Most of you who are Microsoft developers probably are aware of Channel 9 and have benefited both from the deep technical screencasts to the behind-the-scenes interviews that the team has provided with such luminaries as Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Guthrie, Bill Gates, etc.
Tina Summerford and the C9 crew produced what I feel is one of (dare I say number one?) the best Channel 9 pieces of content yet (besides the ScottGu intro video for MIX09). Today they present to you The Visual Studio Documentary in two parts (with full detailed interviews to be posted later). You can view Part One and Part Two today. I suggest you take a moment and gather the other geeks in your company, find a conference room and watch them. Insights from Anders, ScottGu, Tony Goodhew, JasonZ about the history of what we know now as Visual Studio and the .NET Framework…and the bumps along the way.
You also get to hear about the other “Ruby” project, and how the team struggled from bundling a bunch of different products to creating an integrated development environment and platform – oh and learn what ScottGu does over his holiday breaks too.
It is well produced, has some very interesting points I didn’t know about myself. I really enjoyed this one and hope you take a moment to enjoy it as well.
Mithun just posted that the videos are now available online from the Silverlight Firestarter Seattle event. You can view the videos here in WMV form, but I also took a quick stab at putting them together in a playlist using the Silverlight Expression Encoder templates. Here they are:
You can click the little icon in the upper right to see the playlist option and to navigate.
NOTE: The offline mode doesn’t seem to work and likely because I didn’t populate the playlist option with the sizes of the videos, sorry about that, but just wanted to put these together conveniently and quickly.
It was a great time and I was sad I didn’t have time to stay for the QA panel for participation. Thanks for all of you attending in person at this and the other Seattle area events…as well as those who attended online!
I’m a little late to the game posting information about it, but there is a plethora of Silverlight stuff to do this week in the Seattle/Redmond area this week. Sleepless in Seattle…definitely not – Silverlight in Seattle baby!
Allow me to interpret Adam’s vector goods…
- 14 Sep (tonight!): Jesse Liberty is presenting at the .NET DA user group meeting on .NET RIA Services.
- 15 Sep: Nerd Dinner!!! Just a casual gathering of people who speak in acronyms and like food. Bellevue Crossroads food court (awesome choices for anyone).
- 16 Sep: I’ll be presenting (thanks to David for the invite!) to the Seattle Interact group on styling/templating interfaces for Silverlight as well as some on behaviors.
- 17 Sep: Seattle Firestarter event. ScottGu and friends. I’ll be doing my best to demonstrate some of the key scenarios for Silverlight and hope to inspire your thoughts.
With the exception of tonight, I’ll be at each of these events and am looking forward to spending the week in sunny Seattle with you folks. Be sure to stop by and introduce yourself!
Just doing some getting caught up from my holiday recently and I was reminded of a “line of business” application that was completed in Silverlight for the United States Army. It is a bit of a supply chain management application…where the supply is soldiers!
This is a pretty cool application that was taken from a full client (Windows Forms) application and brought to Silverlight by ProModel. They specialize in supply and demand issues. Take a look at the interview/demo that Adam Kinney did with Dan Hickman of ProModel. Sure, it would have been cool to have a drill sergeant do the demo, but I’m guessing they are busy right now.
What is pretty cool is that ProModel chose to use IdeaBlade’s DevForce Silverlight to implement the solution. Using this helped them get from zero to something quickly and not worry about plumbing and integration code. Some of the user experience for the assignments as well (as seen in the demo) was pretty cool. Some other background behind the solution:
Hearing Dan talk about it and seeing the final product, it seems like they were really able to concentrate on the end-user interaction with the experience without re-learning a lot of data access with Silverlight. Check out the demonstration above and also be sure to check out the solution they used, DevForce Silverlight!
(and yes, I know that Lee Ermey is a Marine, but c’mon…isn’t he *the* drill instructor?)
I’ve been doing a lot of asking and listening lately…to you, the Silverlight developers! I’ve received a lot of positive feedback and “thank you for asking” comments and it has been real encouraging. If you haven’t seen some of them, here’s some of my recent inquiries:
If you have thoughts on these, please share them at the links above. We’ve also been capturing ways of looking for feature suggestions. One experiment has been using a ‘wisdom of crowds’ type approach. Previously Joe Stegman (group director for the Silverlight runtime) had spelunked the forum questions, blogs, etc. Check out what he has to say (emphasis mine) about a recent effort to collect some suggestion feedback:
Tim Heuer and Scott Barnes have established a more community focused way of tracking Silverlight 4 feature requests. You can find their feature tracker here: Silverlight Feedback Forum. Other than a few items that our outside our control (iPhone, bundling), you're likely to see at least a few of the top items in the next version of Silverlight. source: Joe Stegman.
Hmm…some hints to the future?! :-)
Thanks for all your feedback and keep it coming!
Just doing some getting caught up from my holiday recently and I was reminded of a “line of business” application that was completed in