We've been doing a bunch of Silverlight work lately, so I decided to go to MIX08 in Las Vegas.  I've been traveling so much that I really didn't want to getting on a plan again, but after today's snow storm, I'm looking forward to a few days in the 'lost wages'!

If anyone else out there is going to be at MIX, drop me a email, we'll meet-up!

Home (Detroit, Michigan):

Mix08 (Las Vegas, Nevada):

To further illustrate the point -- here are pictures taken from my home office today...

Vegas here I come!

Nukeation Studios, a leader in Windows Presentation Foundation™ (WPF) and User Experience (UX) solutions has released reuxables, a range of designer themes for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft Expression Blend™.
Reuxables themes are aimed at the fresh new market of WPF applications, and allow software developers to easily implement a new look for their applications with lots of features:

• The reuxables library consists of 6 fully customizable themes, each with their own unique variations that result in a total of 48 different styles.
• The themes are designed by some of the top artists in the UX design industry.
• Reuxables themes provide a consistent look regardless of the operating system, and therefore provide the same look on both Windows Vista™ and Windows® XP.
• Reuxables are completely compatible with both .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5.
• All reuxables themes are provided in both Static and Animated versions, both made from native XAML vector objects.
• Implementing reuxables is effortless as they automatically theme the entire application as soon as the theme file is added to the project.
• Reuxables themes are fully compatible with both Microsoft Expression Blend™ 1.0/1.1 and Visual Studio® 2008.

System requirements include Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 or 3.5 for runtime, and Microsoft Expression Blend 1.0/1.1 or Visual Studio 2008 for development. Individual reuxables themes are available between $19 to $99, with an additional complete collection pack for $299.
A complete demonstration of all themes is available at: http://www.reuxables.com

Dax also made some screencasts demonstrating how easy it is to drop reuxables into either VS2008 or Expressions Blend....

My buddy and podcast-partner Dax has released reuxables, a theme framework for WPF applications.  Dax has been working with WPF and Silverlight since pre-alpha, and has had a passion for UX development forever.   Something that I've always struggled with as a developer is the fact that my UI's are either boxy (tr's and td's) or gun-metal-grey win-form's.  While Dax kept telling me how easy it was to add a little style to interfaces, the best I could ever do was to send him my HTML, and he'd send back something that looked awesome.   With reuxables, through the magic of inheritance and injection, you code up your WPF application, and then select the theme.  Every control on the page is auto-magically themes--- professional UX's at a fraction of the cost --- wow.  I wish I would have learned earlier in my career how important the UX is -- when you are briefing the boss, they need to see a good looking UI, or you won't get your next funding cycle.

Check them out, and download a trial -- you'll be glad you did!

I just got an email alerting me to the fact that the VS2008 VPC image is going to expire on November 1, 2007, rather than on March 15, 2008 as originally announced.  If you are using the VPC image to test out the new VisualStudio, you need to migrate your data soon.  We've been using VS2008 for a while and are very happy with it, but most of we either installed the bits on our virtual partition, or some of our risky team members installed it right on our the base O.S.

From the email:

FAQ

Q. Will my data be available after November 1, 2007?

A. This is still being researched, however, currently the understanding is that customers will NOT be able to access their date after November 1^st unless the data is moved to an alternate installation location.

Q. Can I reset my system date to re-enable the OS image?

A. Again there is still research being done, however, from the current understanding of the problem resetting the system date back DOES NOT re-enable the OS image.

We've been working on our Silverlight code, and it's getting to a point where I can show potential customers -- I tried to load the code on my Demo machine (XP SP2), and got the following error.

Silverlight error message    
ErrorCode: 2252
ErrorType: ParserError      
Message: AG_E_RUNTIME_MANAGED_ASSEMBLY_DOWNLOAD    
XamlFile: TimeLine1KPoints.xaml    
Line: 7    
Position: 9    

When I setup the virtual directory, I had set the permissions to "Scripts and Executables."  I needed to set the directory permissions to "Scripts only", and my Silverlight application worked perfectly!

Thanks to Dax for nominating me for the Microsoft MVP program!

The next thing that strikes me about Silverlight is that it will rely on an already massive developer resource in the Microsoft machine, MSDN, all the existing infrastructure and tools like MSSQL, and the deep experience in content streaming with Windows Media.

To put it simply, the Silverlight juggernaut is just another display layer or front-end enhancement to an already massive developer toolset that is enabling a throng of existing developers worldwide to create Flash-like interfaces without having to learn the often quirky Flash-only language.

The final nail in the proverbial coffin for me is definitely tool sets.

I saw this article the other day, and I totally agree with his argument.  If think VisualStudio is one of the best computer programs not just one of the best programming IDE's.  Everything seems to 'just work' in VS2005 the way you expect (at worst, it's a 'right click' away).  And when you need an advanced feature, it's already there (like custom data visualization in the debugger, intellisense for almost everything, and the code snippets, 'natch).  Compare VisualStudio 2005 to Photoshop CS2 in terms of usability -- it took me years to learn the Photoshop options, and it still takes me quite some time to do mildly complex photo manipulations.

As a developer, I had always wanted Flash to succeed.  They have 98% browser penetration, and the Internet is such a good distribution model.  What developer wouldn't want his application to run "out of the box, no install" on 98% of the computers?  I tried several times to convert my application over to ActionScript, but the tools were just not mature for real applications (No debugger to speak of, 'almost' XML support, no native SOAP/WS support).  The lack of features and tools just precluded any real applications.

Wether Silverlight will kill flash or not is irrelevant to me.  Silverlight 1.1 alpha is showing lots of promise for me (it is so fast!), the key is to get it get widespread distribution.  It's a chicken and egg problem.  Until (any technology) has wide distribution, it's not worth writing software for it.  Once the technology has wide distribution, it's to late to start development.  Most of the environments I work in are totally locked down 'corporate' computers, so anything that is "already installed" is a pretty compelling environment to develop for.

Flash in the Pan: News - Software - ZDNet Australia

Dax is on a rant about WPF and Silverlight.

Look, I'm really happy with Silverlight. I'll be even more when I get to go deep inside Silverlight. But let's not forget WPF. That's the root technology.

Andy and I just had this discussion about Silverlight. His company is really deep into Silverlight and he's just worshipping it like a madman. I'm still iffy about Silverlight. But he and I both agreed on one thing: keep the web and desktop separate to a point.

My company is knee deep in Silverlight.  Although Dax makes it sound like I have a school-boy crush, I must admit that Silverlight answers two very specific issues we are having with our AJAX/SVG solution.  Our customers were giving us feedback on scalability/performance issues.  We have come up with some innovative (paten pending) solutions to the issue, but when I ported over our code to even the alpha-bits of Silverlight they are a 1,000 times faster -- bye bye performance problems!

What Dax and I did agree on, though, was the fact that the muddying of the waters isn't "a good thing."  We (as an industry) need to focus on leveraging the benefits of each platform.  Rather than trying to make "each platform look the same" we should be taking advantage of what each offers.  Rather than have a least-common-denominator interface that runs on both the Web and the Desktop, we should be creating applications that have a similar "feel" between the two delivery mediums.  I actually always wished that VB.Net and C# were actually different, rather than just different wrappers to the CLR.  That way, each language could have innovated in specific problem spaces.  If VB.Net had "just focused" on making client applications, and C# had "just focused" on 'business logic', the languages could have evolved differently.

My hope is with XAML, that we use XAML as purely the language for describing a user interface (user experience), and leave the processing out of it.  My fear, though, is that the industry will try to make XAML yet-another utility language, and I'll see articles with the title "Programming the WebService security model with XAML" and "Simulating deterministic destructors with XAML and WPF"

We've been using SVG to render our interface, but we've been running into some problems on the number of nodes the JavaScript/SVG can render.  We ported over to Silverlight with some amazing results -- I'll post the code snippets tomorrow (I'm traveling today)...Here's a screen capture of the though!

Dax and I have been talking on revolUXions about the magic of WPF/E Silverlight for awhile now.  The recent announcements have really made my head spin.  Dax and I needed time to digest all the information before we recorded the next show!

What holds the most promise for me is the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).  We've been experiencing a ton of scalability problems with our JavaScript framework (once the visualizations gets thousands of data points), so the promise of 1000x increase in performance using C# over JavaScript is enticing.  Expect to see some benchmarks from me, because this is certainly a pain point for us.

I've been doing a bit of Ruby work lately.  Everyone should lean a new language every so often (and no, learning VB.Net after you've programmed C# doesn't count).  At first I was lovin' me some rails, but I've since grown enamored with the language itself.  I love the DRY principle (don't repeat yourself), the convention of only declaring and defining things once, and I both love and hate duck typing (I love it when it works, I hate it when it doesn't). 

The thing I hate the most, though, is the lack of a real IDE, and the lack of a compiler.  These problems will both be solved by the integration of Dynamic languages in Silverlight.  I can't wait to try IronRuby!

Below is a diagram I found that gives an overview of the platform vision.