Website

2 years and 266 posts later...

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:05:21 GMT

2 years ago, on a Sunday, I posted my first blog post. Since then so many amazing things happened, partly due to this blog: I got the MVP status, I got a better recognition in my firm for my expert knowledge on some topics (such as WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET and C#), I started speaking in conferences... One year later, I got a book deal (more on this soon). I met amazing people, and made a lot of new friends in the industry. I went to Redmond a few times and had the chance to talk to some really amazing talents in the software field. More importantly, I really had the feeling that my contributions were acknowledged, and valued. It's really been 2 amazing years.

To all of you reading these lines, thank you. You make my life as a software engineer better, more interesting, and you really help become a better developer.

GalaSoft "TweetMyPage" released for tests

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:54:38 GMT

GalaSoft "TweetMyPage" is a web application allowing you to post to Twitter what you're currently reading in your web browser, on a simple button click.

After you install the small "scriptlet" button in your web browser's "bookmarks toolbar" (Firefox) or "Links toolbar" (IE), any time you want to share what you're reading with the world, you can simply click on the "TweetMyPage" button.

If it's the first time in this session that you are posting, you will be asked to enter your Twitter user name and password. After that first time, you will not be asked for it anymore, not until you close your web browser.

As a result, a message will be sent in your name to Twitter, for example:

When you create the "Bookmark button" in the Settings page, you can customize the "Reading" prefix that will be posted, as well as a couple of other settings.

TweetMyPage is in beta for the moment, and if you want to try it, I'll be happy to send you an invite (just leave a comment down here or send me an email. If all goes well, I will make TweetMyPage public next week or so.

New GalaSoft stickers

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:27:10 GMT

On a whim, I made a GalaSoft sticker and ordered 48 of them at CafePress.com. The stickers just arrived yesterday, and they look pretty cool. I plan to keep some on me, so next time you cross my path, make sure you get a GalaSoft sticker for your laptop

My resume is now online

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:28:08 GMT

I finally did something I wanted to do for a loooooong time: I cleaned up and put my resume online on my website. Note for Beat (my boss), if you read this, don't panic, I am not leaving just right now :) Anyway. For those of you who like to know my (professional) self better, feel free to take a look. If you want a username and password to check my certificates and awards, contact me. And if you have any comment, give me feedback!!

Back home and a couple of news

Laurent Bugnion — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 07:50:05 GMT

We're back home after an amazing week of ski and sun. It was really great. I also worked well on my private project, really happy about the way it went.

I also have a couple of news that I haven't posted about yet. So here it is:

You can now chat with me on MSN directly from my webpage http://www.galasoft.ch. Simply click on the "Chat with me" link in the left hand menu. This opens an inline DIV. Click on "Begin a Conversation". Type your name. Enter the "spam-fight" code and click Submit. There you go, you're talking with me.
Obviously, this only works if I am online when you connect. The icon next to the "Chat with me" link gives you an indication about my current online status. I didn't implement this solution, merely integrated it in my webpage. The makers are of the MSN team, and for more information you can check here (yeah Casey is super excited, but still, if you ignore that and keep reading, it's better later ;).

I've been twittering for a couple of weeks now. You can read it at http://twitter.com/lbugnion or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks to the cool work of Jeff Julian and co, you can also read my Twitter feed directly on my blog page.
I got sucked into Facebook, so if you are into that too, drop me a line (simply search for Laurent Bugnion, I am the only one :).
My blog can now be accessed from the URL http://blog.galasoft.ch. It's again a nice feature thanks to Jeff's work. The old URL still works, but it's nice to have a pointer using the GalaSoft domain!!
I changed my blog's skin. The main reason was that I wanted to get the "Search" feature that some of GWB's skins come with. But also, I wanted a change. I chose the skin based on a few criterias: Readibility, Navigation must be on the left, Clear separation of blog entries, etc... I started with the ScarletAndGrey skin and tweaked the CSS. I wanted a different color set and less lines. I think it looks pretty good. Let me know what you think.

Parlez-vous Facebook? Looking for translators.

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:56:24 GMT

Facebook is looking for french speaking persons willing to help translating the site. I really don't have time for that, so if you speak french and have free time to spare, you should probably register. Looks like they really need it sorely (see below) :)

Silverlight enabled GalaSoft

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 04:52:22 GMT

GalaSoft is my webpage, where I post information about all my private projects. It's not a firm, it's a project that I use to coordinate my efforts in all the technologies I am interested in.

As such, it was pretty natural to add Silverlight content to it. Silverlight is an area where I will be investing a LOT more time from now on, for reasons I will mention in further posts. After posting a screencast about WPF in Silverlight format, the next step is to add a Silverlight logo on some of my pages. The goal is to get more familiar with Silverlight, to show my visitors what can be done with it, and also to boost Silverlight's adoption, by encouraging my visitors to install Silverlight on their PC. Microsoft is pushing Silverlight's adoption a lot lately, and I am glad to participate to this effort, at my own small level.

Silverlight is really cool. You should really install it. And after this week in Redmond, I can safely say that it's a technology that will stick, and that Microsoft is absolutely going to develop much more in the near future with a lot of effort and attention.

Website offline due to maintenance work at DiscountASP.Net

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 16:50:30 GMT

My website was offline for a short while today due to maintenance work at DiscountASP.Net. I apologize for the possible incovenience. To compensate for the loss of connection, I will gracefully offer you 3 visits to a page of your choice on my website, all for free! :-)

Google search on my website

Laurent Bugnion — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 21:20:20 GMT

I've been wanting to add a search box to my website for quite some time, and also wanted to play with Google AJAX Search API. Turns out it's a very easy API to use! I simply wrapped their search control in a PositionedNode and FadedNode, and added a higher-lever object to "hide" Google's syntax and offer a higher level interface. So from today, you can now use the "Search" menu to search the website and also (in the same dialog) this blog.

Google Search API also offers the possibility to search for YouTube videos and for places (using Google Maps), but I don't use this, so I left that out of my wrapper.

Next on my list is:

Add the same feature to the GeeksWithBlogs blog
Wrap the client-side control in a server-side ASP.NET control, to make it even easier to use.

Let me know if you have other suggestions!

Porting to VS2008 / New WPF book / Pictures of Sicily

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:40:22 GMT

Porting to VS2008

I am working on a few ASP.NET projects I do privately, and had a small issue, which I couldn't debug in VS2005. I decided it was time to give a serious try to VS2008, so I converted most of my private ASP.NET projects to VS2008, and everything wen smoothly. I didn't take any risk, and I chose to continue using .NET 2.0 for these projects, so that only the IDE changes, but not the framework. After a very fast and painless conversion, finding the error was a breeze (I was having problems adding a tagprefix to an ASPX page, because somehow the referenced DLL was not recognized by VS2005. In VS2008 however, not only the DLL loaded without any problems, but I even got Intellisense in the ASPX for free! So far, it's been a real pleasure using VS2008, and I can only recommend it to everyone.

Chris Anderson's WPF book

I was in the office for the first time after my vacation (I worked home on Monday, went to Milaqno for a workshop on Tuesday, and Wednesday was Switzerland's National Day!). I found an Amazon.com package waiting for me, and here it was, Chris Anderson's 'Essential WPF' which I ordered before the holidays.

First thing that struck me after I opened it was... Hey, it's in black and white :-) OK, don't want to start a polemic again. I honestly cannot comment on the book's content yet, and it has been warmly recommended to me by Scott Guthrie himself, so it must be a great reference. But I got to say, it's amazing what a little code-coloring and colored illustrations can do for the reader.

Anyway. After that first moment passed :-) I started checking the forewords, and if the book is as good as they promise, it should be a great book. I'll say more about it when I start reading it.

Pictures of Sicily (part two)

I just posted the part two of our July's Sicily trip. I hope you'll have fun reading the blog entry and looking at pictures of Marsala and Segesta. More coming soon.