Last week I mentioned that Silverlight is designed to work for all languages, platforms, browsers, etc right? Right.

But you are a smart cookie. You know that deep down, the boys at Redmond really want you to develop with ASP.NET right? Right.

So how do they lure you? Simple…better tools. While you can call Silverlight objects from any language, if you want to use the sweet tools they are making, then you have to be in ASP.NET.

The next question is: what are these tools and when do they come out (guess that is really 2 questions)? Glad you asked.

Read the rest of this entry »

Although TechEd is officially over, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t keep on giving. Here are some links from the conference concerning Silverlight.

I will also be putting these on my WPF/Silverlight resources article as well.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I have one session left here at my first official TechEd. It was a pretty awesome experience. I learned a lot, and I hope I was able to pass a bit on to you guys.

Last night was the “big party” at Islands of Adventure. Basically it was 20,000 geeks and nerds decending on roller coasters and free beer. Mother Nature stepped in unfortunately and shut down the Hulk, but I did learn a few things last night.

1. Any ride with a 5 minute wait is worth riding
2. Dueling Dragons rocks
3. The Cat in the Hat ride is really, really creepy
4. Nerds cannot hold their liquour

Overall, it was a lot of fun.

So now that it is over, now what? Well, first, I get some sleep. Then next week I will begin processing all that I have learned and I will begin posting some more details about the various technologies, including some cool links and such.

Hope y’all have a great weekend.

So, one of the coolest things here at the conference is Silverlight. That’s the good news…the bad news is there aren’t a whole lotta sessions on it because it is not quite ready for primetime. The main one was given by Scott Guthrie, and it was really amazing (it helps that Scott is a great speaker).

This article details a few things:

1. The different versions of the platform
2. When it is coming out
3. Where it fits in the overall scheme of things
4. Highlights from the TechEd session
5. Finally, why I think it is going to make such a big splash

Read the rest of this entry »

So here I am soakin’ up the WPF goodness here at TechEd. I have been to so many talks now, my mind needs to take a nap. Good thing I took notes.

So my more “in depth” coverage will have to come later after I process this stuff, but here are some highlights about WPF that I have picked up.

• WPF is deployable on both the desktop and the browser (called an XBAP…another winning name)
• It uses the full .NET framework (unlike Silverlight which I will talk about later).
• You can use Click Once to deploy it (while it is outside of the scope of this blog, if you are developing desktop apps, you owe it to yourself to look into that tech).
• WPF is made for 2D - Using scalable, vector-based graphics, the WPF animation, images, and graphics are really efficient.
• WPF is made for 3D - Since Direct3D is the foundation for WPF’s graphical capabilities, it can do just about anything (including games, albeit on a somewhat restricted basis).
• What really struck me when watching the demos and such is how easy doing the animation stuff is. I have done my fair share of Flash, and I always thought that even the relatively easy stuff was overly tedious. This just isn’t the case when working with Blend.
• Controls get an upgrade
  • Textboxes can have a spell checker embedded - Not 100% sure how this works, but its a pretty sweet idea.
  • All controls natively support Ink for use in tablets, or just with a mouse. For the most part, this is just fluff, but I can definitely think of some scenarios where this would be genuinely cool
  • Textblock is like a normal textbox, but on steriods. It is incredibly customizable and supports wrapping, trimming, and formatting.
  • InkCanvas is a control that uses Ink as its primary input. Think Surface, and you will see the potential
• Flow Documents. These things are pretty sweet. Basically they are completely scalable panels that can support a newspaper-like layout (I will have some cool links to post when I get back showing this in action).
• WPF is fully skinnable. While you can’t use CSS (this is a desktop technology afterall), the framework does support skinning and theming so if your client suddenly changes your color scheme, you don’t have to redo everything
• Panels have the ability to size to content which basically is like the autosize on a label, but the content inside can be just about any control
• To use all this graphic goodness, the devs recommend that the client computer has a DirectX 9 capable graphics card. All other requirements are pretty vanilla.

Teched is in full swing now, and I have been knee deep in WPF, Silverlight, and LINQ. Really amazing stuff, and I will be posting about some of them later today (I just have a minute now between sessions).

So keep your eyes peeled (another strange saying), and I hope to post some goodies about both Silverlight and WPF later today.

So today was the big day…and every event has to start somewhere. This one started with a keynote by Bob Muglia the “Senior Vice President for Server and Tools Business”. Bob did a fine job, but the speech wasn’t my cup of tea (strange saying…I don’t even like tea).

It was basically about how the new Microsoft tools will change the infrastructure of companies. Interesting stuff, if you are an IT guy. The developers began jumping ship kinda early. The highlight was Christopher Lloyd reprised his role from Back to the Future for a little spoof. Good stuff.

Now the rest of this article is mainly for the developers out there. Designers probably won’t get too much from it. There will be some cool stuff for you guys soon.

The first session I got into was about the new Visual Studio. Its now called VS 2008…they are so sneaky…didn’t see that one coming. It is strange to see a new version because a lot of companies are just getting on board with VS 2005, but I digress.

However, there are some really cool things coming with the new version that are enough to make a dev nerd drool a little bit. Here are some highlights I got from the session.

• With VS 2008 another version of the framework will be unveiled (3.5). Seems a bit strange because, again, people haven’t even started playing with 3.0. From what I gather it is just some refinements to the goodies that were introduced in 3.0. Nothing groudbreaking from what I can see.
• Office 2007 Support…this is cool if you are developing for office, but it isn’t something pertanent to this blog so I will just gloss over it for now.
• HTML/CSS Designer enhancements are pretty sweet. I haven’t seen them yet, but they are supposedly a big improvement. Hopefully I will have more later.
• All the steps that you have to go through right now to get AJAX .NET to work will be much more streamlined because the new version has integrated AJAX and JS support
• Local caching is a new feature that I am really excited about. For smaller systems, this isn’t all that sexy, but if you build some software that does some heavy lifting this is definitely drool worthy. Basically it allows you to quickly and easily store all your data on the client side rather than making constant hits to the database. This is doable now, but it takes a good bit of custom code. This is much more seamless.
• XAML support will be native
• I saved the best for last…the new version of VS will allow you to debug javascript (this may include having breakpoints too). Furthermore, javascript will have intellisense natively. I practically started panting when I heard this. I don’t know about you, but building custom js always seems unnecessarily tedious. This will help alleviate a lot of that. Yea!

So there ya have it. One other question that I have been asking was answered…how does Blend fit into all this? Well according to the Microsoft guys, the new Visual Studio will not be capable of making the fancy shmancy UIs that Blend can.

It basically boils down to this…Blend is for making the UI fancy…VS is for making it work.

Something to keep in mind if you are considering diving into the pretty world of WPF.

That about does it for this update. I should have some good Silverlight info at some point during the conference, so stay tuned.

Well, I just arrived here at Tech Ed…man this place is huge. I am beginning to reach my inner geek, but I know I will not be able to match up to some of the master geeks here, but I will do my best.

I am really excited, but I am still not sure what to expect (besides the obvious). Since they have all these nice computers all over the place I am hoping to be able to post regularly about all the goodies that are going to be talked about. Let me know if there is anything specific you want to know about and I will do my best to dig up the dirt.

Now if only I can find one of those Surface tables…