When I was preparing for RIAPalooza, I created and blogged about Creating a Simple Silverlight Countdown Blog badge. It was great but I wanted to updated it for the next event and realized that recompiling it was not really a user friendly option. The answer is that I updated the widget to have a level of parameterization so that I could easily update it without having to recode everything. *Update » read more.
Silverlight
I’m going to be speaking at RIAPalooza in about two weeks, well more specifically at the time of this writing it’s 10 days, 12 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds. I’m going to be tag teaming with Mike Labriola again talking about “10 questions about RIA you haven’t had the courage to ask”. We’ve got a short list of questions but are hoping to get some questions from the crowd » read more.
I’m at an internal conference at Microsoft this week and one of the sessions that I attended was called Practical Design tips and tricks for Developers. It was a set of hands on labs that were created out of the Expression team. It was really slick and I learned a whole lot of new techniques and am feeling a whole lot more confident in my Expression Blend abilities. The really » read more.
Wow I’ve been swamped. There’s so much to blog about in the past couple of weeks so I’m just going to catch some of the highlights. Ann Arbor Day of .NET was on 5/5/2007. It was fantastic! It sold out at 250 people and of that there were 210 people show up. That’s actually really good as most free events have a 40% droppoff and they had less than 20% » read more.
I was asked on Friday by a friend how one can consume JSON in Silverlight. At the time, I just said start with the System.Json namespace and I’ll get you a sample later. Well, here’s a sample and a peek into my head because I couldn’t just stop with creating the sample that he needed. Download Solution – PlayingWithJSON.zip *Update – gotta do a quick shoutout to Leon Gersing for » read more.
I was just on a cool webcast called the .NET Coffee Break Show. I did a short show on getting started with IronRuby and Silverlight. Because the show is supposed to be just 30 minutes or so, I didn’t get into my usual preaching about the Ruby programming language or why people should use a dynamic language. Instead I just stated the fact that I really like Ruby and I » read more.
I was asked about the media player in Silverlight and performance. Honestly, it’s not my strong suit. I’m more of a line of business kind of guy. The good news, however, is that there are a ton of great people here at Microsoft that can answer those type of questions. Check out Building high-performance Silverlight Media Players | Ben Waggoner | Channel 10
It’s been an amazing month. I had the opportunity to take a tour around Europe speaking about Silverlight. I got to see a lot of different countries, speak to a lot of different people, hear a lot of different visions and opinions and really experience how global of a company Microsoft truly is. First, let me just say thanks to Beat Schwegler who set up the whole trip. He has » read more.
I wrote a write up for eRubyCon 2008 Day 1 and eRubyCon 2008 Day 2. BTW – thank you to Jerry Nummi for all of the great pictures of eRubyCon. I haven’t had time to browse and put them in this post but I’ll do that tonight or tomorrow. *Update – I added pictures…* I’m sitting in the back of day 3 reflecting on the previous two days. It’s amazing » read more.
Moonlight is still continuing to progress. Moonlight is the open source implementation of Silverlight for Linux. It’s being run by Miguel de Icaza of Novell. There are a couple of things that are interesting to me about this project. First, as I talked about in Dancing in the Moonlight!, it’s unprecedented interop and openness on the part of Microsoft. Microsoft gave the project the specs and a ton of support. » read more.
