IE8 and Me.dium sitting in a tree

While we were in Boulder, Colorado, we had a chance to sit down with a few of our customers and get some insight into their experiences with some of the new technologies announced at MIX.  One of those partners was Me.dium, a company providing an add-on to the browser to provide a social browsing experience.  Me.dium graphically connects users with their friends and others enabling users to interact online, similarly to how one interacts with people in the real world.

We met with David Mandell, Peter Newcomb and Robert Reich, founders of Me.dium, as they shared their experiences working with Internet Explorer 8 and how Activities and WebSlices are helping to expand the reach of their offering as well as enhance the user's browsing experience.  They were able to implement WebSlices within their existing content management framework that they developed as well as bring the Me.dium social browsing graph to the end user via Activities.  The end user can highlight a term on any web page and start the Me.dium activity which shows them contextually to that term their social browsing experience.

Take a look at the video then head on over to the IE developer center and look at the Activity and WebSlices whitepapers to learn more and implement yours today!

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Code Trip at VSLive! 2008

The Code Trip bus stopped by Moscone West yesterday so we could check out VSLive! 2008. We were onsite interviewing attendees, harassing presenters, and giving away hundreds of prizes throughout the day.

This was the debut of the Code Trip foam bus collectible, which was showered upon the crowd at the Wild Wednesday event that night. All in all, it was a great time at a great conference, and we hope to make it back to VSLive! again in the future. Thanks to the VSLive! gang for letting us in and sanctioning our monkey business.

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From vector to 3D - Eden Soto

A lot of people have asked us about our video introduction animation.  We put a mention of the artists behind it in our toolbox section, but thought we'd share a bit of an e-terview with the main man, Eden Soto.  When The Code Trip was in early planning stages and after we had worked with Terralever for an initial brand and design strategy, we turned to Eden based on referrals and proven work with some of the shows on Revision3.

As developers, we rely on designers (visual and motion) to ensure the technology and user experience work together.  In the world of rich media solutions and rich internet applications, this is becoming increasingly important to work hand-in-hand with designers and user experience experts in our application development.  For our intro video (sure, it's not an 'application') we wanted something that 'popped' and kept the attitude of the overall design elements for The Code Trip...and animated stick figures wasn't going to cut it.

We virtually sat down with Eden recently to talk to him about how he took a vector file of The Code Trip logo and created the 13 second intro animation that you see at the beginning of the videos.  Here's what he had to say...

Code Trip (CT): What is your background?
Eden Soto (ES): I started out in print design back before digital video had really come of age.  I started dabbling with After Effects way back at version 3 I believe it was...it always fascinated me, so I kept playing around in my spare time until finally digital video (and more importantly video on the Internet) really started to explode.

CT: When you were presented with the vector art for The Code Trip, what was your inspiration?
ES: Right when I saw the Code Trip logo, I knew it was going to be a fun project.  One of the early logo comps had a bus in the art, and I really liked that and knew that would animate well with the final logo, so it was really just melding the two and coming up with a neat little way to have the animation play out.

CT: What tools do you use?
ES: My daily apps I use are the Adobe CS3 Production Premium Bundle (with After Effects CS3 at its core)...then I use Cinema 4d R10.5 a lot, which is primarily what the Code Trip bumber was created in.  Other than that I use a great suite of 3rd party plug-ins for AE by GenArts called Sapphire.  Oh, and some of the Trapcode plug-ins too like Particular and 3D Stroke.

CT: How long does it take from inception to final?
ES: Really depends on my workload at the time.  The Code Trip bumper took about 16 hours from start to finish.  A lot of that is waiting on renders...ambient occlusion renders take a long time :-P

CT: When providing audio, what determines the attitude of the audio track in your animations?
ES: Audio I leave to the master...Lawrence Scaduto.  He is the pinball wizard when it comes to all things audio.

CT: Is this your passion (doing visual design and animation)?
ES: Absolutely.  I still feel like I'm just getting started ;-).  I don't envision doing anything else other than motion design now.

CT: Other than The Code Trip, obviously :-), what is your proudest piece of work?
ES: Proudest piece of work was probably the Diggnation open...it's really the piece that really pushed me over the edge and made me want to go full time with motion design, it's what most people know me for.  Other than that, being a HUGE gamer, I recently had the opportunity to do some motion graphics for some SXSW content produced by Microsoft that got published on the XBOX Live Marketplace (Bringing it Home SxSW), so that was a huge thing for me, as I frequent the Marketplace so often, knowing something I made is on there is really cool...I'm REALLY hoping I get to do more for the XBOX Marketplace in the future :-D.

Thanks to Eden and Lawrence for their participation in making The Code Trip bumper for our videos.  We are very impressed with their work and can definitely say when you need some motion design, look no further than Eden.

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Rejected Launch Marketing

It's Launch Day today in Phoenix and Seattle for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008. We on The Code Trip wanted to be a part of the launch wave, so we did up an advertisement for Windows Server 2008 when we were on campus a while back. For reasons unbeknownst to us, our ad was given the thumbs down. Here is our rejected ad... just don't tell anybody you saw it here.

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SSDS @ Red Bull

Friday night, The Code Trip stopped by Red Bull headquarters for some good ol’ P&P (presenting and partying). I was first to speak and Woody, Buzz and I were talking to some of the people there about how easy it is to provision an SSDS Authority and get an application up and running. 20 minutes before I was about to start speaking, Woody and Jason(Buzz) have the video camera out and we are like ‘DUDE…why don’t you go on video and write an app in the 20 minutes you have before you present?’  So what would this app do? How about a database of drinks you can make with Red Bull :) So I found a soft spot in the corner, fired up my laptop, and started coding. A couple minutes later the guys from TechZulu.com came over and were like “What you doing?” and I told them and they proceeded to start interviewing me as I am coding…All in all, I probably coded for about 5 minutes if you factor in the interview time and the laptop booting up and all the people stopping by to ask questions and say hi… Oh yeah, and I was using a wireless network that had a EVDO uplink to the Internet…

But, I did it…

Here’s what it looks like….

This is probably the best UI design I have ever done. The top text box(without the label) is the name of the drink, and the bottom is the ingredients. I know entering a comma separated list is lame, but I was short on time…Add button, will add the drink entity to the Container.

There is also the Setup SSDS button which creates the Red Bull authority and the Drinks container.

The part I wanted to call out in this demo was not only is SSDS easy to provision and develop against, but i wanted to demonstrate flexible entities. If I was doing this using a relational DB, I would need to have two separate tables. DrinkHeader and DrinkIngredient with a foreign key. So when I insert a new drink, I have to insert 1 DrinkHeader record and N DrinkIngredient records where N = the number of ingredients.

SSDS’ flexible entity model allows me to have each Drink entity have whatever shape, or in this case, ingredients that I require…Lets look at a couple entities from the app…

   1: <RedBullDrink>

   2:     <s:Id>redbull jaeger</s:Id> 

   3:     <s:Version>1</s:Version> 

   4:     <Name xsi:type="x:string">redbull jaeger</Name> 

   5:     <Ingred1 xsi:type="x:string">redbull</Ingred1> 

   6:     <Ingred2 xsi:type="x:string">jaegermeister</Ingred2> 

   7: </RedBullDrink>

   8: <RedBullDrink>

   9:    <s:Id>redbull vodka</s:Id> 

  10:    <s:Version>1</s:Version> 

  11:    <Name xsi:type="x:string">redbull vodka</Name> 

  12:    <Ingred1 xsi:type="x:string">redbull</Ingred1> 

  13:    <Ingred2 xsi:type="x:string">vodka</Ingred2> 

  14: </RedBullDrink>

  15: <RedBullDrink>

  16:    <s:Id>Chucks Irish Bomb</s:Id> 

  17:    <s:Version>1</s:Version> 

  18:    <Name xsi:type="x:string">Chucks Irish Bomb</Name> 

  19:    <Ingred1 xsi:type="x:string">2 shots Hpnotiq</Ingred1> 

  20:    <Ingred2 xsi:type="x:string">2 shots Jack Daniels</Ingred2> 

  21:    <Ingred3 xsi:type="x:string">1 shot Vodka</Ingred3> 

  22:    <Ingred4 xsi:type="x:string">1 shot Irish Whiskey</Ingred4> 

  23:    <Ingred5 xsi:type="x:string">1 splash Cherry Juice</Ingred5> 

  24:    <Ingred6 xsi:type="x:string">4 shots Red Bull</Ingred6> 

  25: </RedBullDrink>

So if you scroll through the entities, you will see that each of them have different ingredients. I don't know who Chuck is, but WOW...

The flexibility of our entity model allows your data to take whatever shape you need. In our case instead of having to use a header/line model, I am able to have my entity contain all my data for my item in one nice and neat package...

And...I was able to use my Excel AddIn to pull it down into a spreadsheet...

Here is the code - for the authority and container setup

   1: private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

   2: {

   3:  

   4:  

   5:     ssdsCreds = new NetworkCredential(RBSSDSUserName, RBSSDSPassWord);

   6:  

   7:     string payload = BuildAuthorityEntity("redbull");

   8:     string RBUri = HttpHelper.PostHTTPWebRequest(RBSSDSUri, payload, ssdsCreds);

   9:  

  10:     payload = BuildContainerEntity("rbcontainer");

  11:  

  12:     RBUri = HttpHelper.PostHTTPWebRequest(RBUri, payload, ssdsCreds);

  13: }

  14:  

  15: static string BuildContainerEntity(string ContainerName)

  16: {

  17:     string ContainerTemplate = @"<s:Container xmlns:s='http://schemas.microsoft.com/sitka/2008/03/'>

  19:                 <s:Id>{0}</s:Id>

  20:               </s:Container>";

  21:  

  22:     return String.Format(ContainerTemplate, ContainerName);

  23: }

  24:  

  25: static string BuildAuthorityEntity(string AuthorityName)

  26: {

  27:     string AuthorityTemplate = @"<s:Authority xmlns:s='http://schemas.microsoft.com/sitka/2008/03/'>

  29:                 <s:Id>{0}</s:Id>

  30:               </s:Authority>";

  31:  

  32:     return String.Format(AuthorityTemplate, AuthorityName);

  33: }

Here is the code to add the drink

   1: static void BuildEntity(string name,string Incredients)

   2: {

   3:     string TenantEntityTemplate =

   4:        @"<RedBullDrink xmlns:s='http://schemas.microsoft.com/sitka/2008/03/'

   5:                  xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'

   6:                  xmlns:x='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema' >

   7:              <s:Id>{0}</s:Id> 

   8:              <Name xsi:type='x:string'>{1}</Name>";

   9:  

  10:     int x=0;

  11:     string entity = string.Format(TenantEntityTemplate, name, name);

  12:  

  13:     foreach(string ingred in Incredients.Split(','))

  14:     {

  15:         x++;

  16:  

  17:         entity = entity + String.Format(@" <Ingred{0} xsi:type='x:string'>{1}</Ingred{2}>", x, ingred, x);

  18:     }

  19:  

  20:     entity = entity + @"   </RedBullDrink>";

  21:  

  22:     HttpHelper.PostHTTPWebRequest(containerUri, entity, ssdsCreds);

  23: }

So that’s it.

For more SSDS specific goodness, check out my blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/drobinson

-Dave

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IE8 Activity: Define with Wikipedia

While at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo I was doing a demonstration of Internet Explorer 8 Beta and showing off a new add-on type called Activities.

During the demo I had a weak moment and said that it looked so easy to implement that while the bus was driving on the way to Mountain View, CA after the meeting I would implement an Activity for Wikipedia. I thought I understood what I needed to do from just looking at the Windows Live Maps sample but I wanted to make sure.

I found the current documentation Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit and the Activities white paper and gleaned the rest from the available samples. Here's what I came up with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
  <homepageUrl>http://en.wikipedia.org/</homepageUrl>
  <display>
    <name>Define with Wikipedia</name>
    <icon>http://en.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico</icon>
  </display>
  <activity category="Define">
    <activityAction context="selection" >
      <execute action="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search={selection}" />
    </activityAction>
  </activity>
</openServiceDescription>

I did learn that you need to use the proper capitalization for the category so that the new Activity will be grouped with the other Activities of that category in the "Manage Add-ons" dialog.

Once you have the XML file you need to install it, it turns out quite easy to do:

<button 

onclick="window.external.addService('http://thecodetrip.com/common/wikipedia_activity.xml')">

Add Define Activity</button>

Now a button like this oneAdd Wikipedia Define Activity (yes it's live) will show up.

So how long did this take? Including a stop at Taco Bell on the way out of San Luis Obispo this took less than an hour to implement! Now that is an easy way to improve the user's experience and help drive traffic to sites.

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Self-Proclaimed 'Czar of Mischief' Joins Code Trip

My Friday started as innocently enough. Email and breakfast at my cafe, then a long slow mass transit trip to the airport for a flight to LAX. The Red Bull HQ wasn't the sort of place LA cabbies seemed familiar with (but really, are they familiar with anything?), but I got myself there nonetheless. The Code Trip vs. Red Bull Party was largely an exercise in drooling over the gorgeous office space Red Bull calls home in Santa Monica (many thanks to Nate Warner for rolling out the waving wooden carpet).

After a riveting demo of SQL Data Services from Dave Robinson, I adjourned for the evening. Saturday was spent with my good friends Josh Fulton from Incase and the Nemesis of Evil and an early night of sleep.

Today began, well, just watch...

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Idaho Power

Weather modification has been in the news recently with China planning to attempt to control the weather for the upcoming Olympics. This may seem pretty far-fetched to some, but weather modification has been going on for years to a lesser degree, even right here in the States.

After a fun-filled weekend at Boise Code Camp, the Code Trip crew stopped by Idaho Power to check out a .NET application they have running in their Weather Center to do just that -- modify the weather.

Christopher Frye, developer of the application, and Gary Riley, senior meteorologist, give us the rundown on how this .NET app controls remote cloud-seeding generators, resulting in increased snow pack and more power generated through their hydroelectric dam. In this Travel Log segment, see how Idaho Power uses .NET to bring down more snow to meet their electrical needs.

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Another code release - Preview Handlers for XP

Almost a year ago I learned about preview handlers from an awesome article written by Stephen Toub.  Preview Handlers are essentially the 'reading panes' for file types.  Think about when you read an email message in your mail client (most of them have some type of reading pane now) as you highlight the message, you get a view next to (or under) of the message contents.  Wouldn't it be nice if you could do this for your file explorer or for email attachments?  Well, in Windows Vista, you can already.  With Outlook 2007, you can also get that feature with email attachments.  This feature of preview handlers is a part of those products.  The best part is...it is extensible!  There are included preview handlers for Office documents, but not for custom ones.  After reading the article (and downloading the massive collection that Stephen did), I set out to create my own for PDFs as I wasn't an Acrobat Reader user, but rather a Foxit user.  This resulted in the Foxit PDF Preview Handler.  There was one caveat, however.  You needed Vista.

You see, Vista includes the out-of-process host for previews (prevhost.exe) and because this is included, you can write your preview handlers in managed code.  This is great for developers as you simply implement a few interfaces and go to town writing your C# or VB code to handle your custom .foo files or whatever you wanted.  For Windows XP users though who wanted the same functionality for the custom file types (i.e., PDF, ZIP, etc.), the same installs would not work.  This is because there is no preview host on XP.  So to write a preview handler targeting XP, you'd first also have to write the preview host, an out-of-process COM server essentially.

That is where today's code release comes in.  When the preview handler article was written, there was a little sidebar about this COM server situation for XP.  It was mentioned, but no real implementation shown.  Ryan Gregg, a program manager for the Outlook team, had written one for PDFs for Vista or XP and put it out there.  He released the binary but not the source.  And after Adobe implemented their own preview handler in Reader 8.1, he removed his download.  Well, we're bringing it back!

Today we published an MSDN Code Gallery project called the Preview Handler COM Server.  This code gallery sample includes the code Ryan used to create his handler.  The code is a good demonstration of creating a COM server host in .NET, thanks to some helper code from CodeProject, as well as the necessary code required to implement the preview handler interfaces.  In the video attached to this post, you'll see me take 4 minutes describing what amounts to the core piece of this code sample, demonstrating implementing a plain text handler using this code. 

And since I got numerous requests for the Foxit handler for XP, you can download it now.  It uses this same implementation and adds the funcionality of presenting a PDF using the Foxit ActiveX framework, without having to have any PDF reader installed on your machine.  As a reminder this one is for XP and I recommend sticking with the managed handlers for Vista as it already has the preview host as a part of the operating system.

Hopefully this will get you started for developing preview handlers that target Outlook 2007 on Windows XP if that is a need for you!

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Telerik joins the trip!

Telerik, a leading vendor of UI components for ASP.NET and Windows Forms development, has joined The Code Trip.  Telerik will be sponsoring some of our remaining events through the Pacific coast.  In addition, the team at Telerik will be providing a license of each of the products listed here as a part of our event give-a-ways at the Code Trip stops!  These are amazing products to add to your toolbox and another reason you'll want to be sure you catch up with The Code Trip crew soon.

Telerik has provided a license for:

Be sure to subscribe to the site for continued information!  Thanks to Telerik for their support!  There are still a lot of great Code Trip stops happening, so be sure to check out the events section for one near you!

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First day on the bus - James' adventure

I've been thinking about this since I first heard about the Code Trip from Tim months ago. And when he invited me to climb onboard as a roadie, what could I say? Duh, umm, yes! Had to work out some kinks with work, Mix, vacation (gratefully, Carmina was on my side), but the time has come.

Woody picked me up at the Tustin Metrolink and we head over to the Irvine Microsoft office to get ready for the meeting. The turnout was great, just over 100 people, and I had a chance to meet up with some friends I hadn't seen for quite a while. John Bowen from Interknowlogy started it off with presenting iZoofari, a Silverlight 2 application, which allows people to map out their travels of the San Diego Zoo. Very cool stuff, and I'm glad to see the overall acceptance of Silverlight.

Jason does an incredible presentation on how the CodeTrip web site works, with the twitter updates, the GPS functionality, and how the web site will change based on time of day and weather conditions. His explanation of how he uses Windows Workflow to schedule the updates is the first, clean and understandable presentation on WF. I finally have gotten my head around it. Watching his LINQ examples is a treat as well. I can't wait to get Jason down to the Inland Empire .NET User's Group to present.

Next up is Woody. If you haven't seen Woody present, you really need to. Woody has the unique ability to take an awkward subject, and just make it shine! Can you guess the topic? three letters; first is "I", second is "E". Yup, IE8 Beta 1. Ok, so IE keeps getting a bad rap, but I love it. And, Woody just goes to town, talking about the new security features, "Activities" and, "Web Slices". His presentation style is great...fast, funny, well place barbs, and the audience just eats it up.

The evening is over, time to head to the bus. It will just be Woody and me sleeping. We have a few adult beverages, spend time catching up, both on what's been going on with us, and our email. When we finally realize it's 2:30 AM (yikes!) it's time to head to our respective bunks. Sleeping in the bunk is both comfortable, and creepy. I have a bit of claustrophobia, but I seem to manage. At least now I know what it's like to sleep in a coffin.

Morning comes and it's time for coffee, a shower and a.... oh yeah. Rule #1 on the bus, no solids in the toilet. Ok, will have to remember that one.

Off to Cal State Fullerton for XNA Day. Can't wait for this, I've been wanting to see some live examples. Sam Stokes, Woody and Jason's counterpart for the Academic side of things,  has setup our meeting. The first presenter, Jason from the CSUF Video Game Design Club shows off several of the games the students have developed with XNA Studio. Really nice stuff, and I'm going to start getting my son, Willie involved.

Jason takes over, and goes into much deeper detail about the history of game development, all the hard work involved, and how XNA makes it so much easier now. With that, he starts showing off some of the physics code he developed for XNA called "Imagination". Amazing, amazing stuff.

David Robinson from the SQL Server Data Services team has come down to show off just what exactly SSDS is all about. This is going to be so cool, access to SQL Data via "the cloud."

Time to pack up and head over to USC for another presentation, this time to a group of CS students, set up again by Sam. This is a much larger crowd, but they sure are different in attitude from the user groups I'm used to. Could it be the sign that said "free pizza and win an XBox"? Jason starts in with his presentation from last night, but quickly decides to switch tracks based on the groups reactions. Nice save Jason. Woody shows of the web camera app he built to take images of the bus from a variety of "strategically placed" web cameras located on the bus. Guess I'll need to keep that in mind for the next few days.

Sam keeps the group enthused by raffling off a few items during the breaks, interesting how he keeps mentioning the XBox. David starts off with his SSDS presentation, but since we're running out of time, he's gotta go fast. I mean really fast, like f-bomb fast. I think the group likes his style. As he's finishing up, he puts in a plug that his team is hiring, and afterwards I see he's getting mobbed by potential applicants and several students who want more information on the SSDS technology.

Time for the XBox raffle. And it couldn't have gone to a more perfect winner. A short, dumpy, pimple faced geek. The look on his face when he won....I love it!

Have I mentioned Erin Jacobs? Erin is the Tour and Events manager, handles all the logistics for Woody and Jason and is just an absolute kick in the pants. Anything, and everything we need, she gets us.

Next stop, .NET geek dinner, run by a really great guy, Geoff Emery. We meet up at Havana Mania a great little Cuban Restaurant. A few Mojitos, and some Cuban Roast Pork, and it's the end of a great first day.

Tomorrow is coding, geeking, then Red Bull Party.

More later.

James

************
mi esposa. yo quiero mucho. le falto y le veré mañana por la noche

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IdentityMine joins The Code Trip

We just got a note from Kurt Brockett, Director of Product Management at IdentityMine, and they have climbed on board The Code Trip!  The group at IdentityMine are sponsoring a license of their Blendables Essentials Mix at the remaining location stops on the tour.  Kurt will also be a roadie at a few locations and hanging out near the SLO, Silicon Valley and San Francisco stops if you have questions about WPF, Silverlight and the Blendables WPF control set.  View the sponsor page for more information as well as a discount code to purchase Blendables at a reduced rate for subscribers of the Code Trip.

Thanks to Kurt and IdentityMine for joining the tour!  See you in NorCal!

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The Halfway Point

The bus starts the second half of our trip today in Southern California as Woody and Erin check out some cool .NET development InterKnowlogy has done for the San Diego Zoo. The trip has been quite an adventure so far, and we're looking forward to the rest as we make our way north.

To kick off the second half of our trip, we've published some new things on the site. First are our last two road signs:

Under the Hood takes a look behind the scenes at what keeps The Code Trip rolling... check out this section for information about software running on the web site and this here web server, as well as how we stay connected and track our progress through GPS. It's all the stuff that makes The Code Trip tick.

Toolbox is where we pay homage to those tools, technologies, and partners who are making our lives easier and enabling developers with some great tools. Many of the sponsors listed here have chipped in for us to have giveaways at our events -- thanks again to all the organizations that have helped to make The Code Trip possible!

We've also added a new Silverlight header control that lists current information about the bus (speed, heading, etc) and the latest news from the site. This is a Silverlight 2 control, so you will be prompted to install Silverlight 2 Beta 1 if you haven't done so already. Watch the bus as we head to Irvine later this evening (after the San Diego .NET User Group meeting)!

Speaking of Silverlight, the Code Trip crew would like to take a moment to congratulate fellow roadie Tim Heuer, who has recently accepted a new role in Scott Guthrie's organization to evangelize Silverlight. The Code Trip will be Tim's last hurrah with DPE West as he moves on to corporate pastures (though don't worry Phoenix friends, he's not physically moving anywhere.) Congrats Tim from your teammates and good luck to you in your new role!

We have a ton of video updates from the past two weeks that will be hitting the site shortly... stay tuned to The Code Trip!

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InnerWorkings Coding Challenge - Win an XBOX

For those of you that have been following The Code Trip and have participated in one of our events, thank you!  We finally put up some information on the Code Trip site with details on how everyone can virtually participate in one of our contests.

One of our sponsors, InnerWorkings, has partnered with us to present the Code Trip Coding Challenge for our subscribers.  Throughout our visits along the tour, we've been talking about various aspects of the new features in Visual Studio 2008, C#, VB, and LINQ technologies.  We've partnered with InnerWorkings to select a few of their learning offerings and put them into a contest.  InnerWorkings has a unique offering in that their learning experience is IN THE IDE.  That's right, now a lab manual, not a step-by-step guide, but a challenge.  You are presented with a business scenario/task and asked to complete it.  You write the code.  The InnerWorkings engine then 'judges' your task completeness and accuracy based on the original requirements.  In the end you get a score.  It is a much different learning environment than most are used to, but I've found to be much more effective.

So on to the contest...

The task is simple: register online for free, select a learning and complete it.  Your score will be uploaded into the contest which has an end date of April 30 (to enable everyone to be able to complete the tasks).  At that time the highest score wins.  You will win an annual subscription to the InnerWorkings offering as well as an XBOX 360 game console.  It's a great opportunity to get some free learning materials for the latest technologies as well as have the opportunity to win some great prizes.

Visit the InnerWorkings sponsor page for more information about the company and a link to the Code Trip Coding Challenge!

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Thank you Montana!

Last week we wrapped up visits to Missoula and Billings, Montana.  In Missoula we spent some time with the University of Montana career services group, talking with some students about what it is like being a software developer, what it was like going through the hiring process at Microsoft and some tips on starting early in your education and relationship building if you want to do software development for a profession.  It was some good conversation and questions.  The bus was parked in 'the oval' which was in the center of campus.  Code Trip roadie Lance Fisher has a great post you should read which summarizes his experience with our visit to Missoula.  We had a geek dinner afterwards and I had a chance to talk more with Lance about Virtual Earth and some ideas he has for the county where he works.  We also talked about the Javascript intellisense project he implemented for jQuery for Visual Studio 2008.  jQuery is a javascript library that a lot of web developers use for traversing the HTML DOM, handle events, etc. making their Javascript programming experience a little more productive in certain areas.  Great job to Lance for implementing the intellisense comments for the jQuery library.

We then headed to Billings, MT to the main campus of Montana State University-Billings.  The Billings Area User Group helped organize the gathering at the university.  It was another good turnout and we got some good questions about LINQ specifically...that seemed to be what people were working with lately.  Thanks to O'Reilly for sponsoring the LINQ Pocket Reference for attendees on our trip.  It was another good chance to share the Dreamspark details to some of the students.  Thanks again to all who came out and to Regina for helping organize it.

Montana was a beautiful state to travel through.  It was one I hadn't been to in the United States and I'm glad I visited.  Missoula reminded me so much of Flagstaff, Arizona where I went to school.  We ate at Land of Magic in Manhattan (no not that Manhattan) where Jason said we'd have the best steak we'd ever have...it was pretty good.  I think I had my fair share of beef for my entire family by the time I left Montana, but it was good.  Thank you so much Montana for your hospitality and I look forward to coming back to see the growth of the Missoula .NET user group!

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Second Codeplex project - Virtual Earth gets Intellisense

Code Trip roadie Marc Schweigert has released the second Codeplex project for The Code Trip that we are leveraging and promoting.  This release of the Virtual Earth Javascript Intellisense Helper (or VEJS for the non-product managers in us) brings the Virtual Earth API into your Visual Studio 2008 IDE with Intellisense.  With the introduction of Javascript Intellisense for Visual Studio, AJAX style development is getting easier for developers.  Just this past few days we released a new home page for thecodetrip.com which has a tracking feature to show the current location of the bus as well as map out the events for our visitors.  If you click on the 'Bus Location' icon in the legend, you'll be zoomed in immediately to the bus location (being fed from an on-board GPS system) and can hover over to see who is currently on the bus and their last Twitter post.

Our developer for the site, Jason, hadn't worked much with Virtual Earth before in depth (shape layers, importing GeoRSS data, etc.) and started developing the map using the VEJS library.  The Virtual Earth team provides an interactive SDK which is helpful for first-timers to Virtual Earth.  It gives you a glance at core features and sample implementations of the API.  What it doesn't give you is that 'in the tool' experience.  If you are a VE developer, you'd have to have those docs open while developing if you didn't know the API cold. 

VEJS changes the game for Virtual Earth developers.  It brings the API to you.  You can start developing by simply adding an Intellisense reference tag in your file and including the VEJS documentation.  Once you have done that you get full Intellisense of the API, complete with functions, properties, enumerations, etc.  The full source documentation to the VEJS helper is available for you to enhance and contribute at Codeplex.  Watch the video to hear Jason's thought on the time saved and see the implementation first-hand to watch how simple it is to implement.  Then go to the VEJS Codeplex site and download it for your own use!

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Rolling Through Missoula and the University of Montana

Hi, Lance here in Missoula, MT.  Last Wednesday after pulling nearly an all-nighter (coding of course), I woke up in the early afternoon and checked The Code Trip website.  Wow!  The map was online, and the little bus icon was right in the middle of campus.  I had to get down there.

Several weeks ago, when I first found out that The Code Trip was coming through Missoula, I sent off an email to Tim.  All I had to hear was "developers", "RV", "Road Trip".  This was something I wanted to be a part of.

We came up with the perfect place to park the bus.  Smack in the middle of campus.  The center of the UM campus is a nice big park surrounded by trees and buildings with students crossing back and forth to class, throwing frisbee, and slacklining.  What better place for a bus to stand out?

And it did get lots of attention.  There were lots of questions.  Apparently, not many students knew about The Code Trip.  Tim, Jason, and Woody spread the word about Microsoft's new DreamSpark program where students can get MS Developer tools for free.  One student stopped by to share a problem that she was having cutting and pasting in Excel.  I bet when you work for Microsoft you always get questions like this.  It's hard enough to know the few programs that I've written well enough to troubleshoot without seeing, let alone any problem in any Microsoft program.

I arrived after they had shared with students what it was like to be a developer, but I made it to the main presentations that evening in the UC (University Center).  Woody talked about IE8, and the webcams he's been working on for the bus using the directshow.net library.  Jason showed off the code he wrote that pulls the GPS coordinates from the bluetooth GPS, and posts the current bus location to the website along with their bearing and the closest city using some "math crap" to calculate distance on a spherical Earth and some XML from NOAA listing city locations.  I bought "the best freaking GPS" that he recommended, and I keep bugging him to send me his code.  He says it will be up on CodePlex soon.  Tim presented Expression and some cool Silverlight stuff, he also gave me the floor to announce the newly-formed Missoula .NET User Group.

Afterwards, Jason lost out on rock paper scissors and had to ride in the back of my truck to the hotel.  It must have been a cold ride, I had the heater cranked up.  He threw paper against two scissors.  I guess he didn't know that scissors are the safest opening move against experienced RPSers, since "rock is for rookies."  Better luck next time.

I'm kicking myself that I didn't hitch a ride back from Boise to Missoula on the bus.  That thing is posh (and I'm not talking about plain old semantic HTML).  Jason showed me and my friend Andrew around the bus down at Code Camp.  It was our first time presenting, and it was good.  If you get a chance I highly recommend Code Camp in Boise.  There were over 400 attendees.

Thanks Code Trip, for giving me a chance to geek out in Missoula!

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Boise Code Camp 2008

Our second travel log video covers Boise Code Camp 2008, the latest and greatest the Boise developer community has to offer. It was a spectacular event, with over 60 sessions of top-notch material from presenters across the Pacific Northwest. The Code Trip was there along with 400+ attendees to capture the action, present some sessions, and to party.

Thank you and congratulations to all the volunteers who made Boise Code Camp possible!

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Roadies online!

The day-by-day feature rollout continues with the Roadies section going live on the Code Trip site. We will soon be adding individual bio pages for each roadie, but we wanted to get this up at least so you could see who is rolling on The Code Trip.

The Roadies page also displays who is currently on the bus. You can also find this out with the home page map by hovering over the bus icon... it shows the current riders and their Twitter updates.

While on the subject of roadies, a few words about some of the people who have participated in the trip thus far.

Kelly White
Kelly is very active in the Portland developer community. He is the founder of the Portland User Experience user group (PDXUX), which is the first Silverlight-focused user group, and the first group in the local area to be inclusive of both developers and designers. He's also working on starting up a local XNA user group, found at http://pdxna.org/.

Kelly was the first roadie to join us on The Code Trip, rolling with us from MIX in Vegas up to Boise Code Camp. Once we hit the road we looped him in to present at our first event in Salt Lake City. (The first night on the road was spent building code and plowing through MIX samples until about 3:30am when we made it to SLC.)

Craig Berntson
Craig is a Microsoft MVP, and hitched a ride on The Code Trip in Salt Lake City up to Boise for Boise Code Camp. Craig presented at Code Camp on Continuous Integration (CI) using free tools such as CruiseControl.NET and NUnit. Craig has some posts about his adventures on the bus and at Code Camp on his blog. We'll be seeing Craig again at the MVP Summit when the Code Trip wraps up in Seattle in mid-April.

Lance Fisher
Lance is a developer/database administrator for Missoula County in Missoula, MT. He contacted us shortly after we announced our schedule and helped us organize our visit to the University of Montana, which was a great time. (They even let us park the bus in the middle of their campus!) Lance was also at Boise Code Camp with the rest of the Code Trip crew, presenting on JQuery and the Intellisense docs he built for it.

Lance is starting up a .NET user group in Missoula. If you're in the area, definitely check out the Yahoo! group and find out how you can participate.

Wanna ride with us?

We have several more people who will be joining us in the weeks ahead, and you can be one of them by contacting us at crew@thecodetrip.com. Check the schedule and see when we're rolling through your area. If a road trip with a bunch of developers geeking out sounds like a fun time to you, pack up your laptop and come join us out on The Code Trip!

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The First 24 Hours

Our debut video travel log covers the first 24 hours of our trip, from the kickoff at the Venetian in Las Vegas to our Road MIX user group presentation in Salt Lake City. The video took a bit longer than anticipated to get out (due to various publishing and connectivity issues, and also needing to do our laundry) but it's finally here for you to enjoy.

In this video are several people who helped send off the bus, as well as the Code Trip crew on the bus from the very first moments the bus started rolling. We walk through the bus and talk about some of the software on board.

We have a ton of video recorded from the past few days that will be following this one... stay tuned!

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Thanks Spokane developers!

Last night we got a chance to hang out with developers in Spokane, Washington.  The .NET User Group changed their meeting time to accommodate our arrival and we appreciated that.  We met at the WSU Riverpoint campus.  The staff at the campus was really great.  We weren't sure about connectivity, but the IT department granted our laptops an exemption for the day so we could use their wireless.  When I opened my laptop Brian, one of the IT sysadmins, said "Oh, you have Vista...cool, that makes this easier."  Whoa!  Cool to hear a positive comment about Vista from an IT department.  He talked about how easier it was to manage certificate-based authentication for their department on the platform.  Thanks Brian for hooking us up!

The room we met in was a pretty geeked out setup as well.  It was a distance learning/video conferencing room and had all sorts of wicked audio/video equipment that I had no idea what it all did.  They had a digital whiteboard as well that could translate your whiteboard markings to a digital file if you so pleased.  All that being said, we didn't use any of the coolness.

We had a chance to talk about Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8 WebSlices and Activies, WPF and web cam integration with DirectShow, and what is powering our trip with our CMS system, GPS tracking, etc.  It was fun and hopefully informative.  We forgot some of our sheets, so I also whipped up a quick excel doc with a random-generator-prize-giver-awayer for which my code was questioned at times ;-) -- I promise it was random!  We gave out some great things.

Afterwards a few of us went to Jack and Dan's, which apparently is a bar owned by John Stockton (or his family).  During my presentation on Silverlight I showed how you can embed fonts using a new structure and I mentioned the My Font Tablet PC power tool that I used to create the font that I normally show.  Turns out the developer of the My Font tool was there!  Phil Lanier wrote that tool as a part of a contest.  It was great to meet him.  We chatted at dinner about what he did and libraries that he used to do some shape translation, etc.  I prodded him that it would be cool to see an updated version up on CodePlex...hint, hint.  We also had geek fame with Mike Mayfield.  Mike (and Phil) work for Ascentium now, but Mike was the author of the Star Trek text game that was written in BASIC back in 1971(ish).  Between Mike and the Donkey Kong gamers at MIX, I've had my fair share of geek game fame in a while!

Anyhow, thanks to the Spokane developer group for hosting us.  It was a lot of fun and I appreciated the hospitality we received in Spokane!  On to the University of Montana!

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VSLive Offer for Code Trip Subscribers

If you are thinking about heading to VSLive!, we have a special Code Trip deal for you!  For being a Code Trip subscriber, you are able to get an incredible discount off the regular prices for the conference (up to $900 off).  This deal is exclusive to VSLive! in San Francisco on March 30.

Visit the event details section for the code and more details!

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Channel 9 Cribs Edition

While at MIX08, the Channel 9 crew caught up with the current crew of The Code Trip attending MIX.  A few of us gave Dan from Channel 9 a tour 'cribs style' of the bus that is traveling across the West.

Thanks for taking the time to chat Dan!

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S3 Browser for Live Writer - Our First CodePlex Release

As one of our goals for The Code Trip, we plan on releasing several projects to CodePlex, a shared source community site.  These projects might be utility in nature to full on plugins, tools, etc.  Our intention is to create projects that the communities will foster.  I'm proud to announce that our crew has released our first project called the S3 Browser for Windows Live Writer.  This plugin enables communication with Amazon's S3 web services.

The crew uses Windows Live Writer for authoring our blog posts as well as the content management client tool for our sites, like thecodetrip.com.  It is a great tool for simple authoring, but what makes it even better is that it is extensible.  Any developer can write a plugin for Live Writer and, in fact, a lot of people have!  Live Writer has a great ecosystem of useful and fun plugins for the tool.  It is a very simple interface to create a new plugin for Live Writer.

We were fortunate enough to have an immediate and skilled contributor to the project in Aaron Lerch.  While The Code Trip currently is not coming through Aaron's area, he's an honorary passenger :-).  Aaron jumped in and checked-in some significant source code to complete what our crew had started for the project.  It is a great story of open source development.  Here's a snapshot of the tool:

As you can see it is very simple.  If you are an Amazon S3 user, you'll recognize things that you would want: browsing, inserting, uploading being the key features in this use case of implementing S3 services.  It's a great tool and the first release (0.91 Beta) is up on the CodePlex project site.  The project is licensed under the Microsoft Public License as well.

Be sure to subscribe to our feed for more CodePlex projects that you will find helpful and can help in contributing to as well!

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Life on the Bus

Code Trip - Day 1

Last night around 8:00pm I left MIX08 early and hopped on the Code Trip bus. I was extremely excited. My head was still spinning from the announcement of Silverlight 2 Beta 1. I had spent the previous 2 days at MIX meeting people whose blogs I read, playing Rock Band, building new apps/demos with Silverlight 2, and ultimately not getting enough sleep.

Shortly after the bus left the Venetian and the excitement subsided, everyone sat down, pulled out their laptops, and started coding. Now as I think back, that's pretty funny. This was definitely going to be a "Code Trip" and it was finally underway. The bus had wireless and many of the sessions from MIX had already been posted. I was in heaven.

By about 1:00am everyone was asleep on a bunk. I coded until 12:00am, which is when I couldn't think anymore. I made sure to sleep in one of the bottom bunks, that way if I rolled off I wouldn't fall too far. It took a bit to fall asleep, but once I learned that I had to lie flat and not on my side I konked right out. I woke up a little before 4:00am as we were pulling into the hotel at Salt Lake City. Some of us stayed in the hotel and some remained on the bus. I didn't wake up again until 9:30am.

Code Trip - Day 2

We started off the morning with a hearty brunch at Denny's. That was at 11:00am. After eats it was back to the bus and out came the laptops. The first stop of the trip was going to be at the Franklin Covey building at 3:00pm. I was given the task opportunity to show off Silverlight 2 and got busy preparing. I figured this would be good practice for the Boise Code Camp presentation I would be giving on Saturday (3/12).

The event at Franklin Covey went really well. Tim gave a Code Trip / MIX overview; Woody talked about IE8; I talked about Silverlight 2; and Jason talked about the new Deep Zoom technology. The attendees were from many of the various Utah .Net User Groups. It was good times and a lot of swag was given away (Smart Phone, copies of Office 2007, Vista, Expression Studio, Infragistics, etc).

After the event a number of attendees joined us for a nerd dinner. Those that came got to check out the bus, eat good Greek food, and talk technology.

Before we left Salt Lake City, Craig Berntson hopped on the bus to join us. Craig is a Senior Software Engineer with 3M and will also be presenting on Continuous Integration at the Boise Code Camp.

So about the Boise Code Camp...right now there are 475+ people registered for this. Wow. That's a lot of people. Here's some sessions straight from MIX and/or related to the Code Trip:

• Technologies behind the MIX announcements, by Tim Heuer.
• What's new for developers in IE8, by Woody Pewitt.
• The technology behind the Code Trip, by Jason Mauer.
• Continuous Integration, by Craig Berntson.
• Silverlight for Developers, by Erik Mork. Erik also does a Silverlight podcast which I recommend you check out.
• Silverlight for Designers, by Kelly White.

Right now as I'm writing this it is 11:45pm and the bus is 42 miles southwest of Boise, Idaho. Jason wrote an app that takes in the GPS coordinates of the bus, calculates where we're at, and the posts it to the web site. That's one of the things he'll be showing off in his presentation tomorrow. I really need to finish this post and get back to preparing my presentation for tomorrow. However, I can't get the Deep Zoom demos from MIX out of my head right now. Those presentations combined with what I've built so far have given me a bunch of ideas for how to put to use that Canon 100mm Macro USM lens I purchased last summer.

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Leaving Las Vegas...

The Code Trip tour has officially kicked off!  The starting team (Woody, Jason, Tim) left the Venetian just minutes ago to a crowd of people in the bowels of the tour bus loading area of the Venetian hotel.  Thanks to all who came to send us off!

We are en route to Salt Lake City to join the local area .NET user groups for an event at the Franklin Covey building.  If you happen to see the bus on the road, please give us a honk!  We're very excited to have started our journey and looking forward to each of our stops.  Our code monkeys are churning away and we'll be continually updating the site so be sure to visit often and subscribe to the feed.

Special thanks to Channel9 for helping send us off as well.  Be sure to watch the This Week on Channel 9 for a behind-the-scenes tour of the bus itself cribs style.

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Design The Code Trip SWAG

We'd like to have some 'collector' SWAG for The Code Trip.  Instead of having everything provided by us we decided it would be great to get YOU involved!  So in our first contest, we'd like to offer up some prizes.  The contest is simple: design The Code Trip t-shirt.  The guidelines are simple:

• Use the t-shirt template (Templates: Photoshop, Expression Design)
  • Preferably keep it to a white, charcoal or black shirt...but if you come up with a wicked design in another shirt color, do it anyway :-)
• Can only use front/back (no sleeves is really what we're saying here)
• Must use the Code Trip logo (vector version here)
• Must be submitted by March 10, 2008 (email the crew)
• Print-quality (i.e., no less than 150 dpi)

That's it.  Other than that, be creative.  Once you have your design, please submit an email to us with the URL of where we can download it to view.  You can use any tools you like.  Send us a link to a PDF or PNG so that we can view it quickly.  The winner will be contacted for the print-ready art.  We will announce the winner on March 11.  The winner will received full licensed versions of Expression Studio (Expression Design, Expression Blend and Expression Media) as well as Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate edition -- as well as a shirt of course.  The winning design will be printed in rush order for the rest of our trip!  If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask us!

We look forward to seeing your creativity!

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The Code Trip, film at 11

The Code Trip is a road trip, a bunch of developers cruising around in a tour bus and geeking out. It's also an online TV show (or video podcast, or vodcast, or whatever the kids call it nowadays) chronicling our adventures throughout the western United States.

Through the comfort of your online tool of choice, you can follow what's going on before and after we come through and level your town. We have RSS feeds to suit pretty much any device out there, including the iPod, Zune, our jumbo WMV for the desktop, or audio-only MP3 and WMA formats. Subscribe and enjoy!

A couple weeks ago, the Code Trip crew was in Seattle for TechReady6 (a Microsoft internal training event) and took advantage of the time to do some filming in advance of the trip. In our first video segment, Tim kicks things off with announcements about some of our upcoming events, and how you can get involved by visiting this site and giving us feedback.

Visit the Events page for what we have planned so far on the trip. This list is by no means complete... we're still confirming venues and locking things down, so check back here for the latest info.

Have an idea for something crazy we can do in your city? Want to show off some cool code you wrote? Email us at crew@thecodetrip.com and let us know, we'd love to stop by.

On Facebook? Show your support for The Code Trip by becoming a fan at facebook.thecodetrip.com.

We hit the road at MIX08 in five days time... see you soon!

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Get ready, cause here we come!

We are now only a week away from MIX08 and the kickoff of our inaugural Code Trip! The bus is being wrapped at this very moment. Bags packed, batteries charging, code checked in... we're getting ready to roll.

This post is our first on the "real" Code Trip web site. This is just the beginning of a continual stream of new features and content that we'll roll out daily from now until MIX, and through the duration of the trip.

Check out the Events section for details about each of our stops on the trip, and the Travel Log for our latest blog updates. Our first trailer video will be coming shortly... stay tuned!

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