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As you probably know, TechEd US has just passed. I didn’t get to go (like always), but I did get to make my mark on the conference. I got to build one of the apps that Microsoft demoed on stage. I have actually built a bunch of demo apps for Microsoft and their conferences the last year. At some point, I will actually try to find them at some point a post some videos of them here. But they involve a CRM demo with a phone company, a SharePoint demo with a racing team and some other bits and pieces. Anyhow…this year my demo was a Word add-in, and my personal opinion about this project, before it got started, was that it sucked. I I’m not very fond of building Word add-ins as you might have guessed.

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The day before yesterday I was part of a Windows Phone 7 training day here in Wellington, New Zealand. Most of the day was presented by Nigel Parker, Web Development Advisor for Microsoft New Zealand, but I got to present some code demos for the attending developers. At the training, I promised to upload my sample code, so I did. But I also added some of my thoughts after the event. Sorry…

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While working on a little MVVM thingy the other day, I ran into a sweet little piece of code that I wanted to share. I have seen several version of this around the web, but this is where I found this particular version. The piece of code gets rid of the ugly part of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. The part where you use strings to identify what property has changed. I understand that that is how you have to do it, but it feels messy. A common solution is to add constants to hold the strings, but that is not a very much better solution. it is still messy. So how can we handle it in a safe way? Well…one idea would be to do it like this…

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A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft asked me to add closed captioning to the videos on the www.office2010themovie.com. And no…not automated subtitles that converts to what is said into text, like YouTube does…just subtitles from a file. This is not very complicated, not even when you add the fact that the videos are actually being streamed using Smooth Streaming. But I wanted roll it al into a control, to make it fast and easy to add subtitles to any MediaElement in future projects…

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