Well, I was with Vector Security a week before I was offered another job with Federated Investors as a Sr. .Net Contractor.  They are looking for a couple more, so, if you are a .Net Developer looking for a gig in Pittsburgh, PA, send me a message, I’ll refer you to the right people to get you in.

Well, this is my last week with ConsultUSA.  Next Monday I begin a new adventure with Vector Security as a Sr. .Net Developer.  I think my official title is Sr. Application Developer, but it’s using .Net.

I’ll post some of the details of the position as I get them.  Being that it’s a security company there is a good chance that I won’t be able to get too specific.  I will keep you informed of the technologies that we’ll be using and the like, but we’ll see what I can actually talk about.

Because I believe in giving shout outs to those who’ve forged the industry that I love, I want to let you all know that today is Ada Lovelace Day. 

Ada Lovelace is heralded as the person who wrote the first computer program. 

To get a pretty good introduction to who Ada was and why she is celebrated by geeks everywhere, watch this BrainPOP video about Ada. It is made for children, but it’s still very informative and cute.

So, here’s to the “Enchantress of Numbers”.  Thank you for your brilliance and your innovation!

For the record the very first programming language that I learned in College was… Ada.  I haven’t touched it since, it’s not a very powerful language by today’s standards, but it’s a great language to get to understand the basics.  Ada Lovelace didn’t create the programming language, but she was it’s namesake.

For any young women who may read this and wants to get into the industry, yes, there is a place for you and you can do great things.  Yes, there are a lot of men in the industry, but some of the great innovations have come from women.  For instance, if you like the Xbox and go on Xbox live and join a party to play a game with, or have ever watched Netflix in a party, a young lady at Microsoft programmed that piece of functionality.  You can hear Laura every week on Major Nelson’s Podcast.

To Whom It May Concern,

OK, I’m a fan.  I must admit that I am a big supporter of Microsoft and I appreciate most of the things that you release.

But today I want to complain about something.  What is up with your naming conventions?  Some of the things you do are awesome, Silverlight?  That is a home run on an epic scale.  However, it’s first name, WPF/E?  Well, I’m glad you changed the name.

However, what you learned in Silverlight you obviously have forgotten when you named the next version of WinMo “Windows Phone 7 Series”.  What the heck, people, could you make it any longer?  Could you make it harder to market for all of us fan boys?  Granted, I’m going to buy one, I’m going to love it and I’m going to tell everyone how cool it is, but could you please, please, I’m begging you, for the love of all that is good and holy, PLEASE, change the name!

Now, I’m not one to complain about something without offering some solutions.  How about the zPhone?  Here’s your marketing tag, “The last word in mobile communication”.  Come on, that works.  Since the media features come from the Zune, but builds on it, don’t call it the Zune Phone, because that directly tags it as a competitor of the iPod, iPhone.  Yes, it is a challenger, but with the zPhone you narrow down what the competing technology is, the iPhone.

Or, the xPhone, same basic reasoning, except that it plays on the XBox connections.

Now, you can come up with a thousand other names that would work better than WP7S, but it’s all up to you.  I’m not a marketing guy, I’m just a developer who loves the technologies that you put out. 

However, I do think that if you could separate yourself from WinMo 6 more it can only be a good thing. 

The second part of this letter is simple, I love what you are doing with the development for the zPhone (see, it kind of rolls off the keyboard).  I love that apps will be written in Silverlight, that opens up a world of possibilities to those of us who never got into developing for WinMo 6.  It gives us instant ability to write apps in a familiar environment and have them work.  The learning curve decreases tremendously.

For games there’s XNA.  Though I’m not a game developer, it makes me excited that we could potentially see “The Maw” on a phone.  It’s really cool that the XBox Arcade developers will be able to create content for the hand-held and the coolness will continue.  I love that it will be Live aware with Achievements.  It makes me happy.

There are a ton of features that I could name off that I love, but I’m going to let them wait until another time.  I do want you to know, if you decide to use “zPhone”, I’ll be OK with it, I’ll not claim copyright infringement, I’ll just point people to this blog post and say, “See, I named the device.”  It’ll be my own little bit of bragging rights.

Well, until I get one in my grubby little hands, fair well and happy branding.

Thank you,

Shaun

Thank you, Tim Heuer, for creating this simple to use tutorial on how to make a custom media player in Silverlight, simply.  Here’s the link to the actual Blog Post.

To see how I do at using this tutorial, I’ll be putting Silverlight video on the Family Fellowship Christian Center website in a couple of months when we start our expansion project in Miami.

In the meantime I am going to be hard at work doing a complete site redesign, so look forward to that as well.

Have you ever wanted to have total and complete control over all things Windows 7?

Would you like to have this immense power at your fingertips in one simple Library?

What if I told you that you could have this power by following three simple steps?

Would this thrill you?

Would this change your computing world?

How much would you pay for this information?

Is it worth $50? $25?

Well, right now can have these immense, God-like powers, in an itty-bitty living space for just $0.

How is this possible you say? 

How can you afford to give this power away for free?  Well…

Just follow these steps exactly.

1. Copy the following text exactly: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
2. Create a new folder anywhere on your Windows 7 computer.
3. Paste the text you just copied as the folder name.

It’s that simple.  Those 3 steps will create a library with all Windows 7 administrative functions in one convenient spot.  Brilliant!

I just got off of my first Microsoft Ambassador call.  At least that is what we’re being called for the moment, as they explained.  We’re waiting for an official name to be issues.  At that time we’ll be giving titles, badges and all of the other fun stuff that comes from being associated with Microsoft.  I’m looking forward to that, it will be cool.

Anyway, I walked away from the call with 4 pages of notes, most of which surround Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.  I haven’t compiled them into anything usable yet, but when I do, I’ll put up a post about some of the coolness that is in the next version of our favorite IDE.

Steven Smith, one of Microsoft's Regional Directors, owner of ASPAlliance.com and all around nice guy, has a new blog post explaining how he has installed Windows 7 from a USB drive.  This is especially useful for those of you who want to install Windows 7 on a netbook.

Also, for those readers with Netbook, it's been said that you can only use one of the trimmed down versions of Windows 7 on the netbook, this is only partially true.  You can only purchase the trimmed down Windows 7 on the netbook.  If you have a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, the rumor is that you can install it on the netbook and it runs swimmingly. 

Anyway here is the link to Steve's blog post on How to Install Windows 7 from a USB Drive.

Thanks for all of the hard work Steve!

This morning I attended the Windows 7 launch event in Pittsburgh.  It was the start of a very good morning.  First, I had set up some time to meet with the local Microsoft Partner Evangelist so we could set up a lunch meeting.  ConsultUSA is a Certified Microsoft Partner and we're wanting to level set with Microsoft to see how we can make our partnership beneficial for both of our companies.

The Evangelist was gracious, of course, giving me some valuable information about other people at the Pittsburgh office of Microsoft that could probably be more help than he.  He even grabbed my attention a few minutes after we were done talking to introdoce me to one of the people he'd mentioned.  I'm going to try and set up a lunch meeting with him as well.

When I get together with these gentlemen, I need to remember that I've been wanting to talk to someone about getting some .Net MVP's in Pittsburgh.  It's amazing to me, we have a pretty large community of developers in Pittsburgh, but no developer MVP's.  I think it would help bolser the area if we could get a handful of MVP's in the Pittsburgh market.

Well, then we went into the launch event itself.  We sat toward the front, which is what we get for going into the theater late.  I guess my gabbing gave us less than optimal seats.  Normally, I would consider the front row, or seats toward the front, to be great seats, however, the setting for the event was a movie theater.  Not just any theater, it was a 3D screen.  The presentation wasn't in 3D, but the screen was HUGE, making it hard on the neck from our vantage point.

Testiment to the size of the community for Microsoft is in the fact that there were two theaters sold out.  There were no seats in either.

The first presentation was titled, "Taking Your Application to the Next Level with Windows 7".  The presenter took us through some of the new features of Windows 7 and showed us how easy it is to put them into our existing or new applications.  Features such as The Windows Troubleshooting Platform, which will be great for our system admins.  The admin that was with us declared that he was excited, he could put troubleshooting steps in place that could stop many mundane calls to the help desk.

Another nice thing that is in Windows 7 is the ability to stretch the battery life of a netbook out to 6 - 8 hours by changing the settings of services.  You can now set certain services to turn on "On Demand" instead of always being on or off.

Some other neat features are the ribbon bars that were once proprietary to Microsoft Office are now part of the core of the OS.   The ribbons can be added, fairly simply, to new applications.  We can now take advantage of the new task bar in Windows 7, which is one of my favorite additions to Windows 7, by the way, you can now place quick links on the preview windows.  An example would be an MP3 player application.  You could add the play, rewind, forward, pause and stop buttons on the preview panel and they would work in the same way the same buttons would on the full application.  The Zune software does that well and it's awesome, one of my favorite features of the Zune 4.0 software on Windows 7.  Meaning I don't have to Alt+Tab to the application to go to another song, or pause, I can mouse over the Icon and hit the right button without ever bringing up the application in the main window. 

The second session was, "Beyond Human Interaction with Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform". It turned out really sad though.  The speaker had dropped the sensor panel that he was going to use the day before and it wasn't working right.  It's a shame, I was really looking forward to seeing it in action.  The link above gives the how to on the platform. 

The final session was, "Building the Next Generation User-Interface with Multitouch and Ribbon on Windows 7".  it was just really cool to see how easy it is to turn an existing application into a multitouch enable application.  I hope to get an HP Touchsmart someday, so I can start working on some Multitouch applications.  There are some great features in Windows 7 that I will not be able to use until I can get a touch enabled PC.

After the event we all got copies of Windows 7 Ultimate.  I'll be giving the copy I recieved away at my Windows 7 house party, since I'm already running it from my MSDN collection.  If you haven't gotten an invite to my house party and would like one, and I actually know who you are, leave me a comment.

As an aside, when we got back to the office the owner of the company had brought in his 2009 Stanley Cup Championship ring.  Here's a pictury of me wearing it.  it made for the perfect end to a really good morning

As many of you know, I'm a huge fan of Ted Dekker.  He's definitely been my favorite author over the past 5 years or so, when I first discovered his books.  Since then I've read many of his books.  I would type out the list, but he writes a lot of books and the list would be long.

Well, Ted, being the genius that he is, has a street team called the Forest Guard, based on his books Black, Red and White, who's job it is to let people know about his books.  Well, I, being the fan that I am, am a member of the Forest Guard.

If you would like to join the Forest Guard or find out more about Ted's new book Green, go to http://teddekker.com/readgreen and register for the site.  My recruit ID is 6291, don't forget to enter it.

Also, hit up Ted on Twitter and Facebook, those sites will help keep  you in the know.