Andy Weston's Blog

I went to the monthly user group meeting last night and a guy by the name of Chad Campbell showed off some cool silverlight demos.  He did a great job.  A couple of things came to mind I thought were pretty cool …  1) XAML can be read by search bots - this is a very big advantage over Flash  2) there is an event driven downloader class that can could be used to pull down snippets of XAML or any other data on the fly and 3) there is a great new mash-up site called www.popfly.com by Microsoft that lets you connect modules on the fly.  I think Silverlight is way hotter than most people imagine.  Well-written apps are going to take off like fire, man.

Tell me and I forget, Show me, and I may remember.  Involve me, and I will understand.  - Confucius

Check out this animation project that is run completely online … Animation:Master TWO.  It has been running for 2 years now and is still going strong.  Wave of the future, man!

So I downloaded the trial of Expression Blend yesterday and played around with it and its a very cool app indeed.  First off, I noticed how light the size of the install was.  It was like a 30M installer and 40M installed.  I did need to download the .NET 3.0 framework first which is really where most of the functionality is but for a program that does so much 40M is great!  A tribute to .NET, really.

 I played around with creating a canvas and dropping a few controls on it and it worked well.  It reminded me of that simple flash creator program by CoffeeCup software.  And a bit like some of the higher-end 3d programs out there.

Curiously, I want to know how the licensing module works … it looks to be written in .NET and I’m wondering if that is something I could use in my own apps.

Hello, I just finished up a long year working at a startup company that is based on open source and linux and I’ve been away from the Microsoft development world for a year.   I’m getting back into the swing of things and I decided to start this blog to track my thoughts as I catch back up.  So I watched the  quickstart video on silverlight and I can hardly wait to start using it again.  I went to the PDC in 2003 and I saw the first introduction of WPF there and now I can hardly believe that 4 years have gone by!  Where does the time go.  At least Orcas and Expression Blend are in sight this time so by the time I catch up they should be production worthy.

I found some great tutorials I plan on going through on Michael Schwarz’s blog.

WordPress installed pretty easily, I’ll need to put customizing it on my TODO list.