Kevin Hoffman

Kindle Session at Cloud Expo Barnes and Noble just recently unveiled their upcoming eReader, the Nook. On the blog of my non-techy alter-ego I've posted a comparison of the two readers that is entirely based on my own personal feelings of what is cool and what isn't, so take it as opinion and certainly not as a technical review. So far I've remained relatively aloof from the whole "eBook" craze. Ordinarily, given my geeky background and borderline insane craving for technology, one would think that I'd be all over these things. The problem is, my love for the written word also extends to a love for the experience of reading a book. Click here to check out the blog post. Call me crazy, but I love the smudged thumbs I get from a 3-hour reading session where the real world ceased to exist and it was just me and my alternate reality, lovingly prepared for me by my fav... (more)

Working with Table Storage on the Windows Azure

Azure Cloud on Ulitzer If you've been working with Azure for a while then you've probably spent some time using the StorageClient sample that came with previous versions of the SDK. With the November 2009 release of the SDK (the one they'll be using at PDC 2009), they have wrapped that sample up into the SDK and refactored it to fit more in line with the conventions and quality standards of a Microsoft API. As a result, some of your code will break (but not much). Queue storage and Blob storage (discussed in upcoming posts) actually have more breaking changes than table storage.... (more)

Html.JqGrid - Cleaning Up Your jqGrid Code

I was recently working on a project where I had five or six different pages, each of which was going to have a full CRUD-enabled jqGrid complete with form editing, date pickers, fields that show up in the form and not on the grid, etc. The problem is after I got finished doing the first one I realized that there was a truckload of really redundant jqGrid code that I didn't want to have to re-type over and over again. Worse, the code is really fragile and if you misplace a comma, bracket, brace, or paren - the debugging of it will give you migraines. So this is when I decided to ... (more)

Want to Learn How to Write iPhone Applications?

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. Lucky for us, there is such an iPhone boot camp co... (more)

Installing Geneva Beta 2 on Windows 7

Recently I installed the Beta 2 version of "Geneva", or ADFS 2.0. All of my machines are now Windows 7 machines, including just about all of my VHDs and virtual machines. The only time I use Win2k8 R2 is when the product I'm installing specifically requires me to do that. So when I installed Geneva on my Win7 box, I thought everything would be fine. Then I rebooted. The "Modify STS Reference..." and "Update federation metadata" menu items that are supposed to be added to the list of available options on an ASP.NET web application were gone. They were there before I rebooted but ... (more)