Update: This seems to be fixed in Explorer Platform Preview 1.9.7766.6000.

The many MacBooks that are available are probably set up for the Air session this afternoon. Our speaker informs us "We wont be using those", quickly followed by "Silverlight is a cross platform …".

Blend has loads of panels and properties. Nesting controls is possible. You can have a video inside a button.

Changes in Blend are detected in Visual studio. It helps to do a rebuild in Blend to make shure Visual studio isn’t working on an old version. Design view isn’t fully supported there yet. Double clicking on a button doesn’t get you a onClick handler yet.

Silverlight uses layout managers like Flex. Buttons have a content property which enables design and programming to be done separately. You can create some kind of color palette of Brush Resources in Blend which translates to SolidColorBrush elements in XAML. Visual studio has intellisence for XAML which makes it easier to type in there than in Blend. Fullscreen is supported but must be initiated by the user. Controls have a background and a border while other elements have a fill and a stroke. Blend has some glitches when setting properties on multiple controls. Switching to XAML code is the normal reaction to that. Not shure how designers will react to that. Hope these things are fixed when it goes out of beta.

The presentation was quite good, but I’m not sure weather I’m going to dump flash for this.

<script language="javascript" runat="server">
XMLUtil = function() {
  // nothing
}

XMLUtil.createXmlDom = function(xmlFile, xslFile){
  var result = null;
  try{
    result = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument.6.0");
    result.validateOnParse = false;
    result.setProperty("AllowDocumentFunction", true);
    result.setProperty("AllowXsltScript", true);
    result.setProperty("ProhibitDTD", false);
  }catch(e){
    try{
      result = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.3.0");
    }catch(e){
      try{
        result = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
      }catch(e){
        Response.Write("ERROR MSXML is not installed.");
        result = null;
      }
    }
  }
  if(typeof result == "object"){
    // "XSLPattern" in 3.0. "XPath" in 4.0, 5.0, 6.0
    result.setProperty("SelectionLanguage", "XPath");
    result.async = false;
    if(typeof xmlFile == "string"){
      if(xmlFile.indexOf(":") == -1){
        xmlFile = Server.MapPath(xmlFile);
      }
      result.load(xmlFile);
    }
    if (result.parseError.errorCode != 0) {
      Response.Write("ERROR " + result.parseError.reason);
      result = null;
    }else{
      if(typeof xslFile != "undefined"){
        if(typeof xslFile == "string"){
          xslFile = XMLUtil.createXmlDom(xslFile);
        }
        if(xslFile.parseError.errorCode != 0){
          Response.Write("ERROR " + xslFile.parseError.reason);
          result = null;
        }else{
          var transformedFile = XMLUtil.createXmlDom();
          result.transformNodeToObject(xslFile, transformedFile);
          result = transformedFile;
        }
      }
    }
  }
  return result;
}

XMLUtil.parsePlistDict = function(dictNode){
  var result = new Object();
  var keyNodes = dictNode.selectNodes("key");
  for(var i = 0, n = keyNodes.length; i < n; i++){
    var key = keyNodes[i].firstChild.nodeValue;
    var val = XMLUtil.parsePlistValue(keyNodes[i].nextSibling);
    result[key] = val;
  }
  return result;
}

XMLUtil.parsePlistValue = function(valueNode){
  var result = null;
  switch(valueNode.nodeName){
    case "true":
      result = true;
      break;
    case "false":
      result = false;
      break;
    case "string":
      if(valueNode.firstChild != undefined){
        result = valueNode.firstChild.nodeValue;
        // result = unescape(result);
        // result = result.replace(/\+/g, " ");
      }
      break;
    case "dict":
      result = XMLUtil.parsePlistDict(valueNode);
      break;
    case "array":
      result = [];
      for(var i = 0, n = valueNode.childNodes.length; i < n; i++){
        result.push(XMLUtil.parsePlistValue(valueNode.childNodes[i]));
      }
      break;
    default:
      Response.Write("ERROR can't parse "+valueNode.nodeName);
  }
  return result;
}

// usage:
var plistXml = XMLUtil.createXmlDom("c:\\example.plist");
var obj = XMLUtil.parsePlistDict(plistXml.firstChild.firstChild);
</script>

#entries {
    min-height: 500px;
}

To do this go to Site Preferences > Display > My style sheet.

Update: Google seems to have fixed it.

Flash Player 9 reached 90% penetration. Maybe thanks to being truly cross platform?

The iPod touch has a multi touch interface, wifi, iTunes and Safari. I wonder if it also lets you share your music for 3 days?

Opera 9.5 alpha has been released. It is blazingly fast and has a full-text search feature of your history.

Search was added to Google Reader. This also makes it impossible to use with Opera 9.5 alpha.

Sub RemoveBadOnes()
    
    'speed things up
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
    
    Dim sheetName As String
    sheetName = "copy of clean"
    
    'get number of non-empty rows
    '(probably not the most optimal way to do this)
    Dim numRows As Integer
    numRows = 1
    Do While Not IsEmpty(Worksheets(sheetName).Cells(numRows, 1).Value)
        numRows = numRows + 1
    Loop
    
    'go trough rows starting with the last one
    Dim counter As Integer
    For counter = numRows To 1 Step -1
        'remove each row containing #N/A in third cell
        If IsError(Worksheets(sheetName).Cells(counter, 3).Value) Then
             Worksheets(sheetName).Rows(counter).Delete
        End If
    Next counter
    
    'return control to the user
    Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
    Application.ScreenUpdating = True
    
End Sub

SELECT
    column_name
,   data_type +
    COALESCE(
       '(' + CAST(character_maximum_length AS VARCHAR) + ')'
    ,  '(' + CAST(numeric_precision AS VARCHAR) + ')'
    ,  ''
    )
,   column_default
,   is_nullable
FROM
    information_schema.columns
WHERE
    table_name = 'tablename';

Also see Getting a table description.