Some folks that could not make it to Mix have asked about Scott’s coding demo this year. You can watch the full keynote to find it or, I clipped out just the coding bit..
As you can see we have added a lot of great support to Silverlight with Silverlight 3’s , Navigation, DataGrid, DataPager, DataForm, Charting (all from the Silverlight toolkit) and the .NET RIA Services support for great N-Tier data access.
Enjoy!i
One of the reasons I love going to Mix is getting a chance to watch really world-class technical speakers. As I watched the keynote and a few sessions this year one theme really stood out to me: The audience seems to remember how the speaker handles their mistakes\crashes more than the content of their presentations! Obviously it this is a pretty hard thing for a speaker to prepare for. If you can prepaid for it, then I’d suggest avoiding it all together ;-). So how do you prepare for the unprepareable? It seems to me it is all about attitude.
For me, my learning on this started when I arrived a day early for Mix. I had a chance to talk to one of my favorite speaking coach Richard Klees. If you have not had this guy rip you to shreds, you need to! I had the good fortunate to have an error pop up during my talk with Richard – FireFox popped up and wanted to update the browser in the middle of my presentation. I was clearly annoyed and frustrated by this interruption in my carefully planned flow. Richard called me on it and strongly suggested I work on my attitude.
I partially understood his advice, but I didn’t really internalize it until the keynote when Bill Buxton could not get his HP Touch Smart to respond.
Notice how he handled this – so much grace.. I had the good fortunate of seeing this demo during a dry run the night before, so I can say with some confidence Bill got more applause with his quick wit and good humor than if he had actually been able to do the demo.
So that got me really thinking.. I immediately went back to Richard's advice and it started to make more sense. Later in the keynote I was very attentively watching ScottGu’s coding demo.. My team had worked with him a lot of getting this demo just right and crisp.. and being pre-release software I was a little nervous of what bugs we might see so I was a little on the edge of my seat during this demo. And Of course he did hit an issue, but notice how gracefully he handled it?
Scott had been through this demo 100s of times in the previous 24-48 hours and trust me, he never saw this issue.. yet he handled it perfectly! He came across as more real and human. Again, I thought back to Richard's advice, I was really starting to understand…
Just a few hours later, I would get a chance to put into practice my new found wisdom. I was doing 75 mins worth of demo on preview software on to of a random daily build of Win7. Let’s see how I handled it..
So maybe not as good as the masters, but way better than I would have done without the active learning going on. It is all about the presenters attitude and state of mind.
Have you seen some great presentation failures? How about great recoveries?
I was very happy to get a chance to look through my copy of Essential LINQ today. While there are a number of books out there on LINQ, this one from Dinesh Kulkarni and Charlie Calvert is a must read! They do an excellent job of explaining the core philosophy behind LINQ as well as its practice in a number of different domains including Linq to Sql, Linq to Entities, Linq patterns, etc. Dinesh and Charlie were both intimately involved in the design of LINQ from the very early days. Dinesh now leads our efforts on .NET RIA Services where we continue to carry the LINQ vision to its logical next steps and Charlie continues to keep be an expert in listening to the C# and LINQ community!
Enjoy!
Have you tried out the new Silverlight 3 Navigation Application? Our plan with this as to make it much easier to folks to get started building a RIA application with Silverlight. You can find it in the File\New Project dialog.
The features it offers are:
1. An attractive, professional default theme
2. A clear application structure (MainPage, App.xaml, Views directory)
3. Error window for exceptions and bad navigations
4. Clear, easy to follow customization points.
If you want to understand more about it check out the first part of my Mix talk.
We pushed hard to get this into the beta in order to get your feedback on it. Traditional Microsoft has only shipped the “blank” project template so this is a bit of change for us. Do you find it useful? Have you started an application with it yet? What role do you see it playing in your development? Will you be able to use it with few customizations or do you expect to primarily use the blank template? What sorts of things would you like to see us add?
Corrina Black, the lead designer for Silverlight, has posted a bit about her talk at Mix and included a couple of new looks for the template. To use them you simple copy the App.Xaml for them into your project, change the x:Class to match your project name and hit F5. I’d love to see what sort of cool customizations you can do! If you send me links to your work I will blog as many as I can.
Frosted Cinnamon Toast (get the App.xaml)
Lime Shocker (get the app.xaml)
Enjoy!
A few weeks ago a reader wrote in to tell me that they bought the Kindle version of the Framework Design Guidelines and was disappointed to not receive the DVD. Well, I was of course immediately jealous because I don’t have a kindle, but when I got over that, I ask the our excellent publishers and Addison-Wesley what we could do for our Kindle readers. To my (very pleasant) surprise, they suggested that we could just make all the DVD contents available for free on their website. So now, everyone on the internet gets this small dividend from the kindle!
Enjoy…
Download the entire DVD in one zip file. NOTE: The file is 2.34 GB in size. This includes a number of very helpful videos of presentations that cover much of the content of the book.
Download everything but the Presentations, which includes:
Framework Layering tools
TxRef tool for creating simple C# headerfile views of frameworks
Sample API Specification
Links to FxCop and Framework Design Studio
BTW – if you have liked the book, or have some feedback that may help other readers, I’d appreciate it if you wrote a quick review for Amazon. This helps customers more quickly find material they are interested in (or not).
Kathleen Dollard has a very good article on that talks about using Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to allow customers to add their own forms to our Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) app?
In this simple example she show adding custom defined forms into the standard menus.. all of this is done in VB!
Redmond Developer: Working with MEF
<Export(GetType(IExtension))> _
<ExportMetadata("MenuCaption", "First")> _
Partial Public Class First
Implements IExtension
Public Sub ShowWindow() _
Implements Common.IExtension.ShowWindow
End Sub
End Class
Enjoy!
A few interesting post on .NET RIA Services…
What is .NET RIA Services and why should you care?
Kevin has a great post here that does a good job of telling people what is interesting about .NET RIA Services with out the marketing spin ;-)
A Domain-Driven, DB4O Silverlight-3 RIA
Great post on doing Domain Driven Rich Internet Application using Silverlight 3, RIA Services and DB4O
Getting Started with .Net RIA Services and .Net RIA Service – Hello World and .Net RIA Services Metadata Programming Model
Great step by step posts to get started with .NET RIA Services..
Microsoft .NET RIA Services Preview
RIA.NET, ADO.NET Data Services… NHibernate?
Some good questions and a few answers on .NET RIA Services…
.NET RIA Services – Implementing Custom Interfaces
Ahh.. the little tips are starting to emerge!
Episode 40: Shawn Wildermuth on Silverlight 3 and RIA Services
Shawn makes some good points about .NET RIA Services in this podcast… the best one is that we’d love your feedback. Please get in early and tell us what you think!
I am sure I missed some, please send me mail and let me know about it!
