SRT Solutions hosted a "User Interface Smackdown" yesterday. While the "Smackdown" part of the name was a little off what happened, it was a great event with some great discussions. James Ward (a Flex Evangelist from Adobe), Drew Robbins (Developer Evangelist for Microsoft), Chris Bernard (User Experience Evangelist from Microsoft), Dianne Marsh (SRT Solutions), Bill Wagner (SRT Solutions), Mark Ramm (Contributor to Turbo Gears and author of the best book out on the subject), myself and a number of other technologists and business owners totaling 34 in all got together and discussed a lot of different options on the user interface and creating the best user experience possible. The event was in an Open Spaces format which means that none of us lead the conference but all of us contributed, none of us knew what the topics were going to be when we started but all of us got to vote on them and suggest new topics and none of us knew what the outcome of the event would be but we all helped shape it. I don't think that the Open Spaces format is the right fit for every event, but it is a great format for learning and promoting discussion. I learned a lot more about GWT, Flex, Turbo Gears, Ruby on Rails and more. I also learned more about what people are thinking in the areas of design, Rich Internet Applications, Smart Clients and more. We talked about everything from WPF to WPF/e to the Web Services Software Factory to Click One Deployment to an amazing number of other topics. It's really hard to capture all that we talked about yesterday.

It was not a smackdown at all - it was a coming together of minds, technologies and disiplines that I think everyone who attended was able to take something positive away from. I really enjoyed the event and hope that we will have more like in the local area.

Link to User Interface Smackdown 2007 | SRT Solutions

Thursday, April 05, 2007 12:23:41 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2] 

Thanks to all that came - feel free to follow up with me with any questions or comments.

Link to Microsoft ArcReady - Downloads

Tuesday, April 03, 2007 5:52:33 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Martin Shoemaker is speaking on April 17th at the West Michigan .NET User Group. His topic is Dee Jay: A voice-controlled Juke Box for Windows Vista. This is an application that Martin is working on. For those of you that don't know Martin, he is one of the greatest advocate for a lot of the new human interface technologoes that are coming our of Microsoft in the Ink and Voice areas. He is the creator of Tablet UML and a lot of other tools that work well on tablets. He has called me on many nights cursing the speach recognition engines in Windows XP. However, he's been absolutely thrilled with the voice recognition in Vista. I've actually heard that from a couple of different sources. It should be, as most of Martin's talks are, an entertaining talk with a lot of content. For a preview of some of the content, you should read Martin's posts on the subject here - http://www.tabletumlnews.com/speech_and_voice_(managed_sapi)/.

BTW: Martin also wrote these books.

Link to West Michigan .NET User Group

Thursday, March 29, 2007 2:32:47 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Ever since I read Bill Wagner's post on the topic I've been sitting here in stunned silence not really knowing how to react. I guess it really does just take few bad apples to spoil it for everyone.

I truly hope that there is a resolution to this quickly and I pray that Kathy's voice is not lost forever. It's an amazing voice that can post on everything from Crash course in learning theory to Tech T-Shirts for Girls and every post is a gem.

Link to Creating Passionate Users: Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 8:24:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I'm in the middle of the ArcReady tour around the Heartland district (That's Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee). Tim Landgrave spoke in Detroit, MI yesterday and did a bangup job as always. It was fantastic to sit and soak in the knowledge that he has gained through the many years that he's been in business as a consultant on a tremendous number of different projects. He brings a lot of great stories and antidotes that we can all relate to from these varius projects. The only issue is that each of the presentation brings out slightly different sets of antidotes depending on the questions and audience reactions so really, I'd like to sit through all 11 of these rather than just 3 or 4 of them.

I got some questions about the presentation so I thought I'd answer some of them here. First, the names of the books that were referenced in the Patterns and Anti-Patterns section were:

Second question that I'm getting a lot is when and where can I get the presentation? We will be posting it on http://www.ArcReady.com as soon as the tour is over.

The question that I have for you is what topics/speakers would you like to see in the future for this series? Feel free to email me direct or leave answers in the comments.

Link to Microsoft ArcReady: Reinforcing the Foundations of Solutions Architecture

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 5:10:33 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2] 

I get this question quite often - as do a lot of Microsoft folk. I can't answer it better than Gerardo Dada does on his blog here - Link to GerardoDada : Windows Mobile 6 Upgrades for your phone

I'm putting this on my blog because it's easier than remembering and typing in Gerardo's blog... :)

Saturday, March 24, 2007 11:15:27 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I am very excited that I'm getting to go to the MVP Summit this year as an official blue badge. Last time I went it was as an MVP. It was a fantastic networking and learning event. Honestly it was one of the biggest perks of being an MVP - aside from working with Rafael Munoz and Michael Fosmire who were the MVP leads that really took care of me. The MVP Summit is a meeting of 2000 or so MVPs from all corners of the world and the product teams. There are things that we saw and provided feedback for 18 months ago that have just been released this year. With these two amazing groups of people at my disposal - my IM list exploded! Those contacts have been some of my closest friends and best business contacts. Any tech question that you might have in the Microsoft world - I probably have a contact that just knows the answer. It's amazing and it has always been a privilege to be considered among that elite group. I really can't even begin to name them all because I know that I'd forget someone but they range from ASP.NET guys to Mobility guys to Tablet guys to language guys.

Of course, now as an official Microsoft employee I'm coming to the MVP Summit representing the field Developer and Platform Evangelism team.

I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of my old friends and meeting new ones.

I'll see those that can make it at Party with Palermo!

Saturday, March 10, 2007 2:42:50 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

I can't believe that they actually put the word doodad in the instuctions! That's fun...

* Sent from a Windows Mobile 5 Device

Friday, March 09, 2007 2:04:40 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]