I was playing around with the Silverlight 4 beta and was trying to get my webcam working by following this article. Although the code to achieve this is very simple, the webcam did not work in my *.aspx page which contains my Silverlight component. I googled and stackoverflowed around but didn't find anyone with the same problem as I had. When the page loaded, I just saw an empty rectangle and Silverlight did not ask for permission to access my webcam like it should.

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There has been a clear shift in the way I use Visual Studio lately. Visual studio has a lot of built-in panels to help you develop the next killer application. There are a lot of panels I hardly ever use. Most of my time I spend, not quite surprising, in the text editor editing code. As for the other panels I may be using about 10% of all available options. Windows like the Server Explorer, Document Outline, Object Browser, I don’t think I ever opened them while developing. And I didn’t even mention the designers yet. I am a full-time web developer but I never open the HTML designer.

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Ever had someone come to your desk and saying: I have a little project for you, you should change something in our state of the art web application. After agreeing you would do the changes, you open up the solution and you see that the state of the art application is built using HTML spaghetti. At that moment you wished you had a) a gun or b) some guy on your team that loves monkey work and cleans all the code for you. Someone who gets a kick out refactoring FONT-tags to CSS an making the indentation perfect. Let’s be honest, if the guy exists he’s probably playing chess with Yoda in a galaxy far, far away.

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