Remember the final moments of the Scott Guthrie keynote presentation at PDC09?  Where Brian Goldfarb came on stage and demonstrated a completed application using a lot of the features of Silverlight 4?  Yeah, that Facebook application.  Well, it’s here now! The Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook has been released as a developer preview sample.  In order to use it you must have Silverlight 4 developer builds installed. NOTE: When you run this application you’ll be installing the developer builds of Silverlight.  When Silverlight 4 releases, unless you are a...

Two SDK libraries have released this week, helping developers integrate Silverlight experiences into their applications. Bing Maps Silverlight Control At TechEd Europe, the Bing Maps team released version 1.0 of the official Bing Maps Silverlight Control!  This is a replacement for the previous Virtual Earth Javascript control and provides a great DeepZoom experience for using the mapping platform.  Here’s some of the great features for Silverlight developers: Built on Silverlight 3! Designer support for Expression Blend Support for out-of-browser Vector in Pushpin...

All your base are belong to us. The year was nineteen ninety something.  A strapping young chap entered the world of technology.  With overpromises from tech leads, undertrained programmers, and caffeine, there was nothing we couldn’t conquer.  Or something like that. I’ve pretty much been in technology all my “professional” life…save it being a small sting of leadership consulting right out of college that a totaled car at Duquesne solved that decision for me….but that’s another story.  I’ve grown up around programming, I’ve programmed like the worst of them and I am a better person for...

Wow, it's been a few months now since I thought about doing a road trip talking about the next wave of technologies.  I originally thought it would be the "Silvertour" but we've now actually made it happen.  I can tell you that the behind the scenes of this has been a long process.  It seems so simple and I can hear the people now saying 'why was it so hard, c'mon you are Microsoft and have zillions of dollars.'  Sure, maybe that is true about a big company, but that's also the point.  We are a company of companies and...

so maybe my dream of getting exciting people in the silicon desert really starting to think different is coming to fruition? this past weekend was PodCampAZ, an event organized by some community members, sponsored by a few organizations and attended by many.  the primary face of the event seemed to be brent of iboughtamac.com.  let me tell you, if anything else brent seems to have solid skills as an organizer, designer, and marketer (i'm amazed at how he's marketed the iboughtamac brand -- how do i get a shirt?).  the site for podcampaz was very cleanly designed and wasn't thrown together...

last week i was at a team meeting in a town called bodega bay (near the area where scenes from the birds were filmed).  it is about an hour or so north of san francisco.  a nice little town, but my most enjoyable moment were the louisiana hot oysters i had on the last night...mmm...tasty.  ok, back on track. i had not thought ahead and accidentally (well at the time purposefully) made my return flight reservations for 06:00 AM from SFO international.  yeah, do the math.  that means i would have had to leave bodega bay, oh at 03:30-ish in the...

i've suddenly (well okay, not suddenly, but now i've had the time) realized that twitter is pretty good at keeping in touch, especially at conferences, etc.  i wish that some partnership with facebook and twitter would occur.  i'm using both of them and wish there was only one place i could update my status that nobody cares about. one thing is annoying me about twitter (and thankfully hasn't happened over at facebook yet ... at least with my circle of friends).  that is the one-sided conversation.  you know what i'm talking about.  the one where someone you are stalking following on...

well, it looks like my efforts with facePhone were short lived.  i started out creating a better mobile UI for facebook on the iphone.  i was challenged, however as the API didn't provide essentially everything i needed/wanted, so i got a limited functionality, but for me, was fine (getting status updates): well, the guys at facebook (presumably joe hewitt -- i actually contacted him about my efforts and never heard back...maybe this is why :-)). i haven't tried on edge, but they are loading a lot of content there.  looks good though. tags: iphone , facebook , iui , facephone

after playing around with some facebook toolkits, i wanted to ensure that facebook could enable silverlight applications within their context.  you see facebook and silverlight already live in harmony in popfly where you can create oh, i don't know, whack-a-mole with your facebook friend profiles? (sidenote: popfly was just updated again...read more here.) i figured i'd whip up a quick and dirty proof using the python cube example (thus also testing to see if silverlight streaming in a facebook app would work). lo and behold, no problems: using my newfound friend jing, you can see a quick screencast of...

what?! you don't know what facebook is?  haven't you heard all the cool kids are doing it so you should totally jump on it with complete disregard to whether or not there is any benefit to you at all.  then just accept every single friend request and you can have yet another disparate network of your own!  (i'm actually experimenting with adding random friends to see if people accept them the way myspace grew -- friends in myspace seem to almost be a chest-pounding reputation/currency thing.) seriously, though if you haven't heard about it, it is worth a read. ...