All of a sudden I couldn't sync my Zune anymore on my Windows XP computer. I would always get an error that there was an error on the installation of the hardware when I plugged the Zune into the USB port. The actual error I would get was:

There was a problem installing this hardware "zune" 

I tried all sorts of "fixes" including installing the Zune software update and uninstalling the Zune drivers, but nothing seemed to be working. There were folks on the Internet saying that I should format the Zune through a series of clicks - ummm no.

There was also a suggestion of cleaning up my registry and that I should get a registry cleaner of sorts and fix the problem. Though, there was also the suggestion that I should do a complete download/reinstall of Windows Media Player 11 as it will install some services that might have been removed. I gave this a try (as it was an easy one) and it worked perfectly - now my Zune is back connected and I am syncing.

While I was at TechEd 2008, I bought myself some nice "premium" headphones (plugin style).

They have like a canvas feel to the cord which is different and interesting and provide a more rigid cord than otherwise. I like them and they sound great. I also got myself a docking station (to plug into my receiver at home), though the AC adapter is something that I can't take to Europe as it is for US power levels only. Dang. I would have rather carried a bigger AC adapter to then be able to carry that adapter around the world with me.

You see a ton of charting components out there for .NET. Whenever you look into any magazine for developers in the developer space, you will see all sorts of advertisements for charting components of every kind. One of the main things these companies show is the new fancy and shiny charts as proof that they are the obvious choice in your applications that you want to build. As a developer, you might look at this chart and say, "Wow, this is new and this would look wonderful in my application".

I am here to tell you that you are wrong and this assumption is just plain incorrect (sorry for being blunt).

When dealing with financial charting, your end users are only interested in getting a visual representation of a lot of data in a single glance. This "glance" just takes a lot longer when you turn your chart to a 3D chart or add too much visual noise to your charts. "Simplicity is KING" with charts. Remember this and repeat this ten times!

Here is a 3D chart of some performance data:

As you can see here, this chart may look cool to some as it is "new and shiny", "different", "modern", etc ... BUT it really is crap. The idea of a chart is to give you a visual representation of a large amount of data quickly and easily. You are going to want to do this with the least amount of visual noise as possible. Looking at this chart, it gets hard for your eyes to differentiate between the series items in the chart.

Now take a look at this chart:

This chart contains the same data, but it is quite a bit more readable. Here you have simple and flat lines and a line chart is really meant to be presented in a two dimensional fashion. So what if this charting style hasn't changed much for you in the last 100 years or so - it WORKS. You can read this fast and it conveys its points very well. There is no ambiguity in understanding its context.

The first 3D chart is a crazy example, but there are people actually doing this in the financial services world. The other approach in 3D is using something like tubes to represent lines to give the line itself a 3D feel. Again, bad bad bad. Don't fall victim to these types of charting ideas that you see in chart component advertisements. To make this chart even worse, you will also see some that have this in addition to shadows under the lines. How much visual noise do you need?

These non-workable 3D charts are starting to be shoved in our faces more and more as WPF and Silverlight have come to the scene. Microsoft, control vendors, and developers are really trying to show off the capabilities of the platforms they are presenting and show end users these really unusable and non-digestible charts.

I am not against WPF and Silverlight - on the contrary! I love these technologies and I think that it is quite possible to positively impact financial charting. How? Well, imagine a scatter chart:

A scatter chart can have a number of items on a page that represent an item in the collection and its place within an X/Y chart. You can also have a chart that utilizes this structure but also changes the size of the bubble based upon another factor (e.g. such as the worth of the item). An example of that is represented here:

Now in looking at how WPF might enhance this chart - let's say that your collection contains a large amount of constituents - let's say thousands. What could your chart look like in this case?

This is starting to look rather poor. The reason for this is the fact that there are so many constituents in the chart grid that they are stacked on top of each other and you are unable to really view the entire collection and how items in the collection relates to other elements within the same collection. This is really where technologies like WPF and Silverlight will have a dramatic impact. Imagine a situation in WPF where the elements are presented in the chart grid as a set of 20 items in the forefront while the other 980 items a bit more translucent - but still on the same chart (in the background). Then with some type of sliding capabilities with the mouse left click hold moving down or up you can slowly change the collection set of what is at the forefront allowing other items to fall back and become more transparent while the forefront items losing their transparencies.

My point is this - financial charting in the future should not change in how the data visual represented, but in the changing of how this data is interpreted on the chart and scouring through large collections of data can easily and intuitively be manipulated through WPF and Silverlight more so than ever before. I am really looking forward to the future of  these technologies and how they will allow you to quickly filter large series of items based upon specific criteria with relative ease. To me the power for XAML will be in the ability to quickly zoom into a complicated chart to the exact scenario you wish to see, much like Virtual Earth or Google Maps allows you to zoom from a full-blown Earth map to your community with just a flick of the mouse.

This will be the power in charting - it will NOT be in 3D'ing your charts and turning them into unreadable graphics.

I attended a session (title above) by the famous Doug Seven. Doug is always one of the better speakers out there and he covered how to construct your projects to work with various systems that improve the overall application and approach. Focus was put on unit tests and code coverage and the importance of incorporating these items into your development process. It is surprising to me that this is not yet the norm of application development. Again, I said this in a previous post, but development teams need to work to a continuous integration process and use tools that facilitate such activities.

Microsoft has done a lot in this space, but so has the open source community. I, myself, use aspects of both to give me exactly what I am looking for. For unit testing, I use Visual Studio. For our build process - we are using CruiseControl.net.

The Code Coverage UI is not bad in Visual Studio and allows you to really drill into our code. NCover is the competition to this and provides more of a visual aspect to the coverage aspect of your code - but VS is definitely not bad. Looking at the code directly - Visual Studio is better and shows wonderful coloring to show which code is being covered and which code is not.

The other thing Doug presented is the integrated load test preparation capabilities that are built into Visual Studio. I haven't used the Visual Studio one myself, but instead, I have used ACT. I actually have a stand-alone version of ACT that was given to me from Microsoft and it is something that we have generated scripts for when we want to test our web pages as well as our ASMX and WCF services. The Visual Studio load testing features are a heck of a lot better than the ACT one. It definitely does a lot more for you around customization and visualization of your work and results.

Nice session overall.

TechEd is going good. This years TechEd is a bit different than the many that I have been to before. The keynote was ok - not great, but not bad. I was hoping for some customers to come out on stage and present the really cool things they are doing with Microsoft's technologies. I love seeing front line implementations and the hills they had to climb to get to what they have. But there was none of that this year.

They brought out a robot as part of some new Robotics group in Microsoft and they brought out a robot as a demo of what they are talking about. They had the robot play back an old voice recording of S. Ballmer saying "developers, developers, developers". The sad part was this fancy robot was connected by an XBOX controller *with a cord* and a guy following behind controlling him to go this way and that. (wireless anyone?). Here is a good photo of how happy BillG was with the robot:

Beyond the keynote - it is a smaller TechEd in that the IT Pros are not part of this TechEd but they are part of next week's TechEd. I have heard that there are around 5 thousand people at this one (maybe less) and that there is double that next week for the IT Pro event.

I met up with a lot of vendors including FarPoint, Infragistics, ChartFx, Oracle and some others that I have to deal with as part of my job at Thomson Reuters. I have also been attending some of the sessions and meeting with all the various Microsoft teams on the floor of the convention floor. Meeting with the team members in the technology booths is probably the best thing about TechEd as you get some one on one time with them to go over your specific questions and issues. That part of the conference is worth the entire trip.

So far so good. BTW - Florida is hot.

BTW - on another note with the keynote - this is probably BillG's last keynote and there was no real kickoff for him, which is sad considering all he has done for the developer community. I really would have liked more on this topic rather than the joke video of his last day in the office (most of which has been seen before). The conference ended with a Q&A with BillG and most people had walked out by the end of that. I think most people left because of the really silly questions that were being asked of him.

I am heading out to TechEd this year. I have been going to TechEd since 2002 and find this and PDC to be exciting events and usually well done by Microsoft. You really do leave with a strong sense of excitement of what you are able to do for the next year.

I will be posting a lot of posts (hopefully) while I am in TechEd about my trip there and I have brought a camera - so hopefully I will be posting photos as well.

For those that are going - I once posted (back in 2004) a blog entry on what you should pack for TechEd, much of it still applies of course. Take a look at this entry here:

What you need to pack for TechEd 2004

I will also be using twitter for this event to notify friends of where I am at within the huge complex of TechEd (as well as the parties in the evenings). You can find me on Twitter at @billevjen.

For this TechEd, I will be working in the RD (Microsoft Regional Director) booth some as well as hanging out at the Wrox booth some. Come by and say hi!

Ever want to get information for a reliable source then find what you need in a book but really not that interested in buying the entire book? Well, that is the type of customer Wrox is going after with the introduction of their new "Chapters on Demand" service.

You are now able to purchase individual chapters as a PDF file. Looking at the site, you will also find a lot of free chapters made available as well. Rather interesting to see how it goes - some people will love it and others will not.

Funny for me is that I still love to read so much on paper that I even still print out longer articles on the web to read/highlight/etc. I have a tough time getting into a long read of something on the screen .... maybe because I'm getting older now. ;)

Seeing so many others go on and on about how great Twitter is, I decided to give it a try. You can now find my link at http://twitter.com/billevjen. You can now follow me as I twitter (or however you term it). Enjoy or tune out.

I just noticed that our $60 book is on sale at Amazon for $16.49 USD! Crazy price. Grab it while you can.

Two of my latest books just hit the market - Professional C# 2008 and Professional Visual Basic 2008, both from Wrox.

The back cover of the C# book is as follows:

Updated for .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio® 2008, this book is the ultimate guide to C# 2008 and its environment. Beginning with a look into the architecture and methodology of .NET, the team of superlative authors explains why the C# language cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather, must be considered in parallel with the .NET Framework. After gaining an understanding of the foundation of C#, you'll then go on to examine the fundamentals of C# programming with each successive chapter.

New examples provide helpful explanations on how to use C# to solve various tasks. Plus, completely new chapters on LINQ, SQL, ADO.NET entities, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, arrays, system transactions, tracing, and event logging all deliver essential information to help you gain a clear and thorough understanding of all that C# 2008 has to offer.

What you will learn from this book

• How to write Windows® applications and Windows® services

• Ways to use ASP.NET 3.5 to write web pages

• Techniques for manipulating XML using C#

• How to use ADO.NET to access databases

• Ways to generate graphics using C# 2008

• Numerous C# add-ins

• How to use LINQ to easily work with your SQL Server databases and XML

Who this book is for

This book is for experienced developers who are interested in learning the latest version of the number one developer language: C#.

Wrox Professional Guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

The back cover of the VB book is as follows:

The 2008 version of Visual Basic is tremendously enhanced and introduces dramatic new concepts, techniques, and features to this popular object-oriented language. Written by an elite author team who are sympathetic to the challenges of learning VB 2008, this comprehensive book provides a clear and concise approach to using VB 2008 in the ever-expanding .NET world.

This book focuses on using the latest and most powerful tools from the Microsoft arsenal within your Visual Basic solutions. Looking closely at LINQ, AJAX, a new Visual Studio® and more, you'll be able to take lessons from this book and apply them to what you are doing today. You'll examine everything from the .NET Framework to the best practices for deploying .NET applications to database access and integrating with other technologies, such as COM and XML.

What you will learn from this book

• The core elements of VB 2008 as well as full syntax of all the new additions the language offers

• Ways that the Common Language Runtime (CLR) is responsible for managing the execution of code compiled on the .NET platform

• How VB is used in the creation, installation, running, and debugging of Windows® Services

• How to work with the new SQL Server® 2008 along with your .NET applications

• The many features of Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation

• Ways to take advantage of the abilities of LINQ

• The new web technology introduced by SilverlightTM

Who this book is for

This book is for experienced developers who are looking to transition to the latest version of Visual Basic.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.