For those of you reading this via the syndication feed, I rolled out a new site design last night. I figured that after three years it was high time for a new site design. Not being much of a designer, I started with the Rounded design template from the ASP.NET Design Template Gallery. It’s much cleaner and more readable than my old deisgn, as I’ve removed all my blogrolls and fixed the width for 1024×768 screens.

As part of the switch, I moved from using a table-based layout to a CSS-based layout. I even wrote custom dasBlog macros that render my naviagation menu and date archive as unordered lists. The default dasBlog macros for those are rendered using tables. (Note, I didn’t rewrite the category list, so I’m not completely table free). If there’s interest from the dasBlog community, I’ll post the code.

I gotta say, I’m not sure I see what the big deal about CSS over tables is. I mean, I’m as impressed as the next guy with CSS Zen Garden, but honestly I don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I’m a developer, not a designer at heart. But CSS seems like hard-coded voodoo to me. This site has a simple fixed-width two-column layout, but it took a great deal of experimentation to get the floats coded correctly to render in both IE and FireFox. In fact, there’s a small issue with the new deisgn in IE that I didn’t bother to fix. But if I had just used tables, it would have taken five minutes.

Please let me know what you think of the new design.

I went to a brownbag today on Atlas, though since it was at 10am there was no one eating lunch or any brownbags to be seen. As cool as the Atlas project is, the coolest thing is that when I asked where their internal web site was, Johnathan said they didn’t have one – just the public http://atlas.asp.net/ site. How about that for transparency! More of that, please!

As part of the new job, I’m involved in the planning a workshop called SPARK, which Dion Hinchcliffe blogged about this morning. (Dion also writes a blog here - bringing the total to three - so I created a combined feed just to keep track of all the places he writes). My new boss Mike also mentioned SPARK this morning. In the hopes of sparking futher interest (pun intended), here’s the overview of SPARK:

SPARK is the first in a series of high-level forums hosted by Microsoft that use a workshop setting to examine “the issues that matter most” in the practice of strategic architecture and produce guidance for the industry as a whole.

Today, new social movements, advances in technology, and forces within business are overlapping to create a landscape glutted with challenges and opportunities. In many cases, these forces have driven the deployment of new technologies and the adoption of new behaviors, adding multiple layers to an already complex set of issues that must be navigated. Architects are searching for a solution that helps manage this complexity.

SOA, Software as a Service, Web 2.0, and Edge are all elements of the solution, but are they the complete picture? Are they a sufficient answer to the issues?  Can they be used together in a productive and efficient fashion? What matters most?

I have been so focused on Web 2.0 stuff that I’ve been reading a bunch of new blogs and disregarding the old ones I used to read. So I didn’t realize until today that the DSL Tools team released a new drop last week. According to Gareth, the highlights include:

• Integration into the Visual Studio SDK. According to the site, they are shooting for an April release for v2 of the VS2005 SDK, so does that mean the DSL Tools will be done in April?
• Single file format and complete visual designer for all aspects of a DSL. I’m guessing this mean we no longer have to edit the designer definition by hand. That’s a good thing. But I liked the seperation of domain model and designer, so I’ll be interested to see how I like what they’ve built.
• Domain-specifiic model serialization. This is huge – previously, the domain model dictated the XML serialization format. Now, if you can customize this, you can provide a clean model syntax and even possibly read in other syntaxes as well
• Port Shapes and a revised modeling API

Update: Apparently, I can’t read. Only the VS SDK integration is done in this build. improvements to the file format and model serialization will be in the next drop.

It’s been a long time since I cared who won the Super Bowl. But I’ve got to give it up for my adopted home team. Go Hawks!

Update: 😦