I take a lot of inspiration from the iPhone, as to me its this device that fits in your hand and has not a lot of real estate, yet it accomplishes more tasks at times than most computer desktops today. I can make calls, check email, look at calendar, browse [...]
It’s now approx 1 week since I left Microsoft and its been an amazing and relaxing time for me, in which I’ve sat down and mapped out various RIA based projects I’ve wanted to work on for the past 3 years. The one project that’s taking [...]
In the past month if you’ve interacted with via twitter, email, facebook etc you’ve probably been asked by me “How many sites do you visit a week”.
I only ask is that I’ve got this theory or ill feeling that we at Microsoft are making far too many websites than [...]
You can stare at that blinking cursor inside Visual Studio all you want, it’s not going to give you an immediate insight into how you should architect your Silverlight solution so that it can be reusable and scale.
It’s not that you’re an idiot or aren’t good at programming, it’s just [...]
If you’ve read any book on design patterns, prospective memory is bound to come up. A lot of folks may read it and go “ahh, nah, i don’t know what to do with that” and i state this as i constantly wonder as to why applications continue to hassle users [...]
I’ve been working in this industry since i left high school back in 1995, and I often think about my journey to date and how I’ve adopted a technology. I then as a Product Manager on the Silverlight Team constantly try and put myself in you, the adoptee’s shoes. I’m [...]
I recently found a site via a colleague today, which basically outlines the way in which we approach our customers/consumers via the web compared to Apple.com
[ Click here to view the post ]
At first I just simply groaned, and waited for the beating, as [...]
I often meet up with a co-worker (Michael Bach, Product Manger & Designer for Microsoft.com/Web) and we talk all things design. As it for us is therapy given we are constantly surrounded by engineers within Microsoft
One insight Michael came up with the other [...]
How many kettles have you owned over the years? is it more than one? has it always been the same one?
It’s a pretty straight forward device, you fill it up with water, it heats up and then you tip the contents out into a container.
Why then are [...]
I often meet up with a co-worker (Michael Bach, Product Manger & Designer for Microsoft.com/Web) and we talk all things design. As it for us is therapy given we are constantly surrounded by engineers within Microsoft :)
One insight Michael came up with the other night is that Apple [...]
I recently found a site via a colleague today, which basically outlines the way in which we approach our customers/consumers via the web compared to Apple.com
[ Click here to view the post ]
At first I just simply groaned, and waited for the [...]
I’ve been working in this industry since i left high school back in 1995, and I often think about my journey to date and how I've adopted a technology. I then as a Product Manager on the Silverlight Team constantly try and put myself in you, the adoptee’s shoes. I’m' [...]
If you’ve read any book on design patterns, prospective memory is bound to come up. A lot of folks may read it and go “ahh, nah, i don’t know what to do with that” and i state this as i constantly wonder as to why applications continue to hassle users [...]
You can stare at that blinking cursor inside Visual Studio all you want, it’s not going to give you an immediate insight into how you should architect your Silverlight solution so that it can be reusable and scale.
It’s not that you’re an idiot or aren’t good at programming, it’s [...]
In the past month if you’ve interacted with via twitter, email, facebook etc you’ve probably been asked by me “How many sites do you visit a week”.
I only ask is that I've got this theory or ill feeling that we at Microsoft are making far too many websites' [...]
I often in my travels visit customers who at times present a behavior that at times i can only describe as blind faith towards Microsoft. I’m somewhat unnerved by that and it’s not because i think Microsoft isn’t worthy of faith, it’s more a long the lines of understanding the [...]
As most would imagine, here at Microsoft we are constantly researching various ways folks adopt Silverlight and have quite a large amount of notes on the subject. I however love the old, “Why not just ask them?” approach, so I’d be curious to see how you all adopted Silverlight?
In [...]
It’s now 2:25 AM here in Seattle, and I’m of course Jet Lagged with a head cold. I figured what a perfect time to update my blog with a big thank you to all who turned out to see me in my Australia wide tour.
I met a whole bunch [...]
I have been away from Australia for about a a year now, and I came home the other night and noticed the intersection outside my old house has changed significantly. I thought wow, progress is a beast that never rests. Taped to one of the stop light poles was some [...]
I’ve just locked in my dates for the Australian Silverlight & Expression 3 Tour.
Session Details:Silverlight & Expression 3 launch is an important moment in Microsoft's timeline, as this is our V3 moment!. In light of this point in time, Scott has vowed to ensure all within his beloved [...]
It’s 2 more sleeps and I fly home to Australia for a month and I’m excited to be home as well.
I figured whilst I’m home it would be good to setup an Australian Tour to meet folks in each capital city and get their [...]
Shane Morris, who for the few left that don’t know is one of our User Experience Evangelists in Australia. Shane’s actually got a deep background in Usability and is a lot of his fingerprints on our upcoming release of Expression Blend – Sketchflow.
He [...]
A lot of the time folks write off Apple customers as simply being MacTards, fans that are so pre-occupied with Apple and less about the products they make. In part that can be true, I’ve meet some extreme ignorant fans, but in general that’s not true at all.
[...]
I just finished watching an Interview Adobe Evangelist Lee Brimelow put together around UI’s for the movie industry. It occurred to me tonight that I did an interview with the great Mark Coleran in Jan 2008 but never published it!. To help carry this insight into Hollywood and [...]
In my daily life here in the land of Microsoft Headquarters, I often interact with a whole variety of developers & designers from many places both local and far.
I was talking in the hallway the other day with one of the guys in the Windows Azure team [...]
Alex Knight a fellow Aussie, has kicked off an online site focused purely on helping designers navigate the trouble waters of Silverlight.
To quote:
There is plenty of sites out there dedicated to developers and code related tutorials on how to build [...]
As someone whom frequently watches a lot of Video tutorials from all walks of life, I often sit in front of the screen cursing at the author’s ability to waffle on in areas that are irrelevant or tap into my time.
The objective of a video tutorial is to give [...]
I often see a lot of the Adobe communities rant and rave ignorance about how Microsoft follows' Adobe’s every move, like some how they’ve got it all figured out.
vs
The reality is that majority of the time, Microsoft was the first' [...]
I’ve just uploaded one of the first revisions of the new blog design to team.silverlighet.net. It’s a more focused design this time and one in which i had the luxury of spending more time on than the one before.
In this post I’ll walk through some of the experiences [...]
Interesting night for me, as I’ve spent the last 4 hours fumbling around in the Google dark trying to find a way to take “comments” for the team.silverlight blog, sanitize them but preserve their natural format in which the user typed them.
In that for example, I like to sign [...]
It must be my lucky day, but Dave Wolf from Cynergy Systems just emailed me the URL for an interview I did with him on the industry specifically focused on the challenges in RIA overall.
Yes, it’s funny a Product Manager of Silverlight doing an [...]
I rarely do interviews or podcasts as typically I find them goofy, and I despite my blogging/twitter prowess, am quite a shy guy.
That being said, I find value in Peter and openly respect his approach to technology as whilst he obviously prefers Flash over Silverlight, he still reminds me [...]
Steve just did a great post on how well we’re doing in the sporting scene, and it’s worth checking out over at the team.silverlight.net blog.
It does provide some basic common sense rebuttals to what MLB.Tv folks stated today in the CNET article. [...]
I’ve never really been a fan of sys-con.com and it’s approach to content vs. advertising. If anything, it’s probably the best example of an online site carpet bombing the end user with advertising that well basically offends.
They’ve now turned it up a notch, to [...]
Tonight, I watched my twitter stats hit a nice rounded out number..freaky…
How insane is that.. all rounded out in lots of 10. In light of this occasion I dedicated my 7000th tweet to Mr Tim Heuer as i think he’s been doing an [...]
The explosions of plug-ins today have brought innovative ways to visual experience online in ways that are both exciting and dangerous. I say dangerous, as on one hand they are visually appealing they are at times useless and typically can end up becoming a trend.
The Muse.
[...]
Rick from Cynergy Systems has found a way to borrow a headset which enables you to control WPF UI with your mind.
You can watch Rick’s video here, and read the back-story but all i can say is it will be interesting to [...]
I often get asked the question around how one is able to return an investment on User Experience. It’s as if the person asking the question is somehow expecting some random piece of research data that outlines how one could grow their business by x% because of UX?
The reality [...]
I’ve just spent the past couple of days enticing my fellow Silverlight Team members to embrace twitter more (@teamsilverlight). It’s been a bit of an uphill battle to be honest as whilst some pro Social Media folks will cast a glazed confused look, one must [...]
I’ve been following the concept of what RIA represents since well, I can’t honestly remember but it’s around 1998. My first glimpse of RIA was via Erik’s ye olde project called WebOS.com, which was a virtual web based operating system built with DHTML (pre-AJAX wave).
It began with Formats [...]An Engineer and a Designer walks into a bar, and notices a picture hanging on the wall. It’s a picture of a dog screwing in a light bulb. The engineer turns to the designer and says “that’s just not possible, the dog hasn’t got opposable thumbs..” the designer turns and [...]
Damian Edwards stayed at my house a week leading up to MIX09 and he’s had an amazing impact on our product teams whilst he stayed. One question he did provoke my way was what makes Silverlight better than JavaScript/HTML (forgot the actual wording but the meaning i walked away [...]
Hi All,
I’ve just put The Official Silverlight Blog online tonight. This blog has been an absolute fun side project for me to personally design and develop. The reason being is it rekindled my hidden JavaScript & XHTML passion (with thanks to Damian Edwards for reminding me of the power [...]
Chris Messina is quoted as saying the following:
There’s been a long history of innovation on the web founded in open access to the underlying source code that first websites, then later interactive web applications, were built on. The facility of having ready access to the inner workings of [...]
I’m going out on a limb here but this new idea of mine is to write a series of short blog posts on how a typical customer I’ve seen goes through the overall adoption phase of Silverlight. This is drawn from friends whom have adopted it through to past history [...]
I just finished watching MacHeads, it’s a documentary about basically die hard Mac fans and was filmed around Macworld 2007.
It was insightful, as the lesson I learnt was something I’ve been noticing for the past 3 years with regards to Microsoft. Here it is, and are you [...]
I got a few emails this week about Adobe’s executive shooting his pipes off about how Microsoft has fizzled in comparison to the mighty Adobe, basically the usual ranting by Adobe staffers outlining that Silverlight doesn’t exist and it’s failing propaganda that would make the most devoted politician cringe with [...]
When you create an MSDN blog here at Microsoft you’re pretty much given very little access to it, especially if you want to customize it. I’ve managed to basically hack my way around this through both CSS and JavaScript manipulation.
Tonight, I decided to hijack my graphical header and put [...]
I’ve meet with a few die-hard Silverlight developers in my time and some feedback I get at times is how designers produce bad XAML.
“..I hate it when a designer touches XAML..” – oh? why?
My first thought was, “bad XAML?” how on earth can a designer produce bad XAML. [...]
When I’m working in Silverlight I typically like most developers heavily rely on the breakpoint/debug workflow.
Although this is extremely powerful, I at times need to inspect what’s been loaded in a more hierarchical manner to ensure my various UIElements are loaded as per my instructions via code.
To do [...]
I’ve got three machines that I’ve allocated to role based use, as typically given the nature of my role here at Microsoft I'm all to often loading/unloading software far to much (I dogfood a lot of our internal products).
I not only dogfood, but I constantly roam the' [...]
CNN CNN is inviting people witnessing “The Moment” to take part in a special iReport assignment by e-mailing their pictures to themoment@CNN.com. The photos will post immediately to iReport.com, CNN’s user-generated news community, and shortly after the oath of office, viewers and users can see [...]
I’m definitely not your typical Microsoft blue blood. I at times buck the kool-aid internally and prefer to always keep my options open to the “competitors” we have at Microsoft. It’s not that I'm a rebel at heart, it’s simply I can’t be bothered being that guy that' [...]
I’ve been asked this a thousand times and i often give a thousand different answers, as typically each time you ask me, I think of something new to do with it and respond.
Deep Zoom is one of this fascinating differentiators we put into Silverlight that can be used and [...]
I’ve been doing plug-in development & design for many years, and often I've seen many a battle around this space. It typically starts with ubiquity, once that is overcome it then settles down at abandonment rates and from there the curse of the dreaded plug-in ends.
The reality however, no' [...]
I’m an extremely lazy coder. If i can find a way to write a base class to do the bulk of my chores within code, by crikey I'll do it and damn the scorn from my peers.
In this case, I wanted to write fairly generic CRUD (Create, Read, Update' [...]
Look, I have lots of regrets and at the same time I have heaps of wins, above all, I did what I could, and where it counted the most.
Going forward, I just want to spend more time working with .NET developers & designers whom want to succeed in WPF [...]
I typically get a mixed reaction to this blog, and despite the visible negative comments on full display, the blog continues to grow in visits and RSS subscriptions.
I often ask myself "why the hell would anyone want to read my rants" and after speaking with customers in both Microsoft [...]
It's been an extremely interesting past week. I and a few of my colleagues decided to check out the Adobe MAX 2008 conference to see what the other side has to say about the future of the web (much like their folks come to MIX conferences).
I've got a bunch of [...]
I was having a conversation with a friend tonight over IM and he asked me:
"So what's up with you and 3D Modeling? you about to make a career change?"
I explained to him that no, no need for career change and that 3D art can be applied to produce' [...]
I often read various press releases regarding Silverlight, namely it's always curious to read what our "competitors" often say about us.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Adobe's CEO was quoted saying:
"If you look at the number of partners who are signing up [to use Flash] despite the fact [...]
I've put together a proposal to shake things up in the Silverlight/WPF ecosystem. I need your help, in that part of this proposal I'm working on requires also some of your feedback and evidence to support this cause.
I've put together a simple 11 Questions (Very short, no typing required) [...]
We've just released the Silverlight Toolkit via Codeplex.
The release will include the following additions to our toolkit story:
Ben just posted some interesting stats on our efforts with the NBC Olympics site:
During the 17 days of the games, the site had
- 51.9 million unique visitors (106% more than Athens and Torino combined)
- 1.3 billion page views
- 75.5 million video streams initiated (601% more [...]
We've got IIS7 Smooth Streaming in play and Akamai have put together a demo site called SmoothHD.com
All I can say is "wow" in terms of quality. I always knew Silverlight could pull itself together for HD video online, but it's truly amazing to see IIS7 handling the workload here.
[...]Our team decided a while back to bring a fresh new look to the .NET logo, given the old was in need of a refresh to suite our future product positioning (I've been staring at this for a few weeks now and it's totally grown on me).
[...]
I just attended the Seattle Chapter of Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Tonight the topic was "UX lessons from game design".
It was an awesome event and you can catch the video later this week. What struck me as really great about this, was the discussion of how to map [...]
Adam & I have been talking to Julian Frelat from InnoveWare Solutions, and we've been both extremely impressed by QuakeLight - a Silverlight port of id Software's Quake.
This was a few days ago, and Julian the other night [...]
The folks in Japan, 2ndFactory have done an amazing amount of work with Deep Zoom. The project title was JellyFish and it's been hot topic here at Redmond.
I can't tell you how many times internal people have asked me "when's it coming out.." and then [...]
I'm done, I'm handing in my Apple iPhone badge and tacking back my Samsung BlackJack II.
The reasons are:
I deeply regret ever engaging anyone in this twitter dust off, mainly because it was just stupid :) No excuses, just stupid.
I've gotten a lot of positive emails about how well I held my composure and how folks thought Michael was in poor form.
The part that I'd [...]
To celebrate the Silverlight 2 launch, I've posted just a quick Silverlight application that has home made fireworks in it..
Click on the screen to create more explosions..well kind of... :)
Note: Michael Arrington has updated and made changes to the original article which removes the below quote sentence in bold. This for me was the part that I felt he overstepped the line on. It's good to see Michael regain composure and do the appropriate amount of editing. Thank [...]
I was roaming the hallways early today and Michael Bach (Product Manager for Web Platform) was grinning like a he was up to no good.
Given we're all working hard on the various efforts required for PDC, Silverlight RC0 etc I was wondering what he could possibly [...]
Living in the US vs Australia has one standout plus, the cars over here are so damn cheap that it makes me angry to think I'm paying almost double to triple for the same models back home.
That being said, I decided my birthday is coming [...]
Introduction. In today’s .NET ecosystem you the customer are basically digesting a lot of our new wave of products, and the on ramping can be at times a bumpy ride. As typically the products are isolated in various pockets on Microsoft.com or other areas of the [...]
I'm knee deep in a WPF project i'm writing for my team. I had the need today to have an innerglow, and noticed that we seem to have forgotten this little BitmapEffect of goodness (which I'll be promptly hassling Jon tomorrow for in the next revision).
That being said, as [...]
Scott Guthrie is close to being back from his vacation (which for Scott maybe a case of 20,000 emails a day instead of 50,000 heh as he was still somewhat active internally). He was recently interviewed by Microsoft Press Pass around some new developments for Silverlight in the [...]
Stephen Price sent me a piece of email asking how the heck does one submit a bug to Silverlight Team?
I replied "connect.microsoft.com" thinking it was self-explanatory from there and off you go. I then actually clicked on it and I'm embarrassed to say that not only is it [...]
Interesting, I keep asking this question a lot and the responses I get are something that un-nerves me. In that, in Silverlight there is a native RSS Reader built in, so the ability to consume an RSS Feed is so easy, it's almost cheating (Sharepoint readers, pay attention here).
The [...]
It was interesting to read this CNet.com article around Flash, HTML and AJAX.
It talked about the various ways in which the Adobe Flash is struggling to compete with AJAX in the RIA space. In fact, some of our early research showed that AJAX was associated with RIA, and [...]
I can haz ur LOLCats in DeepZoom Thx bai.
Well, for those of you whom aren't up to speed with LOLCats then you really need spend some time studying this creation of gold nuggetness.
Rob has definitely put a lot of thought behind this and I [...]
This one came into my inbox today, I had to just laugh. I mean I know Bill Gates said he wanted to put Windows on every desktop, I just hope he didn't mean the presidents as well in this particular case :) hehe.
Just goes to [...]
I get asked a lot about what the .NET folks can bring to RIA, and the first thing I proudly say is the fact is they bring a lot of engineering maturity and given Silverlight compliments a lot of their existing knowledge, it is our bet that this will carry [...]
I have this really bad habit of buying domains for projects I plan on working on for 1 year only. I recently accidentally lost BeyondTheBrowser.NET and SilverlightCoders.com due to not only moving between US to Australia (i.e. lost track of my inbox) but also due to being extremely busy.
Ok, [...]
I've had the pleasure of meeting Lutz in our downtown Seattle Office and he's just announced his blog tonight is now online.
Hey everyone –
I started a deep zoom blog to answer some of the many questions I’ve been getting and to put some nice content and samples [...]
There are times, when I see great things around Silverlight and this one site for me always seems to capture us at our best.
Great video, and from a great site..
[...]July 8, VP Brad Brooks gets on stage, and says the following about Windows Vista:
We know our story is very different from what our competitors want us to think.Today we are drawing a line and are going to start telling the real story
I hear at times a lot of ignorance [...]
Gilbert (one of the original guys behind prooving Silverlight + SEO) of had a great write-up outlining some depth thought around this whole SEO buzz that Adobe unleashed early this week.
I like this quote:
Microsoft has .XAML and the .XAP extensions, the second been just a [...]
I've seen a lot of talk around VisualState Manager online and it mostly covers button states and so on. What I want to do here in this post is illustrate why VisualState Manager is a handy tool for the average interactive designer out there and how it can kind of [...]
This is a basic example of how to create a "PullDown Menu" using Silverlight and Expression Blend.
The ObjectivesToday was a fun road-trip day for me ( I don't get out as much now that I'm in corp so bare with me). As we drove to downtown Seattle to check out what the latest movements are with the Seadragon folks (Deep Zoom) as well as introduce myself [...]
Napoleon was supposed to have once explained to an inquirer, "There are four types of soldiers. The first are the dumb and lazy. These I make my infantrymen. The second are the smart and energetic. These I make my field commanders. The third type are the smart and lazy. [...]
By rights you should be answering that question with sites like Silverlight.Net and if you're not getting that answer, my comments and inbox are wide open for your commentary as in the end our goal is to provide less friction as possible to ensuring you're kept up to [...]
It's been basically a month since I first moved into my office here on Microsoft campus and I both love and hate it here.
Geek Celebrities need their own star pathLife on campus can be really fun and it's kind of surreal to be sitting here at lunch time and seeing [...]
Gilbert Corrales and I metup last week here at Redmond and he and I were talking to about how I wanted to make use of an EventDispatcher approach to routing events around the code base (the analogy we came up with was "the difference between a cough and a [...]
I've been reading a few comments and questions floating around in the Silverlight ethos around DataBinding and basically the how. The most common examples I've seen usually show the Binding capabilities within XAML but don't really break open the "code-behind" or more to the point, "how to bind to a [...]
