Building A Product For Real

As some of you know; I’ve been showing a number of Silverlight features in terms of Project Turing.  It was never my intention to finish that project; rather to use it as a mooring point to ensure that the mini-tutorials were realistic about building applications.

The second purpose of the Turing project was as a proof of concept. I now have the green light to go for a full development process, with the clear goal of creating a working application that will be:

  • A complete design to delivery project
  • A source of frequent mini-tutorials and videos
  • An opportunity for much more intense community contribution
  • An opportunity to work with designers and the Expression team
  • A product we can put to use here on Silverlight.net

It just doesn’t get any better than that. 

Who, What, When, Where and Why

Who:  If all goes as planned, this project will be moderated open-source with active participation and contributions from as many in the community as care to participate. Until now, I’ve been doing what I refer to as “glass house” programming; that is, designing and programming myself, but openly and documented.  It is possible that the initial stages will be glass house, but the plan of record is to move to Open Source.

What: The VideoWiki project lends itself to being completed in two discrete phases.  Phase 1 will be the creation of a Silverlight HyperVideo player targeted at enhanced How-Do-I videos. Phase 2, moving from HyperVideo to VideoWiki will follow if time and interest allows.

When:  While I already have a number of postings on HyperVideo, it is time to re-think, redesign and to create a detailed specification.  I’ll deliver that, here on my blog, by November 30. 

Design and Coding begin December 1, 2009 and will be completed by July 1, 2010.

Where: For now the project will live on my blog; but if this is to be truly open source then it must move to CodePlex. That is the goal.

Why:  To meet the needs of both novice and intermediate Silverlight programmers, and if Silverlight 4 comes along during our development time, to provide a great basis for introducing new features.

It shouldn’t be all that hard

The truth is that this is not all that big a project, and a quick look at the work done last year reveals that the tools will do a lot of the work for us. That said, there are some interesting subtleties we should be able to explore along the way.

If you have early thoughts about what should/must/must-not be in the project, be sure to let me know.

With PDC on the way, there will be a short-term drop in the release of videos and mini-tutorials for the next couple weeks., though I will make sure that there are some very substantive posts during that period. Expect a sharp uptick afterwards.

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. His latest book, Building APIs with .NET will be released early in 2025. Liberty is a Senior SW Engineer for CNH and he was a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Microsoft MVP.
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