I’m looking forward to working with Visual Studio 2010 in (hopefully) the near future.  This little gem came across my RSS reader; an intellisense-like experience for editing XAML.

XAML Intellisense Presenter

And on a side note… can you spot the user experience bug in the screen shot above?  :)

In July 2009 I took a trip to Mont-St-Pierre with some friends to participate in the annual hang gliding festival held there.  What a neat place, and what great people!  Special thanks to Harry and Roxanne for the drive and their wonderful company.  Thanks to Lindsey and the Chew family for our day hike on an iffy flying day.  As always it was great to be in the air with Harry and Lindsey at a wonderful site and to get their wise input into hang gliding there and in general.  Flying there is no sweat for a hang 3 like me, just make sure you talk to the locals about the peculiarities of all the launches as well as micro-meteorology to be mindful of.

I had several flights during the course of our stay in Mont-St-Pierre; most were sledders.  On our last day before the trip back I had a 90 minute flight working the ridge over launch.  The lift band is quite narrow, a lot smaller than what we're used to at Ellenville, so you need good gaggle skills to stay up.  Toward the end of the flight I saw a small squall moving east along the coast toward launch and eventually some of the local pilots standing on launch indicated that I should head for the LZ and land.  I later discussed with some local pilots and was told that the LZ can get really hairy when squalls move through, so this was a safety issue.  On my flight it was not a problem but better safe than squashed.  This flight was a great way to conclude the trip and I really got a chance to appreciate the special quality of the site.

My feeling is that as Ellenville ambassadors we made a good impression.  Don't be surprised if we have some Canadian visitors at our site in the near future!

Harry clowning around.

Harry and Roxanne

Moon over the valley

Sunset on the beach

Panorama of the ramp launch at Mont-St-Pierre, at center. 

Panorama of Mont-St-Pierre LZ, originally uploaded by falcon170ct.

Here is a picture of the landing zone at Mont-St-Pierre.  The peak with the main launch is in the center of the frame.

To see all of the pictures I took on this trip, click here.

Video highlights of ellenvillers at Mont-St-Pierre

Below are a few of the many videos shot on this trip.  There is a link at the bottom for the rest of the videos.

[youtube:2Wf1ZzZZj8o]

Lindsey makes a landing

[youtube:32ylXKqr2-E]

Harry makes a landing

[youtube:-AOiKhXSDY0]

On this flight I land in the bushes and relearn the value of not going brain-dead when setting up my approaches.  The camera is pointed in kind of an odd angle but you may notice me popping the glider over a large bush at the very end then parachuting down into the bushes; the grass there was up to my chest.  The good news is, all of my landings after this one were great!

[youtube:-9fUDvi3cJw]

One of my first flights off of the east launch... Lindsey gives me encouragement while Harry records the video (thank you gentlemen!)

[youtube:ZT15eDrRoVI]

Lindsey makes a low transition and a nice landing.

Here is the full playlist of videos from the trip. There are 54 videos in all, and include a number of launches and landings, as well as views of clouds over the mountains and other scenes from the area.

Woohoo!  Finally found out what the problem was with BlogEngine comments.  It turns out the problem was an element in the parent web.config called xhtmlConformance.  Here's an article about it in Scott Guthrie's blog:

Gotcha: Don't use <xhtmlConformance mode="Legacy"/> with ASP.NET AJAX

I had figured it wasn't really a problem with BlogEngine, and was probably some sort of configuration issue, for this simple reason: the site was identical (except for content differences) on my server, vs. my local machine.  In my case, the legacy switch had been turned on in the web.config of the parent web... which is why I had trouble tracking this down.  Not knowing about the legacy switch didn't help the situation.

Thank you Scott Guthrie!

Here is a revised version of the Quotations widget for BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5.  This version of the widget includes miscellaneous bug fixes and enhancements:

• The "lastshown" field is now hidden (reserved for future use)
• Clicking the "cancel" link when editing a quote now works properly
• Added paging to the gridview
• Text wrapping fixed on the quotation textbox
• Fixed bug when last item is deleted

Quotations.zip (5.02 kb)

Wow, hotmail / windows live mail is down:

I wonder what happened?

In the spirit of A Continuous Learner's Weblog, and to try to update my blog more frequently, I'm going to start posting links here.  I'll try not to recycle Steve's excellent choices, but I can't guarantee that I won't inadvertantly (or even deliberately) repeat these moving forward. 

Client Scripting

• jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices

Prior to upgrading BlogEngine I had written (actually borrowed/rewritten) a fairly ugly user control to show a daily quotation.  Now that BE 1.4.5 is here, the new widget framework looks pretty nifty.  So I took the LinkList widget and massaged it into something I could use to store and display daily quotes.

My original quotes setup only shows one quote on any given day and uses a datestamp to keep track of this.  I've attached my first pass at a quotation widget below.  This widget picks a quote at random each time the page loads.  However when you edit you will see a date field... eventually I want to make a daily quote as with my original (or perhaps you can choose to display random quotes or to rotate at daily intervals, or even time intervals).  So the date field is there for future use.

The quote is displayed in a div styled with the selector "quotation".  The author/source is displayed in a 2nd div with the style selector "quotation_author".  So you can update your theme stylesheet to modify the appearance of these.

Enjoy!

Quotations.rar (4.21 kb)

---------------

3/13/2009:  There is an update to the quotations widget.

Finally installed BlogEngine 1.4.5.  Something goofy happened with my web hosting provider permissions on the app_data folder... I kept getting exceptions, but with tech support finally got it straightened out.

Now I just need to fix my daily quotes control.  I want to turn this into a widget and contribute to the community.