Die, AJAX!

WARNING! You may need to watch this video twice. That awesome Star Destroyer model distracted the hell out of me the first time. Looks like it had the same affect on a few other people, too.

Apparently, Adam Kinney didn’t have to walk far for this interview. Currently, his office neighbor, Mike Sampson (a.k.a Sampy), works on the Silverlight-based media player for Microsoft’s Channel 8 and Channel 9 websites. So for about fifteen minutes, Mr. Sampy animatedly discusses his extremely positive experience using the Expression suite and Silverlight to bring this media player to life. Read the rest of this entry »

“If you build it they will come”

Don’t know about that, but if you use MSBuild, it’ll sure make everyone’s life a hell of alot easier.

Until now, I used batch files to build the C# managed code used in my Silverlight tutorials. Now granted, a build and batch file share many traits: both execute instructions in a (mostly) seequential order on a set of inputs. However, build systems really shine in their ability to provide more domain specific constructs for working with files, directories, source assets and external utilities. This relieves the developer from the typical file shuffling burden that plagues an even midly complex build. As of .NET 2.0, Microsoft provides developers with a build engine, called MSBuild, as part of the runtime distribution. In this tutorial, I will walk through hand-coding a MSBuild build file for the sample code of my last Silverlight tutorial application. Read the rest of this entry »

It looks like Microsoft has found a new victim in their continuing onslaught of consistently excellent, impromptu developer interviews. This time Adam Kinney puts the spotlight on Tyler Ballance, an employee of the picture slide show company, Slide (if you’ve read any number of MySpace profiles and bulletins, then you’ve definitely seen their logo). This young man, seemingly reluctant at first, but opening up once the technical questions started flowing, discusses the San Fransico SilverlightDevCamp and gives his opinion on how programming in Flash compares to Silverlight. Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, I went to the September MSDN event in Atlanta, held at the AMC Parkway Pointe theater. The itinerary included presentations on LINQ (Language Integrated Query), WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and Silverlight. Having seen live presentations on LINQ and WCF before, I hoped to justify the experience by seeing a dazzling Silverlight presentation, in the flesh.

Unfortunately, “dazzled” I was not. However overall, the experience did satisfy. Read the rest of this entry »

I started writing this post as two separate summaries, however these videos contain so much overlapping information, I decided to just combine them. If you want to watch the videos yourself you can find Dr. Sneath’s video here and Scott Guthire’s video here. Read the rest of this entry »