Blogging Schedule

Regular readers of my blog have probably noticed that my blogging schedule has been a bit erratic lately (not that I've ever stuck to a strict schedule :). Unfortunately I haven't had much free time lately.

I've started taking classes to obtain a certificate in usability from the University of Washington.  At work I recently gave a presentation at a user conference and I'm rewriting the UI framework that our company uses. And my family has taken up some time as well with football, birthdays, etc.

However, I do plan to keep my blog going and will try to fit some short posts into my schedule on occasion. Who knows, maybe someday my writing will improve enough where I have Jeff Atwood's (from Coding Horror) problems.

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On another note, what types of articles would you like to see?

My most popular post is Data Binding Classes, Interfaces, and Attributes in Windows Forms 2.0. This post is even more popular than my main page. Perhaps I should write more articles focused on the .Net UI. This is my area of expertise. Perhaps I could write articles on design-time support for Visual Studio? I am certainly aware that this is an area that needs more documentation.

Of course I am also starting to focus more on usability at my work and I'm taking the certificate program. Perhaps I should write more articles that discuss this topic?

What about other topics? Business of software? Cool technology? Developer productivity? Others? I would love to hear from you and get your opinion!

I would especially like to hear from you if you read my blog in an RSS reader. I do not believe that the analytical software that I use (Google Analytics and StatCounter) tracks RSS feeds. So I have no idea if anybody is reading my blog through an RSS reader. Just a "Hi, I read your blog through an RSS feed" would do fine :).

Seam Carving

Have you heard of Seam Carving before? Seam Carving allows you to stretch or squish images without distorting them. It's an amazing process that you have to see to believe. The video is just a little over 4 minutes and well worth it (even my wife thought it was cool, though she might have just been pretending).

 

 

I learned of this through a blog post by Mike Swanson. He has created a .Net version of this algorithm. I'm really hoping that this makes its way into Paint.Net!

For more details about Seam Carving, check out Seam carving for content-aware image resizing [20 MB PDF].

Microsoft is releasing the source code for the .Net FX

Microsoft has announced plans to release the source code for the .Net framework (comments and all!). This is awesome news for those of us that stress the framework fairly regularly.

Of course, Reflector gave us the ability to view the code already, but now you will be able to view the source code comments as well as step into the code with VS 2008. In fact, with VS 2008, if you don't already have the source code and you attempt to step into it, it will prompt you to download it automatically.

It's not quite open source, but it's still a big step for Microsoft. VS 2008 is certainly looking like it will be an interesting release! Hopefully it will be ready by the end of the year (please don't make me wait too long!:).