MVP

With WPF and Silverlight against cancer

Laurent Bugnion — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:42:36 GMT

MVPs are well known for their good heart (like the GeekGive initiative shows) and Client App Dev MVP Gregor Biswanger is no exception. At the latest MVP summit (beginning of March 2011), he took over a DVD about WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 and asked a few Microsoft superstars to sign it. Right now, the DVD is auctioned on eBay and of course the proceeds will go to a charitable work: The German League against Cancer (Deutsche Krebshilfe). The post is in German and English (scroll down for the English text).

This sounds like a great idea, and considering who signed it, it is going to be a real collectible:

Scott Hanselman (Principal Program Manager Lead in Server and Tools Online)
Tim Heuer (Program Manager for Microsoft Silverlight)
Rob Relyea (Principal Program Manager Lead - Client Platform WPF & Silverlight)
Pete Brown (Developer Division Community Program Manager - Windows Client)
Eric Fabricant (Program Manager WPF)
Jeff Wilcox (Silverlight Senior SDE)
Jeffrey R Ferman (SDET Visual Studio Client Dev Tools)
Chan Verbeck (Expression Blend Team)
Yaniv Feinberg (Expression Blend Team)
Douglas Olson (Director Dev Expression)
Samuel W. Bent (Principal Software Design Engineer WPF)
John Papa (Technical Evangelist for Silverlight)

So if you feel that you could do a generous gesture, go ahead and take a look at the auction, and talk about it around you. Let’s prove again that geeks rule, also when it comes to giving to a good cause!

Cheers!

Laurent

Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)
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Silverlight MVP of the year

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:10:36 GMT

Here is a quick news from the MVP summit in Redmond. Things here are amazing, with a lot of good news (that will be made public at MIX, so in the mean time I cannot say anything more about it, except that it is awesome). The summit is, amongst other things, an amazing way to connect with other MVPs and with the product group. This is an amazing community to be a part of, full of really smart people.

In that sense, it was a pretty big surprise for me when I got an email announcing me that I had been selected by my peers and by the product group as Silverlight MVP of the year. I am equally happy to say that I am not the only one, and Dave Campbell (of Silverlight Cream fame) was also selected. That makes me especially happy because I had voted for Dave :)

I remember reading the Silverlight MVPs achievements back then, and thinking just WOW, what an amazing group of people to be a part of. It sounds cheesy, but I will say it anyway, any Silverlight MVP should be an MVP of the year :)

Thanks all who voted for me, and here is to an amazing Silverlight year!!

Laurent

MVVM Light Toolkit on Codeplex

Laurent Bugnion — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:42:31 GMT

Responding to a few requests from MVVM Light Toolkit users, I opened a project on Codeplex and published the installer as well as the source code there.

http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com/

Formally, nothing much changes, my site and my blog remain the main location to find information on the toolkit. Being on Codeplex gives the project more visibility, and provides a convenient place for discussions too.

Happy coding!

Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)
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Member of the INETA Europe Speaker Bureau

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:53:56 GMT

I am very proud and happy to announce that I am now a member of the European INETA speakers bureau.

For those who don’t know it, INETA is an non-profit organization dedicated to “support all user groups interested in Microsoft .NET platform. (from http://europe.ineta.org/) One of the aspects of this support is the speakers bureau, which gathers experts in various .NET related fields. Right now there are 39 speakers available for talks for your user group.

As a user group responsible, you can request speakers for your events! More information about that topic on the INETA Europe speaker bureau page.

I really hope that this new position will give me opportunity to meet many people in Europe. If you are interested in hearing me talk about topics such as WPF, Silverlight, Designer-Developer Interaction, Model-View-ViewModel pattern, Expression Blend, SketchFlow or other that I talked about on this blog, let me know, and ask the INETA Europe Speaker Bureau to help us meet!

Switching expertise: From Client App Dev to Silverlight

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:25:25 GMT

At the last MVP summit in March, some of us were informed that a new MVP expertise had been created for Silverlight. They asked a small number of existing MVPs with strong Silverlight competency (including yours truly) if they would agree to switch to that new expertise.

I must admit that I have not always been very happy with the thought of a new expertise dedicated only to Silverlight. In my opinion, it is very important to keep Silverlight close to Windows Presentation Foundation, and to make sure that WPF experts are informed about the latest changes and the future plans of Silverlight. This is why I liked the Client App Dev expertise, gathering under one roof WPF and Silverlight people.

So why did I accept to switch then? Well, precisely for this reason. Since the new expertise is created anyway, I thought that it would be good to be part of that, and to make sure that the product group is sensitive to this aspect, and keeps close to WPF. Also, since my audience is made as much of WPF than Silverlight developers, it will be a good way to spread the news about Silverlight plans and maybe to contribute to bring these 2 platforms even closer.

I am excited about the switch, actually, especially because the Silverlight expertise will be a small group, allowing quite a rich interaction with the product group. I know personally some of the other Silverlight MVPs, and all of them by reputation. This should be a very lively group and I am proud to be part of it.

Going to Seattle (MVP summit 2009)

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:41:37 GMT

The March travel madness is about to begin. During this month I will be away a lot. First destination is Seattle where I will attend the MVP summit 2009. Last year was my first summit and I loved this experience. This year should be even more fun, because I met so many software enthusiasts over the past year, and many of them are going too, yay.

I will leave Zurich tomorrow around 14:50 tomorrow and transit via London to Seattle where I should arrive around 7PM. Stay tuned to my Twitter account for updates. I hope it will go smoother than last year, where the idiots at Lufthansa made me miss my connection in Frankfurt and I had to go to Vancouver instead, and then drive down to Seattle. Crossing fingers ;) I fly British Airways this time, I am pretty sure it will go better!

On the last 2 days of my trip, I will be at IdentityMine's offices in Seattle ad Tacoma and connecting with as many of my colleagues as possible. Working from home and remote is really OK but sometimes you need direct contact, and I am really looking forward to this!

New "Welcome message" on www.galasoft.ch

Laurent Bugnion — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 21:14:43 GMT

I changed the "welcome message" on my website www.galasoft.ch and thought I would also publish it here :)

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Update: In addition to the talks listed below, I will also talk in TechDays Geneva. More details here.

Here are some fresh news from Stäfa! With Xmas and New Year behind us, Chinese New Year around the corner, the year 2009 is well started and looking very good. I have a number of exciting events in front of me.

You might have noticed a new box titled "Sponsors" in the side bar of this page and others on the site. After a long hesitation, I finally decided to place advertisement on GalaSoft. This is not enough to make tons of money (I am not Scott Hanselman or Jeff Atwood ;)), but it will help me to keep the site entertaining and to improve services (like bandwidth or storage). I took great care of choosing an ad service that is both tasteful and totally related to the content of this site. So much so, in fact, that I joined the newly opened Silverlight room at the Lounge, a service that gathers only respected professionals and that takes great care to display ads that are especially targeted at professionals.

First you will see me in Seattle at the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional summit 2009. The summit is an exciting event, the chance for us to meet Microsoft product groups and pass them feedback, and to learn about the future of technology under Non Disclosure Agreement. And of course this is also a chance to meet old friends and to make new one. The comunity is amazing and vibrant, and this year should give me the occasion to meet people I have only met online so far. This will be in the first week of March.

During the same trip, I will be visting my friends and colleagues at IdentityMine in Seattle and Tacoma. By the way guys, we're planning a get together on Thursday night, the 5th of March 2009, so if you are in the region and want to join, contact Teresa who is organizing everything :)

The week after I come back to Europe, I will fly to Antwerp in Belgium, where I will give two talks in the Microsoft TechDays. This should be really nice. See the abstracts here. When I am there, I will also be an attendee at the local Geek Girl Dinner, thanks to Katrin who invited me to be her "sacoche" (hand bag :)) I think this should be really nice, and I am impatient to meet lots of new people there. I think that there is really a much too low number of women in our industry, which is a shame considering how creative this work is, and how well the few women who are active in the community are performing. We could really use a different, more feminine way to solve problems!

The next trip will be to the USA again, Las Vegas woohoo. MIX09 is coming up, and it will be really exciting! MIX is my favourite conference, and I have been to all of them since it started in 2006. I can honestly say that this first edition truly changed my life: It made me discover WPF, motivated me to start my blog and to switch my attention from the JavaScript community to the .NET client application community. This year's MIX should be a fantastic edition if I believe what I read so far, so don't wait longer to book your places there! It's a smaller conference than PDC or TechEd, and when it's sold out, it's over!!

After my return to Switzerland, I still have one exciting event planned: TechDays in Bern, where I will be speaking on the 9th of April. I really like TechDays Switzerland and am always amazed at the number of people who show up, considering that we are a small country after all (and this is the Swiss German part of the event, another one for the French speaking part takes place in Geneva a week earlier.)

I really hope I can meet many of you at these events, and have interesting talks about all these technologies that are our passion. More than ever before, maybe, these are really exciting times to be in the business.

Happy Coding!!
Laurent, Stäfa, the 24th of January 2009

MVP award 2009 in Client Application Development

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:02:45 GMT

I am humbled and honored to be awarded a Most Valuable Professional award by Microsoft for 2009. This will be my 3rd year as a MVP. I got my first award in 2007 for ASP.NET, and then due to my increased activities in the fields of Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, in 2008 and now 2009 in Client Application Development. This expertise gathers specialists of these two disciplines and provides a fantastic way to exchange and discuss amongst professionals.

Without a doubt, one highlight of 2009 is going to be the MVP summit in Seattle. I attended the summit last year for the first time, and was thrilled by meeting not only experts in my field and learning so much from them, but also having the opportunity to give feedback to the product groups, and to discuss the future of these technologies with them. I am hoping to attend again this year.

Another thrilling event is going to be MIX09 in Las Vegas. It will be the fourth time that I attend this User Experience conference in the Venetian hotel. The first time, in 2006, truly changed my life, making me discover WPF and giving me the opportunity to start developing in this technology. Later, in 2007, Silverlight would be presented, before it stole the show in 2008.

This year should show the big return of WPF in front of the scene, with WPF 4 (part of .NET 4.0) and many improvements to what is already a very stable and revolutionary platform for desktop applications. It should be a very interesting year in Europe for all WPF developers, and I think that we will see a great number of firms adopting WPF for their new development.

Of course, we will continue to see improvements to Silverlight too, with Silverlight 3 being announced for the course of 2009. We should see a lot of pretty interesting development and here too, a lot of firms are going to start development in Silverlight.

There are so many new technologies being developed in the moment, both by Microsoft (Mesh, Azure, Oslo, MEF, and more) and by concurrent firms (Adobe, Apple to cite only two) that it’s hard to keep track. 3 years ago, I took the hard decision to stick with User Experience and I have not been as active as I would like in other fields like WCF for example. It’s not an easy choice, because the back end is as important to an application as the front end. But in these days and ages, we are forced to admit that specialization is necessary. Thankfully, it is still possible to keep a superficial knowledge in those fields in which we cannot be experts, and to rely on other developers, for example other MVPs to help us there. For my part, my recent change to IdentityMine, one of the leaders in the field of User Experience in WPF, Silverlight, Windows 7, Surface etc comforts me in my choices and with this in mind, getting the MVP award for Client App Dev is a thrilling and exciting opportunity to dig further.

I take the opportunity to congratulate all my friends in the community who got their MVP awards too, and I really hope to meet you all in March in Seattle. And to all my readers, here is to a fantastic 2009, and happy coding!

#mvp08: Day 1 and 2 are over, more to come

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:06:13 GMT

Today was day 2 of the Global MVP Summit. We spent it in Redmond, on the Microsoft Campus. For my part I spent the whole day in the RIA (pronounced "reee-ya") track, focussed on Silverlight (mostly) and WPF (a little). I won't say much about it for two reasons:

Either the code we saw was very similar to the one shown in Vegas one month ago, or
I don't have the right to talk about it because of NDA

Generally speaking, it's safe to say that really great things are going to be built on top of Silverlight. The basis is stable enough that they can use the bits to realize new concepts. That will be really interesting to follow.

My comment to all the DevDiv people I could talk to was always the same: Do whatever you want with Silverlight, I am OK with it. Add triggers or not, honestly I am not too concerned about that. But please oh please, keep WPF a superset of Silverlight. Only by doing so will you be credible for WPF developers, who don't want to learn a whole new set of skills just for the sake of Silverlight, and to SIlverlight developers who want to reuse their newly acquired skills to move their expertise to the desktop.

Think about it: Why is ASP.NET so successful, so much more than ASP ever was? Because ASP.NET builds on the same skills as .NET for the desktop. A C# developer is a C# developer. The libraries are, for many of them at least, the same. Parsing XML for the desktop is the same as parsing XML for ASP.NET. Obviously, some libraries are specific to ASP.NET, but you get my point (I hope).

By following the same concept, and sharing as much code as possible between Silverlight and WPF, you can boost the adoption and cancel most of the criticisms I heard so far. So please, continue to pursue it as a goal (and by the way, if you could do it soon, it would be great :)

Networking

As I thought, the major value for me in the summit is networking. Amazing discussions, with people (from Microsoft or not) whom I have been following sometimes for years, and finally have an occasion to meet face to face, so many great talks that I don't even want to start enumerating, because I am really tired and I want to sleep, sometimes.

Retrospect

Yesterday, the summit organizers tried something they called Open Spaces. This concept is not new, but trying to apply it to the summit was new. Honestly, I am not convinced. I see the value of an open discussion, but the one I attended ("So you want to be a writer", about people writing and why they do it) was barely convincing. Honestly, I was really disappointed to hear why full time writers do that job: Money and nothing else. To me, writing (in a book, magazines or in my blog) is about much more than money. It's about sharing my passion for software, very much in the same spirit than an artist writes to share his ideas with the world. Pretending that people write only to make money doesn't make sense. If it was true, noone would do it, because it's too long and too painful a job. Simply not worth it. That's for the content of the session. As for the format, given the time constraints (which a true open space wouldn't have, since it's open, but I understand the issue), I would prefer a panel discussion with Q&A like there is at MIX. In yesterday's session, we ended up hearing always the same people talking over and over again. So let's be honest about it, put those guys on a stage and give them a mike.

Oh, BTW, special frown at the idiot woman who found the way to answer her mobile phone in the middle of the session, and explain very loudly that she couldn't talk because she was in a session. Hey, heard about vibrating alert and combox? Some people are just so rude that it's barely conceivable.

OK, rant apart, the summit is great. Can't wait for tomorrow. And if you want to know more about what's going on here, follow me on twitter.com/lbugnion

Good night!

#mvp08: Arrival at Global MVP Summit

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:01:04 GMT

Day 0

Oh man what a trip.

First I left home at 6:30AM, which on a Sunday (and my birthday) is pretty more a crime against humanity. Additionally, I was woken up a few times during the night: Twice by my elder daughter who came to check if my bags were still there, because she was afraid to miss me to wish me happy birthday in the morning (she opened her door at 2:30AM and 4:30AM, both times waking me up of course :)

Then after taking the train to the airport, I learned that my flight to Frankfurt (there are unfortunately no direct flights from Zurich to Seattle) was delayed for technical reasons. It was a problem because I only had about 1.5 hours in Frankfurt to change plane. Only when we reached Frankfurt did we learn that they hadn't rebooked us automatically (even though they told us they did in Zurich), so the hunt for a flight started... I got to say, overall (and though I have a lot of understanding for technical issues being both an engineer and a former pilot) I was rather disappointed by Lufthansa as a company. The information flow was really not good from Frankfurt to Zurich. Swiss would definitely have handled that much better. That said, the employees did their best to help us and went out of their way sometimes to make the experience not too painful.

So anyway. The only options were:

Overnight in Frankfurt
Go back home and try again on the next day
Overnight in Chicago
Fly to Vancouver

Since I absolutely refused to lose day 1 of the Summit, the only viable alterative was to fly to Vancouver. They put me on waitlist from Vancouver to Seattle, but I decided to find something else on location, because I didn't want to arrive too late in Seattle (not even mentioning that I was not sure to get my seat on the Air Canada plane).

The flight to Vancouver went well, though of course I didn't get my preferred seat (I like to have space for my laptop (and my legs) so I usually take a seat near an exit row or in front of the plane. I had that seat booked on the Seattle plane, but I had to take what was left on the Vancouver plane... So instead of working, I just decided to chill out and watch movies. Not a bad choice after all. I saw National Treasure, the Rocky Horror Picture Show (love that movie) and a german speaking comedy about men and women, really funny and sexy.

In Vancouver, I went to hunt for an earlier flight but was unable to find any. I also tried the coach (2.5 hours drive down to Seattle) but the next one was leaving too late. So instead, I decided what the heck, and I rented a car. It was a good choice: The weather in Canada was great, not too many people on the road and the drive is very scenic. It took me a little under 30 minutes to cross the border, and the personal was really friendly.

I eventually reached the hotel (Grand Hyatt Seattle) at 7PM, which definitely beat any other option I could have chosen. Dropped the car in the hotel (the downtown Avis return place was closed already), took a shower (oh my god the pleasure) and then took a cab to Jillian's, a bar and billiard place where the Palermo party for MVPs was taking place. I have to admit I didn't stay long, but I had a couple of beers and some hot wings (yum) and had the great pleasure of meeting and chatting with Shawn Wildermuth, Tim Heuer, Karl Shifflett, Keith Helder, Sam Gentile and of course Jeff Julian and John Alexander of GeeksWithBlogs. They had prepared a great gift: A T-shirt with the GeeksWithBlogs logo on front, and the URL to my blog on the back. It's a great thought guys, thank you so much!!

Day 1

So today is day 1 of the Summit! I woke up at 4:30AM (not bad, 6.5 hours sleep!!). Later I will go down for breakfast, then go to register for the summit and finally go and return my car to the Avis place downtown. Then the Summit will start and I am really looking forward. I am sure that the day will bring a lot of good times!