I attended Presentation Camp Boston, a bar-camp style conference, on 24-Oct-2009. There were many good ideas and presentation tips. Among them, these are my favorites.

Top 10 Presentation Tips

The top 10 presentation tips I took away from Presentation Camp Boston

From Kenny Raskin’s keynote:

1. “Have a Passionate Purpose”

When you are speaking, it is not only about the content. If you mean what you say – you really believe in it – (which I believe Dale Carnegie refers to as conviction) - then you are more likely to be successful at conveying your message and persuading your audience.

Kenny shared a quote which was something like the following:

Who you are being when you are saying what you are saying says more about what you are saying that what you are saying.

Not just sell it – it was believe it + sell it both at once. This tip resonates with me and is consistent with a lesson from studying and performing improv; one of my instructors, Erik Volkert, really got across the difference between acting it out and really committing – and the impact that has on stage.

2. “The presentation starts before you are even in the room”

• Find out who the audience is and what you want to say to them. What do you want them to FEEL. (“Know your passionate purpose!”)
• As you are preparing to enter as a speaker, take a breath. Focus. Clear your mind.
• As you enter, look your audience in the eyes. Before you say a word. Greet the audience. Pause… and let them respond.

3. Genuine eye contact != scanning

Eye contact is important. Don’t scan the audience and think that’s eye contact – you need to pause and connect with individuals one at a time – this may be for the duration of a thought or statement – or just until you feel you’ve connected. Some of your eye contact moments will be during pauses and are your opportunity to re-energize by breathing.

From Diane Darling’s Talk about Networking:

Not about presenting to large groups, but focused on presenting to very small groups of one or a few other folks in a social / networking situation.

4. Business Cards from A-Z

Some wisdom on business cards:

• You need business cards. And they don’t need to be plain and boring… Diane’s cards have a list of tips on one side – useful and “sticky“.
• She advises to keep your business cards in one pocket, and the ones you collect in another pocket – just have a simple system to avoid fumbling.
• Write on the business cards – you may forget later otherwise that this card is from someone you offered to send a link to an interesting paper, or perhaps they might be a future business partner. Handy, easy hack.
• If you do give a talk to a group, be sure to have a stack of cards handy to share at the end.

5. “Own the room”

I am a highly functional introvert
~ Diane Darling, author of The Networking Survival Guide: Get the Success You Want By Tapping Into the People You Know

I love that quote! As a fellow introvert, that’s how I want to be. Diane builds a case for being highly functioning with a plethora of straight-forward tips on how to handle lots of business social situations. A couple of examples:

• Prepare several generic ice breaker questions you can use when you meet someone new. A good format for such questions is “Tell me about ______.” You fill in the blank with “your job” or “how you got into this line of work” or “how you ended up at this conference” etc.
• Wear your name tag close to your RIGHT shoulder (since that’s where the eye most naturally is directed during a hand-shake.
• Don’t start with your name! Introduce yourself by saying something about yourself, and end with your name – it is easier to remember there.
• Saturday Night “Live” != Saturday Night “Unrehearsed” — you will be more successful if you practice some of what you will say — like what is your brief introduction of yourself (your elevator pitch), ending with your name, of course!

6. Connect with the Gatekeepers

If you want to get access to key people who may be hard to get to, consider connecting with those people who control access – such as a personal assistant to the CEO.

From Edwin Guarin’s talk, The Killer Presentation:

Edwin is an Academic Evangelist for Microsoft. His talk was called The Killer Presentation – Gettting to Point B.

7. Distributing Your PowerPoint Deck

Suppose you’ve given a talk, but now your audience wants a copy. Here’s how to do it, plus a couple of important benefits:

• File > Save As… and choose either PDF or PowerPoint Show.
• If you have Hidden slides – perhaps because you want “single source” for a slide deck that you use in multiple circumstances, but don’t want to maintain the bulk of the slides more than once – this will drop all those marked as hidden at the time you Save As.
• If you have Notes, they are not included either. Sometimes your Notes are just speaking points, but perhaps they are not something you want everyone to see.

8. Spruce Up Your Talk with Images

You are preparing a deck, and you want to be memorable. You want that “just right” image or text effect.

• Edwin recommends the use of royaty-free photos from http://sxc.hu.  You need to create an account to access them, then are free to use them in your PowerPoint slides.
• Note that you are not licensed to subsequently redistribute these images if they are embedded in your PowerPoint deck. I registered an account on sxc.hu web site asking for clarification – and there was a tad bit of ambiguity around the licensing (the license text seem to both suggest it was fine and also say it wasn’t) – so I sent in a specific question on this scenario. The response from sxc.hu support was that the PowerPoint cannot be posted for redistribution. I am not a lawyer. And I do not even play a lawyer on TV.
• [In my talk, I advocate searching through Google Images advanced search and filtering by Usage Rights to only include images labeled for reuse (usually through Creative Commons).]
• To embed an image that is too bright, overlay it with a rectangle – and set the transparency to accordinly to fade it a bit so that text can be seen on top of it.
• Use SmartArt to snazz up your text… transform a bullet list into a ring, or horizontal property or other eye-candy fanciness.

From Brainshark demo:

9. Sharing Your Presentation After the Fact

Brainshark has a cool way for you to post your slide-deck to their free http://my.brainshare.com hosted service: you can upload both the deck *and* an audio track.

This is way better than just distributing the PowerPoint deck, which may not be of any use for people who didn’t attend the talk. Of course, you do need to create (or record) an audio track.

I am not sure how the slides and the audio are sync’d – like when in the audio track should slide 7 pop in – but my guess is that you are expected to record your voice while delivering the talk – and some agent on your desktop keeps an eye on when you transition between slides. If so, I wonder if it can also capture screen shots of non-PowerPoint activities – like if I pop up a web browers, or use Visual Studio.

From Bill Wilder’s talk on Better Tech Talks:

Yes, I am recommending a tip from my own talk.

10. “It is a Talk, not a Read”

Don’t even thing of reading your slides to your audience.

• If you cram all the text for your talk into your deck , you will be guilty of promulgating support for Death By PowerPoint.
• Your audience can read faster than you can talk anyway – they will be done before you. And they won’t be listening to you while they read; they can’t do both at once.
• Your audience will resent being read to. As Jack Welch is reputed to have said to a presenter reading him the slides: if everything is on the slides, then we don’t need you.
• There are better tools for a stand-alone document – like blog posts, or word-processors. PowerPoint is a poor substitute when writing a document that is being prepared for general reading.
• If you do need to capture more info than belongs in the slides, consider putting it into the Notes section, and then using dual-monitor capabilities to have your laptop display different content than the projector, and configure PowerPoint to know about this via:  Slide Show > Set Up Show > Multiple Monitors.

I attended Presentation Camp Boston on Saturday 24-Oct-2009. I sat in on several excellent talks, plus led a session myself called Better Tech Talks. which was a presentation & discussion on giving technical talks to technical people.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to give code-centric talks to software engineers, plus the general problem of clear communication through presentations. Those in my session will recognize that my slides (Better Tech Talks – 24-Oct-2009) do not stand alone well! – but should serve as a good reminder for those who participated in the session.

Feel free to follow-up with me to continue the discussion!

The Boston Azure User Group is a Cloud Computing community group focusing on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s Cloud platform, and …

The Boston Azure User Group is now on the map – literally!

Check out Jim O’Neil’s user group map. Zoom in on Cambridge, MA and you will see us waving from the NERD center. Thanks Jim!

While not as awesomely interactive and visual as a Bing map, we do appreciate other people plugging the user group:

• Boston User Groups
• The Boston-area User Group Calendar
• Our friends at New Hampshire .NET
• Community Megaphone
• Chris Bowen’s Blog : Announcing the Boston Azure User Group (might be the earliest mention ~ thanks Chris!)
• From ASP Scribe: User Group Happenings East and West and in Between
• And a mention or two from Roger Jenning’s blog

Speaking of Roger Jennings… at the first Boston Azure meeting this Thursday night (Thu 22-Oct-2009 @ 6:30), we’ll give away copy of his hot-off-the-presses book Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform!

I found Roger Jennings’ book chock full of useful information – from context to detail to practical code samples. I stopped at Barnes & Noble after a user group meeting in Burlington and picked up my own personal copy – why no Kindle version!? – and quickly plowed through it. Now I want to go back and play around with the abundant code samples. And in case you are wondering – no, this isn’t the copy we’ll be giving away…we have a new one.

Gary Chin on SketchFlow for Silverlight

Gary Chin spoke at Boston Code Camp 12 (on Oct 17, 2009) – his talk was all about using SketchFlow for Silverlight.

I heard from various folks that the talk went really well. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it since I was presenting at the same time (actually presenting on presenting.)

Gary was kind enough to send me his slides which I have attached to this post: SketchFlow-GaryChin-Oct2009

See you at the next Code Camp! (Though will probably also see many of you before then – this Thursday night at the first meeting of the Boston Azure User Group!)

Boston West Toastmasters Reaching Out

I’ve been a member of Toastmasters for the past couple of years. While Toastmasters has many clubs around the world, I belong to Boston West Toastmasters which meets in Needham, MA on the second and fourth Monday evenings.

While at Boston West Toastmasters, I’ve made friends with some really cool people (several of whom provided ideas for my Code Camp talk on giving technical presentations) and have been working to improve my speaking skills through application of Deliberate Practice (where the feedback, ideas, analysis, expert critique and encouragement all come from fellow Toastmaster members).

Now my club is reaching out to the community to help the unemployed, holding an open house encourage the general community to get a glimpse of what Toastmasters is all about… and not to mention taking part in a really fun social event.

Some Boston West Toastmaster members from 28-Sept-2009 meeting

Scholarship offer for Unemployed

Full details are in the attached Boston West Toastmasters Scholarship Press Release from 5-Oct-2009, but here’s the teaser:

Boston West Toastmasters is offering five scholarships to the unemployed who want to improve their speaking and leadership skills.  These scholarships, underwritten by Robin Samora, owner and president of Partner Promotions, cover the annual membership dues for the winners.

Bring a Friend, Meet a Friend – Open House at Nov 9 Meeting

Our meeting on 9-Nov-2009 will have a social hour before this meeting which is an Open House for Boston West Toastmaster. Anyone is welcome to attend this meeting – at no cost, no obligation. (The “no cost, no obligation” is actually true generally – feel free to check us out at any meeting – you won’t get a hard sell – just the information you might be interested in. For most people, Toastmasters sells itself.)

Here are the details:

Bring a friend, meet a friend at the Boston West Toastmasters Open House on Monday, November 9, 2009:

Mark your calendar for this important OPEN HOUSE.  It is a great opportunity to share your Toastmaster experience with friends, relatives and co-workers.  Invite them to attend the meeting.  We will have an informal start to greet guests and answer questions @ 6:30 p.m.  Robin Samora is our Toastmaster for this and we will have special snacks that evening during our Opening reception 6:30 – 7 for new members (and our team if possible).  Send an email to people inviting them to attend our OPEN HOUSE.  It will be a memorable event!!!

You don’t need to let me know – thought would appreciate a heads-up so I can look for you – but just showing up is the key.

Soiree in Back Bay – Social Night – Co-Sponsored by Boston West Toastmasters

This looks like a really fun event: Soiree in Back Bay on 22-Oct-2009, co-sponsored by Boston West Toastmasters.

[Unfortunately, you won't see me there - I will be at the kick-off meeting for my Boston Azure User Group that same night.]

Gave a talk 17-Sat-at Boston Code Camp 12 called So, You Want to Give a Code Camp Talk?.

How to Give Your First Code Camp Talk – 17-Oct-2009

If you attended my talk, you learned than I don’t advocate ensuring the slide deck makes sense stand-alone (since it is a framework for a talk, with purpose different than that of an article or blog post). You’ve been warned.

We are getting close to the kick-off meeting of the Boston Azure User Group – next week, on Thursday October 22, 2009 starting with pizza at 6:30 at the NERD in Kendall Square. Microsoft’s Brian Lambert is the featured speaker.

We have a couple of behind-the-scenes planning meetings this week then will finalize the information on the bostonazure.org web site.

Have you joined the Boston Azure User Group mailing list?

Spoke at New Hampshire .NET User Group back on June 17, 2009. Talked about Prism (focusing mostly on Silverlight, a little homage to WPF), showed some code, shared a slide deck.

I will be giving an updated version of this talk at the upcoming Code Camp 12 in Waltham (Boston area) on Sat Oct 17, 2009.

Hosting Two Different Domains in Same ASP.NET MVC Site

Motivation – I am Cheap!

I have a hosting account at DiscountASP.NET that I have used as a playground for anything I want to host on the web. My personal Coding Out Loud site is hosted there (with a few directories that are not linked, for example). Since starting the Boston Azure User Group, I need a place to host a page. While I would eventually like to host the user group site on Azure itself, for now I have produced a simple ASP.NET MVC site. To avoid paying for two hosting accounts, I am reusing my existing account – sharing the hosting across bostonazureusergroup.org and codingoutloud.com – but still maintaining their distinct identities.

We can consider the Boston Azure User Group the main site, and Coding Out Loud the secondary site.

Requirements

The approach I take makes sense to me since I want a solution that is:

• Very simple
• Inexpensive
• Easy to manage once implemented
• Treats bostonazureusergroup.org as the main site, but “tolerates” codingoutloud.com being around (in other words, maintainability/risk of errors for codingoutloud.com is less important)

Solution

In order to host two sites with a single hosting account, you have a few steps:

1. Add a Domain Pointer with your ISP. If, like me, your site is hosted on a shared IP address, this step is necessary so that the site’s IIS web server knows which top-level directory your domain is associated with. In my case, this tells both codingoutloud.com and bostonazureusergroup.org to go to the same site.
2. Configure your DNS. This is easier than it sounds. Your ISP will tell which DNS servers your should point to. You could also deal with Godaddy’s Domain Forwarding and cloaking, but for a one-time cost of $15 with my ISP (DiscountASP.NET) I just added the pointer – a cleaner solution, and possible more search-engine-friendly.
3. Note that the following changes to the code are only necessary if you want different results dependent on which domain is used to access the site – in other words, I don’t want my bostonazureusergroup.org visitors to be stumbling across any codingoutloud.com artifacts, and vice versa. The following screen shot includes the hack simple code modifications – they are circled – a private method with a little dirty work, invoke the method in the right place, and display a specific View. Note that the view is specified in a different file – and under a folder that is specific to your secondary site – CodingOutLoud in my case.

To create the …/Views/CodingOutLoud/Index.aspx view shown in the right-hand pane in the screen shown above, you would do the following:

1. Right-Click on Views folder and choose Add > New Folder from the pop-up. I called mine “CodingOutLoud” and it is shown above.
2. Right-Click on the newly created Views/CodingOutLoud folder, this time choose Add > View… from the pop-up, as shown below. I called my View “Index” (and since it lives under CodingOutLoud folder it does not clash with other Views with that name, given the default routing rules).

Name your view – and I also chose not to use the master page, so I unchecked it:

Once created, …/Views/CodingOutLoud/Index.aspx can contain any code you like – even plain old HTML.

This is all it took to get this simple approach to work. Now when users visit via “codingoutloud.com” they are diverted to …/Views/CodingOutLoud/Index.aspx, and otherwise the usual machinery of ASP.NET MVC takes over.

Other Potential Approaches

I considered, but did not adopt, some other approaches – mostly since I wanted to do something very simple. Here are some of the other approaches:

• ASP.NET MVC Subdomain Routing
• ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing
• Subdomains for a single application with ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET MVC root url’s with generic routing

I took notes during the Boston Cloud Computing Group Meetup 23-Sept-2009 – the raw notes are below, but a couple of more noteworthy highlights appear first with some of my views interspersed.

Executive Summary – Key Take-Aways & Highlights

Notes from Javed Ikbal’s talk (http://10domains.blogspot.com) are in regular type. My editorial comments and thoughts are in italics or bold italics – so don’t blame these on Javed.

• Key take-away – going to the Cloud is waaaay more about Business Tradeoffs than it is about Technology.
• “There are 2 kinds of companies – those which have had a [data security]breach, and those which are going to have a [data security] breach” -Javed
• Centralization of data makes insider threat a bigger risk -Javed
• “On premise does not mean people are doing the right thing” –Javed – right on! I bet the majority of the fortune five-million (as 37 Signals refers to the medium and small business market) have insufficient IT – they just don’t know it. Any stats?
• Someone from the audience stated there are more breaches in on-premise data centers than in cloud. Therefore cloud is safer. I don’t buy the logic. There could so many more publicized breaches in on-premise systems simply because there are so many more on premise data centers today. So this is easy to misinterpret. We can’t tell either way from the data. My personal prediction: today if there is a data breach for data stored in the cloud, people will not be able to believe you were reckless enough to store it in the cloud; 5 years from now, if there is a data breach for data stored on premise, people will not be able to believe you were reckless enough to store it locally instead of in the cloud which everyone will then believe is the safest place.
• Someone from audience commented that business value of losing data will be balanced against business cost of it being exposed. This comment did not account for the PROBABILITY of there being a breach – how do you calculate this risk? I bet it is easier to calculate this risk on the cloud than on premise (though *I* don’t know how to do this)
• Comment from Stefan: We can’t expect all cloud services to be up all the time (we were chatting about Google and Amazon downtime, which has been well documented). I completely agree – And many businesses don’t have the data to fairly/accurately compare their own uptimes with those of the cloud vendors – and, further, if the cloud vendors did have 100% up-time, that may destroy the economies we are seeing on the cloud today (who cares if it is 100% reliable if it is 0% affordable – that’s too expensive to be interesting)
• Off-premise security != in cloud – different security issues for different data – Javed In other words, treat SSN and Credit Card data differently than which books I bought last year. But I can think of LOTS of data that is seemingly innocuous, but that SOME PEOPLE will balk at having it classified  as “non-sensitive” – might be my bookmarks, movie rentals, books purchased, travel plans/history, many more… not just those that support identity theft and/or direct monetary loss (bank account hacks). I think it would be a fine idea for data hosts to publicly declare their data classification scheme – shouldn’t we all have a right to know?
  
• I think IT generally – and The Cloud specifically – could benefit from the kind of thinking that went into GoodGuide.com.

Raw Notes Follow

The rest of these notes are a bit rough – and may or may not make sense – but here they are anyway…

Intros

• Pizza & drinks, some social (sat next to Stefan Schueller from TechDroid Sytems and enjoyed chatting with him)
• Went around the room introducing ourselves
• People who were hiring / looking for work spoke up
• Around 30 people in attendance
• Meeting host: Aprigo – 460 Totten Pond rd, suite 660 – Waltham, MA  02451 – USA
• Feisty audience! Lots of participation. This added to the meeting impact.

Twisted Storage talk

From Meetup description: Charles Wegrzyn – CTO at TwistedStorage Inc. (Check actually built an Open source cloud storage system back in ‘05)

TwistedStorage is open source software that converts multiple storage
repositories, legacy or green-field, into a single petabyte-scale cloud
for unstructured data, digital media storage, and archiving. The Twisted
Storage Enterprise Storage Cloud provides federated search, electronic
data discovery with lock-down, and policy-driven file management
including indexing, retention, security, encryption, format conversion,
information lifecycle management, and automatic business continuity.

History of Building Storage Management software

• Open Source
• Been downloaded 75k times
• Re-wrote – now version 4 – in Python

Common anti-pattern observed in real world:

• Users storing “stuff” in Exchange since that was a convenient place to store it
• Results in a LOT of email storage (and add’l capacity is easy to keep adding on)
• Can’t find your data (too much to logically manage)
• Backups inadequate
• Complexity, complexity, complexity

The Twisted Storage Way

• Federated storage silos w/ adaptors/agents
• Provide enterprise capabilities spanning sites (access control, audits, search/indexing – including support for metadata, simplified administration and recovery)
• Petabyte-scale
• ILM = Information Lifecycle Management
• Open Source
• Work-flow (Python scripts, XML coming)
• Policy-driven (“delete this after 2 years”, “encrypt me”) (Python scripts)

Twisted Storage Design Goals

• Always available content (via replication)
• No back-up or recovery needed (due to replication)
• Linear scalability (scales out)
• Able to trade off durability with performance
• Supports old hardware
• Minimal admin overhead
• Support external storage systems and linkage
• Portable – will run on Linux, Windows, (iPhone?) – due to portable Python implementation
• Pricing: Enterprise Edition: $500 / TB up to 2 PB (annual), minimum $10k for first 20 TB (see web site for full story)
• versus competition like Centera which charge $15k/Silo + Enterprise Edition
• http://www.twistedstorage.com, cwegrzyn@twistedstorage.com

Info Security & Cloud Computing Talk

From Meetup description:  Javed Ikbal (principal and co-founder of zSquad LLC)- will talk about:   “Marketing, Uncertainty and Doubt: Information Security and Cloud Computing”

• What is the minimum security due diligence that a company needs to do before putting it’s data in the cloud?
• Since 2007, Amazon has been telling us they are “.. working with a public accounting firm to … attain certifications such as SAS70 Type II”  but these have not happened in 2+ years.
• On one side of the cloud security issue we have the marketing people, whohype up the existing security and gloss over the non-existing. On the other side we have security services vendors, who hawk their wares by hyping up the lack of security. The truth is, there is a class of data for every cloud out there, and there is also someone who will suffer a data breach because they did not secure it properly.
• We will look at Amazon’s EC2, risk tolerance, and how to secure the data in the cloud.
• Javed is a principal and co-founder of zSquad LLC, a Boston-based information security consulting practice.

Javed is a Security Consultant

Also co-founded http://www.layoffsupportnetwork.com

Formerly worked in Fidelity (in security area)

Cloud Definition

• Elastic – provision up/down on demand (technical)
• Avail from anywhere (technical)
• Pay-as-you-go (business model)

Cloud Challenges

• Data stored in China – gov’t could get at it
• We never have direct access
• May be locked in? (for practical reasons)
• March 7, 2009 from WSJ – Google disclosed that it exposed a “small number” of Google docs – users not supposed to be authorized were able to view them. Google estimated < 0.05% of all stored Google docs were impacted – BUT! – this is a LOT of documents. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/03/08/1214/
• Sept 18, 2009 from NYT – a recent bug in Google Apps allowed students at several colleges to read each other’s emails – this impacted only a “small handful” of colleges (like Brown University, for 3 days)http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/09/18/18/18readwriteweb-whoops-students-going-google-get-to-read-ea-12995.html
• Google’s official policy for paid customers states “at your sole risk” and no guarantee it will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or free from errors
• Amazon states it is not responsible for “deletioreach” – Javedn, destruction, loss” etc.
• Google will not allow customers to audit Google’s cloud storage claims
• Amazon says PCI level 2 compliance is possible with AWS, level 1 not possible
• SAS 70 Type II reports not meaningful unless you can see which controls were evaluated
• “on premise does not mean people are doing the right thing” –Javed
• Perception of more breaches in on-premise systems – but there are so many more of them, it is easy to misinterpret
• Business value of losing data will be balanced against business cost of it being exposed – but this does not account for the PROBABILITY of there being a breach – how do you calculate this risk? I bet it is easier to calculate this risk on the cloud than on premise (though *I* don’t know how to do this)
• We can’t expect all cloud services to be up all the time – right, and many businesses don’t have the data to fairly/accurately compare their own uptimes with those of the cloud vendors – and, further, if the cloud vendors did have 100% up-time, that may destroy the economies we are seeing on the cloud today (it may be 100% reliable, but too expensive to be interesting)
• Off-premise security != in cloud – different security issues for different data
• “There are 2 kinds of companies – those which have had a [data security]breach, and those which are going to have a [data security] breach” -Javed
• Centralization of data makes insider threat a bigger risk
• Customers should perform on-site inspections of cloud provider facilities (but rare?)
• Ask SaaS vendor to see 3rd party audit reports – SalesForce has one, Amazon does not (Google neither? What about Microsoft – not yet?)
• Providers need to be clear about what you will NOT support – e.g., Amazon took 2 years to provide an answer… Amazon/AWS disclaimers are excellent models
• Providers need to understand they may be subject to legal/regulatory discovery due to something a customer did
• Unisys has ISO 27001-certified data centers (high cost, effort)

Creating Secure Software

• Devs care about deadlines and meeting the requirements
• If security is not in the requirements, it will not get done
• if devs don’t know how to code securely, it will not get done right (if at all)
• Train your devs and archs: one day will help with 90% of issues!
• Build security into your software dev life-cycle
• Let security experts, not necessarily developers, write the security requirements
• Secure Code Review can be expensive –  bake in an application security audit into your schedule, to be done before going live
• (high customer extensibility + low provider security responsibility) IaaS – PaaS – SaaS (low customer extensibility + high provider security responsibility)

I gave my first Code Camp talk earlier this year – at the New Hampshire Code Camp in Feb  2009. Have you ever thought about giving a Code Camp talk yourself, but have had trouble getting over the hump from “want to do” to “have done”?

I am considering giving a talk at the upcoming Boston (Waltham) Code Camp 12 titled “So, You Want to Give Your First Code Camp Talk” which will address that. Would that be of interest to you? If so, I’d like to hear from you in advance. Please comment either via comments to this blog post, or email me directly (to codingoutloud at gmail dot com).

What is blocking you from presenting?

From those of you who have successfully presented, do you have pointers for the aspiring speakers among us?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Executive Summary

This post describes some key aspects of your development environment that need to be in place in order to to write and test code for Windows Azure.

Windows XP does not natively support Azure Development

For all the developers running Windows XP face an obstacle to writing code for Windows Azure:  developing for Azure requires Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2008. The fundamental dependency is that the Azure Fabric Controller (which runs on your desktop for development purposes, simulating cloud behavior) relies on IIS 7, which (you guessed it!) ships with Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008.

One option is to upgrade your operating system. If you are not quite ready to do that, you have another option – use Virtual PC to run Windows 7 from Windows XP. (This technique also works to run a virtualized Windows 7 image from Vista – or even Win 7 itself – since maybe you don’t want to foul your machine with beta software, like a sandbox for Visual Studio 2010 while it is still in beta (beta 1 as of this writing)).

Essential Software to Develop for Azure

The four essentials are:

• Have IIS 7.x on one of Windows Vista (Business or Ultimate, I believe) –or– Windows Server 2008 –or– Windows 7
• Install Visual Studio 2010 – currently in beta (beta 1 as of this writing) – or Visual Studio 2008
• Install Azure plug-in – currently in beta – to Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008
• Create an account on Azure hosting in order to deploy to/test on the cloud

I wrote a separate, detailed post on creating a virtual machine image for Windows 7 using Virtual PC 2007.

Executive Summary

This post describes how to install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, followed by a detailed walk-through of how to create a virtual machine image of a fresh Windows 7 installation using Virtual PC 2007.

In this post I concentrate on creating a Virtual PC image for Windows 7, but the steps for the other operating systems are similar.

Note this post deals with concerns for Developers. This post does not cover use of (related) virtualization techniques which are very popular today on the server-side.

Why Use Virtual Machines?

There are several reasons to use a Virtual PC-managed virtual machine for development:

You don’t want to install CTP or beta software directly on your development machine. A virtual machine environment makes it easy to manage these without risking your real machine.

You want to experiment. You may want to try out some testing with 4 GB or RAM, then maybe with 1/2 GB or RAM – so you know what to expect. Or you to keep testing something that changes your machine – and need to “start from scratch” frequently.

You want to run multiple operating systems. You may want to run Windows 7 to make sure your apps run fine on it – but you also don’t want to give up XP quite yet. You can run Windows 7 within a Windows XP host.

You want to set up a machine configuration and reuse it. You go through a lot of trouble to get your configuration “just so” and now want to share that with colleagues – or with yourself (on your home machine).

Virtual Machine images make all these scenarios possible! Let’s get down to business and walk through how to install & configure these virtual images.

Installing Virtual PC 2007

Visit the download page for Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and then select the appropriate version for your system (that is, 32- or 64-bit version).

Once downloaded, install it.

If you already have an earlier version of Virtual PC installed, you will likely see this self-explanatory message to install the older version.

Go to your trusty Add or Remove Programs applet and remove any remnants of old Virtual PC installs and proceed.

Installing Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

.. fill in your own info here, of course.

I kept the default installation location and let it rip. It completed around 2 minutes later.

Create fresh Windows 7 virtual machine environment using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

You may wish to run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor on your machine to make sure Windows 7 will be happy (as of this writing, the upgrade advisor tool is in beta). Assuming that goes well..

Run Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. From the opening screen, click the “New…” button:

The wizard will start. Click the “Next >” button:

Select “Create a virtual machine” and click “Next >” button…

Give your new Virtual Machine an appropriate name:

I also changed my location:

Select “Other” as Operating system and click “Next >” …

The recommended RAM will likely not be sufficient, so click “Adjusting the RAM” option:

How much memory is right? Considering Windows 7 system requirements (which call for at least 1 GB in the 32-bit version) and Visual Studio 2010 (beta 1) system requirements (which also calls for 1 GB (though not an additional 1 GB), you will hopefully be able to allocate at least 1 GB. I have 3 GB on my host machine, so I allocated 1.5 GB (1024 MB + 512 MB = 1536 MB). These values can also be tweaked later using Virtual PC.

For disk space, you have another set of decisions – Windows 7 wants 15 GB, Visual Studio 2010 wants 3 GB, so I rounded up to a nice even 18.5 GB (since I don’t have an abundance of space here):

Click “Next >” and you are almost done with this step.

Click “Finish” and now we are in business within Virtual PC:

Click on “Azure Dev” (or whatever you called your image) and click “Start” button to proceed:

If you have trouble starting your virtual machine due to not enough memory available, as in the following message, you either need to adjust its memory requirements of free up some memory.

You might consider throttling back your Anti-Virus software which could be a big consumer of memory (I disabled the on-the-fly file-system protection). Also, of course, close all unnecessary processes. The long-term solution is to buy a 64-bit machine with oodles of memory and be happy with that.

Once you have enough memory available, you will see the virtual machine complain very soon as it craps out after spinning up and thinking for a couple of minutes:

This is expected. You still need to install Windows 7 to move this along. To do this, make sure you have a ready-to-go image of Windows 7 as an ISO file (as you might download from MSDN) or physical media. You have two menu options, one for each of these cases:

In my case, I selected “Capture ISO Image…” and installed from there. Note that you navigate your host file-system for the ISO image to capture – not the file-system on your virtual machine, since that does not yet exist.

Click “Open” and notice how the CD menu on the virtual machine has been updated:

Now you can reboot your virtual machine to let the installation on the captured ISO image run (as if it was auto-starting to install on a physical machine). To reboot, choose Reset from the Action menu:

You will be warned:

But since you don’t have any unsaved changes to worry about, select the Reset button and proceed with the reset. (You have saved some information, you may be thinking, like memory and hard disk configuration; but that is all metadata about your image – not changes within the virtual machine itself – so there is no problem here.)

The reset begins…

Here is a warning which we will come back to. Dismiss this for now:

The system will chug and chug for a looong time – mine took around two hours to run (the good news is I let this run while I was watching the New England Patriots game this Sunday; the bad news is the Patriots fell to the Jets):

You will then proceed to install Windows 7 … mostly you will be just moving along without much fanfare, though you will need to name your “computer”, come up with a username (and optionally a password), and will need your Activation Key for Windows 7. Here is another good guide for installing Windows 7 on Virtual PC 2007. (And another.)

After you get Windows 7 all configured, you probably still want to come back and install some updates:

But that’s the end of the detailed tour. You should now have a usable baseline virtual machine image that you can reuse, share, play with, etc. Make sure you create a back-up copy! And have a look at the features which allow you to manage roll-backs.

Good luck!

Coming soon – a new user group for the Boston/Cambridge/Waltham area:

The Boston Azure User Group will focus on Cloud Computing, specifically as it relates to Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.

This group will likely kick-off in October 2009 – exact date to be determined - exact dates have now been determined – now working on the times   – see the Boston Azure User Group site for details and updates – and to join the mailing list.

What would YOU like to see covered in the meetings of the Boston Azure User Group? Please leave a comment with your thoughts / feedback.

And see you at the Boston Azure User Group!

Agile Development Practices Podcast

Delivered as a Podcast Mashup

Executive Summary

I’ve created a Podcast Mashup on SpokenWord.org. This is a hand-picked collection of episodes selected from assorted Podcasts (from other, currently-available sources, nothing originated by me!) which provided particularly insightful coverage of topics important in Agile Development Practices.

The RSS feed is here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AgileDevPractices (wrapped by Feedburner so I have some idea of how many folks are using it).

Be aware that subscribing to a feed containing more than one episode will often only download for you the latest episode, unless you specifically ask for others.

A longer, more detailed discussion follows.

Motivation for Providing a Curated Feed

Okay, I admit it: I have been a heavy user of Podcasts for a very long time. I’ve been using audio downloaded from the web since before iPods existed and RSS feeds were pervasive – and surely long before the term Podcast became part of our vocabulary.

This screen clipping from iTunes is showing there are a whopping 3,754 podcast episodes sitting on my hard disk; good thing I have a spacious 160GB iPod Video Classic!

Yes, I have several thousand episodes from a wide-range of Podcasts – from 120 Podcast feeds – all sitting in iTunes on my hard disk, and being sync’d to my trusty iPod Video Classic, consuming around 75% of its 160 gigabytes. I suppose this makes me clinically addicted. But I’m okay with that.

Many (okay, most) of my podcasts are technical in nature – I take my profession (software development) very seriously and remain permanently paranoid about ever falling behind or getting stale. I listen to a lot of excellent material (while commuting, at gym, out walking, though not while sleeping).

It is rather easy for me to recognize a worthwhile episode on a topic of interest and mark it on my iPod for future reference. (I do this by setting the episode’s “rating” – 0-5 stars – taking advantage of one of the few updates one can make on an iPod that gets sync’d back to iTunes.)

Now I want to offer something back by spreading the word. So I figure, if I am identifying these for my own benefit anyway, why not share these back with the community. I don’t know of anyone else doing this sort of curation.

By the way, I think this matters because of the astounding number of podcasts available out in the wild. I could not find a definitive number, but Steve Jobs announced back in 2007 – nearly exactly two years before this writing – that 125,000 podcasts were being published through iTunes. I believe there is value in helping each other navigate the resources available on a variety of topics – from software development to knitting. We all have limited time and we want to spend it well.

The SpokenWord.org Platform for Podcast Mashups

The cool guys like Doug Kaye who bring us the Conversations Network – with channels for IT Conversations, Social Innovation, and the recently added Computer Human Interaction (CHI) channel CHI Conversations – have gone Web 2.0 on us and are working hard on a platform – SpokenWord.org – which essentially lets individuals curate our own mini-channels, which SpokenWord calls Collections. We can share out our Collections via RSS feeds (plus other consumption options for those who create an account), which of course is the interesting part.

SpokenWord is not actually hosting any audio – SpokenWord only references existing audio (individual files or whole feeds) visible already on the web. So… This makes a SpokenWord Collection close to the moral equivalent of a bunch of Twitter Retweets – other people’s content re-disseminated. Or you could think about this as cross-cutting concern where the system is the podosphere and this related set of podcast episodes from across many podcasts is included in one convenient place (like an XML config file in an application, though this config file is an RSS feed). Or it is just like a list of recommended books; a useful list of recommended books is not just all the books from certain publishers; it is always more nuanced and far more focused than that or it just ain’t useful!

I like to think about this approach to curating & republishing as a Podcast Mashup, which I am defining as follows..

A Podcast Mashup is a curated Podcast with a theme. A Podcast Mashup is built by selectively including episodes from various sources – usually podcasts, but could even include an MP3 hanging out on the web – and combines these into a thematic whole.

This is in contrast to a feed that just aggregates other feeds; a Podcast Mashup is curated – it is selective – you want to tune in because it is “the best of” – not just “all of” – the topic. If there are two excellent episodes on the same topic, the curator may choose to just include one since there was not enough difference between the two.

Using SpokenWord’s Collection feature, I created my first Podcast Mashup this weekend on a topic of great interest to me and presumably many others: my theme is Agile Development Practices.

The process was fairly straightforward.

1. Identify the podcast episodes of interest – the best ones that match your theme. I did this by marking them on my iPod using the zero-to-five star rating system supported on my iPod. I collected these ratings over many months of listening.
2. The ratings are sync’d back to iTunes – so I created a Smart Playlist (filterted to only show 5-star-rated podcast episodes) to show them all at once.
3. Make sure the episodes are known to the SpokenWord system (only 4 of the initial 16 episodes in my collection were already in SpokenWord; I needed to add 12, which surprised me); see the SpokenWord Collections FAQ for instructions for doing this. Note that I added individual episodes – which SpokenWord refers to as a program.  I did not add the entire feeds so that I could curate at the episode (program) level; this is important!
4. Create a Collection to hold your Podcast Mashup episodes (I called mine “Agile Development Practices”)
5. Add each episode of interest to my “Agile Development Practices” Collection
6. Write a blog post about it and share the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AgileDevPractices

[I encourage you to check out SpokenWord.org more generally to see what else is there - I am using it more and more - and may even play with the SpokenWord API.]

What are “Agile Development Practices” anyway?

I’m glad you asked. This is the theme of my first Podcast Mashup.

Agile Developer Practices - a Podcast Mashup

Basically I am thinking about modern tactics used on the ground by today’s agile developers and development teams that just make them better. Unit Testing. Test-Driven-Development (TDD). Behavior-Driven-Development (BDD). Inversion of Control (IoC) containers. Continuous Integration. Philosophies around how to structure code (e.g., SOLID principles, Law of Demeter). Agile. Lean. Metrics (e.g., Cyclomatic Complexity – did you know it can help you know whether you have sufficient unit test coverage?). The unifying theme is those practices that some of the most successful developers are adopting. Stuff you may want to be processing so you can start to use, increase your use, improve your use, or help decide whether to use.

The content of each episode deals with one or more aspect. Usually the episodes are technology-agnostic, applicable to a Java, C#, Ruby, or Python developer, for example. (Some patterns may be deemed less applicable to some languages, especially Ruby and Python, but I won’t get into that here.)

Getting this to work in iTunes

Making this work in iTunes – or your favorite Podcatcher – ought to be straight-forward. In iTunes, simply add the podcast using the Agile Development Practices RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/AgileDevPractices). In iTunes, this is accessed under the “Advanced” menu, via the “Subscribe to Podcast…” option and will look something like this:

Under "Options" menu, choose "Subscribe to Podcast..." then provide an RSS feeed URL in this dialog

iTunes Only Includes First Episode

When you first add a Podcast feed to iTunes (or other Podcatchers), if there is more than one episode, only the latest episode will be included. This may or may not be what you want generally, but in the case of a Podcast Mashup, you probably will want to manually add more episodes to your download list.

A feed with many existing episodes is treated passively by iTunes; you need to click "Get All" or click specific "Get" buttons to include others (Click on the image to zoom in)

If you want to include all of the episodes in the Podcast the first time you load it up, you can click on the “GET ALL” button.

Alternatively, you can expand the Podcast feed in iTunes (by clicking the triangle to the left of the Podcast title) and then clicking individual “GET” buttons.

What other Podcast Mashups ought to exist?

Do you find this idea useful? Is this the right granularity? Or would, say, separate Podcast Mashups for TDD, BDD, DI, and Unit Testing make sense? Or some other cut at it…

What other Podcast Mashup topics would you find useful? Which ones might you offer?

Your feedback is welcome.

Jared Spool spoke at a Refresh Boston user group meeting on Thu May 28 in Cambridge, MA. During his talk, which was titled What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?, Spool delved into some common ways User Experience (UX) goes wrong and some ways to make sure this doesn’t happen to you. My personal notes/interpretations follow; if you think I got it wrong or want to offer alternative interpretations, feel free to comment.

Executive Summary

• Understand your users and their levels of skill/knowledge 
• Understand the skill level needed by users of your software
• Identify any gaps between the actual and needed skills (see two points above)
• Design the software to bridge these skill gaps (which may vary from one user to the next)
• Test your assumptions with real users to make sure you did everything right (Yogi Berra was right when he said You Can Observe A Lot By Watching!)

How to Create Non-Intuitive User Interfaces

First, some counter-examples – easy paths to UX Failure – how to be Non-Intuitive:

• Do the unexpected: Spool showed an example of a site that used * (asterisk) to indicated those field “not required” which is opposite of popular convention. UX Fail.
• Implement non-standard & sub-substandard behaviour: Spool showed a beautifully designed (visually appealing) site  with custom scrollbar that didn’t work right (pretty but not functional). They had implemented their own scrollbar functionality to get the look they wanted – but a fully-functional scrollbar is really hard to do well – theirs was jerky and unpredictable. UX Fail. (Plus a bonus Form Follows Function Fail.)
• Be non-intuitive: Spool showed “Hay Net” - a very simple site to help sellers and buyers of hay find each other. This site had two main choices on the front page – “have hay”, “want hay” – but user testing showed that about half the time “have hay” was chosen to find someone who has hay, and the rest of the time chosen when I am the one who has the hay. (This might qualify as what my old friend Julianne would call “Escher words” – where the meaning flips back and forth in your mind between alternative viable interpretations much like certain of M. C. Escher’s artwork). Wording was not intuitive, even though it was very simple. UX Fail.
• Add non-core features until your application is large and complex: The larger and more complex an app, the harder it is to keep it intuitive. This was a general comment from the Q&A, supported by examples in his talk [Wang dedicated word processors were very complex (requiring 1-2 weeks of training to use), supplanted by WordStar, supplanted in turn by simpler Word Perfect, later supplanted itself by simpler Word (after Word Perfect had grown more complex), and now Word is really complex - tens of toolbars, including one for editing 3D graphics]. But simple does not imply intuitive (see “Hay Net” example above). UX Fail, again and again.

Different Kinds of People

• Key point: Intuitive is personal – maybe it works for me, not for you — it is unlikely that all possible users have identical knowledge
• Prior experience of the user matters – where are the on the Knowledge Continuum?

What is this Knowledge Continuum you speak of? Imagine a continuum where the left-most end is “No knowledge” and the right-most end is “Full knowledge” and your UI is designed for users somewhere on that continuum. If the user’s current level of knowledge is less than the level to which you target your design, your software has a problem – there is a gap that needs to be overcome.

A design is intuitive if the Current Level of Knowledge = Target Level of Knowledge, or if the gap is small enough such that it can be bridged with good UI design. If the gap is too large, you may need training (whether online on in-person).

Two types of Knowledge

• Tool Knowledge (for a specific tool – Word, Visual Studio, TurboTax)
• Domain Knowledge (independent of this (or any specific) tool - writing, developing in C#, creating personal tax return with weak tax-code depth)

Techniques for Creating Intuitive Designs

• Field Studies (watch your users in action)
• Usability Studies
• Personas
• Patterns (reuse known good patterns)

Specific Examples for Creating Intuitive Designs

• Bring Target closer to Current w/o resorting to training or help. This means your software needs to target the right knowledge level – find that target using the techniques listed above – remember: Developer/Designer does not have same knowledge level as User (at least mostly true).
• Wizards can reduce target knowledge requirements (bridging that knowledge gap).
• If your user base consists of very different Current Knowledge levels (e.g., home tax preparation vs. professional tax preparers) you can create two (or more?) specialized/targeted applications.
• Every six weeks, every member of design team needs to watch users using the design for two hours.
• Don’t hire an agency to design your experience. (Spool thought it was fine to have an agency implement your application, but you need to design it first if you want to be successful.)

Further Information

Here is an older article by Jared Spool on the same topic as this talk: http://www.uie.com/articles/design_intuitive/ (thanks Joan).

UIE Resources

• UIETips – newsletter (free)
• UIE Virtual Seminars (looks like they are $129 each - about 30 of them)
• Reports ($?)
• Conferences
• Blog: www.uie.com/brainsparks
• Site: www.uie.com
• I don’ t recall Spool mentioning their podcast, but that’s another free resource: http://www.uie.com/podcast/ (I have it on my ipod)

At the beginning of an XML document, the XML declaration can optionally declare the document’s encoding format. This typically looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>


Sometimes you’ll see the encoding as “UTF-8″ or “UTF-16″ (all caps), sometimes as “utf-8″ or “utf-16″ (lowercase). Which is correct? Or are both correct? The short answer is that the uppercase variant is preferred, but both are allowed, though that does not ensure that both variants are widely supported. This suggests the following recommended approach:

Be forgiving when reading, strict when writing. When consuming XML, you are fully standards-compliant by supporting case-insensitive parsing of the encoding format. When producing XML, you are still standards-compliant by generating an uppercase encoding format, while also more likely to be readable by potential consumers.

Often the journey is more interesting than the destination when it comes to deciphering Internet standards; read on for the gory details.

Hmmm... should "UTF-8" be in uppercase, or is it lowercase?

At first blush, the lowercase usage appears consistent with XHTML (which requires elements and attributes to be lowercase) – but does this convention apply to an XML Processing Instruction (which is metadata, not content)?

According to the W3C Recommendation for Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition) section 4.3.3 Character Encoding in Entities:

“XML processors SHOULD match character encoding names in a case-insensitive way and SHOULD either interpret an IANA-registered name as the encoding registered at IANA for that name or treat it as unknown.”

Looking up the values in the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) registry for the official spellings of the encoding values, you will find “UTF-8″ and “UTF-16″ – listed in uppercase. IANA also cross-references RFC-3629 which also goes with all caps. And all of the examples around the XML Recommendation seem to use uppercase exclusively.

So the uppercase versions appear to be the “right” ones.

But are the lowercase versions actually wrong? They might be. The meaning of the word “SHOULD” in the above quoted text is governed by RFC 2119 where it is defined to mean:

“… that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.”

If the writers of the XML specification wanted to insist that processors always treat this in a case-insensitive manner, the word “MUST” would have been used from RFC 2119.

So a processor can choose to ignore the part of the XML Recommendation where case-insensitive processing is suggested, and still be within the standard. A processor must always support uppercase; further, a processor only supporting uppercase is perfectly legal. Even if an uppercase only processor seems unlikely, I’m going to standardize on all caps when I create XML files.

What about other character encodings, or what if one is not specified?

A character encoding need not be explicitly specified; if it is not specified,  UTF-8 is default.

UTF-8 and UTF-16 are “universally” supported by XML parsers (by standard requirement); ISO-8859-1 is also often supported, but that char set is less complete (e.g., euro symbol missing).

Wikipedia says:

“The root element can be preceded by an optional XML declaration. This element states what version of XML is in use (normally 1.0); it may also contain information about character encoding and external dependencies.

The specification requires that processors of XML support the pan-Unicode character encodings UTF-8 and UTF-16 (UTF-32 is not mandatory). The use of more limited encodings, such as those based on ISO/IEC 8859, is acknowledged and is widely used and supported.”

These details and conventions are important to anyone generating XML files, such as for bloggers and podcasters publishing in the RSS and ATOM formats.

In summary, if you are producing XML files, it is best to output uppercase “UTF-8″ and “UTF-16″ since that is always known to be supported. If you are consuming XML files, it is advisable to accept both uppercase and lowercase variants since both are permissible within a strict interpretation of the, uh, “letter” of the standards. And if you are consuming XML files, be sure to handle the case where the optional encoding is not specified at all; the default value is “UTF-8″ if nothing else is specified.

Also of interest:

• RFC 3629
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
• http://htmlpurifier.org/docs/enduser-utf8.html
• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
• http://guru.multimedia.cx/utf-8/
• http://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-20070409/189381.html

Blogged with Flock

Tags: xmlencoding, creating podcast feeds

I have spoken a few times recently (NH Code Camp 1 on 28-Feb-2009, Beantown .NET User Group on 05-Mar-2009, and Boston Code Camp 11 on 28-Mar-2009) on building composite applications for Silverlight and WPF using Prism (which is officially known as Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight). The slide deck and sample code are essentially the same in all cases, so I am only posting them once.

• Building Composite Application for Silverlight and WFP using Prism – Slides
• Sample application – Save As Podcast code

Recall from the talk that the Save As Podcast code was a (partial) demonstration of moving from “old school” code-behind WinForm pattern into Silverlight and WPF using a newer, cleaner pattern called Model-View-ViewModel and going on to leverage functionality specific to Prism. This code is a partial transformation of that code. To compile, you should first install Prism (aka Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight) and then essentially replace the “Hello World” QuickStart with this code – that will make your life easier since the projects will retain the relative links to other libraries.

I am playing with TagLib#, an Open Source library that supports reading and updating ID3 metadata from MP3 files. I ran across the following error — “a generic error occurred in gdi+” — displaying a bitmap image I pulled from the MP3 file.

   TagLib.File file = TagLib.File.Create(@"foo.mp3");
   int pictureCount = file.Tag.Pictures.Length;
   System.Drawing.Bitmap bmp = null;
   if (pictureCount > 0)
   {
      System.IO.MemoryStream pictureBitstream = new System.IO.MemoryStream(
                                                    file.Tag.Pictures[0].Data.Data);
      bmp = new System.Drawing.Bitmap(pictureBitstream);
      pictureBitstream.Close();

      string fn = "foo.jpg";

      // create thumbnail
      using (System.Drawing.Image thumb =
                      bmp.GetThumbnailImage(10, 10,
                               new System.Drawing.Image.GetThumbnailImageAbort(
                                        delegate { return false; }),
                               IntPtr.Zero))
      {
         thumb.Save(Response.OutputStream, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Jpeg);
      }
   }

The “a generic error occurred in gdi+” message is not very helpful. I did some googling and came up with a few helpful posts on the matter, including several that appeared to be different problems. Looks like 4 Guys from Rolla have functional code.

My problem was in closing the stream too soon, which was not obvious to me at first, though makes some sense. The fix is to defer

      pictureBitstream.Close();

until after the Bitmap object is done with its work. I was initially under the illusion that once I’d created the stream for the image it read the whole image; of course that’s not true – it is not read in until it is read in.

I would submit this is a confusing UI design. Developers deserve better affordances. Good thing an exception was thrown; otherwise, this may have blown up later in a less obvious manner or at a less convenient time.

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Henry David Thoreau from Walden

I am embarking on a coding adventure – and I plan to blog as I go. In effect, Coding Out Loud – thus the name of this blog. I do not know whether anyone will read this blog or follow my adventures, but I will give it a try anyway. I expect many of my posts will be the kind I would personally like to find – the kind I may even refer back to from time to time for reference – because it will in part be a repository of useful information, hard-won insights, interesting approaches, and documentation of thought processes for making trade-offs. My technology orientation right now is ASP.NET 2.0.

I have been a blog reader for a long time and a big fan of podcasting since its early years. For podcast listening, since September 2007 I have owned a sixth-generation iPod Video with 160 GB of space (bigger than hard drives on most of my computers – including my work computer – and I am a professional developer!); I do watch some video on this (e.g., TED), but I do like me some big hard drive (my older iPod nano constantly ran out of space from too many podcasts).

Since I am now embarking on blogging for myself the first time, I will try to make sense of features of WordPress (categories or tags?), technorati, feedburner, and others of the many technologies & services out there. Which should I care about – and why. This process may spawn blog posts.

I also do have a day job but I will not blog on it. So my adventures will be “off hours” – mornings, nights, weekends mostly – on my solo projects.

So, in summary, this blog will encompass my adventures coding + my adventures blogging (or podcasting someday..).

So the journey begins…