Code To Live!

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We’ve launched a new Channel9 show called Code To Live!.  Josh Holmes (me) and Steve Loethen are the hosts.

We are taking a fairly wide departure from a lot of the other things that you see on Channel9. Code to Live is about highlighting customer stories. There are a couple of different formats that will be on Code To Live. The main show is an interview format that will highlight heroes from our customers that are passionate about what they do and have a good story to tell. To this end, we are riding a 2007 Harley-Davidson Road King around the central part of the US to do interviews. The second format will be Microsoft employees (such as Jennifer Marsman) showing how to use the technologies that our customers are passionate about.

The first show is on XNA and Independent Gaming. Dave Redding and John Stevens were our guests. Dave is a corporate developer by day but he builds XNA games by night and extends into building game consoles, such as a race car, an arcade cabinet and a flight simulator. John runs an independent game conference in Minneapolis.

Want to get involved?  Have a good story to tell?  Want to be seen by thousands of developers all over the world?  Then send them to me.  My email is josh.holmes@microsoft.com

Another great option is to video yourself saying the phrase “we watch codetolive in <location>” and we will put it in the show.  Become the person with the video from the farthest place from my home base (Ann Arbor, MI) and Steve and I will take care of you some how.

The bike will be running around the middle of the US through June of 2008, with stops planned all over the place.  I will be riding it to the Expression Day in Ann Arbor, AdobeMax, DevLink and then turning the bike over to Steve Loethen to drive to the Heartland Developers Conference.  Come track me down and I will get you a code to live sticker for your laptop.

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Code to Live!

Southfield Halo 3 Pre-Launch party

Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team

cordially invites you to

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The biggest video game launch ever is coming in a few weeks. This is your invite to join in the fun and have a sneak peek before everyone else.

This is an exclusive, invite-only event for our special guests to discover Halo 3 first-hand. We will have several Xboxes setup with Halo 3 for multiplayer play, including the opportunity to play the Halo 3 campaign for the first time.

We’ll also have other Xbox 360 games to enjoy, as well as food, drinks, and prizes to give away, including some exclusive Halo 3 branded items. And for those up to the challenge, we will be hosting a tournament pitting the top teams from cities across the US against each other. This is a one-time only event… don’t miss it!

Microsoft Office

1000 Southfield Town Center 19th Floor

Southfield, Mi 48324

Food, Drink, Great Prizes and Attendee Gifts for All!

To register, go to

http://iammasterchief.com/

and register to attend with your RSVP code:

SOUTHB

Please use this code for your registration.  Please note that this code has limited seats left (about 20) and it is first come first serve. Please register quickly.

Please also note that this Halo 3 is rated 17+ so parents and advised/asked not to bring their children under the age of 17.

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Silverlight DevCamp Chicago

This is going to be a fun event! My comrades in the mid-west, Larry Clarkin and Dave Bost are working with Clarity Consulting to host a Silverlight DevCamp. I’m hoping to attending as much of the Saturday bits as I can. I know that I’m attending AdobeMax the next day so I’m going to see if I can come in a day or two early and catch this event. I know that there will be a number of designers and developers there so it should be a fantastic conversation and hack fest.

Hopefully, I’ll see you there.

Date
September 28-29, 2007 (Friday night until Saturday afternoon)

Time
Friday (09/28): 7pm-10pm / Saturday (09/29): 11am-5pm / Possible Happy Hour afterwards – Location TBD

Location
Clarity Consulting 1 N Franlkin St, Suite 3400, Chicago, IL 60606

Official Silverlight DevCamp Chicago site
BarCamp wiki / SilverlightDevCampChicago

Registration, such as it is….
BarCamp wiki / SilverlightDevCampChicagoAttendees

Rich Web Experience Conference Kickoff Panel in InfoWorld

I’m speaking on Silverlight at the The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, CA. At the last minute, I was pulled into a panel discussion that kicked off the conference. It was a fun panel. There was a editor from InfoWord named Paul Krill who wrote a fantastic article on InfoWorld.

There were representatives from Microsoft (me), IBM (Jon Ferraiolo), Yahoo (Bill Scott), Ryan Breen (VP of web testing company Gomez) and many consultants including Scott Davis and Stuart Holloway. The panel was run by Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks). Neal threw out the question designed to bait the panel, “Ajax, Flex, Silverlight – who’s going to rule the world?” I thought just for a moment about jumping up on the table and yelling “Silverlight!!!” but I thought that’s probably not the introduction I needed to the crowd so I waited. There were several of the guys that said that stepped up for AJAX because of the ubiquity factor. I stepped up for Silverlight/Flex talking about the continuum of experience from ubiquitous lowest common denominator web applications supplemented web to platform optimized. Silverlight/Flex fill that spot in the middle. It was fun to be the guy on the panel that was answering all of the Flex questions as well as the Silverlight questions. People asked about testability, accessibility, tooling and more. I had fun and was really happy that I had attended the RIA Jam in Crested Butte. I was also thrilled, with the crowd that we had in attendance, to announce the Moonlight project news. The whole panel went really well.

Rich Web technologies debated | InfoWorld | News | 2007-09-06 | By Paul Krill

*Update – ComputerWorld picked up the article – http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9035018&source=rss_news10.

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Dancing in the Moonlight!

Very, very close (It was #1 Explore)         132 times Fav.!When I was at MIX and walking down the hall, I ran into a rather excited group of people that included Miguel de Icaza at the center. I stopped and listened as Miguel was running through the Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 collateral and saying things like “We’ve already got that”, “That’s a week’s worth or work”, “That won’t take too long” and so on. I realized that I was watching the formings of the Mono-Silverlight project later to be named Moonlight.

I didn’t foresee this news though!

Microsoft is going to officially endorse the Moonlight project from Novell!

Here’s what that means:

  • Microsoft is listening to it’s customers and is delivering that they need when they need it.
  • Moonlight, via Novell, is going to have feature parity and compatibility with Silverlight and Silverlight content will run on Moonlight with no changes. Woot! That’s going to be ensured because Microsoft is giving Novell access to the same test suites that they are running on Silverlight. That’s sweet.
  • One of the large pushes on Silverlight 1.0 is HD video but it’s WMV. Guess what – Microsoft is producing codecs for the Moonlight project that are going to run on all distributions of Linux and BSD that Moonlight runs on.
  • That last bullet point means that Moonlight can be distributed commercially because the video codec that they are currently using is not licensed for commercial distribution.
  • Very importantly for me – I am allowed to officially as a Microsoft employee to say that Moonlight is the answer for Silverlight on Linux.

What this does not mean:

  • Microsoft is not going to support Moonlight, that’s still up to Novell and the Open Source community.

Miguel de Icaza‘s post on the subject:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html

This is the official press release from Microsoft:
Microsoft Delivers Silverlight 1.0, Extends Support to Linux: “Entertainment Tonight” HSN and World Wrestling Entertainment showcase new online experiences; more than 35 partners commit to Silverlight Partner Initiative.

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