Its funny how sometimes there are pairs of products that contend for “best” and yet seem to be so evenly matched that the decision is often arbitrary, a pick made based on what your friends use, what you used first, which commercial (or Evangelist) is better. Some classics come to mind
I recently ranted on language police who enforce arbitrary or misguided prescriptivist “rules,” that compound their misunderstanding of how languages evolve with a misreading of the history of English, applying Latin rules to a Germanic Bastard Tongue.
That said, while I don’t think there are unchanging truths about how English “should” be written or spoken, there are useful observations about what causes confusion and what makes for clear and easily understood prose.
John Papa invited me on to Silverlight TV to discuss a key premise of WP7: Silverlight Programmers are instant WP7 programmers. To demonstrate this, I created two applications side by side: a traditional Silverlight (Web) application and a WP7 application using the same code.
This is the first in a series of mini-tutorials on Windows Phone 7 Programming for Silverlight Programmers.
I’m very pleased to announce that Adam Kinney and I will be at a Special Boston Spark event, Mix 2010 Recap
The Silverlight HyperVideo project ran full steam from January through the day before Mix, and then went on hiatus while we all recovered, and while I pondered three critical questions:
[ Revised with C# and VB.NET code]
Okay, first, understand that I’m in the position of running through the streets yelling at folks “c’mere! ya’ gotta see this!” and what I’m pointing to is the incredible new invention of… a laptop computer. Something that is undeniably amazing and cool, but everyone else on my block has already got one.
Second, and much worse, I’m about to show you how I used a “pattern” that you either have already embraced, or that you’ve been avoiding like the plague because the folks who are running around shouting “MVVM! MVVM!” sound just like the folks who were running around shouting “MVC! MVC!” and “OOP! OOP!” and “COM! COM!”… you get the idea.
Many of us are still recovering from the last five fads that caused us to go out and buy dozens of books and break our head on the latest/greatest trend, only to have it be “oh so last year” by the time we fully grokked it.
This article is part of the Mini-Tutorial Series
This article continues the design and exploration phase of the Silverlight HVP project by beginning to examine the role the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) will play in solving a number of challenges in the project.
I had decided to create a list of what videos were already available on the Learning Pages of Silverlight.net. When I clicked on the page for the entire list, however, I was quite daunted by the sheer number. I opened the “source” for the page, and found that there was an easy screen scraping capability, however. The name of each video was also a link to its landing page, and so I could grab the HTML and search for the appropriate links.
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:
These four areas of intense concentration have spawned a number of projects, many of which address more than one area. The principal projects are…
I promised to post the slides I used during my SLHVP and Robust (MVVM/TDD) Silverlight Applications presentations. As noted at the time, they don’t stand on their own terribly well, and beyond that, they make extensive use of images that are under license through iStockPhoto.
That said, here are the slides for the SLHVP presentation, and here are the slides to the Robust Applications presentation. The Getting Started presentation was all code with no slides.
These links will provide additional information on topics covered in the presentations.
The ferry to Belfast was uneventful, and Belfast itself is a beautiful, scarred city, caught between decades of violence and flickering hope for the future.