Unthinkability

Line Rider is a groovy little ‘flash-based’ game that has become a groovy little ‘Silverlight-based’ game. 

Similar to Mike Ormand’s experience, it’s funny that I was just talking with a fellow programmer about how deep these Expression toolsets have become, and why developers haven’t embraced them as quickly as I expected they would.

For young developers, it’s as much about “cool” as it is “capabilities.”  This new Line Rider platform switcheroo adds several metric tons of street cred to the Silverlight technologies.

So, I’m dusting off the source code for the ol’ www.myBabyNameGame.com site.  I needed a practical sample for trying out some LINQ, AJAX, and maybe some MVC (but I’m not interested in re-plumbing the whole site with MVC at the moment).

This site is old and dank.  I have not touched the source code in any significant manner for 5 years (since July 2003).  Much of the code is lame-o-lamity-lame.  

It has some neat features: PayPal PayFlow, a bitmap banner generator, an e-mail notification engine with one-click entry/auth URLs, and some flexible game options.  It does not, however, have any practical object-oriented design, nor proper CSS, nor an attractive look-and-feel.  It also has some hinky quirks that only I can see, but those quirks leave me feeling ashamed.  This old bag of bits seemed like the perfect candidate for tinkering.

SO while I was wiring up the MyBabyNameGame projects on my Vista laptop, I stumbled into a couple of gotchas/differences between IIS 5 (in Windows Server 2003) and IIS 7 (on Vista Ultimate):

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The old Visual Studio 2002 sure did a sloppy job with HTML… or should I say “html” because of the capitalization conventions. VS 2005/2008 does a much better job of capitalization and helping you deal with the open/close tag pairs.  (I’m blaming the old VS 2002 for the problems because to do otherwise would imply that I am not perfect.)

As I revamp the www.mybabynamegame.com website, I am finding that there is a lot of html cleanup to do in this site;  Missing tags, incorrect tag nesting, etc.  I’m pulling out all of the <TABLE>’s and replacing them with <div>’s to support CSS, and I’m fixing the tag capitalization while I’m there.  It is tedious and unrewarding grunt work.  I’m also changing the graphics and AJAX-ifying the site with the AJAX extender toolkit, so I might as well do it all at the same time.

Even though the underlying C# code that I wrote 5 years ago is a bit outdated, there is also a lot that is right about it, too.  For one thing… it still works, and it is easy to understand. 

Before I reviewed the code in depth, I had considered refactoring the whole thing for the MVC framework.  Now that I have seen the code, there is no way that I want to implement the MVC framework underneath this old maiden.  Doing so would be a bit like doing a heart transplant on a perfectly-healthy 50 year-old.  Let’s just do a bit of a face lift, some teeth whitening, and some angioplasty.

Anyone want to play it when I publish the changes?  E-mail me for a Gift Certificate.

I am quasi-religious when it comes to installing updates and patches on my Vista Ultimate laptop as they come down the pike from Microsoft Update.  Once a week on the unoffical “Patch Tuesday/Wednesday,” my system tray icon dutifully notifies me that there are updates available.  I usuall do not read the details, but today was different for some reason.

I was amused to read the details of KB Article 955020:  (From the Microsoft Knowledge Base KB:

In Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008, when you check the spelling of English language text in an application that uses the English dictionary, all the following words cannot be recognized and are flagged as being misspelled:

•	Friendster
•	Klum
•	Nazr
•	Obama
•	Racicot

Well, now that I have installed the update to fix that problem, I can rest easy tonight!

I giggled just a bit after I added a movie to my Netflix queue.  (See the screen shot.)

It has been three weeks since the bomb was dropped on my old company.  After weighing many options and meeting several great people from some good companies, I have accepted a position at a small-and-mighty software shop.  They have a neat-o idea, big dreams, a v1.0 product ready for market, some wicked-smart people with a passion for what they do and a vision of where they want to go.  To top it all off, “the old man” that hired me has built a business like this once before, and is ready to do it again.

I start Monday.  You have my permission to feel jealous.

I was sitting in my car in front of my house on Monday when lightning struck a tree next to my house.  When it happened, the whole world flashed a brilliant shade of white-blue, and there was an eerie, high-pitched rolling thunderclap. After the flash subsided, I saw sparks and embers falling onto the wet roof.  Crazy.

Lightning is funny.  It crawls, streaks, envelops, jumps, and whallops.  Inside the house, most everything survived.  The victims: The garage door opener, my internet router, a network hub, and a modem.  Everything else was OK; the flat screen TV, all of the computers, microwave, XBOX, all survived.

So, after three days with no internet, no web or mail servers, and a trip to Best Buy to pick up some gear, we are finally running again.  Ya miss me?