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Zanadu

Rumination, Perambulations, Confustications

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Josh Zana

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Software Developer
Location
Seattle, WA
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Book list
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
The Confusion
The Enigma

Blog
May 01

Interesting post from Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza posts on his thoughts on Core CLR.  He's the guy who runs the Mono project, which is an open source version of the .Net framework that runs on linux.  He's apparently here somewhere, and is pretty psyched about silverlight in general.
 
11:50 AM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | Mix07

Good Morning

This morning is all about .Net and Silverlight.  Two back to back sessions walking us through the whole .Net Silverlight process, from start to finish.  Hopefully, this will answer some of the questions I have, like how to reuse existing .Net code, how to talk to services, how cookies and security work, what kind of WPF -style control stuff they've added, etc.
 
Last night was great.  I went to Spamalot which was HILARIOUS, followed by winning 400 bucks at craps in about 30 minutes.  Not too shabby!
9:16 AM | Add a comment | Read comments (1) | Permalink | Blog it | Mix07
April 30

Thank god for Coffee

Whew!  All this learnin' can be exhausting.  Thankfully, I've had one cup of coffee, one latte, and a coffee Haagen Daaz bar today, so I'm still semi-lucid.  I should get up at 4 AM every day!
 
Attended two of the breakout sessions after lunch today.  The first was one on Silverlight programming with the Javascript model.  Interestingly, the content on Silverlight is split betweeen 1.0, previously public stuff, and the 1.1 content that included the Core CLR (I'm starting to think that's the right name)  The talk I saw was JS only, but it was good for beginners like me.  The room was packed way past full, so I sat on the floor.  I'll write up some notes on that session in a bit.  I've already got my CLR hello world all set up in VS orcas.  Favorite part - using CreateFromXaml to programmatically generate content - makes creating listboxes and such much easier.
 
The next session was about new features in VS orcas.  A lof of the features I'd heard about before, but it was cool to see them all end to end.  Luckily, I copied a VPC image off corpnet before I left that has basically every tool, runtime, app, etc they are using here, so I don't have to go install all this alpha stuff on the beeftop.  Favorite feature - JS intellisense with XML comments, bar none.
 
I'm also trying to find a good way to get pics off the Q onto spaces.  I have a command for "Send to your space" on the phone, but that doesn't seem to do anything.  I'll have to figure out bluetooth sync, since I left the USB plug at home.
4:19 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | Mix07

Sitting in the Ray Ozzie Keynote

Just finished up the morning keynote sessions at Mix, and I'm really blown away by the features and demos of Silverlight they announced.  I haven't seen the stream available yet, but I'll be sure to post a link once its up.  Highlights for me, the C# loving web developer:
  • Netflix demo of streaming movies full screen, synchronizing with what your friends are watching, and integrating with all of the netflix system in a silverlight app built in 3 weeks.
  • They are claiming at least 300x performance increase when moving logic from JS to silverlight C#.  They showed a chess simulation (Scott's Chess, from Scott Guthrie) where the C# was able to evaluate way more moves per second.
  • They are releasing some great libraries for Silveright C# (what am I supposed to call it, by the way???).  The two that stood out for me were LINQ for data access and a subset of the WPF controls and data binding stuff.
  • The first run experience for Silverlight was really FAST and seamless.  The page reloaded after the one-click setup finished.
  • Great stuff added to Orcas to tool Silverlight.  Ability to attach a debugger to a remote mac running Safari or firefox and debug C#, xaml ASP.Net controls, Command to "Add Silverlight Link."  Command to view in Expression Blend
  • Saw a great demo of a video editor written on silverlight that does some great animation, drag and drop, etc.  Built in 4 weeks and needs only 50K  download.
  • CBS and MLB demo that do lots of cool stuff with high def full screen video.  The CBS one had some REALLY cheesy local newscasters.
  • A demo built from the ground up by Scottgu from hello world to a cool interactive airline app in 10 minutes.  Scott showed calling webservices from the client, reusing controls, etc.
  • A quick demo of Silverlight running on a smartphone.  No announced release date, but that is VERY cool.

I'll keep posting as time allows.

 

12:07 PM | Add a comment | Read comments (1) | Permalink | Blog it | Mix07
April 29

I'm going to Mix!

This week, I get the chance to attend Mix07 in Vegas.  I'm psyched to learn more about Silverlight, get the latest on Web Development, getting some good Kosher meat, and of course, winning big at the craps table.
I'm going to try out the whole blogging thing while there as a way to record all the good stuff I learn.  We'll see how this goes, it could be the start of good thing!
4:57 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | Mix07
 

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