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- Custom List: Other SitesNovember 1 2007
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Other Sites
A short bio about my inolvement helping define and create web technologies.
A web developer community I have been hosting for 8 years.
If you can't remember my URL and need to get back - just remember Weblogging. http://weblogging.com!
- Talking about Gadget devs, come out and play!August 2 2006
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I know it has been awhile since I posted. Tonight we have big news! MSN Spaces is now Windows Live Spaces. The Windows Live vision is taking shape! In addition to tons of cool improvements (themes, social networking, and more), now Gadgets can be built for Spaces as well as Live.com. Stay on top of developing for Spaces at the Spaces Platform blog.
One of the best aspects of Gadgets on Spaces is their viral nature. See a cool gadget on someones space - just click on the + sign and you can quickly add it to your Space. Let the fun begin!
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Gadget devs, come out and play!Admit it.You've always thought MSN Spaces was pretty cool -- that we did some things right and would work hard to smooth out any rough edges over time. But, you weren't sure if the Spaces team would ever let developers outside the company party in someone else's space. Well, a big part of joining the Windows Live family today is support for web gadgets written by anyone including YOU! Thanks to the great work done on Gadgets to date, you can now write a gadget that works both in Live.com (personalized portal) and Spaces (online expression/identity). And, it only takes one person adding it to their space for your gadget to become popular -- visito - Watch my Engineering Great AJAX Experiences Talk...May 4 2006
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My presentation from the Mix06 Conference, Lessons from the Trenches: Engineering Great AJAX Experiences is now online:Description:
Explore the challenges and lessons learned developing the Windows Live and Gadgets Web client frameworks powering Windows Live, Hotmail (Kahuna beta), Spaces, and more. This technical talk presents design and architectural considerations for building interactive AJAX-like sites. See how componentization, network management, accessibility, page composition, and more impact the design and engineering of your Web application.(To find other talks, go to the main Mix06 Sessions Page).
- Gadgets and Cross-Browser DevelopmentApril 27 2006
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We are working hard to improve the Gadget framework documentation. In the meantime (and as we improve documentation), I am working on a series of short tutorials, tips, and highlights introducing how to use the Gadget framework and the underlying APIs.
I am going to start with our compatibility layer. After exploring various third-party gadgets being developed for Live.com, I discovered that many developers are still struggling with the API differences between Firefox and Internet Explorer. Most common, I see various tricks to handle the event model differences where IE uses a global event object and Firefox passes the event object as an argument to your handler.
This is not necessary when you build Gadgets. Instead, you should be leveraging the underlying compatibility layer that is part of the overall Gadget framework.
As I posted last September, as we develop our properties, almost none of our application logic contains browser specific code. Instead, we develop once to the Internet Explorer API and our code runs without modification in Firefox. This occurs because we download a special script that emulates the most useful IE’isms inside of Firefox and in a few cases, Firefox/W3C’isms in Internet Explorer. In this article I highlight the most useful methods and properties of this layer (I promise we will develop
- What we learned building Live.com (or why are we slow)?April 25 2006
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Over the last 18 months, we have explored how to build a highly-interactive, customizable, and extensible portal. The first iteration was a simple portal on Start.com. We created various iterations (start.com/1, start.com/2, start.com/3) which have evolved into the first fully extensible portal on Live.com. Today, from Live.com to the Kahuna (Hotmail) beta to MSN Spaces, and so-on, we are investing heavily in building very rich, interactive experiences. With these investments, we are learning a great deal on the right and wrong ways to engineer rich, interactive web-sites.Underneath all our Windows Live properties, we share a common framework for how we engineer our client experiences. The framework is very client-centric where we composite most of the page client-side. For example, if you were to view Live.com’s HTML, you will notice that it serves a web-page “shell” and meta-data that describes the content. This meta-data is interpreted by the Live.com application and then rendered. This approach is extraordinarily flexible as we can quickly enhance and extend the application without any heavy server lifting. However, as we have learned and is