Linkedin Networking

I'm really enjoying Linkedin. I've been able to reconnect with some old classmates at ASU and it will help me stay in touch with my colleagues from previous positions I've held. If you haven't seen it yet (which you probably have -- I'm just always the last to find out about new things on the web), check it out -- it's basically a professional networking application.

Connecting Families with Silverlight

One of the biggest hassles my family has concerns pictures. We take pictures on our digital camera, stick them on our PC, and let them sit there for months on end. Occasionally we may print a few or e-mail them to family. True, we could use a site like Flickr to provide an online listing of your photos that family can share. This still leaves a lot to be desired. When we're with family, we can show them printed pictures. They can handle the pictures, rotate them, look closely at fine details. If wehave the time we might create a photo album to show them, containing page layouts, possibly grouped around a specific theme, with the photos positioned however we like. Why can't we do this on the web? I would like to be able to take pictures on my camera, stick them on my PC, upload them to a web site, and create a virtual photo album just how I want. I also want my family to be able to virtually "handle" these pictures by rotating, zooming, repositioning however they want. Stay tuned as you'll be hearing more about this in the near future...

Instrument Preferences

Over the past few years I've mostly been playing bass guitar, with keyboard thrown in occasionally. Daniel Brymer, on his last Sunday at Living Streams, moved me over to the piano. Since then, I have been scheduled for piano maybe 1/3 of the time. I just received the May schedule and it looks like I'm back on the piano full time. I'm really looking forward to it as I've felt like I've let my piano skills degrade over the last few years while I played bass more, and hopefully I can improve my skills while not hitting too many bad notes in the process.

Mat Weddle

Today was my second time on the Living Streams worship team with Mat Weddle (who you may recognize from YouTube) leading. He's a really great guy and I hope he gets scheduled for more Sundays. It seemed like he felt a lot more comfortable leading our church's worship service this past Sunday than he has in the past, and as a result the worship set was amazing. He has a sincere heart of worship, and a great ability to lead others into a genuine worship experience, and that was on display this past Sunday. Unfortunately, the next time he is playing is on Mothers' Day, which I requested off (finally - I had played it 3 years in a row, which included my wife's first Mothers' Day - big oops!), so I'm not sure when we'll be playing together next, but I am looking forward to it.

Silverlight Development

I am working on a Silverlight 2.0 project right now and got pointed to Tim Heuer's blog on one of my queries and found out that Tim is now working on the Silverlight team along with Jesse Liberty. Tim is a great guy who lives in the Phoenix area and helped me when I was a consultant with Sogeti, as our local Microsoft developer evangelist. If you're working with Silverlight and have any questions, check out his blog: ~ Method Of Failed ~. Aside from that, I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to learn XAML and the Silverlight model. I previously had no WPF experience (my .NET 3.0 experience was limited to WCF), so I had no prior knowledge of XAML, but was able to pick it up pretty quickly. Granted, I made (and keep making) plenty of newbie mistakes, but overall the learning curve has been pretty gentle. Of course, coming from the perspective of working with Microsoft CAB and the Smart Client Software Factory, just about anything else will have a gently learning curve... but that's a topic for another post altogether. By the way, if you're working with that stuff, Ward Bell rocks.

Rebooting the Web

If you're not a geek like myself, you probably haven't heard about Silverlight, Microsoft's new web technology. As both a web developer and a client developer using the .NET platform, I see the strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the thick/thin client coin. Silverlight, especially Silverlight 2.0, blurs these lines. It allows developers to write what are essentially client applications on the web. A few years ago, AJAX (using a technology created by Microsoft, and made popular by sites such as Google Maps), greatly enhanced web applications by doing away with the page refreshes between mouse clicks. This allowed developers to create a new generation of web applications that behaved more like client applications. This revolution was called Web 2.0. It was a great improvement, however web applications were still handicapped by the visual confines of HTML and the browser. Of course, a compelling user experience could still be created with Flash, but that meant that the Flash content would not be indexed by a search engine. Silverlight is the next evolution of the web. As Jeff Prosise put it last year, Microsoft "rebooted the web" by giving developers a declarative programming model using XML (XAML), that allows for the creation of Flash-like user interfaces that can also be indexed be search engines (not to mention it has killer performance). In the past year since the announcement of Silverlight (formerly WPF/E), there have been some great ideas developed around it. Most early adopters used Silverlight simply for streaming HD-video, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the Silverlight Showcase to see what is possible with Silverlight 1.0. Silverlight 2.0, currently in Beta 1, expands on the Silverlight model by including a version of the .NET platform to write code against. This opens the door for .NET developers who have never touched Flash to write applications on the web that provide experiences that users never thought possible on the web. It will be interesting to see how quickly this technology (or alternatively, Flex, but I'm rooting for Silverlight) is adopted and how the web will be transformed. It is an exciting time to be a web developer.

Introduction

Well, I finally bit the bullet (thanks Kelly!) and decided to create a blog. It will primarily focus on Microsoft technologies and my experience with them, and hopefully provide some insight into the world of software development to the uninitiated. I may also write about music, life, and other bits and pieces. Occasionally there will be code walkthroughs, so to you non-geek types, you have been warned!