David Chappell – coming to Southfield, MI

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Topic: Principles of Software + Services: Design, Development and Deployment

Abstract: The move to service-orientation is well underway, both inside enterprises, ISV’s and on the Internet. What role does traditional software play in a world of on-line services? In particular, how is Microsoft approaching the combination of software plus services? This presentation provides an overview of this area, giving an introduction to and a perspective on this emerging combination.

Bio: David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates (www.davidchappell.com) in San Francisco, California. David has been the keynote speaker for dozens of conferences and events in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. His popular seminars have been attended by tens of thousands of developers, architects, and decision makers in forty countries. David’s books have been translated into ten languages and used regularly in courses at MIT, ETH Zurich, and many other universities. In his consulting practice, he has helped clients such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Stanford University, and Target Corporation adopt new technologies, market new products, train their sales staffs, and create business plans.

Who Should Attend?

Anyone responsible for application architecture, software design,  setting technology direction or those responsible for testing and implementing SaaS systems.   

Southfield, MI

May 13, 2008 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Microsoft Corporation
1000 Town Center, Suite 1930
Southfield, MI 48075

Register

Open Source Project of the week – Witty Twitter

Witty is a free, open source Twitter client for Windows Vista and XP powered by the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
Project Name: Witty
Project site: http://code.google.com/p/wittytwitter/
Language(s): C#, WPF
License: New BSD License
Source Host: Google code
Documentation: FAQ
Discussion Group: WittyTwitter
Owner: Alan Le

I have a stated and known addition to Twitter. And I’ve tried a LOT of different clients for it. Check out http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps for a huge list of apps that are out there. I started out using SMS but that became overwhelming pretty quickly. I have used Twadget, TeleTwitter, TwittIt, Twitter-Sync (Yahoo Messenger client), Twhirl and Snitter.

Witty, however, has been one that have kept my eye on for quite a while. It’s an open source project being worked on by Alan Le, Jon Galloway, Scott Koon, Keith Elder and a couple of other good guys.

It’s written in C# and WPF. It’s been a pleasure to watch it going from fairly rough to slick, stable and usable. The guys have gone back through the original and done a ton of refactoring and error handling to get it to the point that it is now.

Witty includes the following functionality: (from the project site)

  • View recent Twitter statuses from the people you follow (auto-refreshing)
  • View recent replies to you
  • View a specific user’s timeline
  • Update your twitter status
  • View and respond to Direct Messages
  • Links will open in the user’s default browser

Keith Elder hosts a ClickOnce installer that will keep you up to date as they continue to make updates and improvements. This is my preferred way to install it because it ensures that I’m up to date and it’s usually a very stable build. Unfortunately, the extra skins that are supposed to come with it don’t ship in the ClickOnce installer. There’s a bug in the skinning and they don’t load right. Alan Le is working on it and is refactoring the skinning to load the URI (uniform resource indicator) from an embedded resource file rather than individual files. Good advice from this article – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970069.aspx.

Licensed under the New BSD License, you are allowed to take the source and/or binaries and redistribute as long as you retain the copyright.

Feel free to jump in and discuss on the google group or

Witty Twitter 0.1.8.3 Published