i hopped on a plane at 4am this morning to head back to phoenix from seattle.  oddly enough i landed in rain.  what gives phoenix?  actually it is a welcome refresh for me.

i was in seattle for the silverlight fire starter event with my comrade mithun.  this was basically a one-day silverlight lovefest.  and the lineup of people was awesome:

• jesse liberty
• adam kinney
• laurence moroney
• adam nathan
• ernie booth
• arturo toledo

it was awesome.  if you had silverlight questions, this was the place to be.  i mainly lurked in the back and twittered occasional thoughts on what i was seeing (which probably did nothing since a poll to the audience showed not many people are on twitter in that area).  i saw a lot of people ask the presenters questions which i assume is always a good sign.  i learned some new stuff myself which is always great.

adam kinney proved no smoke and mirrors on his...er...i mean...lenny's xbox live gadget built in silverlight.  after getting gamertags from the audience i think he suddenly realized that the statuses would be offline because they were all there :-) -- but yet, one person had a "1 minute ago" update and they were in the audience...hmmm...portable xboxing?

the popfly demonstration seems to always get a smile from most even if you aren't interested in mashups or anything.  i think it is because you just realize the ease of bringing information together and not having to spend a ton of time together -- and getting an interesting visualization!  adam actually whipped up a similar xbox live gadget in a few minutes using popfly (not the same features, but for not writing a lick of code and getting xbox live gamer information and a silverlight UI plus implemented in a vista sidebar gadget that was impressive).

there was a couple of things i twitter'd about that might be worth mentioning here as well (aside from my happiness to chocolate milk on campus)...

• arturo demonstrated the desginer/developer workflow of
• laurence's book on silverlight 1.0
• there was a question about positioning text within elements.  although silverlight 1.0 does not have justification settings in elements explicitly, you can do it.  the code in my user controls in 1.0 sample has some code that you can look at how i used some simple functions to center the text on a button based on the text and size of the button...very simple.  hoping this will be obsolete in silverlight 2.0.
• adam kinney talked about user control patterns and specifically called out an important createFromXaml parameter (second, optional parameter) which is createNameScope.  this boolean parameter provides a unique name to each element that you create.  this is very helpful (and required almost) when you are creating a lot of same controls in an iteration for example.
• i learned of two tools JSLint and JSMin.  the latter is for 'crunching' javascript to reduce size of the script files (you know remove whitespace, etc.).
• adam nathan's book on silverlight 1.0 unleashed
• ernie had really good pointers on working with media, specifically with what attributes in playlists are supported.  i couldn't capture them all in time, but the content will be posted.
• ernie also had a session on what silverlight might look like in the future...his message: understand WPF.

great sessions.  the content was recorded, so subscribe to this blog and i'll update a link once it is available.

check out the beta of the microsoft download site.  it is built on silverlight...some media streaming happening as well as some of the subtle interactions done in silverlight.

if you click on the browse downloads link you can see some of it as well as other new navigation areas...

good to see microsoft starting to implement it in broader sites.

i'm twittering some of my thoughts on the silverlight firestarter event.  also as people are answering questions i'm trying to provide direct pointers...so if you are interested, follow me on twitter.

also the event is being filmed so subscribe to my blog for updates on when that information is available.

ever wonder what the heck a microsoft certified architect was?  think it is a test you can take at prometric and add MCA to your business card?  think again.  i've often wondered the process, what it is and how it works.  i've heard stories, but never bothered to investigate.

well, here it is, distilled for you in some reading.  my colleague, joe shirey, has just posted some very good information on what is a certified architect and what the process is.  if you are interested, these are must read information.

he's organized it for us non-architects to better read it ;-)

• Intro
• Why do you want to get the MCA?
• Preparing the documentation
• Putting together your presentation
• What else can you do to prepare for the board?
• The competencies
• Going in front of the board
• What to do with your results

thanks joe for putting this out there!

i found this very interesting site at ny times today which titles itself as 'analyzing the details' of the republican debate (the recent youtube one).

aside from the video transcript interface (being able to select a topic and have the video and text jump immediately), there is the transcript analyzer which presents this visualization below:

very cool experience.  i'm able to visualize the time blocks and highlight the large blocks to see the topic/text that is taking that area.  additionally, you can see how much time each candidate actually talked.  it looked like guliani and romney capitalized the time...interesting.

anyhow, a pretty cool/different view on looking at information that is primarily media and presenting it in a different way.