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 thus we still have budgets. For me, that's been the biggest challenge wrangling in budgets, efforts, desires, balancing other goals, etc. It's been a long process.
But it's on baby. The Code Trip is coming...like in a few days literally. We thought small (budgets) and wanted to go the RV route. Well, for various reasons (stop by an event and we can chat), we got a friggin tour bus. And in fact it's the tour bus coming off the Styx tour. How crazy is that? Here's a preview of what we'll be cruising around the western U.S. in:
So we're off...leaving from MIX on Thursday, March 6 (stop by the blogzone to help send us off). Our schedule is up on the site and will be continuously updated. The site will be evolving after MIX announcements :-). We're excited to head out. We know we've forgotten things probably. Heck, it will be a great time and we look forward to seeing you all on the road. Visit the site, subscribe to the main feed, follow us for real-time updates on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook. We'll be having contest announcements TODAY as well so you'll want to make sure you follow all those links as we'll announce some contest in certain areas.
From MIX we'll be hitting these cities first:
Please join us in person if you can, but follow us on line to view our daily log podcasts and code samples we'll be putting up. See you on the road!
I've gotten a few requests from internal local sales teams, Sharepoint professionals and developers about how to implement Silverlight in Sharepoint. I usually try to explain that since Sharepoint is essentially an ASP.NET application it is relatively simple to implement. Of course, that usually doesn't help :-). What helps is some documentation and samples that show how you would use Silverlight to enhance a Sharepoint experience.
As a part of the Software+Services Blueprints series, a new bundle has been made available to download to provide guidance and source code to help provide some information. In the blueprint you'll get:
- A simple “hello, world” sample showing Silverlight in a Web part.
- A Silverlight slider control as a SharePoint custom field type.
- A navigation control.
- A Colleague Viewer that uses lookups in Active Directory by using Windows Communication Foundation.
- A Silverlight picture viewer from a SharePoint picture library.
- A visual how-to center, created in Silverlight and based on a SharePoint list, for viewing videos.
A pretty great resource for those wanting to discover implementation details as well as some ideas for Silverlight in Sharepoint!
Along with some of my compadres, Josh Holmes and Peter Laudati, we're helping our MIX team member Drew Robbins organize the Open Space @ MIX area. What is it? Well, sort of whatever you want it to be. If you've never been to an Open Space event format before there are some things you should know...
Four principles of Open Space:
- Whoever comes are the right people to be there
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened
- Whenever it starts is the right time
- When it's over, it's over
Other than that, we're asking and welcoming anyone who would like to share something with the MIX audience online and offline. We're providing all the equipment and scheduling needs you'll require and hoping you'll have something to share with us. Starting at 4:00 PM on March 4 people will be able to start signing up for session blocks outside the MIX Sandbox area. Visit the Open Space @ MIX site for more details!
If you have something to share, be sure to visit and register for a time block. We'll be around with some video equipment and will help you share it in person as well as get it up online at the MIX08 Open Spaces site!
Are you a Netflix customer and have a Media Center PC? Check out what one of our Media Center MVPs re-birthed. Anthony Park, a Media Center MVP, has regenerated a project from back in 2004 (originally developed by Ryan Hurst) and released MyNetflix v2.1.
I'm not a Media Center nor Netflix user but the user interface is impressive and done very well to look like a part of the overall Media Center experience. Here's a view of your Netflix queue:
You can see other screenshots of browsing 'top' categories, movie details and he's also now incorporated 'watch now' information as well.
Great work on extending and keeping MyNetflix alive Anthony!
