Such a great book. It’s worth a read even if you saw the movie.  A book about a parent’s love for his child. The scare, minimalist writing style is also very interesting.

   This post was long time coming. So i finally read all 5 published books for "A song of ice and fire". I manage to break my own "don't read a series until is published entirely" mantra because i obviously watched the show, read the first book (just to see how faithful the show is to the book) and then, lo and behold, i basically read them all :)
    The series is very good. From my point of view the only "different" thing GRR Martin does (compared to other fantasy authors) is how he juggles with a huge cast of characters. Impressive. The biggest downside i'd say is the variable quality of the volumes (the first and third are top notch, the rest not so much).

So, as a conclusion, ASIOF is definitely worth a read.

- don't use ZUNE for deployment. Use WPConnect (a tool which comes with the SDK. You'll find it in \Windows Phone\v7.1\tools\wpconnect). It's much lighter than Zune and it also allows you to debug launchers/choosers.

- don't close the emulator. Never.

- learn the difference between pivot/panorama and use them accordingly (if it helps think of the pivot as a tab control).

- it's a good idea to not hardcode colors and use the accent color (for instance where you want to "highlight" a specific text).

- make sure you test your app in both themes.

- think of the navigation flow of the app. Remove pages from the navigation stack when it doesn't make sense for the user to "get back" with the back key.

- fast, Fast, FAST. I can't stress so important is to have a app which feels fast.

- the JPG decoder is faster than PNG. Consider this when choosing the format of images for splash screen, backgrounds etc.

- make sure you understand the difference between "content" and "resource" when dealing with app resources.

So i installed the developer preview of Windows 8 (i was actually more interested in Visual Studio 11 rather than Win8) and i decided to share some opinions. To be honest since Win8 has been unveiled for the first time, i've been a bit puzzled about the decision to have the same OS for both tablets and desktop and combine those 2. (i mean touch is so different from mouse & keyboard that it makes no sense to mix them together).
 
Tablet : as a tables OS , Win8 looks fine. But to be honest, i don't really think it matters. Apps matter. Sure it won't be a problem from MS to get good apps for the tablet (i actually think by the time it alunches next year, MS will more apps than Google's honeycomb). But the way it see it, there's no market for tablets. I simply don't think there's going to be a "post PC" era. PCs (desktops and laptops) are here to stay. The keyboard (which is basically the best way to interact with a machine) is here to stay. Sure, MS can't affort not to sell a tables OS. But it looks like they spent too much time working on the "tablet side" of the OS in detriment of theit bread & butter : the desktop.

Desktop : well there are improvments of the desktop OS (it took what....5 years to finally get proper multimonitor support ?) but they certainly didn't improved the OS as much as i would have liked for the desktop use. Worse still they started to change things that only make sense for the tablet :

- replacing the start menu with the table specific start screen. This doesn't make any sense (even if you can tehnically "use" that screen with mouse&kb). Nobody is going to launch apps by scrolling horizontally and looking for a tile with the app name. If you want to improve the OS just add a freaking keyboard launcher not the tiles screen.

- they started replacing "default" controls with their "touch" equivalent (for instance in Control Panel the checkboxes have been replaced with the new Toogle Control). Using the toogle with the keyboard is bad (not to mention that toogle takes way more screen space than the checkbox).

So, in conclusion, i have the feeling Win7 will be the new XP. We're going to use it for a while....

  Ported a app from ASP.NET 2 and 4 and had a interesting issue with HttpContext.RewritePath.  Basically I was doing url rewriting using to ashx handler to get nice urls on asp.net 2. When I moved the app to 4 all postbacks on pages with rewritten url were broken (even if I was running the app with the backward compatible settings).

Found a workaround (not perfect but it gets he job done). Basically RewritePath has a parameter called “rebaseClientPath” which “updates” the path after url change. This rebase doesn’t seem to work anymore on ASP.NET 4 so make sure it set the param value to false.

Hope this helps someone.

The C# 5 async/await look so promising for multithreaded apps. I think anyone who writes SL code and does async requests with callbacks in which we have other calls with their own callback etc await async. I mean…the code written with async looks so clean. Frankly I regret they spend all that time working on “dynamic” (which is mostly useless unless you’re doing COM/DLR interop. And who does DLR inteop ?!) instead of doing async.

Just updated Windows Live Writer and the latest version has the useless Ribbon UI. Don’t get me wrong Ribbon might be useful for beginners but it’s useless for advanced users. The problem is that the UI is mouse “oriented” and  most “actions” don’t have keyboard shortcuts. Also on some apps that use Ribbon  the toolbar buttons tooltips don’t have the keyboard shortcuts.

Live Writer is the kind of app that really didn’t need Ribbon. I see it’s becoming a trend at Microsoft and I don’t really like it.

It was ok. "A fine adventure" to quote the front cover but nothing really to write home about. This was the first trilogy i read entirely on a Windows Phone 7 device (using Freda which is basically the best ebook reader on the platform now). Reading on a WP7 phone was a ok experience but unfortunately not better than reading on my ancient HP pocket pc.

Moved all my OSS projects from BitBucket to CodePlex. Here's the profile page with links to all projects. Source control is Mercurial for everyting. And speaking of Mercurial, TortoiseHG 2.0 was released todays and looks very nice.

It's nice to be a developer. If no one builds the app i want i can just build it myself. And this is exactly what i have done for Windows Phone 7. Here are my current projects (OSS) :

News for Hackers - a client for HackerNews (code located here)

Searcher - a simple app that allows you to search using multiple search engines (code located here)

Unfortunately i can't publish them to the official WP7 marketplace (because i can't create a developer account from Romania) but feel free to try them if you have developer unlocked phone.