Wednesday, May 07, 2008 #

Phoenix Silverlight User's Group Meeting

Sitting in the User's Group meeting waiting for everyone to arrive... 15 people so far, so that's good... we're definitely above our core group.

Right now just discussing Silverlight amongst each other and taking advantage of the fact that Tim Heuer, Steele Price, and Michael Palermo are in the room... geez... two long-term MVPs, one of whom is a Regional Director, and a Silverlight Project Manager... holy crap!

Some WPF-afficianados are asking the hard questions, so that's not bad.

Ended up having pizza *before* the meeting... so that's cool, for me :)

Talking about the fact that we can't get to webcam or microphone from Silverlight... which would certainly open things up for a segment of the developers.

Tim taking requests for 'what things are not being brought to the surface to assist developers'...  for example, a 'personal starter kit', and although some of that is available, having it as a template in VS2008 would be very cool.

People asking for xamlpad, Tim suggested SilverlightPad, and there are two listed on SilverlightCream if you search for xaml and Silverlight 2.

Give-aways: Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse ... Expression suite, Vista... two copies of Camtasia/Snagit, and a few books... good stuff...

Another good meeting, and Simon Allardice has promised to present the next meeting on Silverlight for beginners up through SL2.

Thanks everyone, and see you next month.

-Dave

 

posted @ Wednesday, May 07, 2008 7:22 PM | Feedback (0)

Silverlight Cream for May 07, 2008 -- #269

Tim Heuer on Streaming Media and Making Use of your Legacy JSON, Jesse Liberty on Dynamically creating containers, Margaret on Layout and LayoutInformation APIs, Shawn Wildermuth on executing code on the UI thread, Nikhil Kothari on autocomplete Textboxes, and Michael Sync on Commercial use of SL2.
From SilverlightCream.com:
Streaming media in Windows Server for Silverlight
Tim Heuer takes time to answer a bunch of streaming media questions that he aggregated from his inbox... definitely worth a bookmark if you think you're going to be streaming anything!
Making use of your JSON data in Silverlight
Tim also posted an article about not nuking all that JSON data, and ends up talking about WCF Script-Enabled Services
Dynamically creating and destroying containers
Jesse Liberty responds to a question on his last post about dynamically creating controls, and follows through with dynamically creating containers, and destroying as well.
More on layout and the LayoutInformation APIs
Margaret of the SilverlightSDK crew has a nice article with diagrams discussing the LayoutInformation class... this is some very interesting information, so use as needed :)
Executing Code on the UI Thread in Silverlight 2
Shawn Wildermuth takes on the task of reminding everyone that while the "asynchronicity question" is still flying around, we DO have access to the Dispatcher class from which we can execute code on the UI Thread... read on...
AutoComplete for Silverlight TextBoxes
Nikhil Kothari is back with more goodness from his Behavior Framework and this time delves into AutoComplete for TextBoxes, and as a very small aside, he also demonstrates Filters for TextBoxes -- this is some seriously cool stuff, time to download and read (or print out to draw circles and arrows in my case).
Can I use Silverlight 2 beta1 for commercial application?
Michael Sync attacked the whole SL2B1 for Commercial use question with a couple MSFT folks and reports back his findings.

Stay in the 'Light!
Twitter SLNews | Join me @ SilverlightCream | SL Web Articles | SL2 Web Articles | My Articles | My Tutorials | My Tooltips | My SL2 Articles | My SL2 ToolTips | SilverlightCream
posted @ Wednesday, May 07, 2008 12:43 PM | Feedback (1)

Plateaus

Plateaus

From Bartelby.com, a Plateau is "A relatively stable level, period, or state."

I learned about Plateaus early because I grew up thinking I was going to play guitar for a living. Well ok, I'm not sure how I thought I was going to balance it, but I knew I ALSO wanted to be an Engineer. But musicians as a group, I think we all know plateaus. We get to some point in our learning and seem to stall out. Forward motion stops. We don't get any worse, we just don't seem to get better. The longer we stay in the plateau, the worse it becomes, and some people drop out at that point thinking they've reached the end of their ability.

With music, I found I could get past a plateau by getting a new book, or listening to a new artist on record (yeah... I'm THAT old). Maybe even listen to someone outside your instrument... for instance, even though I'm a Jazz Guitarist, I listened to a LOT of Jimmy Smith on the Hammond B-3 organ.

So how does this apply to my technical world?

I think we reach plateaus technically as well... I sure do. I think we can get a plateau forced on us by working for a living in an area that is different from the one you're chasing. It's very hard to stay on top of a moving target when you can only shoot at it one or two hours a day! Even if the "show-up job" as a buddy of mine calls it is reasonably new technologically and reasonabaly fulfilling, if you're trying to chase another technology outside work, it's tough. And yeah, I'm talking about me. I do MS Access 2000/2003 out to Oracle, and .NET 1.1/2.0 Web applications in C# out to Oracle all day. I'm having to do a lot, but it's last year's technology and there's NO WAY that they're ever going to need Silverlight. VS2005 and .NET 2.0 is NEW!

I found Silverlight 1.0 somewhat easy to pick up and write about because the scope was small... it wasn't that there wasn't that much you could do with it, it was just a smaller footprint of knowledge to get your head around. But even then, as articles and applications got larger, the time between them got larger as well. Now with Silverlight 2, yikes ... all the .NET stuff comes flying out of the woodwork, and it's not just Silverlight anymore, it's all the stuff I have no knowledge of because I have no need to apply it in my 9 hours-a-day job.

So it's really, really easy to coast along on the plateau... even though you're in the thick of things in some respects. But the plateau is bad because as we all know, steady-state doesn't last forever. You have to move up or move aside.

I choose to move up, how about you?

Stay in the 'Light!
Twitter SLNews | Join me @ SilverlightCream | SL Web Articles | SL2 Web Articles | My Articles | My Tutorials | My Tooltips | My SL2 Articles | My SL2 ToolTips | SilverlightCream
posted @ Wednesday, May 07, 2008 10:36 AM | Feedback (2)
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