Articles by Kevin Hoffman

Choosing the Right Mobile SDK and Platform for Your Application

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:30:00 EDT

I am currently of the mindset that Android should be considered a wait and see technology. The iPhone SDK sports the best mobile application deployment and purchasing channel on the market, but can be problematic for enterprises and apps requiring high levels of security. Also, there is some risk in building an app that might be rejected. The .NET Compact Framework is a tried and true, proven mobile development framework that provides a relatively easy way to build apps for Windows Mobile devices. It takes some effort to make your Windows Mobile apps look decent, but you get the benefits of a huge community, re-use of your C#/.NET skills, great tools and more.

Apple Drops the iPhone NDA for Released Software

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:00:00 EDT

Rest assured that I'll be commenting further on this subject, but I wanted to post letting people know that the floodgates are about to open. I'm guessing iPhone bloggers are going to start posting massive amounts of code samples in the coming days. Good times for all... It's just a shame that Apple took so long to open the doors. I feel really bad for the authors who had to change their writing plans and even change the content of their books to accommodate Apple's resistance to lifting the NDA.

Install Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack and You Die

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:00:00 EDT

I'll keep this blog post short and sweet because the more I think about it the more I get close to the verge of exploding. Here's my situation: I had Visual Studio 2008 Professional installed. From scratch, clean install. Everything works great, all is good in the Microsoft world of .NET. Yay me! Now, I have a particular need to compile and run code that will only work on .NET 3.5 SP1 so I install Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1... and it completely and totally prevents me from building any WPF application. I can create a brand new WPF application with File->New and immediately hit Build and I will see the same failures. It complains about 'SplashScreen' and then complains about failures in 'MarkupCompilePass1' task.

iPhone Developer's Journal - AppleInsider Reveals Details of My WWDC Presentation

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 05:10:00 EDT

An NDA is something that you volunteer for, it is willful act, you must choose to agree to the terms of the NDA. No one is forcing you to do it, there are no guns pointed at your head. If you do not like or agree with the terms of the NDA, then do not sign it. However, if you do choose to sign it, then, in my opinion, you lose the right to bitch and moan about the fact that you cannot divulge privileged information. We all knew what we were getting into when we agreed to the iPhone Developer Program NDA, and we all know that when you buy a WWDC ticket, you are bound by an NDA that covers every word overhead, every word displayed, every piece of content in that conference with the exception of the keynote. If we really feel so strongly that these NDAs are overbearing and excessive, then we have the right to voice our disapproval by NOT agreeing to them.

Web Services Manifesto - RESTful Architecture and the Programmable Web

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 04:30:00 EDT

I don't need to go into too much detail here about what exactly REST is - I know that most of the readers of this blog are well versed in Web Services technologies and architectural patterns. The thing that I want to cover is that REST is an architectural decision, it is not a protocol or a wire format or even an industry standard. It is a set of recommendations for how you organize the information exposed by your Web Services. Before I go into detail here, I personally think that REST is the way to go. Unless you have a particular need to be strapped into the SOAP/WS-* roller coaster, your Web Service should be exposing resources via RESTful URLs. I can't imagine why people would chose not to do so.

iPhone 3G - MobileMe vs. Live Mesh

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:00:00 EDT

So how does this relate to MobileMe? MobileMe is, according to Phil Schiller's keynote, 'Exchange for the rest of us'. What this means is that using MobileMe, you will receive push contacts, push e-mail, and push calendar notifications. This will work with any MobileMe-aware application, including Outlook on the PC and iCal, Mail, and Address Book on the Mac and iPhone. This also includes the old iDisk functionality which allows you to share files among all of your devices using file synchronization technologies. iDisk works, but don't ever try to code directly on an iDisk folder with Xcode unless you have a back-up. Hopefully this peculiarity has been fixed in MobileMe.

P2P Explained: What Exactly is a Peer Network?

Fri, 23 May 2008 15:15:00 EDT

Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to P2P network, but all of them can be reduced down at some point to a drawing containing nodes and edges.

P2P Explained: Introducing the Windows Communication Foundation Peer Channel

Fri, 23 May 2008 08:00:00 EDT

To quickly recap from the previous article, a peer network is a logical graph of computers (or applications, depending on your abstraction level) which are connected in some way. In a pure serverless peer network, there is no single designated machine in the network that holds more or less state than any other computer. Hybrid variations of peer networks involve peer communication for some tasks and client/server communication with a state/central server for other tasks

Kevin Hoffman's Review of Iron Man

Mon, 19 May 2008 06:00:00 EDT

I took the advice of a friend of mine and steered clear of the 'normal' movie theaters and went a little out of the way to go to a DLP movie theater. The experience of comparing a regular movie theater to a DLP movie theater is like comparing standard def analog TV with a 1080i HDTV signal. The movie itself was awesome. I was pleasantly surprised. I expected, wrongly so, another loosely connected chain of high-impact special effects moments like most of the other recent comic book adaptations have been.

Using My HDTV as a Second Monitor

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

During my last trip to Best Buy, on a whim I picked up a DVI-to-HDMI connector (male DVI, female HDTV). This little doohickey plugs into the side of my Macbook Pro and then I plug the HDMI cable into that. I run the other end of the HDMI cable into the HDTV and I get something that is pretty awesome. I'm sure all of you techheads and mediaphiles have been doing this for years but I'm generally a little behind the times. I was expecting to get the same experience I get when I plug in a projector, where the projector and the main monitor become synchronized and I see everything really fuzzy on the laptop monitor and clearly on the projector.

Peer Networking Series - A Closer Look at PNRP vs. Bonjour/ZeroConf

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:15:00 EDT

It seems as though whenever I bring up PNRP and its benefits, I am immediately inundated with a list of questions or comments indicating that Microsoft is re-inventing the wheel and that PNRP has already been implemented before in the form of ZeroConf and, more specifically, Apple's implementation of it called Bonjour (formerly known as Rendezvous).

CLINQ v1.1.0.0 Released

Fri, 02 May 2008 17:15:00 EDT

CLINQ v1.1 has been released. Some of you may have already downloaded some of the new builds, but here's a rundown of what the new release includes: Support for Continuous Aggregation. Now, in addition to being able to have your result sets automatically update themselves in response to changes in the source set as well as changes to items in the source set, you can have aggregate scalar values that continuously update in the same fashion. The following is a list of the supported aggregation types that can now be done continuously:

Are Social Networks Just Another MMO Grind?

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:15:00 EDT

You remember back in the early days of video games when there wasn't enough capacity on the carts themselves to support 30 hours of gameplay? What was the solution to keep you playing? They made the games unbelievably freaking difficult. Try playing Kid Icarus now after having played a modern game and you'll see that the game introduces artificial barriers and creates needless blocks simply to increase the amount of time spent in the game. If you're an MMO maker and you charge a monthly fee, the more time people spend in your game the more money you make.

Is the Silverlight Adoption Rate Artificially Inflated?

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:45:00 EDT

Silverlight 2.0 is a freaking phenomenal RIA development environment and I would actually, at this point, put the development experience in Silverlight 2.0 above and beyond Flex. I can do more faster and have it look better and run more efficiently in Silverlight 2.0 than I can in Flex. BUT, when you're looking for case studies, look for ones where the person or organization who adopted Silverlight did so of their own volition, without being approached by Microsoft. I'm interested in hardcore, unbiased opinions from people who have been in the trenches doing their own coding, not watching Microsoft consultants do the coding for them. There are plenty of case studies like that out there, you just have to look past the shiny bouncing balls that are the Olympics and the Oscars and all the other crap that probably cost Microsoft a hojillion dollars in marketing funds and incentives.

Silverlight 2 - Adobe Flex Killer Is on Its Way!

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 11:00:00 EDT

Silverlight 2.0 kicks ass and I can't wait to start dropping more hardcore blog posts regarding it. Scott Guthrie's tutorials are a fantastic place to start. The issue I have, however, is that all of the tutorials assume you have installed Silverlight 2.0 tools for VS 2008. There is a small issue with that and I'm not sure everyone's aware of it.

Want to Learn How to Write iPhone Applications?

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:30:00 EDT

If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.

AJAXWorld Report: Inaugural iPhone Developer Summit in New York City

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 05:30:00 EDT

I want to thank everyone who showed up to share my enthusiasm for the iPhone as it is, what I believe, the mobile development platform to target. I also want to thank those people who tolerated my evasiveness and lack of detail during the SDK session. As I've said before, just because everybody else on the internet has no problem violating NDAs, when I click 'Agree', I know what I am agreeing to and I intend to stick to that agreement.

Taking Advantage of the Partial Class with the ADO.NET Entity Framework

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 05:30:00 EDT

So you're building your data-driven application and you've got an ADO.NET Entity Model that represents an abstraction around your database. Maybe you're even pretty savvy and you've used inheritance and some filters to enhance the entity model so that it really is an entity model and not just a raw translation of your database schema into objects. One thing that I have noticed is that in a lot of sample code, a lot of utility functions end up being put in inefficient locations because people forget that the entity model is a partial class. This means that you can extend the model with your own properties and methods.

Windows Mobile Discussion During iPhone Developer Summit

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:15:00 EDT

During the Q&A period after one of my sessions at the iPhone Developer Summit last Thursday, there was someone there from Microsoft Competetive Intelligence. She asked myself and some other folks who were lingering nearby to describe, in our unbiased opinions, what we thought was wrong with Windows Mobile.

iPhone Developer Summit

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:45:00 EDT

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

My Take on the iPhone SDK

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:45:00 EDT

So, to start with, I need to preface this blog post with a notice: The contents of the SDK as well as the experiences that occur while using the SDK are confidential. Yes, I am one of those crazy-weird people who read EULAs and license agreements. When you agree to installing the SDK, you agree to those terms. Anybody posting information about the innards of the SDK is violating the agreement and subject to assault by massive teams of rifle-toting SWAT guys. So, the opinions and information I post here will be based on information in the public domain, such as Steve Jobs' keynote and information you can find on Apple's website without logging in using your ADC or iPhone Developer credentials.

Jobs Says "Not Likely" to Flash on the iPhone

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 04:00:00 EST

Ever since the iPhone was first displayed, people have been wondering if there was going to be any kind of Flash support for the iPhone. Initially, I think the response from Jobs was 'maybe', but I took that as a 'nope'. There are hundreds of reasons why Flash doesn't make sense on the iPhone, but I'll run through a couple of my own opinions as to why Flash, in its current state, is not a good fit for the iPhone.

iPhone SDK Will Be Worth Waiting For!

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:30:00 EST

I love reading about how these people have inside sources. If an inside source within Apple was leaking information like that, that information source wouldn't be working for Apple much longer. No matter how close these friends of Apple employees may be, those Apple employees aren't talking. I have the utmost respect for the people who continue to tell me that they can't tell me anything. Whether you agree or disagree with the policy of secrecy that typically surrounds upcoming Apple products, feature offerings, and SDKs - you have to respect their ability to keep a lid on that. So, anytime I see anybody claiming an inside source, I'm skeptical from the start.

Silverlight 2.0 - One RIA Framework to Rule Them All

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:45:00 EST

Anytime you can create a blog post about the .NET Framework that also includes borrowed half-quotations from Lord of the Rings, you've got to take that opportunity. Like pretty much every other RIA developer, I am sitting back anxiously awaiting the arrival of Silverlight 2.0. Silverlight 2.0, to me, represents the idea of what Silverlight should have been from the start. It is a rich, full-featured, amazingly powerful subset of WPF that runs on a miniature CLR and allows developers to re-use their existing experience, design patterns, skills, knowledge, and abilities with C#, .NET, and WPF. It also allows designers to re-use their knowledge and experience using the Expression Blend suite of products for producing XAML-based designs and artifacts.

Scott Guthrie Posts More Details About Silverlight 2.0

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:00:00 EST

Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications. This upcoming Beta1 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc). The built-in controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions.

Windows 7 Really Just Windows Surface?

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:45:00 EST

I was reading news feeds when I read a blog post that included some quotes from Bill Gates. Bill was quoted as saying that Windows 7 will make the keyboard and mouse far less important than in the past. We've all heard that crap before, it's typically what Bill used to say before attempting to pimp yet another failed Tablet PC project. I admit, I fell for the Tablet thing once... I had one, and I hated it. It was never powerful enough to be a real laptop and it was never portable enough to be a good enough tablet. In short, it was useless.

DreamSpark Is Very, Very, Very Un-Microsoft-Like!

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 EST

The DreamSpark program is one of the newest initiatives to come out of Redmond that are very, very un-Microsoft-like. I'll talk about another later in this post. It appears as though University and high school students will, at some point (I don't know the hardcore details) be able to receive free copies of Visual Studio, SQL server, and other development servers and enterprise servers. They can use these for non-commercial uses free of charge.

Macbook Air

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:15:00 EST

There were a total of four Macbook Airs on display, as well as a bunch of other shiny things that I wanted to touch. At first, I wasn't really all that interested in the MBA. I had previously done some number crunching and determined that for me, the price-per-feature was too high to justify the purchase of the device. However, as I've discussed with multiple people, if you are one for whom laptop size and weight are more important than true horsepower, then the MBA is your ultimate device and the answer to most of your prayers (no, the MBA will not answer the prayer you have that involves supermodels, Jell-O, and 80s hair bands....)

Why is O'Reilly Condoning iPhone Hacking?

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:15:00 EST

So is O'Reilly actually condoning the hacking of the phones? O'Reilly has had a long and prestigious history as being the ultimate source for *nix manuals, including many books that became so dogeared I actually bought multiple copies, including dozens of 'in a nutshell' books. Back in those good old days, 'hacks' which appeared in O'Reilly titles were actually just low-level down-and-dirty nuggets of pure gold that geeks and admins loved but were all perfectly legal.

iPhone & Virtualization: ASP.NET Inside VMware Fusion on a Mac

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:45:00 EST

So here's my precarious situation: I'm writing some sample web applications for the iPhone. Every once in a while, I poke around using Ruby on Rails, but by and large my web development lately has consisted entirely of the ASP.NET MVC framework CTP. I also don't own a PC anymore - I own a Macbook Pro and an iMac. So, what's an ASP.NET developer to do?

Volta is to AJAX What Tums is to My Stomach

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:15:00 EST

In a typical AJAX application, your goal is often to have the user click something. In response, JavaScript goes out and (through the magic of XML HTTP Requests) obtains data and potentially modifies data on a server as well. Using the returned data, the JavaScript can then directly manipulate the HTML DOM to make it appear to the end user as though things just dynamically happened in a manner very similar to a traditional desktop application.

How to Display Safari Address Bar on iPhone v1.1.3

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:30:00 EST

OK OK, so I admit I'm already running version 1.1.3 of the iPhone firmware. While I think it's fantastic that I now get the ability to add web icons to the home screen, and that the home screen has multiple pages, I usually spend my first few minutes on a new version of the firmware looking for changes in Safari that might impact iPhone web application developers. One that I noticed right away is that Safari is no longer fooled by the 1-pixel scroll trick. In case you're not familiar with this trick, the way it worked is that under previous versions of the iPhone software, if you scrolled the web page slightly, then the address bar would hide itself. iPhone web application developers took advantage of this to make their applications look a little more 'native' by using JavaScript to simulate a user scroll of just one pixel.

Why Geeks Just Don't "Get" the Macbook Air

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:15:00 EST

Think about this: If I wait a couple weeks until I can lay hands on one in a store before ordering, a shiny new Macbook Air might arrive just in time for the iPhone SDK, giving me the perfect iPhone development machine since the iPhone GUI doesn't require the same amount of screen real estate that Interface Builder 3 requires. My usual rule of thumb is to wait 2 weeks after a Steve Jobs keynote before purchasing anything. That way I can be sure that any residual RDF effects have worn off. We'll see how well I'm holding up two weeks from now :)

Popcorn + TiVo + Macbook Pro + iPhone = Hell Yeah!

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:15:00 EST

I plugged in the iPhone and now I've got several episodes worth of 'The Universe' that I can watch in the palm of my hand while I'm on the train. I'm sure everybody reading this has already realized how cool this ability is, but I'm new to the whole video conversion thing. So with the addition of a fairly cheap piece of software (Popcorn) to the hardware I already own, I was able to add a lot more value to my TiVo recordings. From TiVo to iPhone took me about 40 minutes for an episode, but that's because the TiVo is wireless and the Macbook Pro is admittedly not the fastest at video encoding. Either way, if you have a TiVo and an iPhone, you need to go buy a copy of Popcorn.

iPhone with High-Speed G3 Support at Macworld

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:30:00 EST

Who am I to break with the tradition of spinning wild flights of fancy in the spirit of Apple lovers everywhere and calling them predictions? Just about every site on the net that is even remotely related to technology is now fully caught up in the buzz and hype and has posted their predictions for what fantastically cool new gadget that Apple will produce. In my typical cynical fashion, I have been quoted as saying that Steve Jobs could walk off stage, head to the mens room, come back on stage with the um... net result ... call it an iCrap, and the audience would roar with ecstatic frenzy and worship the new gadget as though it had been brought down from the mountain by Moses himself.

Installing Orcas Beta 1 with VMware Style Virtualization

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:15:00 EST

In the past, I have downloaded the behemoth Virtual PC images that Microsoft provides for the Orcas CTPs. When I was confronted with the choice of whether I wanted to download the Orcas image (which is a 5.3GB dual-layer DVD image) or whether I wanted to download the Virtual PC image (which I think is 8 gargantuan files, and must also download the base image, also over 1GB) I decided to download the DVD image.

Apple Developer Connection Changed My Life

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:15:00 EST

Since I purchased my ADC subscription in January, it's coming up on renewal time and I thought I would take a few moments to reflect on the past year from the perspective of a newbie Cocoa programmer. When I showed up to the Leopard Tech Talk in 2007, I felt a little nervous... after all, I showed up and took notes on a Windows Vista machine ;) Everyone there, especially all of Apple's evangelists were very welcoming... they didn't even throw me out when I started asking them for comparisons between Cocoa and WCF and Core Animation and WPF. They even remained gracious when I started talking about Remoting and PNRP ;) Trust me, it takes a lot of patience to be in the same room with me when I'm in 'learning mode'.

An Introduction to Volta: Tier-Splitting is Not Tier-Agnosticism

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:45:00 EST

Basically Volta's tier splitting feature is designed to make it so that you can build your application early and then figure out where the services need to go when you're done. This allows you to profile your entire application on a per-method-call basis all in a tight integrated system without having to deal with complicated distributed deployments. Once you've done your profiling you will be able to see what communications are chatty, which ones are chunky. Further, you can then decide whether you want Service A to be in the 'secure' server type and whether you need Service B to be running on the 'high availability' server type, etc.

Will Google's Android Sink or Swim?

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:45:00 EST

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.

How to Hack AJAX Into the ASP.NET MVC Framework

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:15:00 EST

There's a couple of things that I like about his sample, and a couple of things that worry me. First, I like the idea that there's an Ajax controller. I hope in the final bits it's simply called Controller and they don't make you distinguish between an Ajax controller and a regular controller - you should be able to pick and choose the functionality you want, and, well, quite frankly, I'm just sick and tired of seeing the word Ajax embedded in code. The Ajax controller should give you, as he demonstrates, the ability to render small bits of HTML. What I dislike about the Ajax nomenclature is that this functionality is useful even outside the realm of Ajax rendering and I think it should be included in the default controller.