Kevin Hoffman, editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's iPhone Developer's Journal, is Technical Chair of iPhone Developer Summit. He has been programming since he was 10 and has written everything from DOS shareware to n-tier, enterprise web applications in VB, C++, Delphi, and C. Hoffman is coauthor of Professional .NET Framework (Wrox Press) and co-author with Robert Foster of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed. He authors The .NET Addict's Blog at .NET Developer's Journal.
One of the biggest problems about this year's PDC is the sheer volume of new stuff that has been unleashed upon us. Some clickbaiters like Joe Wilcox are in "Bash Microsoft" mode and are calling the Azure platform "vaporware" (yes, despite the fact that we've been able to actually buil...
I have been listening to a lot of people tell me that I should be using Ruby for my Silverlight development because the dynamic language dramatically simplifies common development tasks and that my Silverlight applications will be quicker to market, cooler, more elegant, and indeed wil...
Windows Azure's concepts of Web Role and Worker Role is absolutely, totally, and unequivocably a game-changer in the world of cloud computing. The best thing we've had prior to this were cloud-hosted VMs that had a predefined stack (e.g. ASP.NET or J2EE or PHP or Cold Fusion, etc) to w...
What I see when I look ahead for Silverlight isn't just some simple RIA technology. No, what I see is the potential for a game-changing developer experience that could be as big as the transition from COM to .NET back in 2000 (you DID drop COM back in 2000 didn't you? :)). Picture this...
With all of the hype surrounding Cloud computing, Microsoft's upcoming Cloud OS and current efforts around Live Mesh, I thought I would take a trip on the WABAC machine to look at where it all started. Back when I was in junior high school, the best type of connectivity that I could ho...
I am currently of the mindset that Android should be considered a wait and see technology. The iPhone SDK sports the best mobile application deployment and purchasing channel on the market, but can be problematic for enterprises and apps requiring high levels of security. Also, there i...
Rest assured that I'll be commenting further on this subject, but I wanted to post letting people know that the floodgates are about to open. I'm guessing iPhone bloggers are going to start posting massive amounts of code samples in the coming days. Good times for all... It's just a sh...
I'll keep this blog post short and sweet because the more I think about it the more I get close to the verge of exploding.
Here's my situation: I had Visual Studio 2008 Professional installed. From scratch, clean install. Everything works great, all is good in the Microsoft world of ....
An NDA is something that you volunteer for, it is willful act, you must choose to agree to the terms of the NDA. No one is forcing you to do it, there are no guns pointed at your head. If you do not like or agree with the terms of the NDA, then do not sign it. However, if you do choose...
I don't need to go into too much detail here about what exactly REST is - I know that most of the readers of this blog are well versed in Web Services technologies and architectural patterns. The thing that I want to cover is that REST is an architectural decision, it is not a protocol...
So how does this relate to MobileMe? MobileMe is, according to Phil Schiller's keynote, 'Exchange for the rest of us'. What this means is that using MobileMe, you will receive push contacts, push e-mail, and push calendar notifications. This will work with any MobileMe-aware applicatio...
Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to ...
To quickly recap from the previous article, a peer network is a logical graph of computers (or applications, depending on your abstraction level) which are connected in some way. In a pure serverless peer network, there is no single designated machine in the network that holds more or ...
I took the advice of a friend of mine and steered clear of the 'normal' movie theaters and went a little out of the way to go to a DLP movie theater. The experience of comparing a regular movie theater to a DLP movie theater is like comparing standard def analog TV with a 1080i HDTV si...
During my last trip to Best Buy, on a whim I picked up a DVI-to-HDMI connector (male DVI, female HDTV). This little doohickey plugs into the side of my Macbook Pro and then I plug the HDMI cable into that. I run the other end of the HDMI cable into the HDTV and I get something that is ...
It seems as though whenever I bring up PNRP and its benefits, I am immediately inundated with a list of questions or comments indicating that Microsoft is re-inventing the wheel and that PNRP has already been implemented before in the form of ZeroConf and, more specifically, Apple's im...
CLINQ v1.1 has been released. Some of you may have already downloaded some of the new builds, but here's a rundown of what the new release includes: Support for Continuous Aggregation. Now, in addition to being able to have your result sets automatically update themselves in response t...
You remember back in the early days of video games when there wasn't enough capacity on the carts themselves to support 30 hours of gameplay? What was the solution to keep you playing? They made the games unbelievably freaking difficult. Try playing Kid Icarus now after having played a...
Silverlight 2.0 is a freaking phenomenal RIA development environment and I would actually, at this point, put the development experience in Silverlight 2.0 above and beyond Flex. I can do more faster and have it look better and run more efficiently in Silverlight 2.0 than I can in Flex...
Silverlight 2.0 kicks ass and I can't wait to start dropping more hardcore blog posts regarding it. Scott Guthrie's tutorials are a fantastic place to start. The issue I have, however, is that all of the tutorials assume you have installed Silverlight 2.0 tools for VS 2008. There is a ...
If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to becom...
I want to thank everyone who showed up to share my enthusiasm for the iPhone as it is, what I believe, the mobile development platform to target. I also want to thank those people who tolerated my evasiveness and lack of detail during the SDK session. As I've said before, just because ...
So you're building your data-driven application and you've got an ADO.NET Entity Model that represents an abstraction around your database. Maybe you're even pretty savvy and you've used inheritance and some filters to enhance the entity model so that it really is an entity model and n...
During the Q&A period after one of my sessions at the iPhone Developer Summit last Thursday, there was someone there from Microsoft Competetive Intelligence. She asked myself and some other folks who were lingering nearby to describe, in our unbiased opinions, what we thought was wrong...
This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for m...
So, to start with, I need to preface this blog post with a notice: The contents of the SDK as well as the experiences that occur while using the SDK are confidential. Yes, I am one of those crazy-weird people who read EULAs and license agreements. When you agree to installing the SDK, ...
Ever since the iPhone was first displayed, people have been wondering if there was going to be any kind of Flash support for the iPhone. Initially, I think the response from Jobs was 'maybe', but I took that as a 'nope'. There are hundreds of reasons why Flash doesn't make sense on the...
I love reading about how these people have inside sources. If an inside source within Apple was leaking information like that, that information source wouldn't be working for Apple much longer. No matter how close these friends of Apple employees may be, those Apple employees aren't ta...
Anytime you can create a blog post about the .NET Framework that also includes borrowed half-quotations from Lord of the Rings, you've got to take that opportunity. Like pretty much every other RIA developer, I am sitting back anxiously awaiting the arrival of Silverlight 2.0. Silverli...
Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. This upcoming Beta1 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), c...
I was reading news feeds when I read a blog post that included some quotes from Bill Gates. Bill was quoted as saying that Windows 7 will make the keyboard and mouse far less important than in the past. We've all heard that crap before, it's typically what Bill used to say before attem...
The DreamSpark program is one of the newest initiatives to come out of Redmond that are very, very un-Microsoft-like. I'll talk about another later in this post. It appears as though University and high school students will, at some point (I don't know the hardcore details) be able to ...
There were a total of four Macbook Airs on display, as well as a bunch of other shiny things that I wanted to touch. At first, I wasn't really all that interested in the MBA. I had previously done some number crunching and determined that for me, the price-per-feature was too high to j...
So is O'Reilly actually condoning the hacking of the phones? O'Reilly has had a long and prestigious history as being the ultimate source for *nix manuals, including many books that became so dogeared I actually bought multiple copies, including dozens of 'in a nutshell' books. Back in...
So here's my precarious situation: I'm writing some sample web applications for the iPhone. Every once in a while, I poke around using Ruby on Rails, but by and large my web development lately has consisted entirely of the ASP.NET MVC framework CTP. I also don't own a PC anymore - I ow...
In a typical AJAX application, your goal is often to have the user click something. In response, JavaScript goes out and (through the magic of XML HTTP Requests) obtains data and potentially modifies data on a server as well. Using the returned data, the JavaScript can then directly ma...
OK OK, so I admit I'm already running version 1.1.3 of the iPhone firmware. While I think it's fantastic that I now get the ability to add web icons to the home screen, and that the home screen has multiple pages, I usually spend my first few minutes on a new version of the firmware lo...
Think about this: If I wait a couple weeks until I can lay hands on one in a store before ordering, a shiny new Macbook Air might arrive just in time for the iPhone SDK, giving me the perfect iPhone development machine since the iPhone GUI doesn't require the same amount of screen real...
I plugged in the iPhone and now I've got several episodes worth of 'The Universe' that I can watch in the palm of my hand while I'm on the train. I'm sure everybody reading this has already realized how cool this ability is, but I'm new to the whole video conversion thing. So with the ...
Who am I to break with the tradition of spinning wild flights of fancy in the spirit of Apple lovers everywhere and calling them predictions? Just about every site on the net that is even remotely related to technology is now fully caught up in the buzz and hype and has posted their pr...
Kevin Hoffman, editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's iPhone Developer's Journal, is Technical Chair of iPhone Developer Summit. He has been programming since he was 10 and has written everything from DOS shareware to n-tier, enterprise web applications in VB, C++, Delphi, and C. Hoffman is coauthor of Professional .NET Framework (Wrox Press) and co-author with Robert Foster of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed. He authors The .NET Addict's Blog at .NET Developer's Journal. 
One of the biggest problems about this year's PDC is the sheer volume of new stuff that has been unleashed upon us. Some clickbaiters like Joe Wilcox are in "Bash Microsoft" mode and are calling the Azure platform "vaporware" (yes, despite the fact that we've been able to actually buil...
I have been listening to a lot of people tell me that I should be using Ruby for my Silverlight development because the dynamic language dramatically simplifies common development tasks and that my Silverlight applications will be quicker to market, cooler, more elegant, and indeed wil...
Windows Azure's concepts of Web Role and Worker Role is absolutely, totally, and unequivocably a game-changer in the world of cloud computing. The best thing we've had prior to this were cloud-hosted VMs that had a predefined stack (e.g. ASP.NET or J2EE or PHP or Cold Fusion, etc) to w...
What I see when I look ahead for Silverlight isn't just some simple RIA technology. No, what I see is the potential for a game-changing developer experience that could be as big as the transition from COM to .NET back in 2000 (you DID drop COM back in 2000 didn't you? :)). Picture this...
With all of the hype surrounding Cloud computing, Microsoft's upcoming Cloud OS and current efforts around Live Mesh, I thought I would take a trip on the WABAC machine to look at where it all started. Back when I was in junior high school, the best type of connectivity that I could ho...
I am currently of the mindset that Android should be considered a wait and see technology. The iPhone SDK sports the best mobile application deployment and purchasing channel on the market, but can be problematic for enterprises and apps requiring high levels of security. Also, there i...
Rest assured that I'll be commenting further on this subject, but I wanted to post letting people know that the floodgates are about to open. I'm guessing iPhone bloggers are going to start posting massive amounts of code samples in the coming days. Good times for all... It's just a sh...
I'll keep this blog post short and sweet because the more I think about it the more I get close to the verge of exploding.
Here's my situation: I had Visual Studio 2008 Professional installed. From scratch, clean install. Everything works great, all is good in the Microsoft world of ....
An NDA is something that you volunteer for, it is willful act, you must choose to agree to the terms of the NDA. No one is forcing you to do it, there are no guns pointed at your head. If you do not like or agree with the terms of the NDA, then do not sign it. However, if you do choose...
I don't need to go into too much detail here about what exactly REST is - I know that most of the readers of this blog are well versed in Web Services technologies and architectural patterns. The thing that I want to cover is that REST is an architectural decision, it is not a protocol...
So how does this relate to MobileMe? MobileMe is, according to Phil Schiller's keynote, 'Exchange for the rest of us'. What this means is that using MobileMe, you will receive push contacts, push e-mail, and push calendar notifications. This will work with any MobileMe-aware applicatio...
Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to ...
I took the advice of a friend of mine and steered clear of the 'normal' movie theaters and went a little out of the way to go to a DLP movie theater. The experience of comparing a regular movie theater to a DLP movie theater is like comparing standard def analog TV with a 1080i HDTV si...
During my last trip to Best Buy, on a whim I picked up a DVI-to-HDMI connector (male DVI, female HDTV). This little doohickey plugs into the side of my Macbook Pro and then I plug the HDMI cable into that. I run the other end of the HDMI cable into the HDTV and I get something that is ...
It seems as though whenever I bring up PNRP and its benefits, I am immediately inundated with a list of questions or comments indicating that Microsoft is re-inventing the wheel and that PNRP has already been implemented before in the form of ZeroConf and, more specifically, Apple's im...
CLINQ v1.1 has been released. Some of you may have already downloaded some of the new builds, but here's a rundown of what the new release includes: Support for Continuous Aggregation. Now, in addition to being able to have your result sets automatically update themselves in response t...
You remember back in the early days of video games when there wasn't enough capacity on the carts themselves to support 30 hours of gameplay? What was the solution to keep you playing? They made the games unbelievably freaking difficult. Try playing Kid Icarus now after having played a...
Silverlight 2.0 is a freaking phenomenal RIA development environment and I would actually, at this point, put the development experience in Silverlight 2.0 above and beyond Flex. I can do more faster and have it look better and run more efficiently in Silverlight 2.0 than I can in Flex...
Silverlight 2.0 kicks ass and I can't wait to start dropping more hardcore blog posts regarding it. Scott Guthrie's tutorials are a fantastic place to start. The issue I have, however, is that all of the tutorials assume you have installed Silverlight 2.0 tools for VS 2008. There is a ...
If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to becom...
I want to thank everyone who showed up to share my enthusiasm for the iPhone as it is, what I believe, the mobile development platform to target. I also want to thank those people who tolerated my evasiveness and lack of detail during the SDK session. As I've said before, just because ...
So you're building your data-driven application and you've got an ADO.NET Entity Model that represents an abstraction around your database. Maybe you're even pretty savvy and you've used inheritance and some filters to enhance the entity model so that it really is an entity model and n...
During the Q&A period after one of my sessions at the iPhone Developer Summit last Thursday, there was someone there from Microsoft Competetive Intelligence. She asked myself and some other folks who were lingering nearby to describe, in our unbiased opinions, what we thought was wrong...
This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for m...
So, to start with, I need to preface this blog post with a notice: The contents of the SDK as well as the experiences that occur while using the SDK are confidential. Yes, I am one of those crazy-weird people who read EULAs and license agreements. When you agree to installing the SDK, ...
Ever since the iPhone was first displayed, people have been wondering if there was going to be any kind of Flash support for the iPhone. Initially, I think the response from Jobs was 'maybe', but I took that as a 'nope'. There are hundreds of reasons why Flash doesn't make sense on the...
I love reading about how these people have inside sources. If an inside source within Apple was leaking information like that, that information source wouldn't be working for Apple much longer. No matter how close these friends of Apple employees may be, those Apple employees aren't ta...
Anytime you can create a blog post about the .NET Framework that also includes borrowed half-quotations from Lord of the Rings, you've got to take that opportunity. Like pretty much every other RIA developer, I am sitting back anxiously awaiting the arrival of Silverlight 2.0. Silverli...
Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. This upcoming Beta1 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), c...
I was reading news feeds when I read a blog post that included some quotes from Bill Gates. Bill was quoted as saying that Windows 7 will make the keyboard and mouse far less important than in the past. We've all heard that crap before, it's typically what Bill used to say before attem...
The DreamSpark program is one of the newest initiatives to come out of Redmond that are very, very un-Microsoft-like. I'll talk about another later in this post. It appears as though University and high school students will, at some point (I don't know the hardcore details) be able to ...
So is O'Reilly actually condoning the hacking of the phones? O'Reilly has had a long and prestigious history as being the ultimate source for *nix manuals, including many books that became so dogeared I actually bought multiple copies, including dozens of 'in a nutshell' books. Back in...
In a typical AJAX application, your goal is often to have the user click something. In response, JavaScript goes out and (through the magic of XML HTTP Requests) obtains data and potentially modifies data on a server as well. Using the returned data, the JavaScript can then directly ma...
Think about this: If I wait a couple weeks until I can lay hands on one in a store before ordering, a shiny new Macbook Air might arrive just in time for the iPhone SDK, giving me the perfect iPhone development machine since the iPhone GUI doesn't require the same amount of screen real...
