Blog - Duncan Mackenzie .NET

Responding to feedback on Oxite

2009-02-19T00:20:38.89

Hey folks, many of you are familiar with the commotion that occurred around Oxite’s initial release. For various reasons, Oxite received a lot of attention from developers, bloggers and press… mostly because it is by Microsoft and it contained a lot of buzz-words that people care about (the two biggest being Open Source and CMS… and of course, the aforementioned ‘Microsoft’). This attention was a surprise to us, but it was mostly positive to start with so we were fairly happy. Even all the positive attention was a bit of an issue for us though, as people repeatedly compared Oxite to other products. Most of these products are much larger (SharePoint and Wordpress for example) with much larger feature sets, and with years of development and maturity behind them. Overall this was a PR issue for our team, we had to explain to people that we weren’t trying to compete with SharePoint or Wordpress (or Umbraco, BlogEngine.NET, Graffiti, etc.) … we were trying to show that it was possible to create standards compliant semantic markup using Microsoft’s web technologies.

A little bit later, various people in the ALT.NET community noticed that this project was using ASP.NET MVC and claimed to be a good example of Test Driven Development. Both of those facts put this firmly in their realm of expertise. We had made mistakes in both areas though, both around architecture and messaging. What happened next was both impressive (great to see such a large reaction from a relatively informal association of people) and completely disheartening (as the development team receiving the feedback) at the same time. The vast majority of the criticism was completely accurate and most of that was presented in a very professional manner. We really appreciated feedback that tried hard to be useful without any overly dramatic statements, but we read all the feedback, regardless of how it was presented.

Processing all that feedback, trying to understand the overall issue and the individual specific items that people were concerned by, took us some time. Luckily we had the help of Rob Conery at that point, to come up with a professionally presented list of specific issues for us to look at. Using his refactoring of Oxite to learn from, combined with lots of great blog posts from Chad Myers, Ayende, Javier Lozano and others, we started work on rebuilding Oxite to reflect the feedback we had been given. We worked over email with Chad, Javier and others as we went, and arranged a couple of code reviews with Phil Haack and Eilon Lipton from the ASP.NET MVC team and with Jonathan Carter and Jason Olson on the DPE side of Microsoft. In short, we did a lot of the things that we should have done the first time around.

Some people believe we should have taken the site and the source down at that point and put it back up when we were ready for this next release, but I decided that we would do our refactoring right there in the public source repository on codeplex. I understand the arguments either way, but decided that doing our work in public would show anyone who was following the project and trying to learn from it that big changes were afoot and that they needed to stay up to date with the source.

So now, here we are again, with an updated release, toned down messaging and without any big PR push behind the project. You can read about Oxite’s architecture here, and you can follow the blogs of Erik, Sampy and Nathan for lots of useful information, and of course you can go to codeplex if you want to check out the code yourself. I hope that you like what you see, that you understand that we are learning many of these concepts as we go, and that we are very open to feedback. We know there are still some issues with the code, Sampy touches on some of them in his post, and for many of those we have a plan for improvement. I also expect that there will be decisions we’ve made that some people will disagree with, but I’m ok with that… let us know what you would have done instead (no, we aren’t asking you to fix it, just let us know or point us at a better example) as we are always learning and considering new options.

Newly updated Oxite release available

2009-02-16T08:55:06.063

Erik pushed out a new release to Oxite today, the first since January 5th. This release is an important one, because it reflects a great deal of changes made in response to internal and external feedback about our initial release.

From the release notes:

We made many improvements, some based on community feedback, and added new features in this release:

New Model, Services and Repositories

Dependency Injection (Routes, Controllers, Services, Repositories, etc)

ActionFilter Registry

Better test coverage

New validation class added

Improved background services architecture

Projects cleaned up and consolidated

Views cleaned up

No more *.cs or *.cs.designer for views in web project

Now works in a sub directory

New admin dashboard

New and update (from last version) SQL scripts included

Many other small features, improvements and bug fixes

A lot of work went into these changes; they were the primary focus of Erik, Sampy and Nathan for the past 4+ weeks. Unity was implemented to provide Dependency Injection, xUnit was used as the test runner to remove a dependency on the higher level SKUs of Visual Studio, and a great deal of work was put into restructuring our data layer to completely abstract the Linq 2 SQL code from our actual objects. Like most software projects, there is always more work that could be done, and we will be making changes and additions as we continue to use this code for our work projects and for our personal sites.

If you are looking for more about Oxite, the discussions, issues and wiki pages on Codeplex are a great source of information and you can always post a comment right here and ask me your question

Chatting today amongst the EvNet team

2008-08-29T17:41:00

Aug 29

10:20 AM

Duncan M.

source code formatting checked in

Duncan M.

http://localhost/posts/Sampy/PAX-Day-3-In-…

Aug 29

10:25 AM

Duncan M.

I started out with overflow-x:auto ... which would add a scroll bar (at least in FF3), but then I went with white-space:pre-wrap; ... but IE doesn't like that :)

Aug 29

10:55 AM

Duncan M.

Nathan, can you send me the link to those pre-wrap alternates?

Aug 29

11:00 AM

nathan h.

http://users.tkk.fi/~tkarvine/pre-wrap-css…

Aug 29

11:05 AM

Duncan M.

thanks

Aug 29

2:35 PM

Duncan M.

I wonder if we should consider using this site to create/embed polls? http://www.polldaddy.com

Aug 29

2:45 PM

Erik P.

I've noticed a lot of people starting to use js includes and other stuff for polls, comments, ratings, etc.

Duncan M.

yep

Erik P.

For us, I think it's a matter of integration. Is it something we care to tightly integrate into our system to do custom queries and views things like that or is it something we just want to throw in? For polls, not sure which way is better. What do you think?

Duncan M.

I'm interested in the http://disqus.com/ comment system as well ... but not for our core sites

Duncan M.

For polls, I don't think we'd want to do anything with the data that is user specific

Aug 29

2:50 PM

Duncan M.

I think they really just want to put it up on the site, gets lots of interaction (including non registered users) and then discuss the results

Aug 29

2:50 PM

Erik P.

Then I think those external things is a good idea. :)

Erik P.

is = are

Duncan M.

the ideal type of intergration I could picture with something like polldaddy.com would be to associate a discussion with it somehow (like making it an entry) so that we could show the poll on the home page (sidebar?) and then have a 'click to discuss' option

Duncan M.

this could be manual even, just create a forum thread about the poll, embed the poll in that thread *and* on the home page, and then put a link below the poll on the home page to the thread

Best description of twitter I've seen

2008-07-02T14:07:00

From Dave Winer:

The flow there is pointless. It's like trying to make a baby by having sex with a rock. First, it's hard to get excited. And second, no baby.

Marvel Digital Comics, not perfect, but worth the money!

2008-06-21T04:45:00

A month or so ago, I went looking to see if there was any way to read back issues of Marvel Comics online… and discovered a complete site around providing exactly that service. With a subscription to the digital comics section, you can view any issue of any series that is available on their online catalog; I sat down a couple of nights ago and read through issues 1 to 100 of Ultimate Spiderman for example.

The viewing experience (it appears to be based around some customized version of Adobe’s PDF reader) is acceptable to me, although it sometimes renders text out in odd fonts (obviously not the ones used in the original printed version) and its coolest feature ‘Smart Panels’, that lets you view the comic one panel at a time, instead of one or two pages across your screen, sometimes shows you a view that has cut off parts of the various bits of dialog. So far, the best experience for me has been viewing two pages at a time on a large wide screen monitor like my laptop’s 1920 x 1200 screen. The text is all readable, the rest of the art doesn’t look too cruddy from scaling, and I don’t run into the various bugs of the ‘Smart Panels’ system… and this is the closest in size and format to reading an actual comic, so it works out on many levels!

I’ve been reading a bunch of comics nearly each and every night… from ones that I read as a kid (like old issues of the X-Men, probably the only series where I had a ton of issues… well, other than owning the full run of ROM: Spaceknight and the Micronauts!) to all the new ones that I have never read at all (the Ultimates, Secret War, the Civil War series, M-Day, etc…)

The one major flaw with this system though, and this didn’t stop me from buying a year’s subscription but it might be a deal-killer to you, is that there are often gaps in a series you are trying to read. That 1-100 of Ultimate Spiderman that I mentioned earlier, well it is actually issues 1-3, 6-7, 14-15, 19-23, 31-34… and so on. Storylines stop right in the middle, then pick up so far ahead that it can drive you crazy! I’d like to hope that they are working on fixing this, but the cynical part of my mind wonders if it is on purpose, to encourage you to buy the print version of the comics… I hope that isn’t the case, it would really lower my opinion of Marvel :(

If you love Marvel comics you should check this out… maybe you’ll love it enough to pay for it, or maybe not… but I think it definitely worth a look.

Three Cups of Tea is a great book…

2008-06-12T16:40:00

One positive side to being stuck at home for two weeks is that I was able to do a fair bit more reading. For the most part, I read magazines and watched movies, but my wife also brought me the book “Three Cups of Tea” about Greg Mortenson’s work in Pakistan building schools for the children of poor rural areas. Mr. Mortenson, an avid mountain climber, ended up spending time in a small village near the base of K2 in Pakistan, barely making it down alive after a failed attempt to reach the summit. Spending time with those people made quite an affect on him and from that point on he was on a mission to build schools and otherwise help out the people of that area. The book is great reading, dealing with exciting events, perilous adventures and important issues … all taking place in an area of the world that is completely foreign to many of us. Check it out, read more reviews or buy it here “Three Cups of Tea” in paperback from amazon.com.

The new and improved Channel 9 has shipped!

2008-06-11T16:27:00

When I joined my current team, it was called the Channel 9 dev team, because Channel 9 was the big site that they had built and was the center of all of their efforts. You certainly wouldn’t have known that from how we spent the last two years though :)

We built a whole new code base for a video blog site and launched a new site (Channel 10) on that code, bringing some of the video style of Channel 9 to a new audience. We often discussed, as we shipped out revision after revision of the Channel 10 home page, that our next goal would be to ship out a new version of Channel 9… all moved onto that new code. Things didn’t go according to plan though, and we shipped out VisitMix.com, Channel 8, and TechNet Edge (for IT Pros) before we were really given more than a moment’s peace to start planning out the work to deploy Channel 9 on a new code base.

When it did become time to plan the channel 9 deployment, it turned out that, while the new code base was a major improvement in many ways, the feature gap between what was already available on 9 and what the new code could offer was substantial. Now at least a year and a half had gone by since I joined the Channel 9 dev team, and we could see a long road ahead of us to get the next version of Channel 9 shipped; all the while, new features, bug fixes and UI changes for the other channels kept coming up and mixed priorities from above meant that we still had to devote most of our time to those properties. Finally, at the start of this year (2008), I was asked to start laying out a firm plan that would get Channel 9 v4 (as we took to calling it) shipped. As part of that, we gained a new focus on channel 9 and were able to finally prioritize it above some of the day to day needs of our other properties. We weren’t completely focused on the task, but we finally had the ability to say no to most things that would pull us away from C9… progress began to be made. At the start of May of this year we shipped out a beta version of Channel 9, and by the end of the month (June 2nd to be precise) we did the final switch over, made the DNS change that pointed channel9.msdn.com at a new set of web servers, and v4 was officially launched. Over the next week or so, we were bogged down dealing with a wide variety of bugs that didn’t turn up during our own testing or in the beta, but the site stabilized and is now running fairly well. We still have bugs, but the old site had bugs that had sat for months, so I think we are in pretty good shape. You can see a picture gallery of the various Channel 9 home pages that were envisioned or deployed throughout the past few years, including the new one… and a similar gallery representing the many home pages of Channel 10 that we shipped over the course of just a few months.

version 3, C9 when I joined the team (shipped August 2005)

new, v4 (June 2, 2008)

all in all, I’m very happy with the site we shipped last week and very impressed with the team behind it all… it has been a busy couple of years, but it is nice to have tangible (if you can consider the web tangible) results that you can point at when you are thinking about what you’ve accomplished.

At home, recovering from surgery

2008-06-07T17:31:00

It has been a crazy past few months for my health, or at least the appearance of my health.

For about 30-something years now, I’ve had problems with my tonsils. This has included one or more bouts per year of tonsillitis, quite a few cases of strep throat and a ton of colds that just seem to end up hitting me as sore throats and lasting way longer than it seems like they should. All standard symptoms of someone who needs their tonsils removed, which is what various doctors have been telling me and my parents for the past 30-something years :)

When I still lived at home, and this decision wasn’t up to me, it turns out that my grandfather (who was a pediatrician) disagreed with how quickly most doctors would removed tonsils, so whenever a doctor would suggest that I have mine out he would suggest that we just wait and see if the problem went away on its own. The problem of the moment would always go away, even if it was due to come back in a few months, so we kept that cycle up for many years. Eventually, I became an adult and it became my problem… and it wasn’t long before I ended up noticing the pattern of illness hitting my throat and headed into see a doctor. Canadian healthcare is great if you need something and if you don’t have the money to pay for it, but that benefit produces a system that is generally short on resources. When you go into a Canadian doctor, in my experience, with something that isn’t absolutely necessary (even if it would be a good idea in the long run) then they are likely to suggest you not bother with the procedure, that you try a prescription instead or just waiting it out. That lack of enthusiasm, combined with my own lack of confidence about what I needed, led to many more years without my tonsils being removed. Over the past few years in the US medical system though, I’ve had so many different doctors look at my throat and straight-out tell me that my tonsils really need to come out, that I finally decided to do it. I made the appointment and on Tuesday of this week, they were removed. Now I’m stuck at home, recovering, with a very sore throat and some great prescription pain killers…

What makes this whole experience a bit confusing to my co-workers is that I’ve also been going through a completely different and unrelated medical problem at the same time. For reasons that aren’t completely understood, the hair on my head has started to fall out… rapidly and in big patches. This is a medical condition known as alopecia areata, essentially partial hair loss. This isn’t a sign of any underlying health problems, but it sure looks like it is… and people don’t really seem to believe you when you tell them that it is just a weird type of hair loss and that it isn’t anything to worry about. Combine that problem, which eventually led to just shaving my whole head to avoid looking all patchy, with scheduling some time off for some upcoming surgery and people start looking at you like you aren’t going to make it through the summer.

Fun stuff… but in both cases it is temporary and I’m happily recovering… maybe I’ll even manage to have my hair grown back in over the next few months.

Sunburned at a Chess Tournament

2008-04-14T11:58:00

Well, this certainly isn't something that happens all that often, but after spending all day at a chess tournament (at Wellington Elementary in Woodinville) on Saturday, I ended up with a sunburn on my face and arms! It turned out to be a really nice day, which was good, since the waiting area for parents and kids (where the parents spend up about 6 to 7 hours, and the kids spend all the time between matches) was outside. Never seen that before, and it was cold and wet enough when we arrived that I was pretty unimpressed with the idea. In the end though, it was very sunny out there ... and it certainly gave Connor a lot of fresh air between his matches (which were inside the school gym).

Another chess tournament this weekend, last one before the state championship

2008-04-12T02:41:00

A new father-son activity for Connor and me has been to go to chess tournaments, spending a few Saturdays throughout the year in some school gym. Starting last year, we started to play chess at home and he enjoyed it so much that we decided to enter into the Shelton View Elementary school's chess tournament in the Kindergarten category. He did well and had a lot of fun, so it has become the hobby of choice around our house. The best thing about taking him to a tournament is that you can't really tell from his face whether he has won or lost when he comes out of a match, he always seems to be enjoying himself regardless of the outcome. Tomorrow's tournament is the last one before the state competition (which he qualified for and we decided to attend as well, since it is in Redmond this year), so I expect a lot more first-time tournament players will be attending in the hope of winning 3 out of their 5 games and qualifying for state.

Sidebar Gadgets for Channel 9, Channel 8 and more

2008-04-04T18:48:00

We recently had Donovan West (LiveGadgets.net) build us a set of sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista. These gadgets use the RSS feeds from each site and let you see all of our new content as it gets posted, then (using Silverlight) you can even play our videos right there on your desktop.

You can check out the gadgets (for Channel 9, Mix, C8, Edge, and on10.net) by clicking on the appropriate image below:

Using my Xbox Live data service?

2008-04-04T04:01:00

If you've written an app, private or public, using my data feed of Xbox live info I'd really appreciate it if you'd let me know. This isn't a required 'sign-up', but I want to start to keep track so that I could possibly create a page listing all the sites using it, and it may also be useful to be able to contact folks if I need to make a change or take the service down for an hour or so. Just comment on this post, or drop me a line at duncanma@microsoft.com.

New Xbox Friends Gadget released and a Silverlight Gamercard Generator

2008-04-05T03:44:00

Adam Kinney, Silverlight dude and my colleague at work, has released an updated version of his Xbox Friends Watch gadget and a new standalone gamercard gadget for your website that uses Silverlight 2.0.

ImageShack Toolbar causes incorrect results from ASP.NET's browser checking code

2008-01-10T04:08:00

We recently updated a few of our web sites with code that would provide a 'nicer' experience for browsers that were not compatible with the ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX) scripts we were using. For some reason though, a few users who were running a fully compatible browser (Firefox 2.0.0.*), were seeing the no-script experience. We were puzzled, but one of the users figured out that their ImageShack toolbar might be causing the problem. Sure enough, after I installed that same toolbar myself I was able to test and confirm that it truly is causing the confusion.

Using a little test page, http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/services/browserinfo.aspx (feel free to use it for your own testing), I received the following results for Firefox 2.0.0.11 on Vista before installing the ImageShack toolbar.

Request.Browser

.Type: Firefox2.0.0.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 2.0.0.11
.Browser: Firefox
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

After installing the toolbar, I get this:

Request.Browser

.Type: Mozilla1.8.1.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 1.8.1.11
.Browser: Mozilla
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

Note the version change and the change in Request.Browser.Browser, certainly enough to throw off our atlas-compatibility check. I haven't figured out the appropriate fix for this yet, but it is nice to at least have one possible explanation as to why valid browsers are sometimes seeing our 'no script' experience.

Code Metrics in Visual Studio 2008 and the EvNet project

2008-01-07T23:24:00

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I thought it was neat that I could right-click the main project (excluding all our client script and HTML) that runs behind on10.net, pick code metrics and see cool #s like "23,442 lines of code" :)

Lately though, I've seen us reducing that number while adding features, so this might the highest result I'll ever see for this project :)

The Viewport Meta Tag and the iPhone

2008-01-03T02:55:00

I've been fiddling around with mobile interfaces for both my personal site and for the various sites I work on (http://on10.net, http://channel9.msdn.com, amongst others) and I noticed the use of <meta name="viewport" content... /> on some other mobile sites. A quick search and I found a great discussion of the viewport meta tag on furbo.org (the apple developer site provides the same info in a more reference format). Turns out this simple meta tag helps Mobile Safari determine how best to scale your site for the smaller screen of the iPhone (relative to a desktop that is). I don't have an iPhone, or an iPod touch for that matter (I gather the experience would be similar... if you don't want to get a full blown cell account I'd suggest the 'touch' for testing purposes), although I found a great testing site for the iPhone (best viewed with Safari 3.0 on your desktop).

Looking for good examples of Mobile Interfaces

2008-01-03T17:29:00

I'm part of a dev team that builds blog/forum software and I've been thinking about mobile interfaces lately... so I'm trying to find a good example of site like ours that provides a good (enjoyable, useful and usable) mobile interface... one that will work across a variety of browses. It seems 37 Signals is thinking about the same thing these days and they've made a blog post looking for exactly the same thing I am, examples of good mobile interfaces. I'm looking for sites that are some combination of text and video blogging and are usable via a relatively modern phone. I found a lot of the comments to that post to be completely unhelpful... because they were focused on sites that are specific to the iPhone! Building an interface for the iPhone is not a bad idea, but I certainly wouldn't try to do that until after we had a good general purpose interface for a much wider variety of mobile devices. I did find a few interesting sites though, from the comments and from another site (Brian Cantoni's list of good mobile sites at http://cantoni.mobi/):

http://mobile.seriouseats.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
http://bbcriver.com/ (seems like it would benefit from some paging, but I could be wrong... is one big page better on a phone than paging?)
http://m.joystiq.com/

Of course, all of these map well to the home page of our site(s) (like on10.net or Channel 9), I wonder if there are any good examples for a web forum? I'm pretty sure that a lot of our users would like to be able to view Channel 9's Coffeehouse on their mobile device, and off hand I don't know what the ideal experience for that would be.

On a related note, Brian Cantoni (the author of that list of good mobile sites) has a great series of blog articles about testing your web applications across all major smartphone platforms.

Trying to open a file into VS 2005/2008 ... never works from Explorer

2007-12-20T12:26:00

So I have a file on disk, web.config in this case, and I right click and pick 'open with | Visual Studio 2008' ... and I get this:

Windows cannot find 'C:\projects\9\web.config'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.

[OK]

VS 2008 opens, but no file. If I then pick the file from File | Open it works fine... what the hell? As far as I can remember, this was true with VS 2005 and it has annoyed me every day...

Xbox.com looks really boring without a flash plug-in :)

2007-12-16T16:48:00

I'm planning to get rid of setting our Theme in ASP.NET

2007-12-16T16:46:00

The auto inclusion of all our CSS files has finally become too annoying. We'll still use the app_theme directory, as it is a handy way to store our stuff... but I'm really hoping to not set the theme, and to add the appropriate CSS for the situation (mobile vs desktop for example) while also combining our CSS files and 'minifying' them all through a simple 'css.ashx' style handler. This should make it easier to do that combining at run time, while leaving them nice and separate for debug and development purposes.

We might still have it set in development mode though, if it is necessary to get some of the editor awareness of our CSS... but I think we can make it work.

Death to app_themes!

Xbox.com Personalities answer a bunch of holiday questions

2007-12-14T05:12:00

Trixie had all of us Xbox.com column writing folks answer a bunch of holiday themed questions recently, and I noticed tonight that the answers are all up on the site! Check out some interesting Q&A with Trixie, Major Nelson and others (including me, Xbox Dad).

Xbox.com Personalities at the Holidays

We asked the Xbox.com personalities to share some information on their holiday favorites. What did we learn? Egg nog, "A Christmas Story," and Dean Martin pwn. Plus Major Nelson is a Grinch.

Futurama the movie...

2007-12-14T03:56:00

Just added this to my queue at Blockbuster:

"Matt Groening's cult hit series Futurama takes its killer wit to DVD with this full length movie consisting of a brand new story with all new animation and the complete, original voice cast."

Search Engine Optimization Tweaks over the long weekend

2007-11-25T02:00:00

My team builds a fair number of community sites including Channel 8 (for Students), TechNet Edge (for IT Pros), Channel 10 (for enthusiasts, power users and gamers), Mix Online (for web developers and designers) and the original site... Channel 9 (aimed mostly at developers) ... and we've recently starting putting out sites on a new code base. One of the changes in that new code base was a move to an AJAX style interface for viewing lists of posts on the page. We like the way this works for paging through lists of entries, comments, etc... but we have known from the beginning that it was going to cause us some trouble in the world of search engines and other crawlers. Without JavaScript, there was very little being output onto the page, and what was there was mostly navigational chrome. Taking a look at Google's cache of TechNet Edge from a few days ago gives this:

Checking how your page appears in the cache of Google or Live is one way to check how you appear to crawlers, but it doesn't work great when you are making changes or running in development. One handy way is to check your site using Lynx, like Joshua mentions in this post on Mix Online.

The content on the site was ending up in the index of search engines anyway, through the virtue of RSS feeds and incoming links... but the value of your site to crawlers is going to be much lower than it should be if they don't see any content when they visit. As I said earlier... we always knew this would be a problem, but I guess we just didn't get around to fixing it before pushing out a full three sites using AJAX based paging. Last week I had a meeting with a SEO consultant and they pointed out the exact issue I've been describing. Well... given a long weekend... and no interest in working on my actual planned tasks... I decided to implement two features to help how our sites appear to crawlers.

First, I added some code that swaps out our fancy Ajax entry list with a simple ASP.NET repeater if the browser doesn't appear to be one that is supported by Microsoft Atlas, making our site usable to other browsers (Atlas supports the bulk of users, but not all) and also making our content visible to a crawler. So far, I only output the first page of any given entry list, but that makes the results go from blank to this:

Next, I added an XML sitemap, following the specs from sitemaps.org, by outputting a sitemap index at http://<site>/sitemapindex.ashx and then outputting a series of sitemaps (by page #) from http://<site>/sitemap.ashx?page=<number> (see Mix's sitemap index, and sitemap as an example). Finally, I put a link to the sitemap index into the robots.txt file for each site.

Between the two, I'm hoping our content will get indexed better by a variety of search engines, resulting in more people finding us when searching for relevant topics. These changes also help to make us a little bit more usable to some users, but that is another area where we need to do a lot more work. If these changes improve our accessibility that's great, but I'd hate to even suggest that they get us anywhere near our goals in that area.

Thanksgiving day... and I'm surprisingly short on things to do...

2007-11-22T16:13:00

Lots of plans for the weekend, lights to put up, some yard work... but today, my daughter is napping, my son is keeping himself very busy with a new remote control car that has a built in video camera (he is chasing the kitten around the family room)... I'm not quite 'free' enough to put in Mass Effect and try it out, but that will come later!

Picked up Mass Effect today... built XML site maps instead of playing it :(

2007-11-22T03:02:00

I'm very excited about it... really! I just got distracted on http://sitemaps.org and ended up building a site map for this site... real brute force, just grabbed all the blog entries and tags and output the appropriate absolute paths into some objects that I then wrote out into an XML document. Same method wouldn't work on Channel 9 though, it has too many entries, so I'll need to move to a site map index with multiple sub site maps... now I just have to figure out how to divide the entries up (by tag, by type of content, by date?).

Ice Cube talking about Silverlight...

2007-11-22T01:42:00

and the Group Manager of Platform Evangelism at Adobe feels the need to comment about it.

Let me summarize. Ice Cube is involved in an Internet video project and has chosen to use Silverlight, and you can watch an interview with him about it in Silverlight. (on a side note, I decided not to include the video into my post, even though the instructions to do so are right there in the original blog entry, because it is set to auto-start when someone visits the page and I think that is just downright rude :) )

The post is interesting, the video is interesting... but what is really interesting is the fun going on in the comments on that blog entry, including comments from Mike Downey of Adobe and Scott Barnes of Microsoft... fun stuff. The old 'if you have nothing nice to say...' rule probably should have been applied for both of them.

found via Mix Online

Anyone have contacts with TVTonic?

2007-11-19T00:40:00

One of their users emailed us to comment on our video quality... essentially pointing out that it sucked when viewed through their TV using TV Tonic. Well I was puzzled because, while we don't ship out DVD quality video, our high quality download is quite good for a podcast. Turns out though, after installing TV Tonic and picking on10.net out of their catalog, that the feed they have in their system is our 512kbps WMV feed... which is certainly not the best quality around, around 430kbps for video and 320x240... fine for display on our site, but not the hottest around... instead they should be using our WMV (high quality) feed (2500 kbps, 640 x 480), but I have no idea how to tell them about it. I've emailed their support address, but didn't ever hear back from them....

The new Zune software rocks!

2007-11-19T00:31:00

Great UI, podcast support, music video downloads... and a firmware that works on my 'original' Zune.

and look at the great member info page!

It is hard to explain why, but...

2007-11-07T12:36:00

I need the link http://localhost to be on my site's home page :)

New Xbox Dad column: My take on the Bee Movie Game

2007-10-28T04:43:00

If you or your kids are all excited about the upcoming Bee Movie with Jerry Seinfeld, then you should definitely check out my latest article on Xbox.com. Along with the movie, an Xbox 360 game is also on its way.... and a demo is already up on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Not the most representative demo (more on that in the article!), but still fun and the game promises even more.

Silverlight based Sidebar Gadget showing your Xbox Friends

2007-10-25T12:42:00

Awesome gadget from Adam Kinney, great information and a nice slick UI done in Silverlight.

Xbox Friends Watch - Get the Gadget!

Custom Armor Configurations in Halo 3

2007-10-24T14:38:00

In Halo 3 multi-player you can customize your SPARTAN or Elite's armor, with different variations unlocked by various achievements/activities in game (including one that can only be unlocked by being a Bungie employee). You can find out more about the different variations here, but it turns out that your profile on Bungie.net knows what choices you've made and displays your current armor configuration on the web site.

If you go to the Halo 3 Model Generator though, created by a community member, you can find the picture of any particular gamer you'd like (including yourself, which is how I found my picture, below) or create a custom image to plan out your own armor customizations.

What I'd really like to create is a live URL, one like /getpicture.ashx?GamerTag=Festive+Turkey, so that I could put my picture on my site and have it automatically update as I change my armor configuration in the game... hopefully ending up like this

The code for my blog site is now available on codeplex.com

2007-10-24T00:56:00

For anyone who is interested in using the code behind this site for their own blog, or who just finds reading code to be a fun pastime, you can go to http://www.codeplex.com/oxite to check it out. Of course, there are other blog engines up there, including blog engine .NET (which appears to be very highly supported and recommended by many folks), if you are in the market for some free blogging code.

Xbox 360 Arcade System announced

2007-10-23T05:23:00

For the price of $280, you can now get a new edition of the Xbox 360 console. This one is similar to the original core system, but with HDMI output, a 256mb memory card (so you can play and save your games right out of the box), a wireless controller, and five full arcade games. Perfect if you are more of a casual gamer or if:

you have an existing 360 with a hard drive and would like one with a HDMI output
you need a DVD player and/or a Media Center Extender (play all your Zune and Windows Media Center or Windows Media Player content in the living room!

For that price, you can pick up this system instead of a DVD player with HDMI out and you get the network connectivity and media streaming features along with an amazing system for playing a ton of great games. Sure the name says Arcade, but you can fire up Halo 3, Gears of War or Lego Star Wars II...

Crazy stuff, and perfect for you family focused Xbox gamers... and perhaps soon to be a second 360 for my house, since I now have a TV with HDMI in and nothing to hook into it... and it would be great to have the ability to play my music, TV and movies on our second TV as well...

More info on Xbox.com

Sampy explains how we built the Silverlight player for Channel 8

2007-09-27T04:49:00

In an interview with Adam Kinney on Channel 9 today, Sampy goes over how the player works and why using the JavaScript and templates from Expression Media Encoder saved us a bunch of hassle

See this video on Channel 9!

We added a Silverlight player to Channel 8 today

2007-09-15T18:29:00

We used a modified version of one of the templates that ships with Expression Media Encoder as our player... and channel 8 has become the first of our sites (which include Channel 9, Channel 10, VisitMix.com and more) to have a Silverlight video player on them. And, below here, you can see that player embedded into this blog post...

Note that I had to remove the 'scrubbing bar' due to some odd bug around releasing the mouse after scrubbing was completed... but we'll figure that out and get it back in as soon as we can. Check out the video above back in its home on C9.... check out the video from above on on Channel 8, and build your own player using those templates!

Tracking RSS Feed Statistics

2007-09-05T02:58:00

A few of my friends and co-workers have jumped on the FeedBurner bandwagon, and I've been pretty impressed with the stats they've been gathering. I'm not willing to send my readers off to someone else's service though (even though there are some reasonably safe ways to do that), so I started to think about how best to gather similar info myself. One idea would be to ship the IIS logs from my site back to my PC on a regular basis and run them through a LogParser script that would figure out all the stats for me... but that seems like a rather manual (or difficult to automate) and data transfer intensive method.

Instead, what I decided to do was to log every feed requests into a table on my SQL Server (actual SQL updates occur at regular intervals, not on every feed request). I log the feed URL being requested, the user agent of the requester, the IP Address of the requester, the number of subscribers represented by the user agent string (Google's feed reader, amongst others, indicates the # of subscribers in the user agent string) and the date/time they made the request.

What happens next is currently a manual process, but I'm working on making it automatic...

For a given 24-hour period:

I sum up the number of requests by user agent/IP address combo
I filter down to user agent/IP address combos that made more than one request to the same feed during that time period... this is intended to distinguish between a manual user visit and an RSS aggregator. (of course, if an RSS aggregator is set to be very polite and only hit my site once per day, then this will cut those #s out of the list)
I sum up the average subscriber # for all useragent/IP address combos ... to avoid counting any single aggregator user more than once and also to accommodate any fluctuation in web aggregator subscriber counts throughout the day.

This produces a final # that I believe is roughly accurate... 792 (for the past 24 hours) across all of my feeds (mostly either the main feed or the Visual Basic feed).

About half of the requests (244 total) filtered out because they made only one request in 24 hours do appear to be aggregators (looking at user agent strings) so that would add 120 or so to this #, but in the interest of not inflating the numbers, I think I'll stick with the calculations I've worked out so far. My other worry is that some of the web-based aggregators might be producing some duplicate values due to multiple source IP addresses, probably as a result of having aggregation code running on multiple nodes of a web farm.

Has anyone else tried to implement their own FeedBurner-style stats? Any thoughts on my logic so far?

Added Silverlight Streaming support to Channel 9's forums

2007-09-04T01:11:00

Continuing on in the same pattern as my last post, adding Soapbox support to C9's forums, Adam Kinney bugged me a bit and I went ahead and added support for Silverlight Streaming as well.

It will be interesting to see if (or more accurately, how long before) someone turns this to malicious purposes.

Added Support for Soapbox Videos on Channel 9

2007-08-29T19:35:00

When I started on the C9 dev team, one of the first things I did was to remove the ability for users to post embed, object and script tags. We had a couple of people abusing this feature and I wanted to lock it right down. The downside to this move was that it prevented some forms of user interaction/posts that we didn't really mind and in some cases would even like to encourage.

As a small step towards a more community-driven future, I added support to C9 today to allow you to embed Soapbox videos in any forum post. Simple use the following markup in your post:

[soapbox video="(soapbox video id)"]

and it will turn it into a full blown embed tag with a link to the source material underneath. The Soapbox video id is simply the GUID that appears on the permalink url (http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=5699dafe-d864-4d1f-976c-d5f4d9ed78db for example) for a video and also shows up in its embed code if you take a look at that as well.

Overlaying HTML over Silverlight

2007-08-28T17:51:00

In the new code that we are building for Channel 9, we have a few HTML popups here and there... floating divs for user info being one example. At the same time as we've been adding that feature, we also moved from using Windows Media Player to using Silverlight as our video player.

We ran into a bit of an issue though, in that our floating HTML was sitting under the Silverlight player, no matter what I did with the z-index of the two areas of the page.

That just wouldn't do, so I asked Adam Kinney (Silverlight Evangelist and former dev on the C9/C10 team) what to do. He pointed me to the 'isWindowless' property of the Silverlight object and that info, combined with this KB article about Windowless controls, was enough for me to figure out what to do.

Changing our player creation script to include this property solved the issue:

Silverlight.createObjectEx( { source: this.get_playerXaml(), 
parentElement: this.get_playerHost(), 
id:this._hostname, 
properties:{ width:'322', height:'296', 
version:'1.0', isWindowless:'true', 
inplaceInstallPrompt:'true'  }, 
events:{
onLoad:Function.createDelegate(
this, this._handleSilverlightPlayerLoad) }} );

producing a much nicer result...

XSLT and Alternating Rows

2007-08-17T11:54:00

Saw this today (it is over a year old though) on Roger Hartford's blog;

XSLT alternating rows

In an XSLT template tag you can simulate the same functionality as in GridView/DataGrid "AlternatingRowClass" property using this syntax:
<div class="MyClass">
    <xsl:if test="position() mod 2 != 1">
        <xsl:attribute name="class">AnotherClass</xsl:attribute>
    </xsl:if>
</div>
It's that simple!
Roger

I'm a big fan of XSLT based processing... and it is great to see ways to get exactly the results you want without additional server or client side code...

Xbox Dad article on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is up

2007-08-14T12:23:00

I was a bit surprised to find that I enjoyed this game, although I enjoyed the last few books in the series and the latest movie, I really figured the game would only appeal to kids. The pace is slower than most adult/teen games, but that makes it into more of an exploration instead of just quickly moving from one task to the next. My wife watched it and thought it was similar to a much more interactive and complex form of the game Myst... there are some action elements where you have to move quickly, target the bad guys, etc... but for the most part you are figuring out puzzles, perfecting your spells and exploring a very open set of environments. You can see more of my thoughts on the game in this Harry Potter article on Xbox.com.

Zune for Dummies hits the bookstores

2007-08-13T03:29:00

Brian was in town a few days ago and we ended up at a local bookstore... of course, since Brian hadn't even seen our new book, we looked around and found a copy... :)

The Channel 9/Channel 10 team is hiring

2007-06-28T12:16:00

Hey folks, I work as the dev lead for Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online and other sites. We build community sites for Microsoft using video, audio and text blogging and we build them using the latest .NET technologies. If you are into web development, if you have a passion for design and user experience, and if you really rock at AJAX, Javascript, CSS, C# and ASP.NET .... then this is the job for you :)

The Developer and Platform Evangelism Team is hiring a software design engineer to join the team that builds and extends Channel 9, Channel 10 and more. Our sites build a two way interaction between our customers and Microsoft using video as the primary communication tool. In the past several years we have built several additional sites and our network has grown in both traffic and content, and as a result we are looking for an additional Software Design Engineer to join the team. We are looking for someone who lives and breathes HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX and ASP.NET. The ideal candidate will have skills in all those technologies combined with a passion for design and user experience.

Do you like to ship, takes chances and effect change? Do you want to build cool sites that use Silverlight and Atlas to deliver a great user experience? Then come join our group where you'll find a small dynamic team of folks and you'll swear you are part of startup.
Experience in HTML/CSS, ASP.NET and C# is required and experience with AJAX, SQL, Scrum and Test-Driven Development is highly desired. Experience with Silverlight and/or WPF is not required but it would be great to have.

If you are interested and you meet the requirements, go to the official job listing on the Microsoft careers site and submit your resume!

Ratatouille preview article up on Xbox.com

2007-06-25T15:50:00

My latest kid-focused game article, which happens to be yet another movie tie-in, is about the upcoming Pixar film Ratatouille. Cool game, very nice looking... and it has entire missions around making recipes by spilling ingredients... just like how I cook at home!

Internal Microsoft tool, eScrum, is available to the public...

2007-06-22T19:10:00

We (the dev team behind Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online, and others ...)been doing scrum-ish development for a few sprints now, but we recently switched to using eScrum. This is a set of templates and tools for use with Team Foundation Server and it really rocks. There are few less-than-polished elements about the install and the web interface, but I'm glad they shipped it out for general use.

You can read a good summary of eScrum on the blog 'A Developer's Life', which is also a good resource for lots of other Visual Studio related news.

Hey, I'm on Channel 10 ... just in time for Father's Day

2007-06-17T04:13:00

I sat down to chat with Tina from Channel 10 to chat about my Xbox Dad articles, gaming with your kids, etc...

Keeping in Touch, a new Xbox Dad article is live

2007-06-14T10:32:00

It has been 'marketized' a bit from how I originally wrote it (with the addition of a product name right into the title for one), but a 'father's day' article from me is up on Xbox.com

Keep in Touch with Xbox LIVE Vision
Published June 13, 2007
It's an interesting time of year for Dads. High school graduation is just around the corner and college graduation has probably already happened. For some of you, this means that your son or daughter is moving out of the house, and there are going to be some changes in your relationship.
As Father's Day approaches, I find myself reflecting on the relationship I have with my Dad as an adult, and then in turn, wondering how things are going to be with my kids as they get older. My biggest worry about my kids, and my biggest feeling of guilt around my own father, is the difficulty of maintaining a strong connection, and trying to continue to be a part of their lives.

Need to write a parser of your own?

2007-06-13T02:41:00

I haven't had to write a parser since university, but if I had to write one now I'd definitely be checking out Tommy Carlier's 10 part series showing how to write a parser for a demo programming language of his own creation.

Blog - Duncan Mackenzie .NET

Responding to feedback on Oxite

Newly updated Oxite release available

Chatting today amongst the EvNet team

Best description of twitter I've seen

Marvel Digital Comics, not perfect, but worth the money!

Three Cups of Tea is a great book…

The new and improved Channel 9 has shipped!

At home, recovering from surgery

Sunburned at a Chess Tournament

Another chess tournament this weekend, last one before the state championship

Sidebar Gadgets for Channel 9, Channel 8 and more

Using my Xbox Live data service?

New Xbox Friends Gadget released and a Silverlight Gamercard Generator

ImageShack Toolbar causes incorrect results from ASP.NET's browser checking code

Code Metrics in Visual Studio 2008 and the EvNet project

The Viewport Meta Tag and the iPhone

Looking for good examples of Mobile Interfaces

Trying to open a file into VS 2005/2008 ... never works from Explorer

Xbox.com looks really boring without a flash plug-in :)

I'm planning to get rid of setting our Theme in ASP.NET

Xbox.com Personalities answer a bunch of holiday questions

Futurama the movie...

Search Engine Optimization Tweaks over the long weekend

Thanksgiving day... and I'm surprisingly short on things to do...

Picked up Mass Effect today... built XML site maps instead of playing it :(

Ice Cube talking about Silverlight...

More Xbox Dad articles, Viva Piñata Party Animals and Xbox Live

Anyone have contacts with TVTonic?

The new Zune software rocks!

It is hard to explain why, but...

New Xbox Dad column: My take on the Bee Movie Game

Silverlight based Sidebar Gadget showing your Xbox Friends

Custom Armor Configurations in Halo 3

The code for my blog site is now available on codeplex.com

Xbox 360 Arcade System announced

Sampy explains how we built the Silverlight player for Channel 8

We added a Silverlight player to Channel 8 today

Tracking RSS Feed Statistics

Added Silverlight Streaming support to Channel 9's forums

Added Support for Soapbox Videos on Channel 9

Overlaying HTML over Silverlight

XSLT and Alternating Rows

XSLT alternating rows

Xbox Dad article on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is up

Zune for Dummies hits the bookstores

The Channel 9/Channel 10 team is hiring

Ratatouille preview article up on Xbox.com

Internal Microsoft tool, eScrum, is available to the public...

Hey, I'm on Channel 10 ... just in time for Father's Day

Keeping in Touch, a new Xbox Dad article is live

Need to write a parser of your own?