Rants Tagged with “Speaking”
1 2 3 4 > >> (Total Pages: 4/Total Results: 32)
I am coming to West Palm Beach, FL on November 25th, 2008 to do my Introducing Silverlight 2. If you are in the area, don't forget to stop by to ask me about anything Silverlight (or anything else for that matter).
I am finally on my way home from Europe and had a great time speaking at both SDC and DevReach. The people in Bulgaria really treated me well. If you were at any of my talks, please see the following code downloads for the demo code:
I hope to see everyone in Sofia again next year!
I just finished up with my four talks at the SDN Conference outside of Amsterdam and I had a great time. For anyone who missed it, you missed a great time. 
I had four sessions ranging from cloud computing to Silverlight 2. For the attendees I wanted to give you a chance to download the demo source code I wrote for the sessions. You can find it here:
If you have any questions, drop me a line.
I just got back from the Silverlight 2 Firestarter in New York City. I had a great time. We have a good turn-out and great discussions about the technology. The Microsoft guys that set this up were just great, especially Peter Laudati who organized the whole thing and made my short trip up there really simple and fun.
For the attendees of the talks, here's a link to the example project I built for you:
Next Monday night (July 28th, 2008), i'll be giving the short Q&A session at the Atlanta .NET Users Group. The topic? NHibernate's LINQ and ADO.NET Data Services support. If you're interested in using NHibernate but don't want to give up your LINQ skills, stop by for a listen!
In case you didn't catch it, I participated in a webcast called geekSpeak. This webcast was hosted by Glen Gordon and Chad Brooks. The topic today was "Silverlight and Line of Business Applications". While geekSpeak's usually focus on hands-on examples of creating code, we took a different tact today and discussed the larger topic of where Silverlight fits in the development ecosystem (at least Microsoft's ecosystem).
For my money, the real benefit in Silverlight is for applications that cross the firewall. This means Line of Business applicaitons are really for B2B and B2C solutions. Unfortunately, what I hear from the community is that people see Silverlight as a solution for porting their desktop and traditional 3-tier applications to the web. Is this a good idea? I don't think so. The problem is that desktop development usually involves business objects that tend to have a direct connection to the database. Moving these sorts of applicaitons to the web means that you need to create an extra layer of communications and serialization. There is a cost both in development and performance for these extra layers.
It comes down to a key question...why are you moving to a web model for your application? If you want to expand the reach of your application to more users and clients (outside your organization), Silverlight is still a great story. Unfortunately many organizations see web applications as a deployment solution. No install, no framework, etc. While clearly this isn't true for Silverlight per se, its also a bad reason to go to a web application. Technlogies like Click-Once and XBAP are a great solution for a better deployment story than traditional desktop applications.
Since I brought up XBAP, let's plug it a bit. I notice that even amongst WPF guys, XBAP is a lost story. If you're not familiar with it, essentially its an in-the-browser WPF applicaitons that is deployed via manifest files (e.g. like ClickOnce). This means you can have the richness of UI, the better data binding story and interactivity that WPF/XAML affords you without having to deal with the limitations of Silverlight. I suggest that many organizations that want to use Silverlight for internal applications (inside the firewall) should be doing XBAP instead.
So what about ASP.NET/AJAX? The big story here is that HTML-based interfaces still have the longest reach of all the Internet enabled applications. HTML just works on many more platforms and browsers than Silverlight or Flash. Before you commit to moving away from HTML-based UI's, spend some time with your server logs. Understand who is really using your existing application before you leave anyone in the dust. A better strategy is often to include fall-back functionality. For example, in my Silverlight Tour website (http://www.silverlight-tour.com), I decided that developers may have Silverlight installed so I wanted to give them a better experience by showing an interactive map of tour stops. But their bosses and accounting departments were unlikely to have it installed. In that case I made a design decision to never prompt to install Silverlight, but instead if it wasn't installed to show a simple table of the classes instead of the Silverlight app. This is a great solution to moving forward without leaving old users in the dust.
Why is Silverlight not a good solution inside the firewall? The two issues are infrastructure and security. In order to build solid line-of-business solutions with Silverlight, you need to have a way to communicate data with the server. Building this infrastructure can be labor intensive, but more importantly adds complexity. More moving parts == more than can go wrong. Security is the second issue. Silverlight (for good reason) is pretty locked down. This means you will need to often learn to work in tighter confines (limited access to storage, no access to file system, registry, ports). If your application is meant to work in trusted scenarios (e.g. Integrated Windows Authentication), the limitations of the high-security environment will be a real limiter.
So what does this all mean? I still think Silverlight is still the solution when you need to *extend* the HTML model in the browser. Line of Business applications across the firewall still need to be web driven in my opinion, but enhancing that story with Silverlight for soutions like data visualization, user interactivity or media is a great solution. While I think that creating whole-browser solutions make sense for some applications, it doesn't for many many more. My fear is that we will move from monolithic desktop apps to monolithic Silverlight apps. The web is still a disconnected model and deciding on building a single huge Silverlight app (instead of page-based functionality) just doesn't make much sense. If you are planning on building one of these monstrocities, please also read my recent blog about linkability in Silverlight:
http://wildermuth.com/2008/06/25/Doesn_t_Anyone_Bookmark_Anymore.aspx
This week, I will be joining Glen Gordon and Chad Brooks for a GeekSpeak webcast. The Webcast starts at 3pm EST (or noon PST) on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008. We will be discussing Silverlight 2 and its use in so called "Line of Business" applications. Please join us and bring your questions.
If you don't know what a GeekSpeak event is, here is a description straight from Microsoft's website:
MSDN geekSpeak is a fresh kind of webcast series, hosted by Glen Gordon and Lynn Langit of the MSDN Events team. Dispensing with traditional slide decks and scripted demos, geekSpeak brings you industry experts in a talk-radio format. These experts share their knowledge and experience around a particular developer technology.
See you there!
As promised here are the slides and demo's from my talks at the Atlanta Code Camp yesterday. It was a great time and I got to see a lot of attendees and speakers who I haven't seen in a while.
My big embarrassment moment was at the speaker's dinner when I saw David Silverlight and completely forgot who he was (i've met him a number of times). When I heard he'd just flown in from Florida, I asked him, "Did you fly in with David Silverlight?". He promptly replied, "In a sense, yes..." I was so red faced.
On to the slides and demos:
Enjoy!
This weekend I will be at the Atlanta Code Camp this Saturday. I have four talks and they follow the predictable Silverlight and Data topics. Here are the talks:
- Using Blend 2.0 for Silverlight
- Consuming Data with Silverlight 2
- Digging into Deep Zoom
- Using C# 3.0 Features for Clean Code
In addition, we giving away a seat at the upcoming Atlanta stop of the Silverlight Tour (on May 12-14th, 2008). Com early and state late to be there for the drawing. The code camp is giving away a number of prizes, this is just one of them.
Hopefully, i'll see you there!
Its that time again. The Atlanta Code Camp is open for registration. I will certainly be doing a bunch of Silverlight 2 talks (though I am not sure how many yet). If you want a day of fun, learning new technologies and a way to meet the cream of the crop of the Atlanta speakers...register now!
At long last, we are happy to announce registration for the 4th annual Atlanta Code Camp is now open.
What: All day geek fest focusing on code and not marketing fluff.
When: Saturday, March, 29, 2008 All day (doors open at 7:30)
Cost: Free! (If you are not satisfied, we promise a full refund.)
Where: Devry University in Decatur - 250 North Arcadia Ave, Decatur, GA 30030 (view map)
Speakers and Agenda: Currently being finalized. Check the http://www.atlantacodecamp.com/ website over the next week to see the finalized version.
To attend the event, you must register at the following link so that we can make sure to have food to feed you. http://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=126492. If you don't register, we can't guarantee that you will be eligible for food or swag.
