One Laptop Per Child has a “give one get one” program that just started today. For $399, you purchase one laptop as a donation and you get one sent to you. I just purchased one - can’t wait to hand crank that battery! From the web site:

From all of us at One Laptop per Child, thank you for your interest in our mission. Today marks the first day of our limited-time “Give One Get One” program. Starting today, when you donate an XO laptop to a child in the developing world, you’ll receive one for the child in your life. The price for the two laptops will be $399, $200 of which is tax-deductible. Additionally, T-Mobile is offering donors one year of complimentary access to T-Mobile HotSpot locations throughout the United States, which can be used from any Wi-Fi-capable device, including the XO laptop.

 Hit www.laptopgiving.org – 15 days left.

I’m excited to be posting an early build of Pistachio for the WPF Community to get their hands on and try out. Pistachio is a utility I created with fellow Infragistics VDGer Tim Hussey. It’s pretty simple really, you just open a .csproj file with Pistachio and it identifies all resources defined within the project, then shows you which of those resources are used and where they’re used. It’s now a part of our project cycle - we use it to identify all stray resources and clean up our projects. It’s also great for getting a big picture understanding of your current resource structure.

We have plenty of ideas for making the overall experience better, but I’d love to get some feedback anyway. I’m currently using a xamCarouselListBox at the top of the window to display resource dictionaries. In mockups this approaches looks clean and nice, but in practice it doesn’t really cut it. Most of our resource paths are actually longer than the template for each item provides, so we start to see text colliding. I’m planning on moving the resource list to the left side of the page and possibly presenting it in a tree or vertical tab format. I want to reinforce the relationship between the active resource page and the grid of resources. Later posts will also incorporate usage visualizations courtesy of our new xamChart.

 So — download Pistachio and take it for a spin! Let me know if you love it or hate it (or if it doesn’t work for you).

Continuing my posting craze of the night…

Spread the word: Heelys are gonna be hot at Adobe Max 2007 — If you have them, bring them. If you don’t have them, get them! (And learn how to not fall down wearing them). All the cool kids are gonna have Heelys, and yes, they come in adult sizes. Order them online at Dick’s or other sporting goods stores if you can’t find them locally. And you better hurry, cause we’re down to 3 weeks before Max…

What is “Tangerine” you ask? Tangerine is a WPF “Exemplar” produced by the Infragistics User Experience Group (UxG) and Visual Design Group (VDG). An Exemplar is the term we use for a reference application. (Click the exemplar link to learn a little more about the terminology.) Instead of re-inventing the wheel here, I’m just going to paste in the description from our community site:
Tangerine v1.0 is a WPF-based asset browser application. It has a pluggable architecture so that you can provide any number of different back-end asset providers while reusing the same snazzy UI that’s based on Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF toolset. In our first release, we have supplied an Amazon Web Services’ E-Commerce Service provider so that you can use the application to browse and search the Amazon.com catalogue. You can use the links below to both run the application (via ClickOnce deployment) now or download the solution and papers.

This application covers a huge range of techniques and technologies and is great way to increase your knowledge of WPF. We’ve used the xamCarouselListBox throughout the application in several different ways — hopefully this will inspire some additional creative uses of the control.

I’ve had the good fortune to work on Microsoft Silverlight 1.0, published by Wrox, with a great group of colleagues at Infragistics. We churned this thing out in record time, staying up late, losing sleep, and sacrificing weekends — all while going to our real jobs during the day. For any of you who have written or contributed to a book like this, I’m sure you understand completely. But, the satisfaction that comes at the end of a project like this is totally worth it, and did I mention the book is in FULL COLOR! I’m really excited to see the printed version when it hits store shelves in a few weeks.
For now, you can get more info at the Wrox web site, or pre-order via the Amazon.com listing.