I’ve got a thought lately and curious if I’m thinking crazy. You see, probably the most asked questions I get are around working with services within Silverlight. Although I’ve got some helpful (at least I think they’re helpful) posts on the subject:
it still seems there are people not quite able to get over some stumbling blocks. Believe me, I get it. New stuff can be confusing when it doesn’t work as expected. So here’s my thought. Today I helped a colleague that kept emailing back-and-forth about something. I told him “let’s get on a live meeting and fix it together” – and we did – and he was happy.
As I was doing that I thought…why not do that for everyone? Of course, the obvious answer is because it couldn’t possibly work in all situations. I can see one question: "Hey I’ve got my JBOSS service using Fitzer serialization on HP/UX servers with a RPC remote call exposed via standard SOAP – why doesn’t it work?” Some things just aren’t solvable in this debug session format I’m envisioning. But things like “I keep getting that friggin 404!” might be.
So what do you think? I’m thinking that it would be a combination conference call and Live Meeting (as that is the technology I have available to myself—so participants would have to install the client software). There would be some limits (i.e., amount of people) and you’d have to be willing to share your desktop – what’s the point of a live debugging if you aren’t going to show right?
Another (Chad) suggested that I gather a list of questions and just do a webcast answering those and working through some situations.
Leave a comment here on your thoughts. Am I crazy? Would it be too many cooks in the kitchen and not work? And if you’ve done something similar, what has worked in the past?