Did you watch Minority Report ? Do you remember when Tom Cruise moves pictures and videos by taking them on the screen with his hands ? It sounded really futurist at that time, but it was without counting on the hidden Microsoft projects. Yes, they did it, or almost. The project is named Microsoft Surface and according to them, "it represents a bridge to the digital world". Basically, it is a digital table (55 cm high, 55 cm by 105 cm) that allows you to manipulate digital informations, such as watching pictures and videos, planning your trip in the city, etc. The different demos on the website are quite impressive. And it is really amazing to see that the project originally started in 2001 by Stevie Bathiche and Andy Wilson and being unveiled only two days ago. The project is not supposed to be available at retail stores until end of 2007 and I think it will be costly... But in the meantime, and if you are in New York, you should be able to see it at the Sheraton Hotel, or also during the SIGGRAPH Conference in San Diego.

During several months, I was completely unable to cross-post from my main blog on peneveyre.com to my account at blogspot.com.

I have never investigated why this was impossible, but the fact is that, now, it is working.

Cool !

Preparing a presentation about AJAX and a comparison between the Microsoft world and the other (basically the rest of the world...), I went to an issue I did not expect, because I thought it would be more automatic.

When you add a ScriptManager and an UpdatePanel to a web page, the first times you will run the application, there are chances that the "'Sys' is undefined" Javascript error occurs. Not only the Javascript error is shown, but when you click on, let say a button in your UpdatePanel, this will post the page back to the server, updating the whole page.

This is because in the HTML code, the Sys.Application.Initialze function is called close to the end of the code. The problem is that the resource files containing the Javascript code are coming and downloaded from the server using a .axd file (ScriptResource.axd, more precisely).

To fix this issue, the line below has to be added in the web.config file under the <httpHandlers> section :

<add verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate="false" />

I was a bit busy during the last few weeks, that is why I did not post as much as I would.

Busy, because my assignments were changed, from a customized human workflow application to a MS CRM 3.0 application and doing some mobile development. Other technologies, other challenges, in other words, fun !

 

But I'm back, and I hope to post more frequently on this blog.