A new (and great) idea has been making its way across the country.  It’s called Startup Weekend.  What is it?  From their site:

Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion?

Startup Weekend answers that question and more. A unique three-day experience, Startup Weekend brings the best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams, and develop the product, marketing and revenue model. 

Occurring in cities across the world, Startup Weekend is the new way to allow your local entrepreneurial community to come together and incubate a company from concept to completion in just 54 hours. – Source: StartupWeekend.com

Still don’t understand?  Get a bunch of smart people with entrepreneurial spirits, ideas from their brains and those provided by community members, put them in teams, and make the ideas come to life.  Phoenix was recently selected as one of the cities to host one of these weekends.  This isn’t a user group.  So if you think you can show up and sit in the back of the room, my guess is you can’t.  Roll up your sleeves and get ready to collaborate.

You literally take an idea, bring it to a vision, and in some cases get to an implemented 1st cut of a product.  Your team builds a company in a weekend.

Several local sponsors in Phoenix (and other cities where these are happening) have come together to provide the facilities, food, and other forms of sponsorship so the weekend can be successful.  Want more information?  Here’s some links for you:

• Startup Weekend main site
• Phoenix Startup Weekend
• Phoenix Idea Gathering
• Phoenix Planning Wiki

Still need some convincing?  Local entrepreneur Sean Tierney wrote some of his thoughts when he went to a Startup Weekend in San Francisco:

Let me just say that in every respect this was an amazing event. It condensed a year long product dev and launch cycle into just 2.5 days and it began on a Friday night with a room full of 132 complete strangers. The fact they were able to keep the wheels on the bus and deliver a working alpha by midnight on Sunday was an impressive feat in itself, but what was even more impressive was to see how leaders emerged and groups solved problems."

I’m looking forward to seeing how this event evolves and being a part of it.  It isn’t a free event (but isn’t expensive), but hopefully that will give you more incentive to be serious about it.  It will be a great event for learning, leading, networking and being creative.

Had enough media players, games, and animated shapes with Silverlight?  How about integrating into some line of business applications?  Microsoft produces an application called Microsoft CRM, now in it’s 4th release (those closer to the CRM information can correct me if I’m wrong…I’m actually not too familiar with the roadmap/releases of CRM).  What is CRM?  What you’d expect, a customer relationship management system…define your use of those systems as you wish.  There are many CRM systems out there, but what struck me as interesting about MS CRM is based on a demonstration I saw about a year ago when v4 wasn’t yet released.

The presentation was from David Yack, a Microsoft MVP and Regional Director, during a meeting in the unbelievably gorgeous mountains of Aspen, Colorado.  David is a smart dude, but among his technical prowess I believe CRM sits pretty high up in his knowledge.  He’s built a company around CRM consulting and such and I’ve not come across people in my paths that have spoke with the type of authority that David does with regard to MS CRM.  In this meeting David actually didn’t focus on CRM as a product, but as a platform.  The way it is structured (you really have to experience it and I’m not going to do it justice by trying to describe it here) enables it as a developer platform, providing flexible entity models on the back end with great end-user customization on the front-end (read: no coding to change data models and interaction with certain data).  In his hour discussion I came to appreciate his knowledge even more about presenting CRM as a .NET developer platform above the product features it provides.

A few months later at MIX08, David sat me down and showed me some stuff he was tinkering around with regarding Silverlight 2.  This was < 1 day after Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was released at MIX.  Sitting on some bean bags in the open space area, he had created a Silverlight interface to CRM data.  Turns out, CRM provides a pretty extensive service layer for developers.  Of course he did hit some snags along the way given that the CRM services implement some features not supported by Silveright 2.  Have no fear though, it still is possible!  How?  Well, David’s done a lot of the work for anyone wanting to access CRM services using Silverlight in his book CRM as a Rapid Development Platform.  In his book (chapter 7 specifically) he talks about building different user experiences for CRM, one of which is Silverlight.  The companion source code for the book provides about a 20K library to access the CRM service features from Silverlight, taking the hard work away from you and providing you with the already-implemented work-arounds to access the services. 

If you are involved in customizing or even understanding Microsoft CRM as a developer, this is a must-have resource.  I was fortunate to have been provided a code that I could share with you here to get you $10 off the current price for the first 20 readers here to buy the book.  Does this sound like a commercial?  Well, sorry if it does, but I know David, I’ve read portions of the book (as I mentioned I don’t work in the CRM world, so some of it doesn’t make sense to me as the API isn’t something I work with daily), and I’ve seen him speak about the developer platform capabilities.  This is a must-have resource for CRM developers.  So go to www.thecrmbook.com and use code “timheuerblog” for the deal.  Thanks to them for hooking me up with the code.

Related material:

• The Dynamics Duo Talk about CRM and Silverlight

A while back I pondered doing a “live” debug session with people who were/are working with Silverlight 2 and data access via services, etc.  I really like a live concept because it allows people to ask real questions and feels more conversational than a one-way presentation.  After some consideration, I’m not sure I could quite guarantee the environment I was looking for to accomplish this type of style.

So as a second best, I’ve set up a webcast: Troubleshooting Silverlight Data Access.  I hope to keep the question channel open during the webcast though and answer as many questions as possible.  I’ve seen many questions on forums, through emails, and all over the interwebs about people hitting certain pitfalls with Silverlight and data access.  Most of these are common scenarios and you need just a bit of “a-ha!” help to get you over the confusion stump.  That’s my aim.  I have set aside an hour (would have liked to do it sooner, but just time doesn’t permit right now) to tackle the most common things I’m seeing with data and Silverlight.  I’ll create the scenarios that get you stuck and show you what I do to help get you un-stuck from those moments.  Stop scratching your head any longer!

UPDATE: The webcast is now available online for playback.

We’ll look at tools you can use, how you can dig deeper into error messages, working with different types of data, etc.  I want to help!  Please leave your questions here on this blog post as a comment so that I can be sure to address the scenarios.  This isn’t a 1:1 debug session, so it will be hard to tackle the “hey, I’ve got this service from my AS/400 server exposed as a fitzer-valve service bus, which is able to be called from my Java front-end but doesn’t work in Silverlight: why not Tim?" questions, but I hope to help get you along the path of what to look for and to avoid the common mistakes.

Sound good?  I’m looking forward to it.  Again, please leave comments on this post so we can have the best possible session.  You can register for the webcast here.  I look forward to our time together :-).

Related Posts:

• Silverlight cross domain and a helpful tool
• My app cannot access my service!
• Silverlight 2 Beta 2 updates for services

We just put up 4 new hands-on labs for Silverlight 2.  These labs are based around some of the training that partners and early adopters had received over the past few months.  A guided lab document and source code (before/after) is provided.

The 4 labs include building a web application based around a travel site.

• Building the UI: using different layout with Grids, StackPanels, etc.
• Styling the UI: use styles, templates and VisualStateManager…work with default templates in Expression Blend
• Binding Data
• Browser Integration

Be sure to check them out on silverlight.net!

Remember Photosynth?  Remember when you first saw it and your initial smile came across you in that ‘this is cool’ kind of feeling?

Multiply that.

A team at the University of Washington in conjunction with Microsoft Research presented “Finding Paths Through the World’s Photos” at SIGGRAPH2008.  I haven’t read the paper yet, but the video speaks for itself in the advancements of photo recognition and path interpolation to me:

There is some really similar Photosynth and DeepZoom stuff happening here, but a lot more as well.  You can visit their site to read more and also download some code from some of the parts of the system.

UPDATE: And when you are done watching this, check out Unwrap "editing video is now as easy as editing a single image." -- Um freaky.