What does Agile mean to you?
October 25, 2008 Category: Blog, Events 2 Comments »
I just posted this over at CommunityCast.tv
After the Tulsa TechFest this year we went around and asked several attendees and speakers what Agile Development was to them… then we asked some of the non-attendees that happened to be in the area. Here are some of the responses.
An HTML Public Service Announcement
October 23, 2008 Category: Blog 3 Comments »
Because friends don’t let friends use HTML Tables …
I’ve been spending more time lately working in MVC and MVP, (specifically M-V-VM) style applications. I thought that it would be a good time to pull out some of the great MVC PSA’s that Adam Keys from FiveRuns and the guys from RailsEnvy put together. They started a while ago, but they keep adding more! Be sure to check out the other MVC PSA’s linked below.
Check out the other Model View Control – Public Service Announcements:
Silverlight 2 for Mobile at PDC!
October 22, 2008 Category: Blog 1 Comment »
I noticed this announcement (below) on the Mobile site from Amit about Silverlight 2 for Mobile. If you’re going to PDC this year, then you should definitely go check out Amit’s session!
That’s right. I said Silverlight 2 for Mobile! – you know, Silverlight with the CLR running in it… on your mobile device!
Think of how awesome that would be!
What’s the big deal?
If you’ve been following the Silverlight for Mobile space, then you’ll know that the only thing that Microsoft has been talking about up until now has been Silverlight 1 for Mobile, even at at Mix this year. If you’ve been paying attention then you might have seen this little tidbit of a roadmap from Todd (technical evangelist from Microsoft).
Why am I excited?
While I think that most Silverlight for Mobile applications will focus on mobile gaming and consumer "widgets" (think: rich mobile widgets for mapping, weather and traffic notifications, etc..) I am most excited about the possibility of creating robust mobile applications for enterprise customers line of business applications. I’m specifically thinking about applications that leverage Test-Driven development practices, Dependency Injection, and Model-View-View Presenter designs for robust flexibility and the ability to multi-target the same rich application for web and mobile web with multiple views.
My Take
Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to talk about, other than the session title at PDC. But I will say that even the idea of having Silverlight 2 on a mobile device is truly exciting!
I’m guessing that there will be more to talk about after PDC. I can’t wait!
Silverlight 2 is out!
October 14, 2008 Category: Blog No Comments »
Several people have already blogged this. In fact, you should stop reading right now and go and look at Gu’s, Hanselman’s, Heuer’s and Shawn’s posts. Go ahead… I’ll wait.
OK, back? I don’t really have much anything to add, except that this has been one of the top 3 questions that I’ve been asked over the last many months. XAML Fest, Clients, User Groups, and TechFests… all seem to want to know the same things… "when will it ship?"
Well, I’m glad to finally have an answer for that question! The other 2 questions are "how would I compare Silverlight to Flash" and "what if I don’t have Blend or Visual Studio?".
I’ll save the Flash/Silverlight question for another time (except to say that you should go look at the Rosetta project).
As far as the Blend/Visual Studio question. Here’s my answer.
Yes. You should use Blend and Visual Studio. The developer designer workflow is awesome and the tooling is exceptional. That being said. You can now also go get the Silverlight for Eclipse plug in … if that’s the way you roll.
As for me?…. Now I’m off to go upgrade all of my code, demos, slides and tools to Silverlight 2. (and maybe I’ll be able to hold off a bit before jumping to the next set of CTP tools… Silverlight 3!)
Dependency Injection for Silverlight with Ninject
October 7, 2008 Category: Blog 1 Comment »
I’m speaking at the XAMLFest in Houston today and there have been several questions around how we did our automatic dependency injection in our Silverlight applications and the tools other tools that I recommend.
I updated my recommended tools for Silverlight on Delicious and
We use Ninject for DI in Silverlight. Here’s a great blog post from Jonas Follesoe (a Microsoft Regional Director from Norway) on using Ninject to do Dependency Injection in Silverlight.
I really like Jonas’ writing style, especially the way that he comments his code examples
also… be sure to check out the very cool Expression Kolur plug in that he wrote. Awesome!
Enjoy!
Using Windows Cardspace with OpenID
June 20, 2008 Category: Blog 1 Comment »
Are you using OpenID to log in anywhere? I use OpenID to access my blog, and a couple of other sites that I use. One of the down sides to OpenID is that it still relies on a Username / Password combination going over the Internet. I’ve started using MyOpenID’s implementation because they allow me to use an InfoCard to authenticate with their OpenID provider… or more specifically I use my Windows Vista CardSpace (CardSpace is .NET 3.0’s implementation of the open standard InfoCard).
In fact, without my info card… it’s impossible to use my (as in mine, my personal account) OpenID. I don’t have a username/password associated with my account at all. In addition to that, they have an automated process that calls my cell phone whenever I log in to the system. That may seem like a bit of overkill, but so far I’ve been happy with it.
MVP Summit 2008
April 16, 2008 Category: Blog No Comments »
This week I’m in Seattle for the Microsoft Global MVP Summit. I’m having a great time up here meeting with the product teams and other MVPs from across the globe. Way too many incredible people to mention them all here. It’s been fantastic and exhausting at the same time!
If you’re on twitter… you can follow along with the #mvp08 hashtags.
Faking 3D in Silverlight
June 15, 2007 Category: Blog No Comments »
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One of the key differences between Microsoft’s .NET 3.0 full blown Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the sub-set Silverlight (formally WPF/e) is that Silverlight doesn’t support true 3D support. (Flash is the same way… if you want the appearance of 3D in flash or Silverlight you have to fake it)
Here is a project that started over at CodePlex that uses that power of the .NET framework to convert / render (fake) WPF 3D over in Silverlight. nice!
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Playing with PopFly
June 4, 2007 Category: Blog No Comments »
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[Removed] 🙁
Update: So, it looks like the current PopFly site requires you to log in to the site in order to view the embedded content. The result was that everyone visiting my blog was getting re-directed to the PopFly site and getting a “page not found” error (since most people aren’t logged in to PopFly). Hopefully, this will change after the alpha/beta period. It’s too bad, because if you could see the results of about 5 minutes of playing with PopFly, you’d be telling your self that you gotta get you some of that!
Now back to your previously scheduled blog post…
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I’m playing with Microsoft’s new Popfly. So far, I’m having fun. 🙂
http://www.popfly.ms/users/calebjenkins
Basically, it’s a web based site for non-developers to creating Silverlight mash-up. Pretty much everything is point and click, very easy to use, and still very flexible. You can create your own “blocks“ that then connect to other blocks (that’s where the mash-up part comes in). So, for example, you can take a sphere display or tile image view (display block) and connect it to a flickr feed block (data) and it just all works. One of the other cool parts is that you can easily share the mash up on your own web site (like here) or download and install it as a Vista Gadget. Popfly is currently in an invite only beta (alpha?) mode, but I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with it so far!
Look for the public availability soon… in the mean time, go check out:
http://silverlight.net/ and http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ to find out more about Silverlight.
Enjoy!
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Visual Studio 2005 ToolBox for Windows CardSpace
May 29, 2007 Category: Blog No Comments »
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Kim Cameron mentioned this over 2 months ago… but I just now saw it. 😛
This looks very promising for anyone that wants to use CardSpace in their ASP.NET applications. (everyone wants to use CardSpace in their applications BTW).
http://www.codecomplete.de/blogs/digitalidentity/archive/2007/03/18/22.aspx
Enjoy!
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