Breaking with a year and a half tradition, my WynApse.com site has been pretty quiet lately. I have kept up with the Silverlight Cream blog posts, but I always feel bad when I don't have much of my own product out there.
After MIX this year, Bill Reiss asked me to do a couple chapters in his book for Manning Press. It's called Hello! Silverlight 2, and I only agreed because I had read the original proposal and thought it would be a good book. Little did I know at the time that I would be involved!
Needless to say, writing a chapter of a book is a LOT more effort than putting product on your own website... no hand-waving of things, no mixed-person writing, no writing as if I'm telling a story... plus the process makes me feel like I should investigate, investigate, investigate... because I want the right information in there.
So... the first chapter has taken me just WAY too much time.
The second chapter hopefully will not because I've learned from the first plus I've put myself on a schedule of sorts.
In an effort to pump up the volume on the book and at the same time branch out a bit, at the prodding of Rod Paddock of CoDe Magazine, I applied for and have been accepted to give 3 sessions at DevTeach Montreal. That was all well and good until I saw the exalted list of folks that are ALSO going to be speaking there, and then I went totally petrified for a few minutes :)
As with most of the material on my site, I want people to leave knowing something other than that I can bang together a bunch of technologies and make it spin and dance, so I'm shooting a little lower and narrower. My first two sessions will follow the 2 chapters I'm doing in Hello! Silverlight 2: 1) Controls and local/application styling and 2) databinding. The third session will drill deeper into control modification and the whole VSM thing.
I hope to foist one or more of these on the Phoenix Silverlight User's Group as fall gears up, and also at Desert Code Camp if we have a fall edition of it.
If you're going to DevTeach, let me know and we can meet up, and you can tell me how I did!
Stay in the 'Light!
posted @ Sunday, August 17, 2008 4:10 PM