The Next Six Months

Enough is going on that I thought I’d lay out my plans for the next six months, especially as a few of these items involve community contributions.

My principal focus from now until the end of 2010 will be:

• Silverlight On Ramp
• Windows Phone 7
• Silverlight and Data
• Best Practices: MVVM, Test-Driven Design, Agile, MEF and more

These four areas of intense concentration have spawned a number of projects, many of which address more than one area.  The principal projects are…

Silverlight On-Ramp and Site Navigation

Working with Pete Brown, John Papa and others, I’m launching two key efforts here. The first is to inventory, update and create a guide to our existing learning resources. You can read all about this (and participate!) here.

In addition, look for a number of “getting started” or “on-ramp” videos and tutorials from all of us over the coming months.

The Silverlight HVP Project

The next phase of the Silverlight HyperVideo Project will focus on three key areas:

• Best Practices (including agile, MVVM, Unit-testing, test-driven design, creating component applications with MEF and much more)
• Data, including  emerging data technologies, such as oData
• Windows Phone 7

HVP Status

The very next step will be to proceed along two paths: moving to version 1.1 (enhancing the UI to make it more self-revealing) and designing the Mobile HVP version 1.  Here again, significantly enhanced community involvement will be critical.

To find many of these postings I’ve created 5 folders in the sidebar. The first two are on-ramp related, the next three cover the topics of Best Practices, Data and Windows Phone 7

For each of these topics, expect to see a set of mini-tutorials, videos and other material emerging over the coming weeks.

Eschewing Obfuscation

All the myriad ways of reaching this blog will continue to work, but I’m consolidating all my contact information around my full name, and thus the primary domain here is now https://jesseliberty.com (those looking for my personal/political blog will find it as a link off the sidebar)

Similarly, while my email address jliberty@microsoft.com will always work, I’ll be adding jesse.liberty@microsoft.com and of course you can reach me on twitter at @jesseliberty.   I will do the same with all other “social media” in coming weeks.

The Folks Who Create Silverlight

Just for fun, late next month I’ll launch a series of short video interviews with members of the Silverlight Development team. I’ll be asking three key questions:

1. What is your primary area of focus?
2. How and when did you start coding?
3. When did you come to Microsoft and what else have you worked on here and elsewhere?

(This will replace the written interviews I conducted but never felt had enough immediacy to be interesting)

Thanks.