Silverlight 3 Launch
I am sitting at the Hotel Intercontinental in San Francisco, where I’m witnessing the launch of Silverlight 3. Developers want one thing – to create interfaces that customers care about. Interactive technologies are evolving quickly. Development and design are converging, collaborative workflow is a necessity, and people expect intuitive interfaces and rich experiences.
Dealing with Complexity
The software development experience is still complex. Our tools and platforms must be robust enough to help with the complexity. Integration is expensive and re-writing code over and over is difficult.
If I wasn’t employed at Microsoft….
I’d be learning Silverlight. Well, I’m learning it regardless, because it brings so much power on top of the aging world of HTML. Less than a couple dozen elements comprise the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. It has grown, but is unable to deliver rich interactive experiences on par with Silverlight. I’ve done this demo showing how to build an end to end application where Silverlight talks to Azure tables and displays data in a fancy list box. I also show an ASP.NET version. Along the way you learn about REST-ful services, VS 2008, while building up various projects from scratch.
Calling out to all MSDN Readers - Can you gather a group of people?
Get a group of people together. We can have as few as 10. But the more the merrier. I can even invite people via Live Meeting and we can do an online version, with attendees from ANYWHERE. Just email me at bterkaly@microsoft.com and let me know if you’ve got a nice group of smart people that are ready to dive in. Even Larry the Cable Guy would say, “get er done!”
Doesn’t get much better – a live presentation where you can ultimately repeat my steps and tell your colleagues that you can build up a Silverlight app talking to the cloud. I want to help people get jobs. At the next Professional Developers Conference (November) we are releasing Azure. And you know what that means – there won’t be enough developers that can talk to cloud data from a rich client application. So now is the perfect time to jump in.
Prediction: SketchFlow is going to be popular
It is the end-to-end solution to make rough ideas real. SketchFlow is a dynamic prototyping feature found in Expression Studio 3 and it revolutionizes the speed and efficiency of prototyping the vision for an application. Rapidly demonstrate and iterate on ideas, application flows, screen layouts, and the functionality of an application.
Win a trip to PDC on INETA
PDC is coming to Los Angles this November and you could be there! INETA will be giving away 2 scholarships to the conference including air, hotel and conference pass. All we ask is you take some time to build an application using some 3rd party components. This could be something new or even something that you have been working on for awhile, it could even be something you are doing at work. All you have to do is take a 5 minute video telling us why your application is so cool and you are in the running. The judges will be evaluating submissions on many different criteria so even if you are new to a component you still have a good chance to win. So what are you waiting for. Get busy, the deadline to get submissions in is August 25th. Get all the details at https://www.ineta.org/codechallenge
A Unique WCF Learning Opportunity
I took Juval’s Master Architect class. Juval’s understanding of WCF is world renown. He’s worked directly with the product teams at Microsoft. Master WCF in five intense days with Microsoft Regional Director Juval Lowy covering WCF programming, design guidelines, pitfalls, his original techniques and best practices. Class Outline -October 5-9th, San Jose CA. Registration and Information
Thanks for reading. ~Bruno