So I spent a few hours today experimenting with various effects and the idea of mixing Jolly-Ranchers with water to create a delicious fruit drink when I came across an interesting technique using CC Ball Action. This one technique can be used to create many different styles of dispersion and you don’t need any 3rd party plug-ins! I will be talking about this technique in my next tutorial along with the many creative ways it can be used. Stay Tuned!
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Experimental Dispersion
In this post I’ll try to answer the most common questions I find on forums and in documentation feedback about C# covariance and contravariance. It’s a big topic for a single blog post, so expect to see a lot of “more information” links. Special thanks to Eric Lippert and Chris Burrows for reviewing and providing helpful comments
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Covariance and Contravariance FAQ
By Rick Wilson In the competitive world of web host marketing one of the common themes that’s become popular is this idea of “Unlimited Hosting”, where you can use Unlimited Bandwidth and Disk Space and never have to pay more than $9.95 a month or $14.95 a month, etc… Depending on what you’re hosting and how important uptime, availability and backups are the “Unlimited Plans” may work for you, but if you’re running an online business if you don’t properly plan out your hosting setup you’re being Penny Wise and Pound Foolish.
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When It Comes to Backups Not All Content Is Created Equal
As promised in the previous post, here is a first look on Visual Studio 2010 RC. i am sure many of you have downloaded the bits already so this is for those who are waiting yet. VS 2010 RC is an upgrade to the Beta 2 that was shipped last year. This build has been heavily focussed on implementing community feedback and fixing performance issues reported. The start up screen looks as below. A little darker compared to the Beta 2 build. You can read my earlier post on First look on Beta 2 here I didn’t notice much of changes to the project templates as yet. But, I did visibly see a great improvement in performance. Particularly when working with projects / solutions, Beta 2 used to take up a lot of resource which isn’t the case with this RC Build. Couple of quick things that have been well documented and blogged about are that, there is no Express edition for this RC release. Silverlight 4 development and WCF RIA with Silverlight 4 isn’t supported in this RC build. Similarly, the RC build doesn’t support the Silverlight Business Application Development although the template is listed. When you select the template and try creating a project, it fails with “This project type is not supported by the current version” error
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Visual Studio 2010 RC first look and Windows Azure Tools
Warning: This is my experimentation and cannot be taken as a recommendation ! I gave it to my temptation and installed the Visual Studio 2010 RC despite having a lot of upcoming WCF RIA Services talks. (One is scheduled right tomorrow and it would be disastrous to try anything fancy) Much has been explained around the non-availability of Silverlight 4 Tools updated version for this RC release and subsequently the inability to work with WCF RIA Services and SL4. Infact, Tim Heuer has put up a nice FAQ on VS 2010 RC and Silverlight Development However, I went ahead and installed VS 2010 RC and the WCF RIA Services Preview for VS 2010 Beta 2, hoping to get it work at least for catering to ASP.NET Development. Much to my surprise, it did work! I could just grab the DLLs from C:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsRIA Servicesv1.0LibrariesServer onto my project reference and grab the System.Web.DomainServices.WebControls.dll file onto my toolbox and then was able to use the DomainDataSource control in the Webform. Similarly the “Domain Service Class” template was also available as a “Add – New Item” which I could use to generate the middle tier. I have written a detailed step by step on this in my earlier post However, note that, this only works and doesn’t provide any warranty. Also, the SL4 Tools don’t work which means, this is not going to help on the Silverlight development front.
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WCF RIA Services Preview and the Visual Studio 2010 RC
“I can’t really make much of a pronouncement about these apps but I was struck by the amount of restraint the apps’ designers used. A bigger screen increases the temptation to just keep adding interface elements.
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"I can’t really make much of a pronouncement about these apps but I was struck by the amount of…"
The European Union (EU) will lift sanctions against President Robert Mugabe and his top allies only after the Zimbabwean leader and his former opposition foes fully implement a power-sharing agreement signed in 2008, a group of British parliamentarians said in Harare on Monday according to ZimOnline . Sounds about right
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Stop using sanctions as an excuse
We need more people like Rejoice Ngwenya in Zimbabwe. People who are willing to say it like it is. Here is Rejoice’s latest article: Many people who have expressed contrarian views on the wickedness of Mugabe , like yours, have only one slight problem – they won’t swap citizenship with me! We liberals in Zimbabwe [and there a miserly few of us] do accept that Leander Starr Jameson and his paymaster, Cecil John Rhodes, galloped across our fore fathers’ land and shot their way to the Deeds Office in 1890. Rhodes’ remains are now at Matobo Hills, a world heritage site that is part of our revered National Parks. Guess who was forcibly evicted from there in the 1900s?
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Spiked with snake venom
Firefox usage remained level and Google’s Chrome continued to pull ahead of Apple’s Safari, but the most notable change in January’s browser usage statistics is that the reviled Internet Explorer 6 no longer is the most common. According to Net Applications’ monthly usage share figures , No. 1 IE and No.
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Tide turns against IE 6 as usage drops
It’s time for the United Kingdom government to scrap Internet Explorer 6, upgrading away from the browser introduced in 2001 and the problems it brings now, according to a petition submitted Monday. “We the undersigned petition the prime minister to encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6,” according to the petition , submitted by Dan Frydman, a managing director of online publishing contractor Inigo
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Petition urges U.K. government to dump IE 6
Bringing the comfort and precision of F1 cars to modern apartments, Hungarian designer Alexander Christoff has come up with a lounge concept that is sure to scorch your living space with its sizzling hot design. Featuring the fiberglass body adorned with ergonomic forms to offer utmost comforts to the users, the revolutionary lounge chair stands tall on its chromed steel legs, while an upholstered adjustable headrest keeps your head steady in a comfortable position to move you straight into the dream world. Via: Behance
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F1 Lounge brings comfort and precision of sportscar to your living space
One year before I was born HBO made a very ambitious intro that was said to be the most expensive and innovative concepts at the time (for the medium). I love the idea of incorporating techniques from the real world inside of After Effects for even more unique results. In fact the whole idea of mattes for compositing come from the early days of film-making… Watch the final intro above then be sure to check out the making of video below, especially the part towards around 5:30 that talks about the burst of light… Watch the Behind the Scenes I’ve also created a project file using that similar technique that mixes 2 images into a subtle animation. Download the Project
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HBO Behind-the-Scenes 1983
Heart Internet Brief Introduction This company was started in the year 2004 by Jonathan Brealey and Tim Beresford and claim to be the second company growing the fastest in the UK. They have brought in a high degree of automation with the intent to present customers more control over their account and what’s more they have been able to keep the prices at very affordable levels.
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Heartinternet.co.uk
Pausing to think about next steps after making strong progress in the “ Exploring: XamlPad to XamlDesigner ” journey in the last 10 days. 3 major things from that Exploring post that haven’t been tackled in XamlPadSample include: Silverlight support, Designer support, and Editor richness
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XamlDesigner – View Only/View or XAML/SplitView/XAML with Preview/XAML Only
Perspective FX 1.0 released : see how to adjust contrast, brightness and saturation of an image, and how to build custom effects by simply assembling filters , without HLSL skills… Here is an example of saturation adjustment done with the Saturator filter :
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Perspective FX 1.0 : easy image editing for WPF and Silverlight
To a Mac user, the difference between one application and the other is, in part, how well it is represented. Even though several useful applications have simplistic sites, in the vast sea of websites that we have today, looks make a difference . The sites showcased here have incredible designs – they command attention and present their apps in the most compelling way.
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Well Designed Mac App Websites
3 major features added to XamlPadSample today! Including Alternate Views, which has not been done in any XamlPad or XamlDesigner that I’m aware of. (link to previous posts/overview & sample code available via XamlPadSample ) App.xaml Support for {StaticResource} View pane now shows result of {StaticResource} or {DynamicResource} resolution of resources from app.xaml. Shown loading Welcome.xaml from Family.Show v3
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XamlPadSample Step 1f-alternateViews, app.xaml & assembly loading
“ So, I made plans to go to lunch with Fred. And then the day before, the morning of, Fred cancelled on me. And it was the reason that he cancelled that made me realize that he was the partner for me.
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"So, I made plans to go to lunch with Fred. And then the day before, the morning of, Fred cancelled…"
Last week, we reviewed Scott Berkun’s latest book, Confessions of a Public Speaker . I asked Sara Peyton over at O’Reilly (the book publisher) for a few copies for Six Minutes readers, and she kindly agreed. Now, you can win one of three copies by sharing your own public speaking confessions! What speaking lesson did you learn the hard way?
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Win a Book! Share Your Public Speaking Confessions
2010 continues to find Silverlight/WPF in a very good place, and the beautiful thing is that we have so many people, in Microsoft, and outside, making it better. Reading some folks on twitter pointed me towards Karl’s blog post about d:DesignInstance and d:DesignData and ondrejsv’s post about Sample Data in Blend/SketchFlow .
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DataBinding tooling: keeps getting better