Ben Waldron
Chief Technology Officer
Posts by Ben Waldron
Corporate Lifecycle Symbiosis
One attribute of the Pop Art culture that I enjoy is the tireless pursuit of making ourselves better. We take time out to enjoy successes, but we are looking for the next way we can improve internally and how we can help clients in new ways. In that spirit, the book Corporate Lifecycles by Ichak [...]
SPIN Seminar – Improving Accessibility and Quality in Web-Based Applications
The good people at Rose City SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) and OGI had me back to talk about Accessibility. I thought the whole thing was going to be cancelled – we had a tornado in the area that night. Unlike the midwest, I learned that tornado in Portland are very rare. Almost as rare [...]
Flash ExternalInterface in ASP.NET Applications
Update 11/27/2007 We do quite a bit of Flash video integrated into ASP.NET web applications. For video library application, the best solution from a usability perspective is to use JavaScript to control the flash player. There are some issues that keep popping up with the Flash Player, SwfObject, ExternalInterface, and ASP.NET that we needed to document [...]
Ideas in Efficiency: Creating Institutional Amnesia
At our last staff meeting, I shared some insights with our team about how we can improve our business. For some background information, we’ve been fortunate to keep the same team together over the past two years. We’ve had a chance to work together — establishing the internal communication pathways and processes that is our [...]
SPIN Seminar – Agile Practices: The Right Tool for the Right Job?
I had the opportunity to speak at this month's Rose City SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network). The talk focused on three main areas: Agile's fit in an organization, performance indicators, and Agile practices that can be used outside of the Agile context. There was great turnout for the event with some really excellent questions. Many of [...]
Move to Vista
I moved to Vista today, here are my notes: Good News: CVS and Subversion work well in Vista (except for what is listed in Bad below). I had to grab the night build of Subversion, but it runs well. Outlook 2007 works extremely well. It actually closes when you want it to and threads [...]
MSDN Article: Enforce Web Standards For Better Accessibility
At Pop Art, we have some very talented folks that adhere strictly to Web Standards. It takes much discipline to develop web application using Web Standards as its often not the quickest path to a solution, but offers significant advantages for clients and future maintenance. In general, gives almost all the tools necessary to create [...]
OneNote 2007
I was hooked on OneNote the first time I saw it beta before Office 2003 was released. When I was at Microsoft, I had a couple of opportunities to meet Chris Pratley and he always showed me some amazing feature that I never knew about. There are a few features within OneNote 2007 [...]
Week #1 in the books
I joined Pop Art this week as thier new Chief Technology Officer. My first impression walking in the door on Monday was that there is a ton of energy and activity going on within the company. All departments juggle many different client, scheduling resources, and churning out great results to customers. Sure, there are challenges [...]
Moved Older Blog Posts Here
Since this will be my new blog home, I moved some of the more meaningful MSDN blog posts from when I was at Microsoft to here. I’m sure that blog will be deleted in due time. They are marked under the category blogs.msdn.com and retained thier original date. No, I didn’t write an application to do [...]
Extend Team Foundation Server To Enable Continuous Integration
My latest MSDN Article is the March Edition of MSDN Magazine: Agile Development: Extend Team Foundation Server To Enable Continuous Integration The article outlines Extreme Programming (XP) and how continuous integration fits into it and other Agile development methodologies. It goes onto to describe how to extend Team Foundation Server to use continuous integration. The code samples for [...]
Alternate Data Stream Questions
I received the following question today regarding NTFS Alternate Data Streams and it is a good topic to post: I just found your NTFS ADS article and class (thanks!) on GotDotNet, yesterday – after seeing most everything else on ADS over the past month. [Summary: User has been using ADS streams to store metadata and had [...]
Determine MIME Type for Content
A while back I was looking for an API to determine content types. One API that I found useful was the FindMimeFromData API. You cane give this method the first 256 bytes of a file and then determine its MIME types (eg. text/plain, text/html, binary content, etc). It is useful for checking files that might [...]
Managed Smart Tags – Another Shameless Plug
The February Issue of MSDN Magazine is out and an article the I wrote about writing Managed Smart Tags for Office applications is in that issue. When I began to write the article, I asked a bunch of developers if they had ever written a Smart Tag (managed or unmanaged). It was 1 out of about 10 [...]
Developing .NET COM Callable Wrappers (CCW)
There is quite a bit of information posted on developing COM Callable Wrappers in .NET. Below is some information that I’ve compiled after developing quite a few. < ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> Developing COM Callable Wrappers, all types exposed to COM should follow the guidelines presented in the following checklist: - Ensure AssembyVersionAttribute is [...]
Virtual Server 2005 – Shameless Plug
I’ve working a lot over the past few months on Virtual Server 2005. One of the great uses of Virtual Server is the ability to quickly stand up a development and test enviroment. To facilitate that, I created an application called Rapid Test that automates provisioning and mangement of virtual machines as well as automating [...]
NTFS Alternate Data Streams
I have always found NTFS Alternate Data Streams interesting. It is an easy way to hide metadata from users. I wrote a utility called ADSFile as a .NET Wrapper for the Win32 API calls. Someone asked for me to provide the ability to enumerate data streams into ADSFile. It ’s not as straightforward as I thought because the only way I [...]
