Jeff Blankenburg already did a fantastic post on DevLink. John Kellar and his crew did a fantastic job pulling this conference together. In its second year - I was impressed with the whole event from the speaker’s dinner to the quality of speaker that this event was able to attract. There were 5 regional directors, 19 MVPs and some of the heavy hitters from Microsoft including Ron Jacobs and Brad Abrams. For some reason they let me speak too.
Have I mentioned that Brad Abrams is my new hero! I’m not belittling any of the other speakers because there were some amazing speakers and things that happened but I feel compelled to brag on Brad a little here.
I saw Brad at Boston Remix but I got to actually meet and spend some time with him at Devlink in Nashville, TN. This is a community conference, large for a community conference but a community conference none the less which is what makes this all the more special. First, someone on Brad’s level is actively engaging the community is very cool. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he was one of the original 5 on the CLR team. He has moved all the way up from writing the String class to his current position as the owner of the entire UI platform. That’s WPF, Silverlight and AJAX.  Between him and Scott Guthrie (his boss) – I can’t think of another company whose brass get out into the community the way these guys do.

Anyways, back to the story. Brad did the opening keynote where he did a fabulous job. He also did some other sessions with a lot fewer people in them. When he wasn’t talking, he was attending sessions like a normal attendee and between sessions and at lunches he was hanging out in the lobby and just talking to people. It was fun sitting in on a lot of those conversations as they ranged from Test Driven Development to the Dynamic Language Runtime to Kathleen Dollard and Billy Hollis taking him to task over complexity in the frameworks, timelines and more. At this point in the conference I’m really blown away by Brad and how approachable he is. He told me to call him and chat about some of the questions that I have around Silverlight road mapping. I know that he meant it and I’m going to take him up on it after we’ve both had a chance to recover from our travel this past couple of weeks.
Then I heard the about what he did on Saturday afternoon and was completely blown away. John Kellar, the main conference organizer, wrote me to tell me about it and I found Brad's post on it. Brad went to listen to a talk on AJAX but the speaker didn’t show. There were 30 people in the room that were, understandably, getting bent out of shape about it. So Brad steps up and asks – “Who wants to see me do some AJAX demos?” An hour fifteen later – the crowd was completely jazzed by the stuff Brad was showing off the cuff. That’s very cool of him and shows that he is truly invested in the community and still has the technical chops to backup any of his things he says.
It’s truly impressive and that’s why Brad Abrams is my new hero!

Friday, October 19, 2007 12:37:56 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

We've launched a new Channel9 show called Code To Live!.  Josh Holmes (me) and Steve Loethen are the hosts.

We are taking a fairly wide departure from a lot of the other things that you see on Channel9. Code to Live is about highlighting customer stories. There are a couple of different formats that will be on Code To Live. The main show is an interview format that will highlight heroes from our customers that are passionate about what they do and have a good story to tell. To this end, we are riding a 2007 Harley-Davidson Road King around the central part of the US to do interviews. The second format will be Microsoft employees (such as Jennifer Marsman) showing how to use the technologies that our customers are passionate about.

The first show is on XNA and Independent Gaming. Dave Redding and John Stevens were our guests. Dave is a corporate developer by day but he builds XNA games by night and extends into building game consoles, such as a race car, an arcade cabinet and a flight simulator. John runs an independent game conference in Minneapolis.

Want to get involved?  Have a good story to tell?  Want to be seen by thousands of developers all over the world?  Then send them to me.  My email is josh.holmes@microsoft.com

Another great option is to video yourself saying the phrase "we watch codetolive in <location>" and we will put it in the show.  Become the person with the video from the farthest place from my home base (Ann Arbor, MI) and Steve and I will take care of you some how.

The bike will be running around the middle of the US through June of 2008, with stops planned all over the place.  I will be riding it to the Expression Day in Ann Arbor, AdobeMax, DevLink and then turning the bike over to Steve Loethen to drive to the Heartland Developers Conference.  Come track me down and I will get you a code to live sticker for your laptop.

Technorati Tags: codetolive

Code to Live!

Thursday, September 27, 2007 3:18:54 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [3] 

Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team

cordially invites you to

The biggest video game launch ever is coming in a few weeks. This is your invite to join in the fun and have a sneak peek before everyone else.

This is an exclusive, invite-only event for our special guests to discover Halo 3 first-hand. We will have several Xboxes setup with Halo 3 for multiplayer play, including the opportunity to play the Halo 3 campaign for the first time.

We’ll also have other Xbox 360 games to enjoy, as well as food, drinks, and prizes to give away, including some exclusive Halo 3 branded items. And for those up to the challenge, we will be hosting a tournament pitting the top teams from cities across the US against each other. This is a one-time only event… don’t miss it!

Microsoft Office

1000 Southfield Town Center 19^th Floor

Southfield, Mi 48324

Food, Drink, Great Prizes and Attendee Gifts for All!

To register, go to

http://iammasterchief.com/

and register to attend with your RSVP code:

SOUTHB

Please use this code for your registration.  Please note that this code has limited seats left (about 20) and it is first come first serve. Please register quickly.

Please also note that this Halo 3 is rated 17+ so parents and advised/asked not to bring their children under the age of 17.

Friday, September 21, 2007 9:14:00 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

This is going to be a fun event! My comrades in the mid-west, Larry Clarkin and Dave Bost are working with Clarity Consulting to host a Silverlight DevCamp. I'm hoping to attending as much of the Saturday bits as I can. I know that I'm attending AdobeMax the next day so I'm going to see if I can come in a day or two early and catch this event. I know that there will be a number of designers and developers there so it should be a fantastic conversation and hack fest.

Hopefully, I'll see you there.

Date
September 28-29, 2007 (Friday night until Saturday afternoon)

Time
Friday (09/28): 7pm-10pm / Saturday (09/29): 11am-5pm / Possible Happy Hour afterwards - Location TBD

Location
Clarity Consulting 1 N Franlkin St, Suite 3400, Chicago, IL 60606

Official Silverlight DevCamp Chicago site
BarCamp wiki / SilverlightDevCampChicago

Registration, such as it is....
BarCamp wiki / SilverlightDevCampChicagoAttendees

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 10:18:55 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I'm speaking on Silverlight at the The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, CA. At the last minute, I was pulled into a panel discussion that kicked off the conference. It was a fun panel. There was a editor from InfoWord named Paul Krill who wrote a fantastic article on InfoWorld.

There were representatives from Microsoft (me), IBM (Jon Ferraiolo), Yahoo (Bill Scott), Ryan Breen (VP of web testing company Gomez) and many consultants including Scott Davis and Stuart Holloway. The panel was run by Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks). Neal threw out the question designed to bait the panel, "Ajax, Flex, Silverlight - who's going to rule the world?" I thought just for a moment about jumping up on the table and yelling "Silverlight!!!" but I thought that's probably not the introduction I needed to the crowd so I waited. There were several of the guys that said that stepped up for AJAX because of the ubiquity factor. I stepped up for Silverlight/Flex talking about the continuum of experience from ubiquitous lowest common denominator web applications supplemented web to platform optimized. Silverlight/Flex fill that spot in the middle. It was fun to be the guy on the panel that was answering all of the Flex questions as well as the Silverlight questions. People asked about testability, accessibility, tooling and more. I had fun and was really happy that I had attended the RIA Jam in Crested Butte. I was also thrilled, with the crowd that we had in attendance, to announce the Moonlight project news. The whole panel went really well.

Rich Web technologies debated | InfoWorld | News | 2007-09-06 | By Paul Krill

*Update - ComputerWorld picked up the article - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9035018&source=rss_news10.

Friday, September 07, 2007 1:38:07 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

When I was at MIX and walking down the hall, I ran into a rather excited group of people that included Miguel de Icaza at the center. I stopped and listened as Miguel was running through the Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 collateral and saying things like "We've already got that", "That's a week's worth or work", "That won't take too long" and so on. I realized that I was watching the formings of the Mono-Silverlight project later to be named Moonlight.

I didn't foresee this news though!

Microsoft is going to officially endorse the Moonlight project from Novell!

Here's what that means:

• Microsoft is listening to it's customers and is delivering that they need when they need it.
• Moonlight, via Novell, is going to have feature parity and compatibility with Silverlight and Silverlight content will run on Moonlight with no changes. Woot! That's going to be ensured because Microsoft is giving Novell access to the same test suites that they are running on Silverlight. That's sweet.
• One of the large pushes on Silverlight 1.0 is HD video but it's WMV. Guess what - Microsoft is producing codecs for the Moonlight project that are going to run on all distributions of Linux and BSD that Moonlight runs on.
• That last bullet point means that Moonlight can be distributed commercially because the video codec that they are currently using is not licensed for commercial distribution.
• Very importantly for me - I am allowed to officially as a Microsoft employee to say that Moonlight is the answer for Silverlight on Linux.

What this does not mean:

• Microsoft is not going to support Moonlight, that's still up to Novell and the Open Source community.

Miguel de Icaza's post on the subject:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html

This is the official press release from Microsoft:
Microsoft Delivers Silverlight 1.0, Extends Support to Linux: “Entertainment Tonight” HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment showcase new online experiences; more than 35 partners commit to Silverlight Partner Initiative.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007 11:49:07 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Jerry Dixon has a (third) blog now! Woot! He's with Microsoft Support in Memphis. I'm excited that he's blogging again - there's a lot of knowledge there that needs to be let out into the world.

Jerbear's Lair

Thursday, August 30, 2007 5:31:25 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

It's by no means perfect, but I've got a new Twitter Badge on http://www.joshholmes.com in the right hand margin.

I was sitting at the Flex and Air Jam and started working with James Ward on a Flex twitter badge and started thinking about what a Silverlight Twitter Badge would look like. James had this concept for creating a clock for the time to really give the badge some context and pop. I liked the idea so I stole it... :).

I'll post the whole source code and all shortly. I've got a few more things that I want to play with - like making the white background transparent.

Friday, August 17, 2007 10:08:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1]