Blend/Catalyst Smack Down?

Designer and Developer Workflow

Is it a myth? Marketing lingo? Or could it be real with the help of powerful tools?

Listen in as Ryan Stewart from Adobe and Adam Kinney from Microsoft discuss the workflow concept from their respective point of views. Ryan will demonstrate how Flash Catalyst works within the Flash Platform development cycle. Adam will show how Expression Blend fits into the Silverlight development workflow.

Come join the fun with two of the best speakers in the world on Adobe/Blend at Interact

http://www.seattled2ig.org/?p=257

Silverlight? what about the hard ware geeks?

So Silverlight is cool, and working around here where everything is WPFish, or Surface-ish or Win 7-ish or Silverlight etc. or even stuff I can't talk about, I tend to forget about the geeky side of the hard ware we use. At IM there are lots of super cool, super smart poeple. Its a company of rock stars, that being the case however that turns out is true even of our IT guys. I finally got turned on to our IT guys blog... very geeky... :)

http://teknation.squarespace.com/

very geeky. One idea we had for the office is he likes this skelton case that looks like its out of a borg movie or something. we thought we could have one floor that has these cases and their uber cooling fans and other either steam punk or borgs sorts of things and then have all the cables drug up to the next floor so we don't hear the cooling fans...

Anyway if your in to hardware geekyness his blog is the bomb...

Silverlight MVP

about a year ago I was at TechEd 08 taking to a friend (Peter) and he asked me if I was an MVP and I had no idea what that was. Granted I had heard it but never spent enough time to put 2 and 2 together. Well over the course of the next year and half or so I did find my self more involved in user groups such as the Seattle Designer Developer Interaction Group and Silverlight Insiders Group and of course I was already going to all the cool events such as MIX. I got a tweet from Suzanne at Microsoft Tuesday evening that I had been awarded Silverlight MVP.

For many years now I have been scoofing at things like MCP etc as I found that certifications like this tend to be something students do but the guys that are really good were the ones that can whip out the stack of experience and code. So for the most part I didn't care about that. I guess why I'm so proud of the MVP award is that it is not something you can just take a test. It is awarded based on contribution to the community and on the work you do professionally. As I understand it other MVPs or MS employees are the only ones that can nominate you and to be recognized like that for the hard work (albeit doing things like Silverlight Simon I have a hard time calling 'work') by others that are generally smarter then me is something I'm really proud of. Of all the silly certifications from school or other industry related stuff the only one that matters to me is Silverlight MVP.

In any case here is my MVP Profile:

https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/David.Kelley

Silverlight on the iPhone

don't get to excited Silverlight wasn't running ON the iphone but we did manage to get a silverlight app servered up from an iphone... So we thought we would have some fun and install an entire web site on an iphone, install it on our network in the data center and for extra special fun we pointed a high end web stress tool at the phone...

I was surprised to see that the phone for the first 3 minutes of the test was doing well with well over 163 concurrent users at a time on the site but at 16971 hits it melted...

http://www.hackingsilverlight.net/samples/iPhone/iphone.JPG
http://www.hackingsilverlight.net/samples/iPhone/IPhoneWebServer.jpg
http://www.hackingsilverlight.net/samples/iPhone/MVI_8003.AVI
http://www.hackingsilverlight.net/samples/iPhone/Site.jpg

as cool as this is Devin did manage to get his iphone recovered but it took some doing. currently though apache is dead and Devin is trying to get it running again...