Been looking around WinFX and specifically XAML recently. Not sure I think writing XML is a great way to write a GUI (but billions of web pages clearly prove me wrong). My first impression is that one of the benefits is going to be automated creation of XAML — not from tools, but from our own programs.

It’s been 10 years since HTML was a household word and I still feel like it’s easier to hand write it than use a WYSIWYG tool. I also never really liked using dialog editors. Even good ones like Delphi have too many limitations, especially when it comes to layout. So, I’m not expecting much from the tool support for XAML. But since it’s just a text format, it should be pretty easy to generate from a simpler format (or from models). I’m looking forward to playing around with that idea.

Here are some links I’ve collected on giving presentations. I have been revisiting them lately in preparation for my talk next month.

• Kathy Sierra, in her Creating Passionate Users blog, thinks that we shouldn’t have slides. She also has this crash course on learning theory (with pictures and a workbook). 
• Seth Godin has a free-book called Really Bad PowerPoint. First tip: “No more than six words on a slide. EVER”
• Guy Kawasaki has the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint.
• The Beyond Bullets blog has great tips.
• The Zen master of presentations, Steve Jobs, vs. Bill Gates.

C++ (and Cocoa) unit testing is built into XCode on OSX. I am writing an application right now that I plan to port to Windows. When I wanted to see how portable my code was, I decided to get all of the unit tests passed on Windows.

Unfortunately, XCode does not use CppUnit, which is already portable. Here is some code I wrote that you can use to run your XCode generated unit tests on Windows.

I’ll be giving the next presentation at the Western Mass Dot Net Users Group on the basics of UML. Details:

Presentation:
Get an introduction to the Unified Modeling Language. Learn the basics of Class, Sequence, and Use Case diagrams.  The emphasis will be on UML sketching, but UML code generation will be discussed.

This session will be platform independent.  Please bring an open mind, your ideas, and experience to share with the group.  Software developers, project managers, students and anyone interested in software development on any platform are encouraged to attend.

Meeting Details:
Tuesday, February 7 at 6:00 PM
Fazzi Associates, Inc.
243 King St. Suite 236, Northampton

Despite his rants against C++, Stevey’s Drunken Blog Rants, is one of my favorite new blogs. Actually, since it hasn’t been updated in about nine months, and was written mostly in 2004, it’s not really new. It was rediscovered by social bookmarking sites (I found it on reddit.com). I was reminded of it while thinking about resuscitating this site.

There are a lot of great articles, but this one about server-side service software is one of my favorites (given that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the subject). Another great article on this topic is Paul Graham’s The Other Road Ahead.

The old .NET SAPs is rechristened under the name: Western Mass .NET Users Group  (and a spiffy new website). Tomorrow’s meeting topic is XML.

Speaking of XML, I saw this recently: Don’t Invent XML Languages by Tim Bray. In addition to pointing to this great list of XML Languages, he introduces “The Big Five” XML Languages and where they should be used.

Suppose you’ve got an application where a markup language would be handy, and you’re wisely resisting the temptation to build your own. What are you going to do, then?

The smartest thing to do would be to find a way to use one of the perfectly good markup languages that have been designed and debugged and have validators and authoring software and parsers and generators and all that other good stuff. Here’s a radical idea: don’t even think of making your own language until you’re sure that you can’t do the job using one of the Big Five: XHTML, DocBook, ODF, UBL, and Atom.