Welcome to Pete Brown's 10rem.net

First time here? If you are a developer or are interested in Microsoft tools and technology, please consider subscribing to the latest posts.

You may also be interested in my blog archives, the articles section, or some of my lab projects such as the C64 emulator written in Silverlight.

(hide this)

Monthly Archives: July 2008

  • Facebook Developer Toolkit 2.0 Release Candidate Now Available

    I just gave a talk at Microsoft TechReady covering how to build Facebook applications that host Silverlight content. One problem I ran into was the changing Facebook API and how the toolkit wasn’t yet synchronized with that. Well, just today, the Facebook Developer Toolkit version 2.0 RC was put up there. I haven’t used it yet, and understand it has some RC-type issues, but I will definitely b...

  • Easy Ways to Make your Technical Blog More Visible and Programmable

    I've been doing a bunch lately with aggregating various technical blogs and surfacing the content through Silverlight and Facebook. While doing that, I ran into a number of challenges and figured out ways that folks can work around them to make their blogs more visible and more easily used in mashups. I'm not a marketing or branding expert so I'd be happy to include suggestions from som...

  • What I Look for in an Interview Candidate

    I’ve interviewed a large number of people over the past 12+ years at Applied Information Sciences. I’m generally not interested in people who just want a job. I want people who love technology and programming (or some part of software development). I want passion and I want self-direction. While that passion is preferably in something related to what we do (either directly like, say, Silverlig...

  • The Uncanny Valley at Delta

    The Uncanny Valley is that interesting little dip in our reaction to near-human movement and appearance. It shows that the more human-like something becomes, the more we notice that it is not human. An example of this is a cartoon vs. something like the very uncanny characters in Polar Express. You don’t think much about how the cartoon character moves, but you’ll notice every misplaced muscle ...

  • How to Resize a Silverlight 2 App and Keep the Same Aspect Ratio

    A similar question just popped up on a list I’m on, so I thought I’d whip up a quick example on how to resize a Silverlight application while keeping the same aspect ratio and centering the content.   The key to resizing is to use a ScaleTransform on the LayoutRoot of your main page. Here’s the important part of the xaml for the page. The key part is the “Grid.RenderTransform” section a...

  • Are You Using WPF as Well? Let Me Know!

    For those of you working with Silverlight 2, are you also working on WPF projects? If so, what types of things are you building in WPF? Are you sharing source and/or team talent across the two technologies? What about readers doing only one or the other? Either way, drop me a note in the comments below. I’m interested in getting a feel for crossover between the two communities and reasons for ...