For me it's been another busy fun-filled intense year with the usual ups and downs.  I've been amazed and fascinated this year with the amount of "new stuff" coming out from all directions, which has seen me cast my information gathering net deep into the web.  The result being that I've developed a good case of information addiction, which I will have to tame in order to get anything done ;-)

In particular from Microsoft I've learnt a fair bit this year about Silverlight, WCF, AJAX, MVC but still have a very long todo list ... including Azure, Mesh, Entity Framework, MEF, Surface, Workflow ... and more. I feel that it is a great time to be a software developer with so much to play with and the future looking so promising.

Also this year I stepped up my reading about the "Singularity" which has kept me very entertained - so much so that it's been a while since I've read a scifi novel (except for Ian Bank's - Matter, which was awesome) since reading about what is going on out there is kind of mind blowing. To hear Intel's CTO Justin Rattner say that the singularity will be achieved by 2049 is extraordinary.  Most conversations I've had with people about the singularity have been met with confused looks - almost "are you out of your mind" type looks - which made me realize that most people aren't really thinking much about the future, or not the distant future 10+ years - maybe people are just struggling to keep up with progress?

I think that next year that the idea of the singularity will gather a bit more momentum and perhaps get into the mainstream - although that may not be such a good thing ;-)

Anyways here are some of my favorites for the year...

Videos that blew my mind in 2008 (still!)

• Building Gods 
• Human 2.0
• Accelerating change
• Next 5000 days of the web
• Flow
• Paintball auto targeting
• Darpa dog
• Darpa Exoskeleton
• PDC 2008 videos
• most stuff from the human network

Technology/ideas that blew my mind (at the time anyways)

• photosynth
• google maps streetview
• twitter
• cloud services - mesh  , windows azure, amazon
• stackoverflow

Favorite twitter peps

• @rands
• @timoreilly
• @elijahmanor
• @SilverlightNews
• @darthvader

Favorite bloggers

• Coding Horror
• Rands in Response
• Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com
• ScotGu's Blog
• Rob Conery
• Jonas Follesoe
• Reflective Perspective
• Arjan`s World
• xkcd
• BrainStuff

Favorite podcasts

• stackoverflow
• hanselminutes
• Herding Code
• Alt.NET
• Channel9 MSDN
• Dimecasts

Have a happy new year in 2009!

This was the last user group meeting for the year, so I made sure to extra pizza to get me through to next year ;-) 

Tonight's presentations were "Back to Basics .NET 3.0" and covered the four pillars of .NET 3.0 : Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Work Flow, and the much unloved and redundant Windows Card Space.

The guys did a great job of putting together this last minute presentation after apparently organized speakers had pulled out.  In fact Mahesh asked for volunteers for future presentations which is worth thinking about.

I've been to many WPF/WCF presentations this year and also had the opportunity to do a bit of production code using these technologies so I didn't really get too much out of these high level sessions, but as far as presentations go they were very well done.

David Burela covered both WPF and Work Flow.

For me the highlights were the XAMLPadX utility which is a great tool for developing WPF/Silverlight and the demonstration some cool things you could do with WPF by showing Kevin's Bag-o-Tricks samples.

There is an absolute treasure trove of goodies related to WPF at http://windowsclient.net/learn/

I was looking forward to the Workflow presentation and although David had prepared a great demo of the some of the Workflow capabilities (with his hamburger builder code) I was unconvinced by what Workflow could give me.  I need to do some further investigation!

If you want slightly more in depth of Work Flow check out Rob Conery's MVC screencasts #19 and #20, I found these to be quite useful.

Also, as expected, some more goodness can be found at Microsoft here.

Mahesh Krishnan looked at an overview of WCF which I have been really getting into lately after having scratched the surface with one of my projects this year. He gave a good historic description of how we got to WCF from OOP, Component Modeling, to SOA, and spent a bit of time discussing the benefits of the SOA model.

I've got this book on order which looks to be a cracker...

Also download the Windows .NET 3.5 SDK code samples which have some great code to churn over as well.

They gave away a copy of Vista Ultimate ... but I didn't get none ;-( next time perhaps :)

See you there next year!

The first Silverlight Designer and Developer Network (SDDN) meeting, held last Thursday, was set to be a great evening with Shane Morris and Jonas Follesø lined up for some presentations, over 80 people in attendance and a $20K MSDN subscription up for grabs.

One of the organisers Jordan Knight opened the evening in front of an impressive looking SDDN screen saver with bouncing stars/balls which definitely distracted my attention on a number of occasions.

Of the 80 people there only 6 owned up to being designers, which was anticipated, but disappointing for the organisers.  Microsoft has never really focused on designer software before the Expression product suite and it's fairly obvious that Silverlight won't hit the mainstream unless they can get designers onboard using their products alongside developers.  They are hoping for more designers to come along to future meetings ... personally I don't know of any designers geeky enough to attend a user group meeting, but hopefully some more will show up in the future.

Other than introducing the evening Jordan mentioned...

• possibilities of more advanced topic talks and perhaps even breaking presentations into multiple streams
• talk of a low cost training day to be held next year
• a call for speakers in future meetings - hmmm

Shane Morris - Keynote

Shane's presentation was about User Interface Design and how to create a great user experience, and how Silverlight can help to achieve those great experiences.

His key take away was "you are not your user" which is a fair enough statement and one that is often forgotten when creating software.  A software project can easily produce a functionally complete product but be completely useless to the end user if not enough thought is given to the user interface/experience.

He pushed the idea of user centred design and how designers/developers need to understand how the people they are writing the software for really work - their environment, tasks, tools, skills, fears, motivation, etc.  The best way to achieve this is by observing your users at work.  In my first job I was lucky enough to spend some time with one of our clients and observe them using our software. It's very much an eye opener and really makes you think a lot more about the user interface.

He finished by mentioning a couple of competitions that are around at the moment which pricked the ears my college Tarn, who recently came second in the Devsta competition.

• mix 10K silverlight competition
• phizzpop design challenge

The break in between the two speakers allowed many of the attendees to have a go on one of the only Microsoft Surface computers in Australia.  I jumped straight in and as pretty impressed, definitely looking forward to these machines becoming more mainstream, and better still being able to write some software for one.

Jonas Follesø - SIlverlight @ PDC

Tarn and I had seen one of Jonas presentations recently at the last VIC.NET meeting and were extremely impressed, so we were expecting more of the same - we were not disappointed.

In a jammed packed marathon session he took us through some of the goodies that came out of the PDC with regards to Silverlight;

• the latest Silverlight toolkit drop from codeplex
• Mesh-enabled Silverlight applications
• sneak preview of the Silverlight Business Application Framework
• touched on Silverlight 3 announcements from the Gu

The toolkit currently consists of 12 controls and 6 themes which you can view when you download the sample application from the codeplex site. Apparently there will be a monthly toolkit drop containing more controls/themes as they become available, all open source and unit tested!

The Mesh-enabled Silverlight application was based on Jonas' Divelog example and although he blazed through the demo we got the general gist of it's power.  Will have to get a key to play around with that a bit more. See...

• https://developer.mesh-ctp.com/Welcome/default.aspx
• http://dev.live.com/liveframework/
• http://blogs.msdn.com/liveframework/

I was very impressed by the Silverlight Business Application Framework and for the first time it really sunk in how full business apps could be done well as an RIA.  It made me instantly think of rewriting our Adminstration website ;-) Can't wait for it to be fully released.  

So all in all a good first meet, with much promise for future.  Oh, and no we didn't win the prize - the guy sitting next to us did, and I had lent him my pen to fill in the ticket - douh! ;-)

The sessions were recorded and will be available shortly - I'll update the links here once they're done.

Here are a few pictures taken that night

I'm not in anyway formally associated Microsoft other than that I've been primarily using their tools to develop software for the over the last few years, so I was a little excited I was invited to Liberation Day in Sydney after placing 2nd in DevSta. I thought it would be great to see Steve Ballmer, infamous for this famous clip and this. He is, of course, also the Microsoft CEO and was going to announce Azure the new Microsoft cloud computing platform. He was sure to be entertaining anyway.

As I'd never been to Sydney I decided I could spend a couple of days on Bondi Beach with my girlfriend and drop into the conference and while I was there. I'm expecting to be looking for a new job from next year, probably not in Sydney, but I thought it would also be good to see who was there and meet a few people anyway. I was expecting there would be a couple of DevSta judges there too.

There were heaps of people at the event, I wouldn't be surprised if there actually was the 1000 developers the flyer claimed there would be. It was cool, I can't image an event with that many developers in Melbourne. It was streamed live and can be replayed on the Power To Developers site. I watched Steve get up and do his thing, and it was fun, not rock'n'roll, but fun. Unfortunately I wasn't feeling very well, almost feverish, and I had to duck out to find a chemist.

Gianpaolo Carraro's presentation attempted to demonstrate how easy developing cloud solutions for the Azure was with Visual Studios 2008. I thought it was pretty cool despite most of his demos failing in ways he couldn't have imagined. The Azure platform sounded pretty awesome, basically allowing custom .Net assemblies to be uploaded and invoked on Microsoft servers. He also managed to successfully demonstrate the cloud emulator for locally running and debugging cloud applications. I also really like the idea of being able to a write LINQ query joining two data tables from a SQL Server Service in the cloud.

Mike Culver presented the Amazon Web Services cloud solutions to the Vic.NET user group about a year ago and I think he sold their technology and the possibilities better. He showed the architecture of a video compression service that used a message queue service to queue requests and a controller application that can automatically rent, build and deploy servers capable of processing the requests. I thought it was pretty cool. I think Microsoft are a long way behind, but we'll see what the software giant is capable of. I'm certainly keen to get in and give it a go.

I still wasn't feeling well and missed most of Tim Sneath which was a shame, Brodie had seen him in London years ago but said he "knew his stuff". At the networking drinks I chatted with Michael Kordahi which was kind of fun, he'd judged my entry and he is a Silverlight guy. He introduced me to a couple of people, one of which was Jeremi Kelaher who does Strange Devices Podcasts. I also ran into Tatham Oddie on the way out who I'd seen present MVC stuff at REMIX and Vic.NET. I would have liked to have chatted with Andrew Coates who is a great presenter and was also a DevSta judge, but I didn't end up seeing him this time.

The winners for DevSta {Challenge 2008} have been announced: GPS Tag wins Microsoft Devsta Challenge. My Desktop Racer entry came 2nd. I'm naturally disappointed I didn't win, but definitely happy with 2nd. It was heaps of fun entering and I'm glad the stress is over ;-)

Congratulations to all the entrants, particularly the winners Jarred Sarge and Michael Minutillo for their GPS Tag Game. Hopefully we'll compete again next year.  Enjoy Vegas boys.

This was probably one of the better VDNUG meetings I had been to ... I'm glad I got there early enough for some pizza as more than the usual amount of geeks rocked up tonight ;-)

I was also happy to hear that they are going to start a Silverlight Users Group with the first meeting to be held on 27th November - WOOT!  After getting into Silverlight a bit more during the Devsta 08 competition I'm pretty keen to continue to develop my skills further.

Silverlight 2 for Developers

Jonas Folleso gave a great presentation about Silverlight, demonstrating his DiveLog application. What was so good about the presentation besides the great slides and flawless code demos was the fact that this was a very well thought out and well designed "real world" application which dealt with Designer collaboration issues (which he does well considering his girlfriend is a designer), Unit testing, and browser issues (navigation, printing, SOA, etc), converting Silverlight to WPF application.

In summary he covered the following;

• using forms authentication and custom membership providers to implement secure web services.
• using Expression Blend and how a developer can be more helpful to the designer - using Mocking to provide dummy data to the design surface.
• showed examples of data binding, using INotifyPropertyChanged, ObservableCollections, IValueConvertors and DataContexts.
• showed a great example of design implementing Command pattern to minimize the amount of code in the code behind file
• demonstrated the built in Silverlight unit testing capabilities which run in the browser

It was the best end to end Silverlight presentation I've seen and we look forward to more from Jonas.  Download the source code from his site check it out for yourself.

NOTE: The presentation was streamed, but i'm not sure if it was recorded. Will post link when it becomes available.

Multi-point touch user interface

John Li brought in his custom built surface computer to demonstrate some multi-touch applications and discuss possibilities of other useful applications. His surface computer was put together after several prototypes and end up costing him (or his employer) around $6000 - not bad, but not great if you wanted to knock one together yourself - although John reckons he could put one together in a week ... he might have a good little business there.

He demonstrated the usual applications;

• Photo manipulation - resizing, rotating, etc (although he realised he needed a close all button ;-)
• Map Navigation - including data from Virtual Earth and Google Maps. What was impressive here was the overlaying functionality
• High density multi-scale images (read Deep Zoom-able images) - with some cool architectural drawings and demonstrated the overlaying technology again - showing drawings from different levels intersecting with each other.
• Video manipulation - similar to the photo app - but showed how you could have multiple users working together on the same surface to put together a film clip.
• Piano

His general point was  how 'natural' multi-touch applications translate well to surface technology.  Overall very interesting as always - I was kind of hoping to see some code but I guess the Surface SDK will be coming out soon after the PDC (Professional Developers Conference).