Once in a life time you get the chance to hire a Luminary

Industry #Luminary & #Silverlight #MVP is looking for his next role, the race is on, if u'd like to have a rock star @ your company see @WynApse author of Silverlight Cream. see http://geekswithblogs.net/TehGrumpyCoder/archive/2010/09/01/day-1-of-being-unemployed.aspx

Hiring an MVP like David Campbell is just an almost unbelievable oppertunity for a company to gain enourmous creditbiltiy as wellas a huge strategic asset. Having heard that David (not me, but Mr. Campbell) I almost chocked. I would give my eye teeth to hire some one of his calibur and there is such low chance of ever being able to hire some one like him. In any case it will be interesting to see what company gets him first :)

some more about David Campbell:

http://www.silverlightcream.com/

http://wsinsiders.com/the-silverlight-mvp/

http://geekswithblogs.net/TehGrumpyCoder/archive/2010/09/01/day-1-of-being-unemployed.aspx

http://www.wynapse.com/

http://twitter.com/WynApse/

Silverlight Connections - Vegas Nov 1-4

got asked to speak at SilverlightConnections in Vegas in Nov. :) topics include: 'Breaking Down Walls – The Story of Getting designers and developers working together in an Agency Environment' and 'Multi Dos and Don’t touches –Multi Touch Development from the trenches' and 'Going from Silverlight to Phone 7 Silverlight Application Development'

http://www.devconnections.com/shows/FALL2010ASP/default.asp?s=151


Title: Breaking Down Walls – The Story of Getting designers and developers working together in an Agency Environment
Type: Regular session
Category: Expression Blend
Level: 300 -- Advanced

Abstract: Breaking Down Walls is about the wall between designers and developers in the typical design shop. Getting everyone to cross over, communicate and build better UX is where we are going and where many of the best Interactive Design firms are already. When designers and developers learn to communicate, and work together they really start to be able to make the best use of the tools they have from Adobe to Expression to Visual Studio, all these tools can be used in an open collaborative environment like never before. Learn to make magic here or at least learn how it has been done at Wirestone and other agencies that have done it successfully.

Title: Multi Dos and Don’t touches –Multi Touch Development from the trenches
Type: Regular session
Category: Architecture, Patterns and Practices
Level: 300 -- Advanced

Abstract: David talks about his experience in the retail space with real world multi-touch applications from touch kiosks to Surface and Silverlight. David will talk about the customer experience and how user centered design and multi-touch work in the retail world with ‘live’ customers as well as the perspective of designers, developers, IA and others regarding multi-touch. From stories about developers touching too much and about good ideas gone amuck David gets it all out on the table.

Title: Going from Silverlight to Phone 7 Silverlight Application Development
Type: Regular session
Category: Windows Phone 7
Level: 200 -- Intermediate

Abstract: This session is about making the leap to Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 and using your Silverlight Skills to build cool Silverlight applications for Windows Phone 7. We'll talk about the basics, game development and even business(ish) apps for Phone 7.

Me on Windows 7 Touch (and I mention Silverlight Hack)

At the MPV Summit 2010 I was asked to talk a little bit about Windows 7 touch and so I talk abit about this touch tag Kiosk technology and our experience at Wirestone working with Windows 7 Touch, WPF and Silverlight. Anyway its pretty cool:

http://www.vimeo.com/10357419

MIX 2010 - in 10 seconds...

um...

windows phone 7

Silverlight 4

better ux

lots of parties (MIXer was awesome)

OData (ado v35.5?)

number of problems with conference direction, still coolest of the public ms conferences

did I mention the iphone killer windows phone 7 (aka, Zune Phone, windows mobile 7) and amazingly enough it might actually be some real competition for iphone, ux is awesome (after 4+ freaking years it had better fraking be freaking awesome)

You can get all the videos here http://live.visitmix.com/Videos

AND Wirestone sponsored it, stole a sign with our Wirestone logo and more parties and friends.

The worst part of MIX was not getting to see everyone I was hoping to. there may have been talk of other things such as azure but they are really that critical and I didn't pay attention...

Did I say windows phone 7 and all its apps are Silverlight and XNA? freaking awesome

MIX10k Wirestones - the game...

first shameless self promotion... Please check it out and vote 5 starts... Here is the link:

http://mix10k.visitmix.com/entry/details/186

That aside this is an interesting contest where the goal is to build the coolest application in under 10k in Silverlight 4 (what other kind is there?) and the problem is that this is not the binary but the source files... and it turns out the wirestone log in Adobe Illustrator had a lot of path data or defined 'points'... that being the case it took me a while to get something that would fit.

If you interested in games like this there is a codeplex project we use for demos at http://Simon.codeplex.com/ and you can go to http://www.HackingSilverlight.net/Simon.html to play the game.

Making an Integrator

There are still a lot of names for it but I’m going with ‘Integrator.’ I’m not sure exactly who coined this but I tend to like it. But what is an Integrator? At least in the context of the WPF/Silverlight world an Integrator tends to be some one that sits between a design team and the developer team at least initially when a company first gets someone to fill the integrator role. In the long term the Integrator becomes more the designer as part of an integrated team where there is not a design team or a developer team and we get into this Agile sort of cross discipline team that is building better UX faster in order of magnitude then anything before. There are lots of things that have come together of the past few decades to make this kind of team possible. We are going to focus on the Integrator but let take a quick look at the cross discipline team that the integrator role tends to move teams towards.

The New UX team tends to be on one spectrum a developer that can do dev work in the data base, in the web services space and then into the .NET and WPF. This developer might be a software architect with expanded data modeling an application modeling etc but tends to also be able to do some light reasonable UI and knows what good design looks like. The next team member might be an IA or Information Architect. Granted the Software Architect might have some IA skills and if so might even be a UX Architect. So the IA helps make sure the data and the flow of the IA in the IA are solid on the up take for the team but on the end the IA is making sure the user experience is good and doing user testing and other interfacing with users to make sure what they see makes since and works well.

From IA we start to get into the Integrator role, the Integrator will have a sound understanding of IA, UX and be able to write code but most importantly they are able to visually decompose what they see into Xaml and do design and design integration. Going Past the Integrator is the pure designer then might live in more disconnected tools. But as a team evolves into this sort of zen state each role including the dev’s, the IA, the architects, the designers and integrators tend to take on some of the skills of all the others. When everyone can do a little bit of everything the team is able to functional more tightly than ever before using some version of Agile and WPF/Silverlight todo more better and faster than before. It is even possible to take this even further and bring in the PM (Project Manager) to be able to work with customers and take on much of the skills of the IA.

In a way the Integrator can become kind of a seed that when planted in the fertile soil of a dev team that loves design and a design team that loves to see their hot designs alive over time turns the team into a UX monster (in a good way). Here is where we see the best innovation and the hottest UX (User eXperiences) at least in my experience.

Integrators are not born though they have to be grown (again in my experience). Now we get to the point of the article… how do you grow, build or otherwise make and Integrator?
So there seems to be two kinds of coal for building the integrator: The Designer and The Developer. In either case there are good points and bad points about each kind of ‘coal’…
For the Developer (especially/mainly the WPF/Silverlight developer) the good points are if they are already comfortable with Xaml and building WPF/Silverlight applications jumping into blend and becoming technically proficient is relatively straight forward but on the downside… if a developer doesn’t have any design sense at all… really give up now before you hurt someone. The hardest part of making a rock star integrator is getting a design sense, point 8 Helvetica is NOT the same as point 9 Ariel and if there is a question over it then you need to start again. Ok so we then make a huge assumption that you have some design sense. How do you cultivate it? Well ideally working in blend with some hot designers (and no this does not mean ‘hot’ looking although that is good too). But here is a good reading list for the dev aspiring ‘Design Integrator’

• Presentation Zen (really you must stop making crappy slides) http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Zen-Simple-Design-Delivery/dp/0321525655/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259022426&sr=8-1

• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink http://www.amazon.com/Whole-New-Mind-Right-Brainers-Future/dp/1594481717/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259022506&sr=1-1

• Foundation Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight By Victor Gaudioso (http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Expression-Blend-Silverlight-Foundations/dp/1430219505/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259021904&sr=8-1 )

• Neuro Web Design – What makes them click? by Weinschenk http://www.amazon.com/Neuro-Web-Design-Makes-Click/dp/0321603605/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259022564&sr=1-1

• Information Architecture by Wodtike and Govella http://www.amazon.com/Information-Architecture-Blueprints-Web-2nd/dp/0321600800/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259022633&sr=1-2

• MVVM for tards (http://tard.codeplex.com/ )

• Foundation Silverlight 3 Animation by Jeff Paries http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Silverlight-Animation-Jeff-Paries/dp/143022407X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259022673&sr=1-1

Once you get this or in the process of getting this along with working with a designer is learning how to talk to designers. More than any other thing is team dynamics and team dynamics is primarily about good communication. Outside of the basics of good communication is when coming from the dev world to the design world you need to get in touch with the vernacular as much as possible. Working with designers you can get it from osmosis to some degree assuming you don’t piss them off, part of this means that when you talk to designers about changing their process understand that you probably don’t understand their world and that you can’t be condescending with really you probably don’t know what you are talking about when it comes to design. As an example designer typically don’t’ name and group elements in the same way that a dev is going to need them. When you talk to designers about naming conventions you need to be nice and explain why you need their help to have things grouped and named in the assets even from Photoshop and Illustrator.

What about making a designer into an integrator?

In this case the biggest problem tends to be getting past the normal design tools to looking at Xaml at times, wiring up a basic event and some basic code. Understanding the basics of how to work with dev’s is secondary to getting the new design integrator up to speed. While the designer brings the most critical skill to the Integrator role (being a design sense) they have a huge learning curve to wrap their mind around Xaml and Code. While a designer doesn’t need to code an Integrator needs too at least a bit. Much like the dev needing to understand design at a certain level the same goes for the designer to understand some coding in the context of Xaml and Visual Studio.

So how do you get a Designer to be able to write a method in Visual Studio? I would say to start with the most obvious and that is blend. The designer has to be interested in being an Integrator. If the designer is not passionate about learning to make their designs real then they are going to have a hard time. Starting with Blend the tool is designed to at least on some level be straight forward for designers and for starters they can focus on the WYSIWYG. For example all the short cut key codes are the same or mostly the same as Photoshop and the tool is great for doing WYSIWYG sort of ‘design’ but the native format is Xaml. Once the designer gets to the point of being limited then introducing Xaml to the designer is a great next step. So building on this to being able to wire up and event in code and launching in VSTS is about the limit. Here is where the sweet spot kind of happens and this like the dev being an integrator works best when it is a composite designer developer team.

From a learning standpoint the reading list might be:

• Foundation Silverlight 3 Animation by Jeff Peries http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Silverlight-Animation-Jeff-Paries/dp/143022407X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259022673&sr=1-1

• Foundation Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight By Victor Gaudioso (http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Expression-Blend-Silverlight-Foundations/dp/1430219505/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259021904&sr=8-1 )

• MVVM for tards (http://tard.codeplex.com/ )
• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink http://www.amazon.com/Whole-New-Mind-Right-Brainers-Future/dp/1594481717/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259022506&sr=1-1

• Neuro Web Design – What makes them click? by Weinschenk http://www.amazon.com/Neuro-Web-Design-Makes-Click/dp/0321603605/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259022564&sr=1-1

• Information Architecture by Wodtike and Govella http://www.amazon.com/Information-Architecture-Blueprints-Web-2nd/dp/0321600800/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259022633&sr=1-2

So let us go back to what is an Integrator?

The Integrator needs to appreciate design and to do good design and recognize good design. An Integrator needs to be able to be able to visually decompose a design and build it in Blend as Xaml. An Integrator needs to learn how to talk to designers and developers and be able understand the needs of both. Dev’s need names, designers need design time data and that sort of thing. Most of all the Integrator needs to help facilitate the communication dynamic between design and development and that is what makes the magic juice you see in some of the high end UX companies building on the Microsoft Stack.

Lastly one of the key aspects of getting companies to buy off on supporting the transition from traditional approaches to composite teams (of designers, developers and integrators and IA’s and anyone else we can get our hands) is ROI for better UX. Companies need to see how better UX can increase productivity, increase sales and user satisfaction and more. And they need to see how the composite team using designers, developers and integrators using the Microsoft WPF/Silverlight stack (Xaml, .NET 4, Visual Studio, Expression Suite) saves development costs, time to market and enable the better UX in general. That is the job of the integrator…

MSDN Events Unleashed: Best of MIX

Doing a presentation on what is new in Silverlight 3 at the MSDN Unleashed event in July:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032414266

in your in the greater seattle area it will be alot of fun and we get to learn some new Silverlight 3 goodness. Hope to see you there.

Silverlight 3 to Silverlight 2

here is a cool post on going from SL3 to SL2 on the same dev box.

http://blogs.msdn.com/amyd/archive/2009/03/18/switching-from-silverlight-3-tools-to-silverlight-2-tools.aspx

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

Facebook and Microsoft demos facebook API's

something cool from facebook and microsoft

http://team.silverlight.net/announcements/microsoft-previews-great-wpf-and-silverlight-apps-with-facebook-openstreams-api/

Silverlight 3 LOB Apps

I did this email interview about building LOB apps in Silverlight 3. I think its worth a read if your interested in the topic. My main point is/was 'yes' its ready :) so check it out.:

http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/David-Kelley-on-Is-Silverlight-3-ready-for-business.aspx

"Silverlight 3 is on its way with tons of new goodies. But each technology has to be well accepted from the business users in order to be successful. But what can help the business to take such a decision? We, at SilverlightShow.net, think that sharing experience is a good start.

This article is a part of our “Shared Experience” initiative that aims to give a place to every person or company that has experience in a commercial Silverlight product or project to share that knowledge. If you are one of them and you are willing to participate, download and answer our questions. In return, we will publish not only your answers, but a white paper of the Silverlight solution you have.

Let’s take a look at what David Kelley from IdentityMine has shared..."

MIX 09 - the coolest place on earth

its about design stupid. developers that can't get on board right brain thinking will be outsourced.



this I think is a critical trend that we in the tec field need to get that in the modern world it will be about design. I read a book 'A Whole New Mind' and if you take that with the book 'Age of Spiritual Machines' I think you can get a clear picture of what is coming and for us in the tec field it is about the design (just like Bill say's on stage just now at MIX) 'its a good time for design'



So instead of code its about the design or the user experience (UX)



Getting back to MIX and the keynote and any annoucements...

Expression Web (really I have a hard time not having Front Page flash backs) but the super preview is really cool... kind of like an uber frontpage...

There is the new version of ASP.NET, VS 2010, Windows Webapp Gallery, and Bizspark...

Expression Blend 3 is really got some cool new features, including:

* my favororiate is Sketchflow and the sketch flow player... very very cool.
* photoshop and illustrator imports
* behavior stuff is cool and designing with data is much better
* Source Control integration
* XMAL, C# and VB intellisense in blend...

As to Silverlight 3...

* 3d
* better data binding
* running on the desktop support even on the mac...
* GPU Hardware level support
* bitmap and pixel API's Pixel Shader effexcts
* new deepzoom stuff
* deeplinking navigation
* multi-touch support
* New Codecx built in (H.264, AAC, MPEG-4
* Raw Bitstream Audio/Video API for doing things like custom codex support
* and my personal favorate this second is the we have more features now in SL3 and the download is 40k smaller including all the SL2 features for the plug in.

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

MIX 2009

MIX is coming up. If Microsoft does the normal thing I'm sure we will get a good look at what is next for Silverlight. Hope to see you all there?

http://2009.visitmix.com/

Crossfader Goes Live

Crossfader is the largest most complicated Silverlight application to date. After a years work finaly is live. Yesterday afternoon in secret the url was changed to point to the real application. most of the dev team spent all day playing with it. Dan the business owner and Darak (Editor In Chief) are working on closing all the artist deals so hopefully all the music content will get all the real artist content loaded over the next few weeks.

As to Silverlight I went through the application and counted 54 distinct screens, dialogs and views currently in the system. Some of these are amagalmations but remember the whole things is one xap. I'm impressed it runs. :) 10 years ago a web application like this even if it wasn't all together was more likely then not going to lock up your computer. Crossfader certainly is next gen stuff and about the experience. Remember this is still just a beta but facebook will have some catching up todo :)

http://www.crossfader.com/

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...

No Silverlight for iPhone

check out this post:

"Microsoft said it was probably not going to be putting its Flash competitor Silverlight on Apple's iPhone 3G, but said it was keeping a watchful eye on Google's Android platform, and said Silverlight might get onto T-Mobile's G1. "

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/microsoft-no-silverlight-iphone-maybe-g1/2008-10-14

IBC Conference - Silverlight

Some cool demos at IBC regarding Silverlight from Scott G. namely H.264 support. check it out at:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/sep08/09-09silverlight.mspx

Silverlight - Rossetta Stone?

hm... so I'm starting to feel this term is a bit over used, ie, the language translation stuff, the orginal, and the project and NOW the Silverlight to Flash???

However names aside I think this site is worth watching...:

http://www.projectrosetta.com/

Crossfader Demo at TechEd

Here is a link to the Crossfader silverlight demo at teched that I helped write.

http://msstudios.vo.llnwd.net/o21/presspass/zune/Silverlight_2_Zune.wmv