There is no great secrete that I'm letting out of the bag but it is something that I never really had the need to stop and think about, it was just something that I took for granted.  Maybe I thought that it worked by some form of magic, maybe I just never cared, but today I'd like to talk about what a master page really is.  I always thought that a master page was simply that, a page.  This makes since based on the name and the behavior that it has right?, wrong.  If you open up reflector and take a look at the master page class it inherits from System.Web.UI.UserControl and not from page.  Once I stopped and thought about this for a minute it makes since. Master pages were introduced in FX 2.0 and by not adding anything as the parent of page there would be very little work that would need to be done to implement this. So how do we get the master page to appear to be the parent of page you might ask yourself.  Well here is were the ContentPlaceHolder and Content controls come into play.  They simply control where the page's content is placed when the page is rendered.  ASP.net is aware of the master page control, because of the reference in the page declaration, and places the markup inside the Content Control inside of the ContentPlaceHolder Control.  This gives the effect of the master page acting as the parent of page without actually changing the control hierarchy. Like I said this is no great secrete but simply something I had never stopped to think about.  The reason I stopped to think about it is that I plays a part in a feature I am working on for the next version of the framework, stay tuned for more information about that feature after PDC08.

Many people HATE vista, even people that are not tech savvy seem to hate it!  It’s slow, it crashes, and people have heard nothing but bad things about it.  Well I’m going to let all of you in on a little secret! This will all be fixed by Mojave: The Next Microsoft OS!  Check it out for yourself http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

This last week I had my one month anniversary at Microsoft.  I put off writing a post about the process and my new job because I wanted to do it after a few weeks of work and settling in.  So what better time then at one month.  I figured I would cover the process of getting the job and what I do at my job.  Please feel free to ask any questions you want. 

Okay, lets start with how I got the job. After graduating college I started email correspondence with ScottGu to ask for some advice about how to be successful and enjoy what you do.  To my delightful surprise I was getting several page emails with very valuable information (in my opinion he is the most devoted developer in the community).  One thing lead to another and he ended up putting my resume in the system, I'm sure it was because of my ability and charm not the referral bonus (jk Scott).

I was contacted by several groups inside the UIFX teams and had several phone interviews back and forth.  After about a month I was invited up to Redmond to interview with the UIFX QA team.  Now here is where I will be completely honest, I was just like every other developer out there and carried a stigma about QA.  let me just tell you this, after meeting with them and having worked for them for a month QA developers are some of the best programmers out there!  QA devs have to understand how the software will be used and all the crazy ways it will be used in addition to understanding the low level of how it was implemented.

So the day of my interviews was one of the most nerve racking days of my life.  Walking in all you know is that you will have at least three interviews, you might have more but its not for sure. For me the first interview was the worst, I wasn't sure what they were looking for and I was asked questions that I was not expecting.  I was expecting more questions about the framework itself however they were more general program questions.  The first question I was asked was to implement, in any language I wanted, a bit array class with focus on the getIndex method and efficiency. Looking back on it, it wasn't that hard of a question but I was nervous and it caught me off guard.  For those of you who are wondering look up bit shift operators.  Any way to keep a long story half way short I returned home and got a call the next day offering me the position.

Okay so now for some interesting stuff, what I actually do all day long.  Well besides drink the free coffee and soda and play foosball I am an SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) for the UIFX Server team.  That just a fancy way of saying the ASP.NET and Silver light team, we are working on changing our name to just ASP.NET.  To set things straight no I don't just write unit tests all day long.  Unit tests are mainly written by the developers themselves.  We were refer to our job as being the first customer of the product or feature.  We still write automated tests both for runtime functionality, method calls do the right thing, and design time tests, making sure the product or feature works properly with the IDE. However we have adopted the idea that we are the first customer so we also create sample applications and simply use the feature or product and log issues.

My first month has not been what I expected.  First off I imagined that the honeymoon phase would have wore off by now but it still doesn't feel like work to me.  Now don't get me wrong I am not complaining about this I want this phase to last as long as possible.  The second thing that I didn't expect was to have the level of responsibility that has been assigned to me in the first month.  Currently, I am responsible for anything to do with page framework, so all the basic controls and features of ASP.NET.  Another thing that was surprising to me was the sheer amount of resources available to you as a Microsoft employee.  Everything from cell phone plans to books to hardware to training. I will say that working for a big corporation has its perks! One thing that throw me off guard and is possibly my favorite part about working for Microsoft is the people that I get to interact with everyday.  I hadn't put much thought into it so I guess that's why I didn't expect it but I get to work with basically ever person on my blogroll.  Everyday I am surrounded by some of the smartest people in the ASP.NET world! Overall, I would have to say that there isn't a better job for me, I love working at Microsoft.

I normally try to keep my blog entries to code related topics.  However, I think I can make an exception for this one entry. For those of you who do not know yet, I have been presented with a once in a life time opportunity.  Starting in June, I will be working for the Big Blue Monster, that is right Microsoft.  I will be moving to Redmond, WA and working on the UIFX server side team.  That includes ASP.NET, AJAX.NET, and Silverlight.  All the work I will be doing with be for version 4.0 of the framework.  I can't wait to get started, this should be a great experience for me and I should be able to learn so much! The picture is of the building I will be working in on campus.

The WC3 Web Test Suites Working Group has just announced that they have a test for mobile devices.  This is an important step as mobile connectivity grows. So head over to there test and see how your mobile device handles it. Short address for the test is http://icanhaz.com/wt

I wanted to thank everyone who came out to the Community Launch and listened to my presentation or pretended to listen. If you didn't come I spoke on the new features of SQL Server 2008.  With in the next few months I will be presenting again on SQL Server 2008 but with in depth examples and walk through's. 

The Utah .NET Users Group will be hosting a Community launch event for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. This is a series of event across the country hosted by users groups and sponsored by Microsoft, Ineta, Culminis, and Pass.  The Utah .NET User Group has decided to make this a four part launch event.  The first being a overview of all three new technologies, with the fallowing three being a in depth look at each technology.  I myself will be speaking about SQL Server 2008 during the launch event series.  So please come and join us on April 10th.  For more information please visit http://utahdnug.org/

Recently I was asked to code a simple method.  This method should take in two parameters a string and a character.  The goal of the method was to count the max number of consecutive times the character parameter appeared in the string.  So an example would be that the string "abaabbaaa" is passed into the method along with the character 'a' The method should then return 3 because the character 'a' appears 3 times in a row.  This seems like a very simple method but it is actually very trick to make it efficient.  So let see what you guys can come up with, post your solution in the comments section.  I will be posting the solution in a few days.

For those of you who don't know there is a series of web standards tests known as the Acid tests.  These test are basically designed to see how close to the standard a browser renders objects.  Just a short while ago the IE8 team released a video on Channel9 saying that they had successfully rendered the Acid2 test.  But the IE8 team need not celebrate too long because the WSP has just released a new acid test ACID3.  This test targets more of the browsers DOM scripting abilities than anything else.  So IE8 team good luck getting this test to work :) Here are some screen shots of the test ion both IE7 and FF2.

This is an interesting idea for a navigation menu.  This is a pure concept and I'm not sure if it would work with any site design but I learned everything I know about CSS from experimenting and coming up with useless ideas.  So, the idea is that the menu bar looks normal till you hover over it.  Once you have over it, all the links appear to blur while the item that is being hovered over remains the same.  This is how I choose to implement this, however, you could make the non-selected items smaller, change color, or even rotate.  The possibilities are endless, so experiment with it and let me know what interesting things you come up with.

Step 1: Create your images for the menu. In this case I am using images because I wanted a blurring effect, if you just want to do simple text manipulation then there is no need for images. The image should look something like the image on the left.  Refer to my previous post to understand why both states are in one image.

STEP 2: Now it is time to create the HTML which is pretty straight forward.  I have simplified it, so some it is not an optimized menu but you should be able to get the idea. It consists of a simple div container with the links placed inside.

   1:  <div id="nav">

   2:       <a href="#" id="LINK1">LINK</a>

   3:       <a href="#" id="LINK2">LINK</a>

   4:       <a href="#" id="LINK3">LINK</a>

   5:       <a href="#" id="LINK4">LINK</a>

   6:  </div>

STEP 3: Now comes the magic, it is time to create the styles for the links.  You can implement these in line or in a style sheet.  There are three main styles to implement.  The default style for the link, the hover style for the container, and the hover style for the links inside the container.  One strange thing that I have done is set the text-indent property to -9999999px.  What this does is is allow me to have the link text for SEO but also not have it displayed on top of the images.

   1:  <style type="text/css">

   2:       #nav a 

   3:       { 

   4:            text-indent: -999999px; text-decoration:none; display:block; 

   5:            height:50px; width:100px; background: URL('images/btn.png'); float:left; 

   6:       }

   7:       #nav:hover a {background-position:0 -50px;}

   8:       #nav a:hover {text-decoration: underline; background-position:0 0;}

   9:  </style>