Thursday, March 11, 2010
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<PIRATE>Arrr, Cameron Albert is cookin' up a cool Sil'erlight Game Gar, Where can I find a bottle o'rum?</PIRATE>
Sorry, I couldn’t resist using the Pirate Translator.
Cameron shares a screencast of the pirate themed game he’s developing in Silverlight.
If you plan on picking up Silverlight 4 Business Application Development – Beginner's Guide, you might as well save money. Use the following codes when purchasing directly from Packt Publishing.
MsSilver15 – Save 15% off hard copy of the book
MsSilver30 – Save 30% off the eBook
If you are a .NET developer looking to expand your skills into Silverlight this is a great introductory book.
The book gets you involved in the code right away and we try and keep the working code philosophy throughout. If you like to learn by doing, then this is the book for you.
So, what are you waiting for? Pre-order now. ;)
To go along with the links from my talk, here is the slide deck:
I’ll be giving a similar talks in the near future in the Mid-Atlantic area, so keep an eye on my blog and Community Megaphone for more details.
In case you're wonder WTH happened to the Silverlight SIG in January and February: you may have heard the good news: I'm a dad now!
You may not have heard the bad news: I seriously injured my shoulder in January.
Meetings will resume March 31.
In fact, I’ll be doing a Deep Dive talk on Silverlight 4. [add to calendar]
If you can't wait until March 31 to get your Silverlight fix, keep a close eye on the goings on next week at MIX10. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I won’t be able to make it this year. :(
Congratulations to Leonard Van Lowe!
Congratulations are in order to the Leonard Van Lowe (@lvanlowe), the new vice-president of the SIG.
He's a local Silverlight expert and all around great guy. He'll be there to help run the group and make sure I am no longer a single point of failure.
Sponsors!
We're looking for sponsors to help support the group. Seriously, we need sponsors. Our pizza fund is in jeopardy.
see more dog and puppy pictures
I'll bring cake to a meeting in the near future to celebrate the publication of my Silverlight 4 book, but unless more sponsors step up, that'll be all the food we'll get for a while. Contact us for details. (frank@franksworld.com or scott@caparea.net)
There are a lot of great things coming down the pipe this year: Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 4, etc..
Here's to a great 2010, even if we have to start it in March. ;)
Follow us on Twitter => @SilverlightDC
Thanks to everyone who attended my Bing Maps & Silverlight talk the other night at the North Jersey .NET User Group.
It was good to be home, even if just virtually.
As promised here are some links I mentioned in my talk.
Paul (@moon) was kind enough to record the session on video and post it to his site, so you can relive the entire experience. ;)
Despite my best efforts, MIX10 was just not in the cards for me. I think the hardest part of not going will be telling the dogs: I think they were looking forward to the buffets.
see more dog and puppy pictures
While I may be stuck in Maryland, my head will be in Vegas next week. I’ll keep a close watch on all the live video feeds, recorded sessions and breaking news coming out next week.
Star Wars + Lego = Pure Awesome.
Friday, March 05, 2010
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I’ll be speaking via web-conference at the North Jersey .NET User Group (aka N3UG) on Tuesday, March 9.
Session Abstract
The Silverlight Bing Maps control is one of the coolest and most practical uses for Silverlight ever. Learn how to make your site geographically aware, provide directions, get traffic data and more.
Bio
Frank La Vigne has been hooked on software development since he was 12 when he got his own Commodore 64 computer. Since then, he's worked as developer for financial firms on Wall Street and in Europe. He has worked on various Tablet PC solutions and building advanced user experiences in Silverlight and WPF. He lives in the suburbs of Washington, DC. He founded the CapArea.NET User Group Silverlight Special Interest Group. Once upon a time, he lived in North Jersey and attended N3UG regularly. He blogs regularly at www.FranksWorld.com.
N3UG was the first user group I ever attended and I’m excited to speak there again.
Here’s a sneak peek of what we’ll be building, though I’ll re-factor it to focus in on NJ. :)
Thursday, March 04, 2010
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Charlie Kindle blogs about some of the details of Windows Phone 7 development, taking the wraps off many mobile geeks have been eagerly awaiting:
![phones[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/ckindel/WindowsLiveWriter/DifferentMeansBetterwiththenewWindowsPho_DE36/phones%5B1%5D_thumb.png "phones[1]")
In just over a week we (finally!) get to pull the cover off of the Windows Phone application & game developer experience at MIX10. There, through keynotes and more than 12 technical sessions over 3 days, we will “tell all” about the what and how of the new developer platform for Windows Phones.
[. .. .]
The Windows Phone 7 Series developer platform is as different as the new user experience. It’s fresh. It’s pure. And it’s powerful.
We took the feedback we gathered from developers, looked at the full potential of Windows Phone 7 Series and landed on 3 basic goals for the platform we’re delivering;
- Enable end users to be able to personalize their phone experience through a large library of innovative, compelling, games and applications.
- Enable developers to profit.
- Advance the “3 screen plus cloud” vision
The first one is pretty obvious: A key value proposition for Windows Phone is personal. We believe consumers will use games and applications to make their phone experience their own.
The bottom line is that you’ll be able to use Silverlight and XNA to develop for the new Windows Phone.
A lot of this will be revealed at MIX10, but in the meantime, Charlie lists out the following resources:
If you like blogs, I suggest you follow these guys as well; they are all part of the extended team of people at Microsoft who are helping to deliver the new platform.
Andre Vrignaud: www.ozymandias.com / @ozymandias
Christian Schormann: electricbeach.org / @christianschormann
Shawn Hargreaves: blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar / @shawnhargreaves
Todd Brix: windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone / @toddbrix
Anand Iyer: www.artificialignorance.net/blog / @ai
Michael Klucher: klucher.com / @mklucher
I’ll be speaking at the next meeting of the CapArea.NET Silverlight SIG. At the risk of overdoing the self-promotion thing: here’s the Asbstract/Speaker bio:
Silverlight 4 Deep Dive
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 7:00 PM [Add to Calendar]
The ink on Silverlight 3 books were barely dry when Microsoft announced Silverlight 4. Come to this talk and get up to speed quickly on the must know features of Silverlight 4. Web Cam/Mic access, Fully trusted applications, COM access and more!
Speaker Bio:
Frank La Vigne has been hooked on software development since he was 12 when he got his own Commodore 64 computer. Since then, he's worked as developer for financial firms on Wall Street and in Europe. He has worked on various Tablet PC solutions and building advanced user experiences in Silverlight and WPF. He lives in the suburbs of Washington, DC. He founded the CapArea.NET User Group Silverlight Special Interest Group. He blogs regularly at www.FranksWorld.com.
PocketNow has a bunch of “retro” commercials for Windows Mobile.
This one is my favorite: the “we have some catching up to do” line has a nice prophetic ring to it.
I’ve made some updates to the meeting detail widget for the CapArea.NET Silverlight SIG.
If you’d like to place it on your site, simply use the following code:
1: <iframe src="http://www.franksworld.com/silverlight/meeting/"
2: frameborder="0"
3: style="border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; width: 492px; height: 290px; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px">
4: <br />
5: </iframe>
6:
If you’re feeling really industrious, here’s the data file I am using for the both this and the countdown widget:
http://www.franksworld.com/Silverlight/Meeting/ClientBin/MeetingData.xml
Keep in mind that I may replace this with a WCF service and this endpoint might change.
Monday, March 01, 2010
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I had some fun posting some funny headlines to Twitter that were generated by the Link Bait Generator. Despite what I may have posted from the @SilverlightDC account, the user group has never appeared in a music video.
At least not yet.
One of the other “uses” of the Link Bait Generator is to inspire actual blog posts and so here it is:
The 8 Insane but True Things About Frank’s World
- Frank’s World was originally a fake news site modeled on the Weekly World News.
- The first “issue” of Frank’s World was a one page sheet posted on my dorm room door in 1991. The idea was to irritate an obnoxious roommate further by posting ridiculous stuff like “Elvis is alive and living in New Jersey” and “Bruce Lee frozen until economy improves.” There’s even a Flash movie intro sequence depicting the events.
- Frank’s World moved to the web in October 1995, with a lead story on how Bigfoot killed Nicole Simpson, complete with Photoshopped “proof” of her relationship with him. Despite my best efforts, I’ve not been able to find that image.
- Aside from the fake news site, Frank’s World at one point included:
- On 9/11 I posted an “I’m alive and trying to get out of lower Manhattan” message once I got back to my apartment. I also uploaded photos up to the site right away in case something happened to me or my camera.
- In 2000/2001, the site became a travel blog of sorts as I’d post to the site my whereabouts when I lived in Germany. In 2001, I used an FTP/SSI hack to use Blogger as a blogging engine. In 2004, I installed .TEXT locally. Sadly, the site still runs on .TEXT. ;)
- In the early 2000s,I had an altercation/running feud with a soap-opera-star-turned-real-estate-agent when I lived in North Jersey. I blogged about it. I even named names. I hear it got picked up by a soap opera gossip site. I never was able to confirm that, but the whole event unfolded like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
- When I first blogged about expecting our baby, I called the post “Project Neo-Natal,” a play on Project Natal for XBOX. More than a few people forwarded the post, writing excitedly about a “release date” (aka due date) of December 2009. I’m sure someone somewhere freaked out about NDA related issues until they read the post a little more closely. :)
Looking back, it’s interesting to see how the site has evolved and grown over time. I wonder where it’ll go next. :)
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
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Some SysAdmins take their job very seriously.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
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In case you’re wondering what’s been going on in Frank’s World in the longer than average gaps between blog posts, I severely hurt my shoulder last month.
Since then, I’ve been doing physical therapy and healing. I’m out of the sling now and (mostly) out of pain. The doctors say I’ve made great progress.
When you hurt any part of your body, you quickly realize how often you use it and rely on it. This injury makes holding my son an excruciating experience. I still do it anyways, because he’s worth the trouble. :)
Monday, February 22, 2010
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Monday, February 15, 2010
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Here’s a Channel9 video showing off some of the features of Windows Phone 7.
Technorati Tags:
Windows Phone 7
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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The snow storm so bad, even the weather man has a breakdown.
And here’s a time lapse of the snow storm of the century (so far).
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
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Maybe the best thing about the iPad is all the humor it has produced.
[found via Ryan Copper’s Twitter feed]
Technorati Tags:
iPad,
Humor,
Nintendo
Either these mortgage ads are getting weirder or they are trying to reach out to the native population on Pandora in an effort to drum up business.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
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More iPad humor.
I guess the point is to show that if an iPhone got larger, so could laptops. Maybe they’ll make a 20 inch laptop like Dell.
Technorati Tags:
iPad,
Apple,
Steve Jobs
Visual SourceSafe’s will reach its end-of-life support date for is in the middle of next year.
This means that, if you still have source code in VSS, you are brave (or foolish). If you’ll have source code in VSS after the end of its support lifespan, you’re just plain nuts.
Ed Blankenship recently appeared on the geekSpeak webcast talking about migrating to Team Foundation Server from Visual Source Safe. [watch now]
Here are some additional Team Foundation Server resources Ed mentions during his talk.
Technorati Tags:
VSS,
Source Safe,
TFS
A co-worker posted this on FaceBook and I'm still drooling over the possibilities of Xbox games on a screen this big.
Imagine Halo or Modern Warfare 2 on this.
Editorial cartoonists chime in on the madness/hype/lead in to the iPad launch. [More cartoons]
Technorati Tags:
iPad,
Humor,
Apple
Friday, January 29, 2010
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Did you ever wonder how Apple keeps its secret projects secret?
Well, wonder no more.
They call themselves the Worldwide Loyalty Team. Among some employees, they are known as the Apple Gestapo, a group of moles always spying in headquarters and stores, reporting directly to Jobs and Oppenheimer. Here's how they hunt people down.
..
"Apple has these moles working everywhere, especially in departments where leaks are suspected. Management is not aware of them," he told me, "once they suspect a leak, the special forces—as we call them—will walk in the office at any hour, especially in the mornings. They will contact whoever was the most senior manager in the building, and ask them to coordinate the operation."
The operation, as Tom calls it, is not anything special. It is not one of a kind event. It's just a normal practice, and the process is pretty simple: The manager will instruct all employees to stay at their desks, telling them what to do and what to expect at any given time. The Apple Gestapo never handles the communication. They are there, present, supervising the supervisors, making sure everything goes as planned.
I don’t know what’s worse: the thug-like tactics or the eerily cheery name of “Worldwide Loyalty Teams.”
Ironic that this is the same company that produced this commercial.