Philip Beadle's Blog

At ReMIX I presented a session on Visual Studio Orcas - What's new for web developers which went down pretty well for my first big event. Dave Glover from Microsoft co-presented with me and we had a bit of fun.

And later that night I did a WebJam after about 10 beers I still managed to do it all in 2 minutes 21 seconds.

Here's a couple of shots of me out with the crew from Microsoft.

This is the Speakers Dinner the night before at The Brasserie at Crown Casino.

And after reMIX a bunch of us went out to the Stokehouse in St Kilda.

I had a great time at ReMIX, the atmosphere was quite different from TechEd as there was about 360 people which made for a more intimate setting than thousands of tech heads running around.  Saw lots of corduroy and way cool designer types there .  We were told that the videos and presentations will be available soon so you can watch all the sessions soon.

Some of the sessions I went see were the keynote by Brian Goldfarb who I spent quite a lot of time with over the course of the event, Brian showed a cool demo of a Chess game where you could pick which technologies would play each other such as javaScript vs .Net, the demo was to show that .Net can calculate many times faster than js.  He was talking about Silverlight 1.1 and the DLR and illustrating that Silverlight 1.1 is going to enable some very cool applications.  We saw another really cool demo written by some guy called Cam at Readify  it was actually Damian’s cool www.SeeMyRisk.com WPF XBAP application but Shane Morris got his name wrong (and profusely apologised after). 

Below are some notes I took during the sessions.

Lee Brimelow - Frog Design
Monday, 25 June 2007
10:45 AM

• Lee is working on the new Yahoo Messenger which is written in WPF
• www.theWPFBlog.com
• The battle between MS and Adobe will produce awesome products and tools.
• Direct competition between Flash and Silverlight will ensure both products grow.
• Talked about how the design comps rarely get to market as the design is not really possible and devs have to build a lot of the design to get the product done.

5 Rules of a prototyping

1. 1 day only to build
2. Don’t use white boxes, make it as visually pleasing as poss
3. Only use XAML for the real parts, PNG work well for fake parts
4. Don’t just proto for your real work, proto for learning
5. "Don't worry about coding the correct way"??? (Not sure about this, this can encourage bad coding!!)

Tools that Lee uses:
Photoshop - said “why use Expression Design?” Lee reckons the stuff you can do in Design you can do in Blend anyway.
Blend
VS2005
ZAM3D
 
Using sliders is a really good way to add input values to your WPF models
ZAM 3D is very easy  www.erain.com/products/ZAM3D
Separate 3D meshes into separate files, don’t just add them to your Blend XAML.
 
3DTools -codeplex 3DTools
 
Check out the “Radial Panel” by Charles Petzold
 
Converting Action Script to C# is really easy - Foundation Action Script 3.0 Animation is a great book.
 
RenderTargetBitMap can create an image of any WPF element.
Rendering WPF elements as Bitmap when not needed improves performance

• 3D meshes of letters available from download from Lee’s site www.theWPFBlog.com

The Carousel algorithm is very versatile - a good one to know well
 
Fake Vista background looks good on a prototype
Showed hardware interation from Phidgets - slider etc www.phidgets.com
 
ContentPresenter.com
 
WPF Unleashed is in lee’s opinion the best book on WPF.

Laurence Moroney - Silverlight, XAML & JavaScript
Monday, 25 June 2007
12:03 PM

• Silverlight js library is a common library that abstracts all the different browsers away from your code.
• createSilverlight() to instantiate an object
• Is worthwhile to get started using Silverlight 1.0 with js as the migration to Silverlight 1.1 and C# is quite simple.

There are some great features in the Silverlight js libraries to make it really easy to manage media eg

Var video= host.content.findName("theVideo");
 
Var seconds = video.postion.seconds
 
Easy methods for controlling volume
 
Download progress property and download progress changed event, fires at beginning and end.
And buffering progress fires every 5%
 
XAML is just text therefore firewall friendly
XAML is searchable - good for RIA to be searched

This last point I want to expand on a bit.  Flash is a good long life product that has been around the block a few times now but it is not indexable by search engines.  Silverlight on the other hand being totally text rendered from XAML is completely searchable which gives it another major leg up on Flash.

Philip Beadle & Dave Glover – Orcas for Web Developers

I then spent the next 2 sessions getting primed up to do my session with Dave.
the AV guy was a dud, I had 15 mins to get ready and wanted to make sure that the audio level for my intro track was right and he came back to the room (after me sending someone to find him) 2 minutes before the session and didn’t get the level right.  So when the audio started we couldn’t hear it until I cranked the output level

So after a slight hiccup in the intro I got started.  This was my biggest crowd of about 250 and i really enjoyed it.  When the sessions are published you can check out the content, but the main points are:

• We can use Orcas (2008) on current projects straight away because of the cool multi targeting feature.
• The CSS designer now gives us great tools and there is no excuse for table layouts anymore
• The new Listview control and the data pager control are very good and give you all the niceties of the repeater but built in CRUD support as well
• The JavaScript Intellisense and Debugging are simply awesome, js is now properly supported in the IDE.

The party at Galactic Circus was lots of fun. There was a WebJam event in which I entered and managed to do my whole thing in 2 minutes 21seconds.

That’s right I installed DNN, skinned it, installed the blog module, created a new user, created a blog and wrote a blog post in only 2 minutes and 21 seconds.

Loads of fun and mayhem involved. 

Then we went bowling and I managed to have an interesting score of double gutter, strike, 1, double gutter, strike etc. Andrew won and Paul S showed off his amazingly smooth bowling action.  Lorraine and I brought up the rear in the scoring and Damian and Lachlan from webJam settled in the middle.  Laser squirmish was next and wow that was fun, running around in the dark pretending to be Chuck Norris on a bad hair day. Damo had so much fun he played again.

Then we had free reign to all the arcade games which was great fun. 

Day 2 saw a few sore heads and some WPF sessions that I didn’t take notes for.

Later the Readify guys had a sit down with Brad Howarth who is going to write us up in the paper I believe.   I wandered around the crowd pushing the new Silverlight course and was encouraged to hear most people saying they were seriously interested in attending.  The flyers were pretty cool.

Then it was on to the Developer vs Design Panel of Experts where I was on the panel and had a fun time talking with 3 other “industry heavyweights” about designers and developers working “together”. I got some good feedback from several delegates which is always nice. So now my PD is to get more into the “Devigner” role.

Michael Kordahi has knocked up a pretty good blog badge for ReMIX.  I like it

CAPTCHA = "Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart"

Just because you’re a MS developer doesn’t mean you’re excluded from Open Source.  The DotNetNuke project is all about sharing and learning together, we have nearly 450,000 users now and have developed a really strong community that strives to do the best it can and share all of our gained knowledge. 

At Readify now we have myself, Lorraine, Daniel B, Andrew Ball and Marc Ridey involved with DNN in some way.  Its a cool place to learn about how to develop web apps and be part of a wider community ranging from backyarders, weekend warriors through to guys with 25+ years of doing this.

I particularly like the fact that DNN is distributed under the BSD licence so we don’t care what you do with it or how you modify it which has created a vibrant and lively group to work with.  We get lots of inside help from MS and lots of guidance from people like Brian Goldfarb, Scott G etc which helps us build a better product.

The project has been carefully managed to create an environment where people Love to donate their time and energy and there are great altruistic rewards and even career rewards.  On the current DNN team which is reassessed every year same as MVP we have I think 12 MVPs now so tis a good way to get visible too.

And not all of it is in VB anymore either, but I’m sure you’re above that level of bickering.  We always need help and if you’d like to pitch in go to www.dotnetnuke.com and join up.

The most fun you can have with code is to give it away and see what others do with it

Just got the Speaker invite to do a session at DotNetNuke OpenForce '07.  I will be doing a double up session with Mitchel Sellers on Building DotNetNuke Modules with AJAX and Silverlight.

There are over 100 DNN sessions and 40 speakers so its going to be a big few days of Nuking, so come along and saee what all the fuss is about with DNN.

I just watched this video http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/media/en/popfly/PopFlyin15.wvx and thought that this will be an excellent tool for users to build their own applications from a bunch of published building blocks.  Can't wait to try it out.

Darren Neimke has just done a nice post on using predicates to filter lists.

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http://kuler.adobe.com

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