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Tavis Hudson is a Tech Headhunter who first recruited me in 2005 to work for Magenic. Over the years we have kept in contact and run into each other at a few events here and there. Recently, Tavis contacted me about doing an over the phone interview (as in journalism not recruiting) for his blog.

In the first of a series of blog posts he is authoring called “Prodigy Developers” he did a write up based on the conversation we had. I’ll try not to let that title go to my head but thanks for the vote of confidence Tavis.

One of the things he touches on in his post is something that I’d like to elaborate on a little more. This is something I consciously say to myself from time to time:

One thing that I have learned in college and in my career so far is that there are lots of people who are smarter than me. I mean downright geniuses. I am not a genius. I am constantly awed by these people and their mathematical abilities or their ability to grasp incredibly complex topics or the speed with which they are able to get to conclusions. This is not my strong point even though I am not an idiot by any means. Yet somehow, in a field generally regarded as primarily mathematical, I seem to thrive. It’s not to say that intelligence is overrated but I think that passion and dedication are, perhaps, underrated.

Sometimes I like to say that I’m an artist who can’t paint. I know that sounds corny but what I’m trying to say is just that I have to rely more on my creative side than my intellectual side when programming. I’m more of a right brainer than a left brainer, if that makes sense. Maybe more people than I realize would be able to associate with this notion but I feel like this is what has helped me more than anything, not that it’s more important but maybe that it’s rare.

Sorry, enough self congratulation and introspection. Head on over and read Prodigy Developers – Justin Chase, by Tavis Hudson.

Expression Photoshop Importer – By Soma

In his latest blog post Soma did a feature preview of the new version of Expression Web and the Photoshop importer gets an honorable mention.

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/06/05/expression-web-3.aspx

With Expression Web 3, we have significantly improved capabilities and workflow when working with Photoshop files. When you import a PSD file, you can choose just the layers you want to import in to your website. You can save the layers as JPG, PNG, or GIF and scale the image* before saving the individual layers in Expression Web 3. If the source file has changed, Expression Web 3 prompts you to update it.

*Actually, you can’t scale the imported image in this window but you can zoom in or out of the preview to view it scaled and you can adjust the quality if you select jpeg. Once it is imported you can scale the dimensions of the image with your image editor of choice.

One interesting thing about the Photoshop Importer is that it is an expression wide feature rather than simply for Blend. Specifically it will be a feature available in Blend, Web and Design for this release. In each application the importer will have slightly different behavior. For example in the window shown here you can see there are options for Encoding and Quality as well as a field displaying the estimated size. When you import a Photoshop file in Web you will get a single flattened image rather than multiple resources like in Blend and Design.

Designing the importer so that it could be extended to support different feature sets for each application was one of my main roles so far. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot!

NUnit for .NET 4.0

I recently upgraded one of my projects to .NET 4.0 only to find that NUnit would no longer run my tests. Rather than waiting for the next version of NUnit to come with a .NET 4 build I decided to download the source code and build it myself. I’m including a zipfile with the required solution and project files to build NUnit yourself.

This should tide you over until the official build is released.

http://cid-dfcd2d88d3fe101c.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/blog/justnbusiness/vs2010.zip

Build Steps

  1. Download the latest source code of NUnit
  2. Place the unzipped contents of this folder at $(NUnit)\solutions\
  3. Open nunit.sln and build
    1. You will get some build errors on one of the assemblies but most of the core assemblies will work fine.
  4. Copy the newly built assemblies into your applications lib folder.

Why Bing?

In case you were wondering, like me, where the name Bing came from here is the reason.

http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/player/embed/31bd7b71-d5c2-4d71-b908-95df720cfd68
A New Product Deserves A New Brand

Our research around Bing showed that it connoted “fast,” “easy,” and “delight”—all qualities that mapped very naturally to the search experience. It was also seen as the friendliest and most approachable name option.

Castle Crashers

http://www.castlecrashers.com/

This weekend I found a great new game on Xbox live called Castle Crashers. It’s basically a hysterical mix of River City Ransom and Super Mario Brothers 3. You are a knight of one of 4 colors (you can unlock more) and you romp around fighting all sorts of different looking monsters. The artwork is very original and full of detail. The game is gratuitously violet, scatalogical and random.

The gameplay is mostly button masher with some RPG elements. Combined with the cheap Xbox Live arcade pricing this game is high in the fun/dollar (fpd?) ratio. I haven’t beaten it yet and I’m not sure how long it is overall but I have a feeling that I still have a ways to go. It’s amazing how much mileage you can get out of a simple idea and fun artwork.