long as your integration system runs in an interactive console, you’ll be able to plug in your rich Silverlight unit tests using CruiseControl.NET, Team Foundation Build, or a MSBuild task.

The console runner is implemented in Python, for a nice cross-platform and cross-browser solution that works in Windows and OS X.  The script does not host Silverlight in the console, but instead actually opens and controls browser instances.  This allows your tests to work with Silverlight UI elements, the browser, and even integrate your own visual verification system if you had some time to spare.

Code coverage
I’ve been prototyping a code coverage solution for Silverlight, and hope to have something figured out.  Stay tuned for details, this is a tricky problem.

Extensible test harness & unit test provider
Inside the test framework for Silverlight, there’s a pretty simple “unit test provider” model that makes it easy to extend or alter the system to meet your needs.

One proof-of-concept project I did was get NUnit’s metadata to work within the Silverlight framework, just by creating a provider that maps NUnit metadata to generic unit test interfaces inside the Microsoft.Silverlight.Testing.dll assembly.  I’ll be documenting this unit test provider functionality in a future blog post.

Asynchronous testing guides
The “asynchronous” test support in the Silverlight test framework is designed to allow a test method to queue up a set of conditional, callback, and other work items that run after the method has returned.

Typically any and all test methods that use this functionality are much more than a “unit” test, but I think the capability is powerful, and it’s helped our control developers get even more coverage for their work earlier in a product cycle.

Here’s the quick rundown of what this is about (and in the current test framework assemblies):

The enqueue calls don’t actually run in another thread like an asynchronous delegate in the full .NET Framework, but instead they manage a set of test work items in the framework.  This allows the managed code stack to fully unwind, returning control to the web browser to perform other work on the same UI thread.

The framework is then instantiated again-and-again, until all of the work items have been completed on the UI thread (which your tests should not block).

This allows for tests that update the UI of the browser or Silverlight plugin, and doing some other neat things.

I’ll be posting some detailed tutorials and walkthroughs on the topic later this summer.  In the meantime, check out:

• Jonas Follesø has written a nice walkthrough of the asynchronous testing capabilities, and provided neat annotations of the code along the way.
• Nikhil Kothari used the [Asynchronous] attribute to test a ViewModel pattern app that integrates with Amazon product search.

What others are writing about Silverlight

A lot of folks at Microsoft have been keeping busy creating excellent content:

• Shawn Burke updated his Silverlight control tutorial sample for Beta 2.  He’s using the awesomeness of the VisualStateManager (VSM) in the sample now.
• Tim Heuer has a rundown of what the Visual State Manager is all about.
• David Anson writes about some wild layout system work, and updates his LayoutTransformControl.
• Nikhil talks about search and rich internet apps.
• Kathy Kam shares some photos from TechEd North America 2008.
• It’s a month old now, but I often get e-mails asking about the changes between Beta 1 and Beta 2 of Silverlight 2.  Shawn Wildermuth has the rundown on Beta 2.

Have a good start to the week!

Adobe MAX conference mini site, ActionScript 3 stuff

The MAX 2008 North America mini site is a fun rich experience.

I like how the app’s startup sequence moves from an initial informative menu of options to a video with Kevin Lynch and then eventually the interactive background environment appears.  Pretty slick.

The interactive background has a lot of neat elements, and I’m still discovering new functionality.  It’s an engaging, well-designed site.  If I was an artist I’d consider replicating something similar in Silverlight, just to see how the experience would go.

ActionScript 3 intro deck
I often get asked to recommend Flex and ActionScript learning materials, and a resource that came to my attention recently deserves a call-out: Grant Skinner’s slide deck for his one day workshop introducing ActionScript 3.  Check it.

I also ran across a really cool Flash 9 page today: it has dancing kittens.

I’ve moved to Building 40

Check it out – the new office, on the 4th floor of building 40 on main campus.  In the scheme of things, it’s not that far away from my last building, number 42… Microsoft internal folks, stop by sometime and say ‘hi’!

Quick SFO note

A few weeks ago I flew down to San Francisco for the weekend to get some fresh air and explore the city.  It was a good time, and I was able to write a few Yelp reviews from it.  It’s a great city.

Last week I was introduced to someone who had a “oh, you’re Jeff Wilcox” moment – followed by a request to post a photo to my blog for customers and others to see.  So, here you go.  The slightly balding top is a key give-away that it’s me. 

The next time you see me at a conference or event, please introduce yourself, I’m open to a wide range of (mostly geek) conversation.

Next time I’m in San Francisco I’ll let folks know to setup a geek dinner or drinking event.  My sister took the above photo of me in the tea garden in the middle of Golden Gate Park (thanks!).

SFMOMA’s personal photography policy is pretty cool
A surprise during my time in San Francisco was enjoying the new personal photography policy at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Unless explicitly marked in an exhibit, personal, non-flash, no-tripod photography is permitted in the museum.

This is a step in the right direction I believe, in the digital age it’s nice to be able to take a quality photo with a digital cam, it’s great to share photos with friends & family over Flickr.com, especially those who weren’t able to come with me to the museum.

Here’s a Mark Rothko from the museum. I’ve had a beautiful print of this very painting at home for years now.

That’s it for the random blog posts for a few months.  I hope everyone’s having a great summer!

Today, I’m making an attempt to move back to raw <pre /> tags, populated with text, that should be formatted on the fly by modern web browsers.  This is great for folks that visit my blog, but does deliver a less-than-attractive experience for newsreaders.

This is accomplished using:

• Windows Live Writer
• Coskun Sunali’s Insert Tag Snippet plugin for Writer
• Alex Gorbatchev’s syntaxhighlighter

Scott Guthrie’s monster blog posts are amazing, and the look is consistent everywhere.  This is because they’re full of Visual Studio + code screen captures.  I’m sure the syntax highlighter screen caps set off the latest wave of .NET developer’s color customizing that’s on all the dev’s machines that I’ve seen.

Here’s what C# code used to look like on my blog:

On to samples of the new system:

C#

    [TemplatePart(Name = HyperlinkButton.StateDisabledName, Type = typeof(Storyboard))]
    public partial class HyperlinkButton : ButtonBase
    {
        #region NavigateUri
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets a URI to navigate to when the link is clicked.
        /// </summary>
        [TypeConverter(typeof(UriTypeConverter))]
        public Uri NavigateUri
        {
            get { return GetValue(NavigateUriProperty) as Uri; }
            set { SetValue(NavigateUriProperty, value); }
        }

Visual Basic

Imports Microsoft.Silverlight.Testing
Imports Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting

<TestClass()> _
Public Class Class1

    ' This is a super simple test
    Public Sub SimpleTest()
        Assert.IsTrue(True)
    End Sub

End Class

JavaScript

var cssNode = document.createElement('link');
cssNode.type = 'text/css';
cssNode.rel = 'stylesheet';
cssNode.href = ss;
cssNode.media = 'screen';

// Append the new node
head.appendChild(cssNode);

XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<items>
  <item type="photoset" id="395" owner="12037949754@N01"
		primary="6521" secret="5a3cc65d72" server="2"
		commentsold="1" commentsnew="1"
		views="33" photos="7" more="0">
    <title>A set of photos</title>
    <activity>
      <event type="comment"
			user="12037949754@N01" username="Bees"
			dateadded="1144086424">yay</event>
    </activity>
  </item>
</items>

XAML

<ResourceDictionary
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">

    <!-- Default style for System.Windows.Controls.Button -->
    <Style TargetType="Button">
        <Setter Property="IsEnabled" Value="true" />
        <Setter Property="IsTabStop" Value="true" />
        <Setter Property="Background" Value="#FF003255" />
        <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="#FF313131" />
        <Setter Property="MinWidth" Value="5" />
        <Setter Property="MinHeight" Value="5" />
        <Setter Property="Margin" Value="0" />
        <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Center" />
        <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Center" />
        <Setter Property="Cursor" Value="Arrow" />

I’ll probably do some customizing of the highlighting brushes in the future, or see about porting the library to C# + Silverlight 2.  Let me know what you think about this change as I begin posting some new content: a step in the right direction?

All I can say is, “awesome work Starbucks.”  Having this option rolled out to as many stores will help to stop eroding their share of the cafe culture’s dollars; I’ve started spending more time at the fun, quirky and fun shops throughout Seattle such as Bauhaus, Ladro, and Vivace, with the corporate Tully’s and Starbucks being the fallbacks for a known entity… and the only one that is everywhere yet charges for Internet is Starbucks.

Not so long ago the infamous Schultz memo echoed what many coffee-goers felt: Starbucks was alienating the core coffee culture group, becoming more gift shop than chill place to spend time. I’m going to love to see what other work Starbucks management has been planning.

“Voxx” in Eastlake
On a related front, just this morning a new espresso shop opened up in the Eastlake neighborhood of Seattle at the intersection of Eastlake Ave and Lynn street.  The place is called “Voxx,” which I was completely convinced was a vodka until realizing the vodka is spelled with just a single ‘x.’  That said, walking inside I felt like I was in a Belltown bar because there was some Thievery Corp-meets-Massive Attack playing and it had that new-age chill feeling to it.  For 8am it sure felt out of place..

Jury’s still out on whether my habits change, the Starbucks on Eastlake has awful parking, is too tiny to sit down and spend some quality time at; there’s a nice bakery nearby that is much more my scene; and about 6K other coffee shops in Seattle…