Hey Free T-Shirts
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

Today was the SilverlightDevCamp in Downtown Chicago at Clarity Consulting.  It was a day that was jam packed with learning about Silverlight.  We had a very good mix of people that had some real deep knowledge of Silverlight and a lot of people who were enthused about Silverlight and wanted to learn more.  In unconference style we starring a few minutes late, ran long on a lot of the sessions, had several sessions added and removed during the day and were still talking Silverlight over 2 1/2 hours after the event was supposed to end.

A quick recap of the sessions

Overview of Silverlight - Ryan Powers of Clarity Consulting kicked off the event by giving an overview of Silverlight.  The organizers of the event got feedback from the San Francisco Camp that we ought to start off with a session that covered the basics of Silverlight. 

Deep Dive into Silverlight Application - Jon from the Revere group gave a great demonstration of a real world application that they are building for a customer in Silverlight 1.1 (and yes he knows that it is not a supported platform yet, but they needed the capabilities that the .NET CLR provides).

Silverlight Games and Graphics - this was a really cool topic that centered on high end graphics and gaming on Silverlight.

Silverlight in a data driven world - Tal of the Centare Group walked us through a very cool sample application to select beers.  The application is a sample built by Centare to demonstrate what you can do with data driven applications.  They are planning to put the application up on the Internet and to release the source code so that the community as a whole can learn from their efforts.

Silverlight and Facebook - Ryan Powers gave his second talk of the day around how you can embed a Silverlight application on the Facebook platform.

Adobe Flex / AIR - Zach Stepek gave us a look at the Flex and AIR platforms.  He did a very good showing the power of the Adobe platform and even gave us some insights about how Adobe has dealt with some of the issues that Silverlight is facing (like using cross domain policy files to limit service calls).

MVC in Silverlight - Gilbert Corrales had a very interesting talk about building Silverlight 1.0 applications with object oriented techniques and component development.  Even more amazing was that he built his first commercial application using open source tools on the Mac OSX platform.

Silverlight / Twitter - Dave Bost walked through his SilverTwitter application.

"What about Design" Closing Remarks - Chris Bernard, the Microsoft Central Region User Experience Evangelist, closed out the day by giving us a quick overview of design process.  Chris was the first person of the day that did not start out their presentation by saying "I am not a designer". 

What I learned

There is a new version of Expression Blend available for download (September Preview) - download here.  I think the notification is buried in the 1000+ e-mails I have back logged in outlook.

There is not as much excitement about the Silverlight 1.0 platform as I thought there would be (or that I think there should be).  The 1.0 platform is a great way to get started on Silverlight and it is not just about video!  JavaScript can be a rich development platform as Gilbert taught us during his presentation (more about that later).

People are really starting to think about serious business applications that they will build in Silverlight.  I figured that we would see lots of Internet applications that are geared towards consumers before we would see real world business applications, but it seems that we will see business oriented applications at the same time as the consumer applications.

What's Next?

SilverlightDevCamps are popping up right and left across the United States and I am sure we will see one outside of the US very soon.  As for Chicago and the surrounding areas we will probably wait a few months before we have another SilverlightDevCamp.  However, before we even officially kicked off the SLDC this morning several of the attendees asked if we could put together a similar event based around SharePoint.  Dave Bost and I will probably spend a couple days recovering from this event and then work with the community to start planning that event.  If you would like to help out, let me know!  Otherwise, stay tuned for more details.

Special Thanks

The guys at Clarity deserve a big thanks for spearheading this event.  Also everyone who participated in the event by giving a presentation or asking questions during the sessions are what makes an event like this great.

More Details

Flickr Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jodieandlarry/tags/silverlightdevcampchicago/

Twitter Feed: http://twitter.com/SilverlightChi

silvertwitter
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

My friend and colleague Dave Bost is going to debut his new Silverlight Application at SilverlightDevCampChicago in a couple hours.  He snuck it out on his blog a few minutes ago, so I thought I would go ahead and Blog about it.    I ranted and raved about Twitter having one too many features in the platform, but I still think it is a very cool platform for Social Networking.

A couple of things are interesting about the SilverTwitter application that Dave built:

• It is a Silverlight 1.0 application, so he is demonstrating that you can do some interesting things with the JavaScript version of Silverlight (you don't have to wait for the .NET CLR platform).
• He is grabbing the XML feed from Twitter directly from the client via JavaScript.  The Silverlight runtime is currently limited to going back to the same web server to invoke services, but there are ways around that limitation.
• It is a great example of using Rich Internet Applications to create badges or widgets for web pages (more on RIA Patterns soon).
• He built the entire application on a Saturday afternoon (I was sitting next to him while he built it).

Check out Dave's blog for more information.  I think we might be able to talk him into releasing the source code for all of us to create our own variations on SilverTwitter.

In the 37Signals book "Getting Real" they talk a lot about less.  Chapter 2 of the Book is even titled "Build Less" and they list a whole bunch of things that your should have less of including features and options.  I know that Twitter uses the Ruby on Rails Framework, so maybe they have a copy of the book lying around and they can read up on that chapter.  They should think long and hard about dropping the "Direct Messages" feature from their platform.

Normally when you use Twitter you post a message (called a Tweet) of up to 140 characters.  It is sent to everyone who is following you.  The mechanism to send the message is independent of the message itself.  Some people will choose to get the text message over SMS and some will get them via IM and others will let them sit until the next time they view / refresh the Twitter web site.  A direct message is one that is sent from you to another person, only they get the messages.

What is so bad about a direct message?

First and foremost - The direct message problem has been solved in a number of ways over the last couple of thousand years.  We first solved it with hand delivered messages, then with letters, telegrams, faxes, e-mails, instant message and finally SMS messages.  We don't need another way to solve this problem.  If I want to send a message to just one person, I know how to do that.  The Twitter platform is about broadcasting my messages to lots of people (and to intertwine my messages with those from other people).

The second reason is that Twitter is a platform with multiple applications that use the services provided.  Some of these applications are official Twitter products and some are not.  You have a web interface, a mobile optimized version of the web interface, SMS to phone, TwitterVision, Twadget (Vista Gadget) and Twitter Widgets (Mac OSX).  Not everyone of these platforms supports the Twitter direct message interface.  The 2 I use the most (mobile optimized web page and the Twadget) don't show that you have direct messages.  So I have to apologize to the people who have direct messaged me in the past, sorry I did not see them before today.

A symptom of a platform and multiple versions

This blog post started out as a rant for me, however when I started writing it I realized that this was more than just a complaint about the micro-blogging tool.  The "Direct Messages" issue that I am facing is probably one that many companies are facing as they go to version their SOA services.  When you create a service for others to consume (like Twitter's Message Feeds) you have an idea about how people might use the service, but you can not guarantee that they will implement it exactly as you intended.  When you go to update a service (like Twitter did a few months ago when they added direct messages to the API earlier this year) there is really no telling how people are going to use it or if they will ignore the new features.  And of course the more you update a service the more the entropy increases in how developers of existing applications will react to it.  Updating a service is a matter of fact, so you really have to develop a comprehensive plan for how you deal with the people already consuming the service.  End of Rant...

2007-09-25 Halo 3 Release Night 007
Originally uploaded by gamertagradio.

We had a rocking good time at the Halo 3 pre-launch party in Downers Grove, IL on Monday night.  This was a DPE Event, but we had a lot of help from our counterparts in other parts of Microsoft (thanks guys!).  We spent most of the day transforming the Multi-purpose rooms (which are classroom style venues) into a gamer friendly environment.  We set up 9 Plasma TVs, 4 projectors and 13 XBOX game consoles for the event.  It was a mad scramble at the end and we came down to the wire (Dave Bost and I had to run to Best Buy and clean them out of wireless controllers, because we had miscounted the number that we needed).  In the end the place looked sharp and you could hardly notice that just and hour and 1/2 before there were customers using one of the rooms for a .NET Briefing.  It was an awesome event, but there was one real downside - I did not get to play the game hardly at all!  We played for a couple of minutes here and there while we were setting up the "game pods" for quality control purposes, but during the event I was too busy taking care of logistical items and talking to people to sit down and enjoy the game.

3 hours of nonstop Halo and no progress

On Tuesday I was so beat from the Monday night event (I got home at 2:30 AM) I did not even put the disc in.  On Wednesday night I decided to load up the warthog and take on the covenant.  I played for 3 solid hours from 10:30 AM until 1:30 AM.  At 1:30 AM I felt I had to quit the game and the get to bed, so I pushed the XBOX button and shut down the console.  On Thursday when I went to continue the campaign, I was right back at the beginning.  It took me a second or two to realize that I had not done the "save and quit" before shutting down the console.  So I had to start over, but that is not the worst thing. 

This Saturday, September 29th is a day that will be packed full of discussions around Rich Internet Applications.  Here is a quick run down of the events:

Tech Cafe with Ryan Stewart of Adobe - 9:00 AM @Bucketworks in Milwaukee

Ryan Stewart the Rich Internet Application Mountaineer, Adobe Evangelist and Znet RIA Blogger will be the special guest at a Tech Cafe held at Bucketworks.  A tech Cafe is "an informal geek gathering focused around a single tech topic" and the topic for this one is Adobe AIR.  More Info

SilverlightDevCamp - 11:00 AM @Clarity Consulting in Downtown Chicago

SilverlightDevCamp is a barcamp style conference that is focused on building Silverlight applications.  Kevin Marshall of Clarity Consulting is the mastermind behind the event being held in downtown Chicago (just a few blocks from Union Station).  Kevin is the world's foremost expert on organizing a SilverlightDevCamp, because this is the second one that he is done in 2 weeks, he also organized the San Francisco SilverlightDevCamp a couple weeks ago (the one in Chicago is the second one ever - but not the last - DC and Dallas ones are coming).  And to keep this from being a Microsoft only event, we have invited Zach Stepek of Crave media and the Stateline Adobe Users Group to come show use Flex and AIR at the devcamp.  More Info

Adobe OnAIR - 7:00 PM @MCA Warehouse in Downtown Chicago

Adobe has been crossing the country in a bus to spread the word about AIR.  Saturday is their last stop on the first leg of the tour ahead of Adobe Max and they are planning a big event.  Ryan Stewart will be kicking things off with the keynote at 7:00 PM (yeah the same Ryan Stewart who started the day in Milwaukee).  More Info

Are you up for the triple play?

Joel and Joseph

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Chicago stop of the FogBugz World Tour.  If you are not familiar with FogBugz it is a web-based project management tool by Fog Creek Software for enabling communication on development teams.  In all honesty, I was only mildly interested in hearing about the software, I really went to the event so that I could see Joel Spolsky of the Joel on Software fame speak.  I have to admit that the trip to Chicago was less of a train ride and more of a pilgrimage.  I have been reading Joel's blog since before we actually called them blogs (and before there was a little orange XML thingee on the site).  Joel is one of the "Internet Famous" crowd that is well known in the technology circles, but like most famous software people is a relative unknown outside of those circles.  I know this for a fact when I tried to explain to some to some non-technical folks who I was going to see the next day:  "You know - Joel Spolsky - the guy that created the Joel Test!".  Blank stares ensued.

I had a lot of questions going through my mind as I headed towards downtown Chicago.  Some of these included:

• Is this just going to be a sales pitch or will he also impart some of his great wisdom to us?
• Has Joel really Jumped the Shark as Jeff Atwood has claimed?
• Was he really serious when he wrote that his product is written in a home grown functional programming language (called Wasabi) based on VBScript?

Well after walking a few blocks to find a Starbuck's coffee, crossing a picket line of striking hotel workers and getting misdirected to a medical conference by a non-Union hotel worker I eventually sat down to hear Joel speak.  There was a small crowd of people at the event - it was about a 50 / 50 split of people who were there to see the FogBugz product and people there just to see Joel speak and there was significant overlap between those two groups.  It was a really good group of people who attended the event.  Technology people are usually not that talkative first thing in the morning, but there seemed to be a buzz in the air.

Ms Owens all over again

I had a big let down in the fourth grade.  I had a teacher named Ms Owens and about 3 months into the school year my family ran into her at a restaurant somewhere.  She was smoking at the restaurant, drinking a glass of wine and she was there with a guy!  How dare a school teacher act so "normal".  I honestly thought that school teachers went home at night, graded papers, read school books (not watch TV) and maybe they went to church on Sunday, but pretty much focused all their attention on being a school teacher.  Ms Owens shattered this belief in one instant and showed me that teachers are just normal people.

I had a similar experience with Joel Spolsky at his event.  Don't get me wrong, he gave a nearly flawless presentation of his software, which seems to be a very good product for tracking defects, prioritizing request for enhancements in software and estimating the software life cycle.  But I used to hang on just about every word that he would write on his blog.  If my feed reader showed a new post from Joel, that was the first one that I read.  I would quote Joel to other people, I used his techniques for sorting through resumes and even followed his advice on how to interview technical people.  But I guess I expected him to get on stage and give a speech worthy of MLK or JFK.  Instead he gave a really normal sales presentation and answered some questions by the audience. 

So what about Wasabi?

The burning question that I had was "Joel did you really write your own Language / framework?".  We got our answer when someone asked the question "I see your application runs in ASP, are there any plans to convert it to ASP.NET".  Joel said that the .asp extension on the site was just a semantic of this particular deployment and proceeded to tell us the Wasabi story again.  Yes they have written their own language that produces PHP code or ASP code (depending on the platform).  He also mentioned that it had been extended with javascript libraries to provide AJAX functionality.  He also mentioned that they were considering an ASP.NET version in a future release, since soon ASP.NET would be prevalent on most Windows Servers.  So has Joel jumped the shark?  Maybe, maybe not.  The last software company that created a framework for developing web applications based on the work that they did in a product seems to be doing okay.

The guys and gals over at Web414, Bucketworks and a whole bunch of other people have been working feverishly over the last couple of months to plan out the second Barcamp based in Milwaukee.  Barcamp is a neat experience where you get a group of people together and talk about technology and non-technology topics.  Barcamps are done in an unconference style where there is a lose organization around what topics will be covered (this can be a little disconcerting if you have only attended traditional conferences, but don't worry - you get used to it quickly and when it doubt, just ask someone).  Because the event is so fluid, I would encourage you to keep checking the main site http://barcampmilwaukee.com/ for event details as they unfold.

There is only one real "rule" to barcamps and that is that everyone is expected to participate in the event.  That can mean giving a quick session on something, or at the very least getting involved in the discussions during a session (it is real hard to not get involved).  Participating in the event can also be as simple as bringing some duck tape along with you.

Event Details and Links

Start Time: Saturday October 13th 10:00 AM
End Time: Sunday October 14th 4:00 PM
Location: Schlitz Park Center, 1555 Rivercenter Dr. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Upcoming.org: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/235252/
Yahoo Mailing List: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/barcampmilwaukee/
Registration Page: http://barcampmilwaukee.com/getting-started

From the "Tastes Great / Less Filling" File

I have to roll my eyes every time someone says "Rich Internet Application" and someone else corrects them with "Rich Interactive Application".  It is the kind of debate that gives us acronyms that are not actually acronyms any more.  It seems that I am not the only one that thinks arguing about the definition is silly.  The Nectarine Blog out of Australia has started a comic strip called "Barley out of Beta" that is also poking fun of the debate:

The Microsoft guy pictured there is Scott Barnes, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist from Australia (who was an Adobe developer before coming to the dark side).  Once the comic settles the dispute over the meaning of RIA (they have published the second strip already), I bet it will still continue.  There are lots of other topics to poke fun of in the RIA and Adobe vs Microsoft space.

Note: The comic was re-posted here with kind permission, please click on the picture to see the original blog post.

Updated:  because this is a past event, the registration information has been removed.

Halo 3 comes out on September 25, 2007, but as a loyal reader of this blog, you don't have to wait until then to play the game.  We are having a pre-launch party on Monday night, September 24th from 6:30 to 11:00pm at the Microsoft Downers Grove, IL Office.  I have 10 registration slots, first come, first served.

Here are some FAQs (please read)

• Can I bring a friend?  Yes, but your friend must register also.  We will have a scary looking security guard checking people at the door.
• Can I bring 10 friends?  I ask that you "share the love" and don't horde the invites.
• Not sure if I can go, should I "register just in case"?.  I ask that you only register if you can attend the event.
• Can I blog this?  Sure, but please link people to this site, don't put the code on your site (In case I need to change the code or I add more information).
• Do I need to BYOB?  We will have food and drink.
• Will there be SWAG or Giveaways?  We will have plenty of items to giveaway.  We are still working out the details on how to give them away - we might raffle or we might use them as prizes for people who win a game of slayer.
• Is this the campaign or just multi-player?  We will be have screens going on both the campaign and multi-player.

Microsoft has officially released Silverlight 1.0 this morning.  This is the Javascript and XAML programming model that is focused around the media capabilities of the platform, and not the full .NET programming model that will come next year.  The actual release is almost a non-event because there has been a rock solid release candidate for the last few weeks that has had all the features.  Some major sites like Major League Baseball have already started rolling out for the past few weeks as I mentioned a couple weeks ago.  Several other companies have piled on with the official release, including the WWE and the Home Shopping Network.

You can check out a very cool HD video in Silverlight 1.0 here (or click the thumbnail on the right).  This is a live action version of Halo 3 that shows the brutes and a warthog (I have to get me one of those).

Enter Official Linux Support

It has been very tough answering the questions around platform support when I have been talking about Silverlight over the last couple of months.  Windows and Mac cover the great majority of computers that people use, but to really have a true cross platform message you have to have Linux support.  We have heard this message loud and clear, here is a quote from Bruce Eckel that sums it up:

Although it's fascinating and compelling, the fact that Microsoft is not saying whether they'll support Linux is still a deal-breaker; "cross-platform including Windows and OSX but not Linux" is not an option for me.

The message has been that the mono guys are working on moonlight, but it is not an officially supported project (Doing it unofficially would have been a second class experience).   That changed with the deal that Microsoft and Novell announced officially today.  Now Silverlight on the Linux platform will be officially supported, but there will be some lag as the mono guys work to catch-up on the first couple releases.  The current plans are that you will see the released 1.0 Linux version within 6 months.  There are a lot of cool aspects to this deal that I will blog about later when I can dig into the details (not the least of which is the license under which moonlight will be delivered - a GPL License!).

I threw away a Christmas gift from my wife yesterday.  Actually I did not throw it away, but I did put it out with the recycling (after I checked to make sure that it was appropriate for the paper recycling in my municipality).  She got me a 2007 wall calendar from the series "Battlestar Galactica" (the new version, not the campy 1970s one that I loved so much as a child).  Jodie does a great job finding gifts for me, especially if you know how awful I am to buy for (I am a strange combination of being very picky, a minimalist who does not want a whole lot, and a impulsive buyer who will just flat out buy something if I want it).  I really appreciated the gift, because she knows how much I like Battlestar Galactica.  The problem with it is that I have no use for a wall calendar, I never even hung it up in the 8 months that I have had it.  As I type this I have 3 devices showing me the date right next to me and two of those can easily show me a calendar view (one just shows the current date).  The marginal utility of these other devices is higher because unlike my Battlestar Galactica calendar, which shows only 16 months worth of dates, my computer and my cell phone can go out years in both directions (to verify this I looked up that Apollo 11's Eagle Lunar Module landed on a Sunday). 

There goes the date, what about the time?

When someone asks you: "What time is it?" What do you look at for the answer?  I think if you are most people you look at your cell phone, your iPod or maybe your computer laptop that is open in front of you.  I can't remember the last time I saw somebody look at their wrist watch to tell time.  I even saw somebody whip out their cell phone to check the time even though they had on a watch!  I see increasingly fewer and fewer people wear watches, even though we as a society are becoming increasingly time obsessed.  I myself have a small drawer full of some very cool watches that I never wear.

My thoughts: wristwatches will become jewelry

So I think the paper calendar is on its way out.  Within a couple of years you won't see that dedicated calendar store in your mall that appears around Thanksgiving and then disappears a couple days after New Years (after slashing prices to 75% off).  I think the wrist watch will stick around for some time to come, but its main job will not be telling time, but rather it will be a status symbol.  I don't see either of these devices ever completely disappearing, after all you can still buy buggy whips.