This quarter's ArcReady is coming quickly. This quarter we are talking about Software + Services (S+S). This is Ray Ozzie's vision of the future of the industry. It's a vision that encapsulates SOA, SaaS and Web 2.0 and really takes it to the next level. SOA can be how you compose, govern and control your services but it doesn't talk enough about delivery of the software to the user. SaaS is a great way to deliver software if your users are willing to rent the software. It A: doesn't work for every user base and B: doesn't address multi-headed clients where you might want a desktop client, web client and a mobile client. Web 2.0 is in the same boat. Web 2.0 can define the user's experience with RIA, collaboration, collective knowledge and more. These tenants of Web 2.0 that we discussed in the last quarter (See the video of the session posted on the ReMix07 Boston site) are engaging on a number of levels but it doesn't really address some of the enterprise concerns of security, accountability and more.

Software + Services really builds on top of all three of these ideas. Come learn more in a city near you.

For the full abstract - see http://www.arcready.com.

* means I'm speaking...
** means that we're actually doing a last quarter's Web 2.0 session followed by this quarter's Software + Services session. They go well together and I missed Louisville and Grand Rapids last quarter.

That's going to be a tough 2 weeks on the road there to be honest. 12/7 - come to my funeral as I die from Red Bull overdose. :)

Microsoft ArcReady - Downloads

Tuesday, November 06, 2007 6:26:11 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

 Jeff Blankenburg has a new video series that he's starting to do called JUXtapose which stands for Jeff on User Experience. That's a clever twist on words there.

What Jeff doesn't mention is that he "grew up" in the technical end of a marketing firm implementing the whims and ideas of the designers. Through that experience, Jeff learned a lot about user experience and design. He was the designer of the original CodeMash site and gear head logo. That's why in his video he said that he was "familiar" with the gear head.

In his first video, he builds a Silverlight 1.0 gear head with spinning gears. I like it for a number of reasons. It clearly demonstrates the power of declarative vector graphics and timelines in XAML. I've done the stupid demo that everyone does for Expression Blend and Silverlight where you take text, put it on a timeline with a gradient and have it spin about the screen a little. As Chris Bernard put it - that's Silverlight Blink meaning that it's the thing that everyone is going to do because it's simple but it's annoying as all get out to the user. However, that was random movement around the screen. To actually make it do something deliberate like Jeff did has been well outside of my depth.

In his second video, Jeff tracked down the CTO as well as the Dev Tools Product Manager, Visual Design Manager of Component One and interviewed them about the controls that they are creating for Silverlight 1.1. That set of controls, called Sapphire, went Alpha yesterday which happened to be the day that he posted the video. It's a well done video with lots of good information. I liked the their attitude where they see Silverlight as a way to reuse their desktop development knowledge, toolset and more for web development. This is the direction that Microsoft is taking things - extending our current base's (mostly desktop developers) experience and abilities to the space known as RIA. Adobe has been in the RIA space for a while and with AIR, they are trying to extend their base's (mostly web developers) experience and abilities to the desktop. This is a subtle but hugely important distinction that Component One understands and is excited about.

On a side note - it was interesting to hear that Component One, as a control vendor, is an agile shop developing in an iterative fashion.

JUXtapose - Jeff on User Experience

Tuesday, November 06, 2007 1:09:29 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I blogged last about Platforms verses Applications and put the statement out there that platforms beat applications every time. At least one of my readers (Alan Stevens) agrees with me. My other reader hasn't commented yet.

Alan pointed out, however, that I missed some rather important platforms that Microsoft ships. One that all of the developers in the audience (on the Microsoft technology stack so that doesn't include you Joe) probably use on a daily basis is Visual Studio. Alan posted about it in his post on VSX. He points out Visual Studio itself is just a shell and that all of the other bits that you see are simply add-ins. That shell is now available for you to leverage as you see fit in your applications. Obviously, you can write add-ins such as the Dotfuscator from Preemptive Solutions or CodeRush. What you probably didn't know is that you can build a stand alone application there that you ship independently of anything else. The cool part about that is that you have a built in extensibility model and other applications can meld with yours because you're on top of a great platform. :) Don Demsak, aka DonXML, had a podcast about Visual Studio Extensibility back in April.

Mappoint and Virtual Earth, despite my recent jolly adventure with Mappoint, is a fantastic platform for building applications on top of. One of the local companies here in Michigan is using it for the base for one of their applications called eoStar. I find it fun that they have built their application as an extensible platform as well - see their plug-ins section for things that third parties have built for their applications.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a horizontal base platform for you to build vertical applications on top of such as Omnivue's Health Care application. There are multiple ways to integrate here from API calls to interfaces you can implement to web services that you can leverage.

I know that I'm missing some of the important applications out there that Microsoft ships as a platform.

So, what does this mean for your applications? There are two directions that you should be looking.

First, when you are starting a new application - is there something out there that you can leverage as the base for your application that will handle a lot of the underlying plumbing. I like Brian Prince's quote - "Don't be a plumber." What he's talking about is leveraging platforms and frameworks that will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you so that you can concentrate on your business logic which is your real value add.

Second, you need to be thinking about what are the possible extensibility points where someone else could tap into your application. I know, you're thinking - but Josh, I'm building the corporate equivalent to Notepad here - there is no extensibility points. While that may be true - think about your favorite text editor here and what add-ins you're using. If you are still using Notepad - you are in the dark ages and need to look at UltraEdit, Scite, E or any of the thousands of others that are out there. One of the things that all of these have in common is that they all support extensibility. Scite, for example, has a great page dedicated to different plug-ins called Scite Extras. There are extras there from various language formatting libraries to scripts that you can use. But what this proves is that even simple tasks like text editing can benefit greatly from being able to leverage a great platform so you should be thinking about that with your applications.

Alan Stevens on VSX

Monday, November 05, 2007 2:51:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [83] 

Soma Segar did a Red vs. Blue show with Church and the gang. It was funny hearing Soma, who is always seems to be serious, chatting with the guys that aren't. One of the things that he talked about was the Balmer Developers, Developers, Developers speech in terms that I actually agree with. He said that Microsoft is a platform company at heart and that we have been since the company was founded in 1975.

That is fantastic and absolutely true! I've been saying for quite a while that a platform will beat an application every time. There are a couple of great examples of this right now. For example, Microsoft Office is, more so than it is just word processing and spread sheeting, it's a fantastic platform that you can leverage to build your application. It wasn't overly difficult to do with COM, not that the object model was straight forward. Even so, all of the power was there and the average developer could figure it out and put together some fairly compelling applications. Now with VSTO, it's very easy to build compelling applications on top of any of the Office Suite of applications including Outlook. As I live in Outlook a good portion of every day, I love the idea of being able to extend it to all of the other things that I need to do throughout the day. <mindDrifting>Now, if the expense system would expose services - I could have a ton of fun with Excel and Outlook.........</mindDrifting>

Another Application vs. Platform situation that you can look at is MySpace verses Facebook. MySpace allows you to customize your page a ton but it's not really a platform for you to build on. Facebook allows you as a developer, through their Developer APIs, to build your own application that adds right into their platform and feels like it's part of Facebook. There are several thousand of them out there already. Some of them are downright stupid like the Vampire application. <rant>I really wish that there was a nukem button for anyone who tried to make me a zombie or vampire or any other stupid thing of Facebook more than 3 times after I've ignored them over and over and you know who you are...</rant> However, some of them, such as the Twitter and Cities I've Visited are great. Others, such as Groups and Photos feel like they are part of the platform when they are actually add-in bits created by the Facebook crew. That's pretty cool and it's part of the reason that Facebook is winning. (That being said, I will have to post some other time about my feelings on whether or not Microsoft should have ponied up 250 Million for rights to do the advertising...)

There are applications that should be platforms that are not currently great platforms and are suffering a little for it. For example, Internet Explorer is a fantastic application - but it's not a great of a platform as Firefox. That's frustrating because it could be such an amazing platform. As it is, it's a frustrating set of COM based interfaces that are not quite completely undocumented.

Now, what does this have to do with your applications? You should be thinking about platforms that you could have built rather than applications. I've been in a number of shops where there are 10+ small applications that are build that could have and should all been written as a single application but the first and primary application was not extensible so the other groups around simply added new applications rather than adding value to the first one.

Defy All Challenges

Saturday, November 03, 2007 2:00:33 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [3] 

I had a lot of fun with the Boston Remix session that I picked up. I did the Web 2.0 talk that we've did for the ArcReady sessions. It was an amazing operation to watch G. Andrew Duthie (aka DevHammer) and crew locked away in the media room working tirelessly to get the keynote and other select sessions on the web site. I'm honored to be one of the selected sessions that they put on the web site as there was a ton of great content at the conference.

The content was originally put together by Jon Rauschenberger, CTO of Clarity consulting. That being said - I have a very different delivery than Jon does so even if you saw him do it - take another look and see if you pick anything new. This is a discussion about what the tenants of Web 2.0 are and how they apply to your applications whether you are in the enterprise or consumer space.

It's cut up into 4 parts due to file size limitations on Channel9.

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 1

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 2

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 3

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 4

After watching my session, then I guess that you can check out the Brad Abrams keynote. :)

All of the REMIX07 VIDEOS

Friday, November 02, 2007 3:52:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

One of the key messages that I've been talking about with a lot of my customers recently is a continuum of experience.

It starts on the left with Web and it's absolute ubiquity through HTML and CSS. This works on any device with a browser from a phone to any desktop and even a lot of computer based applications (such as search engines or spam email harvesting engines). The tradeoff is that the user experience is less than optimal. Billy Hollis calls it the Cobol of the web referring back to the old time green screens. Whether we like it or not, HTML not only has it's place now, it's going to continue to have it's place long into the future. Unfortunately, one of the reasons that many applications go this direction is not because they need ubiquitous reach but rather because it's easier on the IT department to deploy it. This makes things hard on the user. Oops. Things can get better with AJAX. At this point, you are sacrificing some reach for functionality as you are giving up phones, PDAs and older browsers. Often that's an easy decision to make.

On the right hand side of the continuum is Platform Optimized. This is really giving up broad reach for absolute functionality. As an example, the Halo 3 team knew which video card was in the target machine so they could tailor the experience for the edges of what's possible on that hardware. That's a good position to be in when you can be because it means that you can create the absolute best possible experience available. However, it would be hard to take that same experience and put it on any laptop. Short of knowing what hardware you are targeting, look at the platform that you are targeting. If you know that your users are using Vista or XP with the Service Pack 2, you can target WPF, WCF and so on because you know that it's on the box. Backing up from there, if you can target .NET on the box, great.

Somewhere between the Web and Platform Optimized is the Supplemented Web with Silverlight and Flash/Flex. This is an exciting frontier to be in right now bridging the gap. It's not full ubiquity but it's more reach than platform optimized and it has a far superior user experience than HTML and CSS.

Microsoft and Adobe are working from opposite angles here. Adobe, with Air, is trying to take this supplemented web development paradigm to desktop. It's an interesting idea to be able to bring HTML, Flex/Flash, embedding PDFs and so on to the desktop. Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying to take desktop application development paradigm to the web with Silverlight.

I think that there's room for every type of experience along the continuum but you really need to evaluate your skill set and what type of experience you want to target when starting an application. Today actually, I had a customer meeting where we talked about a blended approach where we build a simple ASP.NET application for their ubiquitous touch and then target a click-once deployable application for those clients that are able to leverage it. This would be a great move on their part as it would give the best possible UX for the greatest possible audience.

Friday, November 02, 2007 2:01:23 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

April 28th, 1988 was a break through year for Windows programming. Windows had been out for close to 5 years is some form or another, the current iteration was Windows 2.0 for the 386 processor. At this point in time, it was hundreds of lines of code talking to undocumented APIs and lots of voodoo to get a simple Hello World application up and running. Charles Petzold released the first edition of Programming Windows. It was 860 pages of black magic distilling goodness that really enabled the giant leaps forward in Windows programming enabling a whole new generation of programs being written. He did it again in 1992 with Programming Windows 3.1 and again in 1998 with Programming Windows Version, Fifth Edition.

I, fortunately, didn't have to read any of those because I was doing either VB or web programming. I started reading Charles' books with Programming Windows with C#. It was the must have book for Windows Forms development if you wanted to really understand what was going on and why things did the things that they did. Now, it was not a style guide and it was not going to help you build Windows applications from a design perspective. It was hard core how the System.Windows.Forms and System.Drawing namespaces are put together. Even today - if I need to understand something deep in .NET Forms programming, I pull this book out to understand how the base controls work or how GDI+ works or how to work with images or anything else deep and black belt.

While he's written a number of other books, the must have book that you need these days is 3D Programming Windows. It's not going to teach you how to use Expression Design or Expression Blend to build applications. Rather it's Petzold's style of really going deep and explaining the underpinnings of the technologies and dispels the black magic. He explains the math behind the 3D objects, lighting effects, movements and more that you a creating. He dives deep into the controls available and lays out the best practices for the best performing 3D applications. It's a great book and if you have any 3D work that you are working on - you should definitely pick this book up.

Now - why am I talking about this today? Turns out, Charles Petzold is going to be coming out to Memphis, TN to the Memphis Day of .NET. That's quite a score for them. I can't wait to hear his keynote. I'm sure that it will be deep and enlightening and I've always enjoyed hearing him talk.

Hopefully I'll see you there.

Keynote Speaker Announced: Charles Petzold

Thursday, November 01, 2007 1:35:32 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

As many of you know, I've been playing with Dynamic languages with the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime). It's fun learning about new languages. Furthering that goal, I had the pleasure to sit down with Jay Wren about the Boo Programming Language and interview him for Code to Live. I intended to make it a 8-10 minute interview and cut him off so that I had very little editing to do. 46 minutes later, I cut off the camera. It was a fun interview with lots of code. I found out that the language is a dynamic language but it's statically types. I thought that was an interesting twist on the language scenario. The syntax is based on C#, Python and even F# pulling a lot of the best practices from each of these languages. The most fascinating part of the language, however, is it's extreme extensibility. The first example that Jay showed me was how to extend the language itself with With block style syntax ala VB.

I'm a better .NET programmer because of the things that I've learned about Ruby, Python and now Boo. I really understand the C# 3.0 features that are coming such extension methods. I understand how LINQ works better as a result of these languages. I'm thrilled!

I challenge each of you to investigate a new language. If nothing else, it will change your perceptions and improve your ability to write code in your primary language.

Check out the show and let me know if Boo is the next language for you to check out...

Code To Live: Jay Wren on the Boo Programming Language

Wednesday, October 31, 2007 7:13:09 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

 This past weekend I was privileged to attend and speak at the third iteration of the Day of .NET. I was one of the original organizers of the Day of .NET along with John Hopkins and Jason Follas a year and a half ago. They have far surpassed the original vision which was to just do a cool event for South-Eastern Michigan. The Ann Arbor Day of .NET is now one of the staple events in SE Michigan and they have moved it up to an every 6 month cadence.It's even being exported to a number of other locations including Grand Rapids and Memphis.

The basic tenets are that:
A. Content is king. Over glitz and sponsors and everything else, this conference makes it's mark by delivering rock solid content year after year. There were talks about .NET 3.0, WCF, LINQ, Astoria, Story Driven Design and Fitness, the Dynamic Language Runtime (my talk :) - more on this topic coming soon), and even XNA. 20 sessions in all + 5 vendor driven half sessions. That's a lot of fantastic content.

B. See rule A. :)

C. Leverage sponsors to cover the costs of the venue, food, T-shirts and more. I know that there's been talk of requiring some type of registration fee of all the attendees. So far that's not happened. There are a lot of benefits to the fee based attendance. It means that the variable costs (food, T-shirts and the like0 are covered based on the number of attendees rather that coming out of the flat fees that the sponsors have put in. There's about 30-40% drop off from registration on free events. That's because the people registered don't have any skin in the game and decide that they don't feel like it or it's not a priority to show up. This is frustrating to all the organizers because it makes capacity planning really hard and it's a slap in the face with all of the hard work that they've done to make this event amazing.

D. Nobody makes any money off of this. At different points, we discussed paying for different speakers to come in but we keep getting such great speakers that we haven't ever resorted to that. I'm really hoping that we never have to. in the

E. Maintain your independence. While sponsored in part by Microsoft, there are many sponsors and none of them control the content or anything else - just get their name on the web site and other publicity. The independence of this conference and others like it is crucial. It means that they are able to take chances on "non-approved" content, maintain some level of credibility and attract an audience that would not be interested in a Microsoft or other sponsor driven marketing style event.

All of that being said - the community run aspect of this means a lot of work for the guys that are running the event and it really requires a good committee to do it right. John Hopkins and Jason Follas do a fabulous job year after year and should be proud of their work. I helped out the first year but was too busy with new job to help out last spring so Darrell Hawley stepped up, responsibilities were shifted and they pulled off an amazing event. This year Darrell Hawley was busy so they pulled in Patrick Steele, Chris Woodruff and Jeff McWherter to help out. At this point, there are parts of the event that were really hard that are on autopilot such as the registration system. The first two years were interesting because they didn't have a registration engine and had to scrounge for one. Now they have one written that is just flicking a switch on and off to control the registration. That's cool and needed. The web site was really hard the first year and now it's pretty much writing itself when they add in the speakers, sessions and assignments. The giveaways were really hard the first couple of years but there have been a lot of great strides making that as automated as possible. I'm really impressed by the organizational and leadership abilities demonstrated by John Hopkins and Jason Follas to really make this a repeatable and sustainable event.

Thanks guys!

Day of .Net in Ann Arbor Fall 2007

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 10:50:10 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2] 

It’s been a long but fun month.

9/30/2007 – 10/3/2007 Adobe Max

This was the first Adobe Max that I’ve attended. It was a lot of fun to catch up with James Ward and Ryan Stewart. Even though we are evangelists for different (and even opposing) companies – they are great guys and I enjoy hanging out with them. Actually, I got to meet a lot of the Adobe employees and they were all pretty nice even if they were nervous/suspicious/confused about why I was there. I saw a lot of cool technology there. Obviously, Thermo was the prettiest girl at the dance but some of the ‘Sneaks’ were pretty slick. My favorite technology that I saw was called seaming. The short version is that this guy figured out how to remove seams from pictures rather than crushing them during a resize. His app will, as the picture is resizing, remove areas of low “energy” rather than squishing all of the figures in the picture. This means that he’s not resizing the people, cars and the like and does remove things like part of the sky or beach or building and so on. It was very cool. He can also “paint” an object in the picture and remove enough other seams to pull the rest of the picture in to cover that object and it completely vanishes. As it was a “Sneak”, Adobe has not committed to releasing it but it’s on the horizon and it’s very cool technology.

10/8/2007 – 10/9/2007 Boston Remix

I really wasn’t sure exactly what to expect with Boston Remix. This was a recreation of the developer parts of MIX, which happened in Vegas in the spring. I was really impressed with how smooth the event went, the quality of the presenters from the keynotes to the regular sessions. I was privileged enough to pick up one of the sessions where the presenter bailed. I did the Web 2.0 talk that we’ve been doing with ArcReady. I really enjoy that talk these days. I leverage it as a conversation to see what everyone in the room things of Web 2.0, how they are doing their development and more.

I met Mark Frydenberg who is a professor at a Bentley University. He is leveraging Web 2.0 to teach his classes. By this I mean that he’s leveraging Wiki’s to do class notes, allow the users to contribute possible test questions and more. He’s looking at Popfly to do teach the class the basics of mashups and programming. It’s a very cool idea and I’m looking tracking his progress through-out the semester. I’ve also caught part of this for a future Code to Live show.

10/12/2007 – 10/13-2007 Devlink

This was an amazing event. John Kellar started off in Little Rock, AR (in fact he went to high school at on of the big rivals to my old high school and we know some of the same people from high school... :) ) and started the Little Rock Techfest. He grew this to be a very successful event and then took a job in Nashville (or Nashvegas as Rob Foster puts it). This is the second year for DevLink and it surpassed expectations for the second year in a row. There were 350 people that paid $50 a head coming together for 2 days worth of rock star material. It was an honor to be listed among the speakers that we had here. You probably already saw my post on Brad Abrams, but I didn’t talk in depth about Ron Jacobs, Rocky Lhotka, Billy Hollis, Tim Huckabee, David Laribee, Wally McClure, David Silverlight, Rob Foster, Mark Dunn, Todd Fine, Jon Box, Kathleen Dollard, Keith Elder, Rob Howard, Ted Neward, Alan Stevens, Rob Winsor and I’m probably (almost definitely) forgetting someone else important. The buzz and conversations at the event were fabulous.

10/13/2007 - Indy Techfest

This event was organized by the user group in Indianapolis run by Brad Jones. Brad and I go back to an MVP summit 3 or 4 years ago. The Indy Techfest cut off registration at 563 and they had a large waiting list on top of that. Damn the space constraints. I showed up during the last session of the day. I did my pitch for Code to Live. It was pretty cool because we got to actually bring the bike inside the venue. You can see in the picture Dave Bost, Bill Steele, Larry Clarkin and me. Notice the DevLink jersey... :)

After the event I went to dinner with Brad Jones, Steven Fultcher and the rest of the organizers and some of the speakers. It was a fun time.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 1:38:06 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2] 

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 poin