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 at an End... RIP

I was aghast when I saw this article...

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/307687/html_5_could_it_kill_flash_silverlight?fp=16&fpid=1

don't get me wrong I think html 5 is great but there are so many wholes and are we really expecting all the browser's to get together and get it straight as to rendering behavior? not to mention all the nonsense about 'assumed' markup that browsers try to fix poorly formed markup. I mean really why not just use the SGML spec and call it good...

Any case with the coming trends towards UX and high touch I think the html 5 spec is too little to late for killing Silverlight and flash.

From Silverlight to WPF to Surface... the Saga...

Going from WPF to Surface turns out to be a bit more in the line of code changes expecially in XAML then going from Silverlight to WPF. WPF Simon will run straight up in/on Surface the problem is all the click events are castrated by the Surface Framework as Suface focus's on 'Contacts'. In order these are the kinds of changes I had to make to make 'Surface Simon' playable.

First we couldn't just reference WPF Simon to make the chagnes we needed so I had to copy the code base. Then started with converting the 'Simon' user control to a 'Surface User control' something to the effect of:

<s:SurfaceUserControl x:Class="Simon.Simon" xmlns:s="http://schemas.microsoft.com/surface/2008"

and in the code behind:

using Microsoft.Surface.Presentation.Controls;
using Microsoft.Surface.Presentation;

and

public partial class Simon : SurfaceUserControl

then next thing I needed todo was swap out the button controls with surface button controls so I could get the contact events like this:

<s:SurfaceButton x:Name="ScoresBtn" Click="ScoresBtnClick" ContactUp="ScoresBtnContactUp" Style="{StaticResource ScoresBtnStyle}" Height="41" Width="34" Content="" Canvas.Left="98.407" Canvas.Top="-6" />

note I could leave the click even there and the new 'ContactUp' event basically just calls the click event like this:

private void NewBtnContactUp(object sender, Microsoft.Surface.Presentation.ContactEventArgs e)
{
NewBtn_Click(sender, null);
}

Flex Flash Smack Down and maybe some Silverlight

Last night was the Seattle Designer Developer Interaction Group (user group) meeting. its a user group focused on UX and the designer developer experience. We meet in downtown bellevue. Last night Yoeun Pen was our guest speaker and a did a great presentation on Flex/Flash. Granted we were bolted out of the board room by the local construction cure and we had to play ninja and come up with a venue on the fly but some a miracle (ie, talked to hotel that we have our room booked with normally) we got to use a better room near by (about 100feet). We had a great turn out and a great dicussion on the tools for designers vs the Flex IDE. I was pleased to learn that the designer developer story is better then some of the other technologies we looked at but not as clean as WPF/Silverlight.

Yoeun Pen covered a number of things including:

• What is Flex?
• MXML (flash version of Xaml)
• Flash/Flex 4?
• Flex SDK
• Flex Builder
• Flash vs Flex
• Components
• Embedding assets
• Skinning

and he did a great job contrasting Flash and flex and compairing that with Silverlight/WPF. You can download the powerpoint at:

http://www.HackingSilverlight.net/Downloads/FlexFlash.zip

Yoeun's blog is at:

http://www.nationleprechaun.com/

Hope to see everyone at the next SD2IG about the latest topic related to UX.

Silverlight 2 Installs Greatered the all others combined...

Can't get over the quote '... Silverlight 2, the platform is installed on more machines around the world than the web browsers Firefox, Safari and Chrome — combined. Damn. Them fightin’ words.' from:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/18/microsoft-says-silverlight-installed-more-than-firefox-safari-and-chrome-combined/

Xaml WCF Binding Type

Just kidding... as of late I am not aware of such a think however, it could be done. I was pooring over the great project in outer darkness I'm working on and Karim sitting near by was talking about using Xaml as Clr Object markup and Xaml Reader. In joking about it came up to use Xaml as and WCF binding type. Eventually we got to a more serouse topic about the limitations of WCF support in Silverlight event Silverlight 3. In any case John Papa's book on data driven services with Silverlight 2 is probably the best resource on the topic as of late and John did quick post recently on Silverlight 3 and bindings supporting in Silverlight 3 which includes binary support which would be made in some 'Xaml' hack :)

http://johnpapa.net/silverlight/wcf-binary-bindings-in-silverlight-3/

Stay At Home Server in Silverlight

The book as been out for a while, but its just wrong on some many levels. I certainly keep one in my office... now you can enjoy it online and read it to your kids at bed time too... and its in Silverlight no less.

http://www.stayathomeserver.com/MommySite/default.aspx

Silverlight Simon v.old

Ariel posted a version of Silverlight Simon that runs in SL2. it looses the flip, pref button doesn't do anything and the out of browser experience goes a way but still very cool :) the coolest part was the process Ariel had to go through to make it work in Silverlight 2 after I sent her the Silverlight 3 version.

http://www.facingblend.com/SimonInSilverlight/index.html

and of course the SL3 version is at:

http://www.HackingSilverlight.net/Simon.html

Silverlight Simon and New HackingSilverlight.net

So this is only for 'testing' certainly don't go check it out unless your doing it to test. It is certainly not ready for public consumption yet... So I'm working on a new version in SL 3 of the hackingsilverlight site that I uploaded today for testing. This includes Silverlight Simon (Ariel did the design for this)

http://www.hackingsilverlight.net/Simon.html

http://www.hackingsilverlight.net/

So check out the new design and I'll be adding the rest of the design over the next few months.

Silverlight Presentation Design Rules...

Anyone that knows me well knows I'm in to rules. I have lots of them and even a little black rule book I like to use for fun (ie, Rule number 4 is Mexican food is good so long as it is not authenticate, this way I have an excuse to not eat food that is the least bit spicey.) . I realize this is a bit OCD and all but I like things that are OCD...

anyway over mix I wrote down a few short rules of thumbs for doing Silverlight Presentations (or any other kind) and much of this comes out of the theme at MIX that it is about the design, on top of the fact I have been reading alot of trending related books pointing to an increase in the need to be about design.

For me that is a hard thing. I have always been good at art, namely drawing and sculpting and much of the work I do in support of my 'hobbies' end of being works of Art. and if truth be told I'm probably better suited to be an artist then a programmer, however I just love the logic of coding. That all being the case I'm trying to send me self down the road of being a UX designer archtect sort of role and it starts with some rules I put to gether to statisfy my OCD.

So here they are:


1. Power point is evil.
2. Designs, UX, Images or even power point slides are never about a message or getting information accross but about emotion.
3. A 'Deck' should never be able to stand along and make since.
4. A Visual 'AID' is not an outline.
5. When a picture is worth a thousand words... is when you use a picture.

Along those lines we will see how far I get down that 'UX' Designer Architect... path.

Quantum Computers...and more

so strickly speacking not silverlight related however both very cool and computer/UX related

this one on quantum computers pushing us one step closer
http://www.physorg.com/news156710301.html

and this one on Next Gen UX
http://singularityhub.com/2009/03/04/the-next-generation-in-human-computer-interfaces-awesome-videos/

Twitter and Social Networking

I went to this exclusive dinner party at MIX tuesday night. at the table was a number of luminaries from Mark Brown (CEO IdentityMine) to John Stockton (Author, Acentium, SD2IG). The conversation evolved around UX and eventually into Twitter... I have stayed away from that digital crack but after falling on the side of the converstation for twitter I have decided that if I believe what I was saying I needed to use twitter...

http://twitter.com/DavidJKelley

So that being said Twitter allows a user to kind of plug into the community. It can be a collaboriation tool and almost a collective intelligence sort of tool, so that when I have a question I can post it and it gets answered quickly. Its like a big instance chat room that is open all the time. The power of the group mind to solve problems is clearly where I want to go and this tool among others allows us to get closer to this nervana of one ness.

Next Generation UX

Normally I'm not a big fan of alot of the koolaid you might see coming form big corporations including ms. But I am about cool UX even if I'm just a dev and not even that great of one to begin with but I got this link from Jobi about cool UX applications coming out of MS labs that is a must see for next gen user experiences which I hope to be a smaller part of creating using Silverlight. Check it out:

http://www.officelabs.com/projects/futurevisionmontage/Pages/default.aspx

The Ultimate Design Pattern

So I'm building out all these different variations on Command Pattern for Silverlight and writting articles on MVP or pMVP or MVVM or M-WTF and some times the entire discussion gets so esoteric that I want to screen. I mean really how the heck to you entirely seperate presenter from the model and view for example? in Silverlight its NEVER entirely seperate, not really. Anyway so as always Dr. WPF is the man and has a solution... W-V-poo which I think applies to Silverlight as much as WPF. Check out the article:

http://www.drwpf.com/blog/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/27/Default.aspx

Cool Silverlight 'Patterns'

My friend Nathan sent me this link to this cool Silverlight UX Pattern tool. From Infragistics in Silverlight lets you explore UX patterns visually and by tags and more. Check it out:

http://quince.infragistics.com

Xaml Fest, SD2IG and Coolaid

The Seattle Developer Designer UX Group meet wed night. Ableit we had to meet in the Lincon Square accross from where we normally meet but it was alot of fun. Charles was good enough to take a picture and prove that yes we do indeed drinking Coolaid, in this case 'Silverlight' Coolaid.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=17817&id=721326429&saved#/photo.php?pid=1757210&id=721326429

Here is some cool training you might be interested in the Seattle Area that Brain sent me on Mithun's blog:

Mithun's Blog with XamlFest announcement.
http://blogs.msdn.com/MithunD/
http://blogs.msdn.com/mithund/archive/2009/01/22/xaml-fest-coming-to-redmond.aspx

& event details & schedule is at:

XamlFest Redmond event on Feb 16 & 17.
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/01/21/you-re-invited-to-xamlfest-redmond-february-16-17.aspx

The SD2IG meeting we talked about Smart Device UX. Our goal was to look at the designer developer work flow on mobile devices but clearly on the iphone it kind of sucks right now...

Devin and Matt, I must say the iUI kit that Matt used does give a good story for designers building HTML apps. But really apps on the iphone Devin showed us that this is very very difficult.

Microsoft Tag

Here is an interesting if only vaguely connected to Silverlight bit from Microsoft...

Microsoft 'Tag'

Personally I could do without the colors but is an interesting idea that allows these computer read tags for embedding information on a page, or email etc. Something like an ubber UPC. In silverlight I can see some uses such as on crossfader I could have a tag for each artist on the back of media tiles. but maybe only if the tags work with gray scales...

http://tag.microsoft.com/

Silverlight Trigonometry

a cool post on stuff that makes my head hurt in Silverlight no less :)

http://channel9.msdn.com/continuum/tutorials/Trigonometry/

check it out.

Netflix Layoff Blamed on Silverlight

I heard this morning from the guys in the office, Now this is extremely funny...

http://blog.netflix.com/2008/12/changes-in-customer-service.html

sad for those guys but cool for Silverlight... hmm.. will the dow go up or down?

RPS in Silverlight

first of all I'd like to say that this is going to be a bit of a rant... second, it is my opinion that RPS in general is a giant hack. it is easier to just build your own security infrastructure from the group up then use RPS in my opinion...

That being said at times this has been a requirement. As far as using RPS it is not that difficult once you get past configuration and fairly straight forward to use in Silverlight. In my case I'm currentlying working on a project that shall rename unnamed where it was a requirement to use RPS.

RPS has this thing called a ticket that we pass around to make sure a user is logged in. We had this WCF services we needed to secure as well that the Silverlight application is talking to so we needed to get the ticket up on the client Silverlight app so it can be passed on the WCF calls todo authenication with live id. So once it was working ASP side all we needed todo was seriealize the ticket by using its token or RPS Token value and passing that as a parameter into our Silverlight application.

Then on the root of the app we save this RPS Token value to be used in authentication on the WCF calls.

Great. right?

Wrong...

this all worked fine and about a week in we the ticket type in test changed. one would think ok waht did we do wrong. apparent now we had to authenticate using type 2 in stead of type 3... WT...??? Some time later it changed to 4 and now we have to use 3 again. oh but we have changed anything about around the RPS Tickets? so what is up?

granted this was also a developement system and not hitting the 'live' live id system but still and another guy I know was working on a different project and they hit the same problem. As a joke I finally added this block of code:


StringBuilder WTFErrorList = new StringBuilder();
RPSTicket MyTicket = null;
for (int x = 1; x < 11; x++)
{
try
{
MyTicket= MyAuth.Authenticate(m_RPS_AppName, rpsTicket, (uint)x, propBag); // !!! WTF???
break;
}
catch (Exception E)
{
string WTFErrorMessage = x.ToString() + " WTF Error[RPSSupport::ValidateTicket] " + E.Message;
WTFErrorList.AppendLine(WTFErrorMessage);
WTFErrorList.AppendLine("m_RPS_AppName: " + m_RPS_AppName);
WTFErrorList.AppendLine("rpsTicket: " + rpsTicket);
WTFErrorList.AppendLine("");
Debug.WriteLine(WTFErrorMessage);
}
}
MyTicket.Validate( propBag );

The down side is this will never fly in production with all the code reviews but in got me over the humpe of figuring out what ticket type to use...