Color Me...

Yes, color...

I took a quick look through Google to get an idea of colors vs moods, and just grabbed the first site that popped up. The site isn't important, but I wanted to give credit. I was more interested in the correlation such as:

  • Blue:     Calm, harmony
  • Black:   Formality, elegance
  • Green: Nature, Jealousy
  • Purple: Royalty
  • Red:     Love, danger (whoa... interesting juxtaposition)
  • White:  Reverence, Innocence
  • Yellow: Joy, Optimism

And why did I go on this search? ... I was looking to see if I could find a color for my mood after hearing from Page Brooks about the results of our Silverlight Control Builder Contest.

I thought the contest was a great way to get the community of developers fired up to build some very cool controls. I had an MSDN subscription to give away that I thought would make a great prize. That subscription limited us to US entrants only, unfortunately.

In 45 days, Page had 2300 unique visitors, and 9500 page views on the site. I hesitate to guess how many US Silverlight developers there are, but I'm going to guess there's more than a few. I had enlisted some Silverlight Superstars to help judge, and had a group of names on the tip of my tongue if we needed more. I'm pretty sure I was thinking in terms of 25 entries. We didn't get that many.

That list of prizes for the winner totalled out about $17,000 ... seriously... and made me worried we'd have a lot more than 10 or 15 entries. We didn't get that many.

Maybe it's just me, but I looked at that list of prizes from: Telerik, Xceed, Devexpress, Infragistics, and O'Reilly, and I thought "man ... the winner (or winners) of this thing are going to be contacted about jobs, or writing a book... how cool is that?" But then that worried me that we'd have a lot more than 5 or 10 entries. We didn't get that many.

We very obviously had been in contact with some Silverlight Team Project Managers at Microsoft, and global visibility of any of the entries would boost a developer's street cred' instantaneously... and I worried we'd have more than 3 to 5 entries. We didn't get that many. 

Page has said the contest failed, but I don't think it did... I think the developers failed. The site was great, we all blogged about it, just on the basis of how cool an idea it was, we got all sorts of very nice prizes offered to us to give away, and I'd like to personally thank all the contributors for that! I don't think there's any more that could have been done other than drop the MSDN subscription and make it world-wide, because obviously there was only 1 Silverlight Developer in the entire United States that wanted to enter.

Congratulations to our winner (I'll not name the winner here, I'll let Page do that on his site), not only did you submit, but you submitted a very cool control that I find addictive :)

And for your efforts, you take everything off the top shelf of prizes... how cool is that?

As for everyone else, I looked through that color vs mood list, and I couldn't find a suitable color, so just

Color me ... Disappointed.

Stay in the 'Light!

-Dave

 

Silverlight Cream for August 12, 2008 -- #344

Emil Stoychev on async data, Bart Czernicki on VS and SLTools updates, Denislav Savkov with Part 2 of his weather control, Bill Reiss on Fiddler and SL vs Flash, Page Brooks with a Gauge Control and Polling Control, Matt Berseth with angled DataGrid column headers, and Alex Knight with a Splash screen.

I feel like a wedding planner with this one... something old, something new :) ... of course the old ones are only a few days, leftover from while I was gone. I have one more set of those unless I get a rash of submittals this evening.

Koen Zwikstra reports that as of version 2.0.0.15, SilverlightSpy now runs on x64 platforms. Read about it on his post, plus he has other enhancements coming.

The Expression Blend and Design team reported that Deep Zoom Composer Updated (Again!)... so go get the latest!


From SilverlightCream.com:
Tip: Binding and getting data async from a Web Service
Emil Stoychev discusses the intrinsic problems with getting data asynchronously which is all we have, and a way to avoid the problems it provides... great info!
Silverlight 2 Tools, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Installed & Working Together
Bart Czernicki submitted this post on the whole Silverlight 2 tools/VS2008 SP1 issue... there's lots of these posts floating around, so take a look at Bart's if you haven't done any of this yet.
Custom Controls: Weather control: Part 2 – The Slider
Denislav Savkov posted the second part of his very cool Weather control... this one is all about the slider. This is another great tutorial-style post with lots of code and info... thanks Denislav!
Fiddler is your friend for Silverlight communications debugging
Bill Reiss has a short post discussing using Fiddler to help debug your Silverlight communication. I know I need more instruction on this, so all postings are useful :)
Does Silverlight need to beat Flash to be successful?
Bill also posted this interesting discussion of Silverlight vs Flash ... there's no end to this sort of blog post, but it's refreshing to have one from a Silverlight developer for a change :)
Silverlight Gauge Control
Page Brooks built up a gauge control based on feedback from Andrew Duthie about his treadmill controller. I didn't think of it at first, but this is quite similar to what I used in my Color Picker Utility, except that was in Silverlight 1.0 and a bunch of JS. This is pretty cool, Page!
A Customizable Silverlight Star Selector Control
Page also posted a 'rating' system using Silverlight.... I've been toying with the idea of putting a rating thingy (sorry -- technical term) on my articles, this might tip me over to do so!
Angled Column Headers with Silverlight 2's DataGrid
Matt Berseth did a seriously cool thing and tilted the column headers of a SL DataGrid at 45 degrees to conserve space ... I like this a lot... go take a look!
Splash screen/loader for Silverlight appz
Alex Knight posted information on how to setup a 'loading' app for your Silverlight ... the spinning/dancing/whatever is all yours to create, but Alex shows you how to get it onto the page

Stay in the 'Light!

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