by Allen
July 11 2009 9:55 AM
We are finally going to get a house! It has been a long 6 months. People said that it was a "buyer's market". I disagree. While it was a market from February through July where there were not major bidding wars among buyers, there were other obsticles. Price. The prices for homes really stayed the same. Sure, they dropped about 7% to 12% in some areas from all time highs. But for the most part, sellers were hugely reluctant to sell for lower prices. We found a situation where the sellers were financially solvent and actually wanted to sell. So, they gave us a good price. I still would have liked to see prices drop more. (Sorry homeowners). Then there was location. Then there was what was really on the market. A lot of people didn't even put houses up for sale. I secretly believe they are waiting for the market to improve. It was a buyers market in the sense that once a house with "curb appeal" went on the market, it was only a matter of hours before offers to buy started rolling in. We missed out on one such house. I'm not sad at all though. Making a fast decision when buying a house is really hard to do.
We ran accross a home that we really liked just after making an offer on the one we got. As we started going through the process of making an offer and getting it inspected we found out some stuff. (You don't really get to learn much except what is on the flyer until you pay $300 for an inspection). The sellers were on the brink of financial ruin due to jobs lost. The house was a money pit once you looked past the paint. The roof had original cedar shingles with 4 layers of composite on top. Eek! So, we were uneducated about this before hearing about it. It meant that to repair the roof it would cost a lot more. Each layer has a tear-off price associated with it. Then the cedar tear-off would include new plywood and maybe even new framing if anything was warped under there. Eek! We also learned that you can get a "sewer scope". Which is really cool. A camera is snaked down the sewer line to look for damage. Well, they found some holes in the sewer line. Yuck! With all that repair work looming to be done, the selling agent had the gall to say something along the lines of, "well, they can still live in it." We ran and didn't walk away from that one.
Our new house has its share of things to work on. But that is what is nice about it in a sense. It is all internal cosmetic kind of work. Plus the total price to own it is far less than the others we looked at. If we are smart about it we can really improve the value of the house with fairly low effort. I'm talking about painting, moulding, bathroom tiles, and hardwood refinishing type of stuff. The only major structural thing we'd like to do is put a door and a small porch off the back room. We'll upgrade the electrical and roof in good time but not right away. Basically, we are going to be able to focus on living well in this house. It will be ours on Wednesday or maybe even in time for my wife's birthday. :)
We are happier about it daily.
9bf1e23c-39d0-439b-9644-fddef58ecc7f|0|.0
Tags: home
House
by Allen
July 10 2009 12:26 PM
Here is the Microsoft PressPass article that sums it up. Developers who weren't in the Early Adoption Program for Silverlight 3 can now use Sketchflow for the first time in Expression Blend 3 RC. It is really very exciting news. The projects I work on at the moment don't really require use of SketchFlow. But I'm hoping we get some bigger projects down the road to be able to use it as a team. That would be fun fun fun!!
719dfc3d-8068-42c1-bdb0-e3b2c114a0aa|0|.0
Tags:
Silverlight
by Allen
July 08 2009 10:43 PM
Another project I worked on with the team at my job went live today. This should also be listed on www.silverlight.net/showcase once it is approved. I did a lot of the implementation work from the design team in Silverlight. A big thanks to everyone who worked together to turn this around so quickly. You can see it live here.
And here is a screen shot of the actual graphic:
9b27998a-7f25-4589-b7ed-d0058b2afabd|0|.0
Tags:
Silverlight
by Allen
July 08 2009 10:14 AM
It is almost time for the Silverlight 3 release. There are so many great improvements!
The official release date is July 10th with a release party scheduled in the Bay Area. My work laptop is already up to date with the Blend 3 Preview, Silverlight 3 Toolkit, and the beta runtime. I will have to upgrade those in a couple of days but it's good to have them now.
There is a great article about how to manage the installers for Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 tools on the same machine. Running Silverlight 2 and 3 On Same Machine - Redux!. In that article, Shawn Wildermuth details a great step by step process for managing the version installed using a couple of bat files. It is based on prior work from Amy Dullard.
So, it's time to work on some nice Triggers, Actions, and Behaviors on what will be a sweet little project. (More details on that once the project is released.)
by Allen
July 03 2009 3:53 PM
This blog site is now updated! This is a rather big change in direction. I decided to go with an open source project instead of trying to maintain my own blog engine/site. So, this site is now running on BlogEngine.Net. There were several features I wanted to include and the internet entrepeneurs are always adding new things to the web. There is so much going on this summer and I have really very little time. Besides, there is a great community around BlogEngine.Net project and I may even be able to contribute to it.
It took me one afternoon to download the code and alter the settings enough to be happy with something to deploy. That suits my main requirement. It has all the ASP.Net providers that I like and I'm pretty comfortable with the ORM model (Object Relational Model). It is written with ASP.NET 2.0 and C#. They need more LINQ in the code. But it is a mature enough architecture that I can use familiar tools to enhance and maintain the site. It looks like there are more than 25 open source projects which enhance BlogEngine.Net.
Now, the next step is to convert some of the Silverlight 2 work I did on my last site into a Silverlight 3 implementation that sits on top of BlogEngine.Net features. As many .NET developers know, Silverlight 3 will be out next week!! After Silverlight 3 goes live and after I spend a little time on it, users with newer computers and who install the new plugin will be able to see a much nicer Silverlight UI theme. Users with older CPUs should be able to see the HTML version of the site. I expect the possibility of reaching a much wider set of platforms with this tool (mobile phones, Mac, Linux, and more types of browsers). SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will just work and all the base features of a blog are covered.
My Silverlight 2 site was fun to build. I always knew it would take some work to get the feature set I now have and to write a down-level experience for computers that couldn't run the Silverlight plugin. With BlogEngine.Net I can now focus on the UX (User Experience) and build on top of it. Oh, and writing blog entries too.
Cheers and Happy 4th of July! 
Subscribe