this one time at...er..um...firestarter

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.