I was looking back over my blog history and noticed that three years ago I predicted that all new laptops would be touchscreen in 5 years. At the time my logic was that once you used a touch interface you missed it when it didn't exist. I'm actually a little surprised that Apple hasn't introduced a touchscreen laptop yet but the larger trackpads with multi-touch gestures are getting close.

I've got another 2 years until my prediction is either upheld or fails. I think my original thinking holds true including my opinion that even with touch screen, mouse and keyboard would remain the primary interface for most desktop machines. 

I'll make a new prediction that 5 years from today all laptops will be shipped with wireless chips allowing them to get broadband internet access anywhere you can get a cell phone signal. I'll have to check back in 2013 to see if my touch screen prediction was accurate and how the wireless internet prediction is holding up.

Just testing if the TwitterPing plugin for BlogEngine.Net is working correctly.

Last night I watched professional musicians deal with unexpected failure in front of a crowd of thousands. If your store fails can you handle it as well as they did?

 A friend invited me to go to the local Rock the Vote concert which sounded like fun. It was unusually cold for October and waiting in line for the super extensive metal detector sweep would have been uncomfortable except for the in-line entertainment. The girl in front of us was teetering from side to side, flirting with everyone who wasn't her boyfriend and generally serving as a lesson on why you don't ever want to drink beyond your limits. Surprisingly the metal detector guy could care less about how drunk she was as long as she wasn't hiding a 9mm in her coat.

The show was a collection of short performances by Nora Jones, Jack Johnson, Sheryl Crow and the Beastie Boys. Each performer came out for a short set and then played a few songs together. It was the ensemble performances that had unexpected failures.

 One minute into a Johnny Cash song the microphone started to crackle and pop for Nora Jone's Banjo player. You couldn't miss it from the audience but I was interested to see how everyone on stage handled it. 

First, while I know that everyone on stage noticed, there was nothing more than a short glance without a single blip in the other performances.

Second, a roadie was on stage in 2 seconds flat and looking over the connections.

Third, while the roadie was working everyone else carried on with the show.

Fourth, when the roadie couldn't determine the cause quickly the banjo player grabbed her backup guitar and joined in as though she had meant to be playing the guitar all along.

If one part of your operations fail do the other parts continue on without it? If your ship manager calls in sick during your busiest week who takes over? Can you operate without that person?

When something fails do you have a "roadie" waiting just off stage to immediately review the problem? Does your hosting company have 24 hours support? If the problem is a software issue who's on call and guaranteed to be available?

If your "roadie" can't fix the problem on the fly do you have a backup system in place? What happens if UPS goes offline? How do you determine shipping prices? 

Have you tested your backup plans when you don't need them? My hosting company routinely "pulls the plug" on outside power to verify that the backup power supply is working as expected? Test your backup plans before you need them.

The beta of the the Model View Controller (MVC) framework for ASP.NET was released today. Get ASP.NET MVC here

The beta version is very similar to Preview Release 5 but moves the DLLs into the GAC so you don't have to copy them to your local folder if you know MVC is installed on the server. If you're not sure you can always include the DLLs and the MVC framework will work on any web host that supports the .NET 3.5 framework. SP1 is not required anymore.

 I've been experimenting with the MVC framework and I really like parts of it. The controller architecture forces you to pass every that your HTML needs to render into the ViewData collection. At first this is kind of off putting and feels like an extra step. After a while it starts to grow on you and now I really like thinking about application logic first and then only sending the bare minimum data the page needs to render correctly. I think it forces you to be a frugal developer and will lead to better performing apps and easier updates down the road.

If you haven't tried it yet now is a good time. One note, MVC is NOT going to replace WebForms (the regular way to build ASP.NET apps). Microsoft has been very clear that they will be updating and supporting both WebForms and MVC going forward.  

I thought it was big news that Google launched the Chrome web browser today. Now, I read on Cnet that Google is Launching it's own Satellite for high resolution map pictures! A web browser and a Satellite in the same day. Wow.

OKay, technically, they just have an exclusive deal for the images but that effectively makes it Google's bird as far as mapping sites are concerned.

Google released their own web browser today, Google Chrome. Right now it's only available for Windows XP and Vista but I'm sure it will be cross platform soon. It's based on WebKit which is the same rendering engine that Apple uses for Safari. This is a good things for web developers as we won't have to support another new rendering engine. WebKit is open source and very standards compliant.

One major difference is Google's focus on simplicity. Taking a page out of Apple's playbook they've decided to strip away everything that isn't needed and deliver a rocket fast simple browser. They wrote their own Javascript engine that is supposed to be significantly faster and I suspect they've learned a lot from Gmail and other Google apps.

The clear business strategy is to deliver an application platform for the web. If they have a web browser that compiles javascript to native code for execution they've basically created the .Google Framework for Windows. The Microsoft .Net Framework compiles C# to an intermediate language which is then compiled to native code. Now Google can use their toolsets like GWT to compile dynamically to native code on a windows host. Imagine GMail running as fast as your native mail client. The last part that's needed is offline access. Google Gears provides that feature already.

 So, Google just delivered the tools to send a web application directly to your desktop running at near native speed. You don't need to learn Silverlight, Flash or Adobe Air. Just HTML and javascript.

The platform wars are moving beyond Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux to Silverlight Runtime vs. Adobe Air vs. Google Chrome 

I was in Washington D.C. yesterday for the Parallels Summit. Parallels makes control panel applications for web hosts and BV Commerce is now integrated into Plesk (and soon the other panels). During the summit there were a lot of presentations and the experience of the speakers varied greatly. I don't want to point out specific names but watching the mistakes that were made you could learn a lot:

One speaker moved from slide to slide in PowerPoint by right-clicking and choosing "next slide" from the context menu. Don't ever do this! That's what the spacebar, arrow keys and remote controls are for. It wasn't that the information was poor but the constant "right-click, next slide" was so distracting it was hard to concentrate.

Several speakers had slides that looked like they came straight out of Webster's Dictionary. You know, the book with incredibly small print? Needless to say it was impossible to read those slides so you might as well pull them out of the presentation. Always use large fonts and always go for less information on more slides instead of packing it all into one. Human short term memory can only hold about 7 to 9 items at once anyways and that is a lot of information to put on a single slide.

Another speaker had some slides with a white background, silver and light blue text. Contrast is very important during presentations because projectors will tend to wash out colors that are perfectly readable on your computer display. Pull out a color wheel and pick two colors on opposite sides. Orange and Blue, Red and Green, Black and White etc. 

Scott Hanselman is an evangelist for Microsoft who does a lot of tech demos and has some other great presentation tips. 

I've got a love/hate relationship with credit card companies. On one hand credit cards make it easy for BV to sell software over the internet. On the other hand chargebacks and fraud with credit cards is a royal pain with limited protection for merchants. I watched a great episode of Frontline on PBS about the Secret History of Credit Cards.

The most surprising revelation was that most credit card contracts include a clause called "Universal Default." Basically, if you make a late payment to any other lender or company the credit card issuer can automatically raise your interest rate. If you're on vacation and forget to pay Comcast on time your Visa interest rate can jump from 18% to 25% without warning. 

Credit card companies are the only lenders that get to decide how risky you are when they issue you credit AND change their minds about how risky you are later too. My bank doesn't get to raise my mortgage payments because they think I'm riskier now than when I signed up for my mortgage so why should credit card companies get that ability? Sounds like a huge loophole that lets credit card companies jack up your rates almost at will.

Anyways, if you found this interesting you can watch the whole episode online. 

I was watching our Google Analytics traffic last week and noticed a sharp decline. My first thought was "My God, we've been blacklisted by Google or another search engine." I couldn't figure out why our traffic had dropped so dramatically. If it had dropped to zero I would have instantly thought the tracking script was at fault but instead it just dropped but kept counting with day to day variations.

I discovered that IE was reporting a script error and that was the clue to the mystery. We had added the JQuery library version 1.2.3 to our master page for some fancy image swapping. It turns out that this particular version of JQuery has an odd way of handling some click events and it conflicts with click handlers in Google Analytics. Apparently it doesn't happen all the time and it doesn't happen in all browsers so that's why we were still seeing some traffic records.

I pulled JQuery until it's patched and the stats popped back to normal the next day. Whew!

I just got back from the Mix08 conference in Vegas. It was fantastic! Scott Guthrie and Ray Ozzie showed off some new web tools during the opening keynote and it's clear that Microsoft is jumping into the web with both feet. Ray Ozzie pretty much said that Microsoft will be coming out with a new cloud based services model that will include most (if not all) Microsoft applications. Hosted data services are also coming and I'm interested to see how they differ from SQL relational databases. Ray didn't say anything about Microsoft hosting services but if I was in the hosting business I might be a little worried about what will happen down the road.

Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight was the battle cry from just about every Microsoftie I met. They are pushing this hard as THE platform for rich internet applications (RIA) in the coming years. NBC will be launching a silverlight based web site for Olympic coverage and if it does everything they showed in the demo the internet is going to grind to a halt with that much video running at once. Clearly, Microsoft wants Silverlight to take down Flash as the defactor way to add video and animation to web sites. Given Microsoft's ability to build great developer tools to support their platforms they just might do it.

Scott Hanselman gave a great presentation on ASP.NET MVC or Model View Controller. He started off by opening Notepad on a 40 foot projection screen and just typing random funny comments about the crowd. The room was silent in less than a minute and I thought it was a genious way to start things off rather than screaming for everyone to sit down.

MVC is an alternate way to build ASP.NET web pages instead of using WebForms. With WebForms you have a .aspx page and a code behind file. The code behind file pulls information from your business objects and binds it to controls on the .aspx part of the form. Everything is in one giant <form> tag and viewstate is used to emulate winforms-like interactions. With MVC you have views which are html pages or template language pages that accept some data and are responsible for rendering out angle brackets. A controller is a class that does not have a corresponding display page and is responsible for pulling data from business objects and packaging it into a bundle of data for a view to render. This is very similar to Ruby on Rails and will give ASP.NET programmers an alternative to WebForms. Scott was very clear to point out the MVC is not replacing WebForms and that the two can co-exist in the same web site if you want.

Wednesday night Microsoft sponsored a party at TAO, a night club in the Venetian where the conference was held. They brought in Steve Wiebe who attempted to regain his title as Donkey Kong champion of the world. Steve wasn't able to beat the high score but he did reach level 22, known as the kill screen, where Mario dies because the programmers were out of memory. The kill screen has only been reached 5 times during competition. If you're in Vegas you have to try the Kobe beef sliders at TAO which are incredible!

This was the first MIX conference that I've been to and it was different from other Microsoft events. There were so many opportunities to meet both Microsoft team members and other developers that I'd really recommend it to anyone building web applications on the Microsoft platform. Next year's Mix09 conference will be at the Ventian in Vegas March 18-20, 2009.