I’m starting the ArcReady tour in the Heartland District (Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee) next week.

We are talking about architecting for the user exerience which includes the decisions that you have to make along the way to creating a great user expeience. We will also be covering some of the technologies that Microsoft is producing to create great UIs which is a big part of the overall user experience. These technologies include WPF, AJAX and Silverlight.

I’m on the road for two weeks with ArcReady course of the next month.

Nashville – 5/21/2007

Louisville – 5/22/2007

Cincinnati – 5/23/2007

Indianapolis – 05/24/07

Detroit – 5/25/2007

Then I take a break and hit TechEd. Hopefully I’ll see you there. Come find me if you’re there too.

Then I hit the road again.

Memphis – 6/11/2007

Cleveland – 06/13/07

Columbus – 06/14/07

Grand Rapids – 06/15/07

Link to the official Microsoft ArcReady site 

Need some help getting your head around Silverlight? Check out http://www.silverlight.net. That’s a full blown community site that has samples, screencasts, forums and a whole lot more. It’s amazing how much content there is out there already.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m pretty geeked about Silverlight and am looking forward to being able to factor it into every browser based application that I work on to see where and when it fits.

Billy Hollis calls HTML the COBOL of the web. There’s a lot of truth to that to be honest. CSS helps. AJAX helps more but you really can’t get to a Rich Internet Application (RIA) with these technologies. Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to that RIA gap.

Some quick facts about Silverlight:

720P HD Video that is downloaded with the Silverlight runtime

Has a .NET Runtime that downloads with it with a subset of of the Base Class Libraries

Silverlight has fantastic streaming support that integrates well with our new Silverlight Streaming offering. More news coming soon.

It runs on Windows, Mac, mobile platforms and more!

This is a gag video from 4 guys on the mobile team (Loke, Mike, James and Rob Tiffany) showing a lot of the worst practices for presentations. The really sad part is that it’s histerical because it’s true. I’ve seen multiple examples of the worst practices in multiple presentations over the course of time.

Link to Jason Langridge’s WebLog – MR Mobile! : MEDC Video – Worst practice of presentations

I got a question from an attendee at Day of .NET in email. I thought I’d share the question and answers:

“Please let me know when additional WPF, Silverlight, and WCF info is available. How can I obtain these products?”

WPF and WCF – both of these are out right now at part of .NET 3.0. There is a ton of informtion out about these two technologies at http://www.netfx3.com. The technologies are free and available on Windows XP and pre-baked into Vista. Tools for code development are available for VS.NET 2005 as free downloads and are baked into VS.NET Orcas. Tools for design for WPF – you can do some in VS.NET but the design time experience is really best with Expression which has just been RTM’d.

Silverlight is freely downloadable plug-in that is still in beta. Actually, the 1.0 is stil in beta (It supports XAML and JavaScript.) but the alpha of 1.1 is already out which supports the .NET CLR. That supports C#, VB.NET and all of the other .NET languages as well as the Dynamic Language Runtime so there’s support for Python and JavaScript with Dynamic VB and Ruby on the way later this year. The tools for development for the 1.0 Beta is any text editor and Expression Blend 1.1 Alpha. The tools for development of 1.1 alpha with .NET support are available as add-ins for the VS.NET Orcas Beta and the Expression Blend 1.1 Alpha.

Jon Box is blogging now! Jon is a fellow Architect Evangelist. He’s a former RD and a prolific author (at least before he joined Microsoft). He’s a fellow mobile fanatic –  he’s even written books on the topic.

It’s great to see my co-workers start blogging. I’ve been encouraging Jon (and some of the others) to start blogging. They keep coming back with questions like “What do I have to say?” and “Where do you get inspiration?”. For me it’s not finding inspiration – it’s finding time. I’m honest with them and tell that it’s hard work and a lot of time to really keep a solid blog going and I don’t do the best job. The real reason that I’ve been pressuring Jon (and some of the others) to start blogging is that I have a tremendous amount of respect for the team and want to hear their thoughts.

The time issue is a big one when it comes to blogging. I don’t know how people like Scott Hanselman find the time do keep up with everything that they do. It’s super human and he must not sleep.

In the mean time – let’s welcome Jon to the neighborhood and show him a little blog love… (his term – not mine )

Link to Jon Box

Wow I’ve been swamped. There’s so much to blog about in the past couple of weeks so I’m just going to catch some of the highlights.

Ann Arbor Day of .NET was on 5/5/2007. It was fantastic! It sold out at 250 people and of that there were 210 people show up. That’s actually really good as most free events have a 40% droppoff and they had less than 20% droppoff. The only downside on the day was that with less than a 20% droppoff – pizza was a little short at lunch.

They are actually thinking about going to every 6 months instead of every 12 months. I think this would be fantastic!

I kicked off the day with a session on User Experience technologies at Microsoft. I borrowed from some of the materials that we are putting together for the upcoming ArcReady (Check the site for dates and times across the entire central region – Detroit on 5/25 in two weeks for all those that attended Day of .Net). We dipped into WPF, AJAX and Silverlight. My favorite demo is the Silverlight Airlines Demo. It shows a truly out of the box user experience that’s not all glitz and glammor but a truly solid UI for a true business application. Many of the demos, while showing off the platform really well, are marketing apps that show lots of 3D and animation. My customers often look at the glitzy demos and say that they are not doing 3D so they don’t look at the technologies. What they are missing is that there are real benifits here with enabling truly rich interfaces that go well beyond text and pictures.

I had two more 30 minute sessions. In both of those sessions the overwhelming requests were to have more Silverlight content. I had nothing prepared for these sessions but they went really well. In the first session, I pulled Don Burnett, who started Michigan Interactive Designers, out of the crowd and asked him to do a tour around Expression Blend and Silverlight. He got up, completely unscripted, and did a fantastic job! I will definitely be bringing him in to do more demos and presentations – especially when we have a designer based crowd. It turns out that he used to work with Bill Wagner (my former business partner when I was at SRT Solutions) on the Lion King Animated Storybook.

In the second session, I was on my own but I showed Top Banana, the DLRConsole (python and javascript version – IronRuby will be released as a CTP from CodePlex later this year) and talked about the .NET support in Silverlight 1.1 Alpha. Yes – I actually wrote some Python and did a simple overview for people at the conference. It was a fun day!

Here are some of the resources that we talked about during the three talks:

•Windows Forms @ .NET FX Developer Center
http://windowsclient.net

•WPF @ MSDN Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx

•.NET 3.0 (WPF, WCF, WF) Community Site
http://windowsclient.net/

•Silverlight
http://www.silverlight.net

•ASP.NET AJAX @ ASP.NET Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx

•ASP.NET AJAX Community Site
http://ajax.asp.net/

•DirectX @ DirectX Development Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/

•Microsoft Visual Studio @ Visual Studio Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/

•Microsoft Expression
www.microsoft.com/expression

Day of .NET site

Link to Day of .Net in Ann Arbor 2007 – Home

Don Burnett’s write-up of the event.

Link to Don.NET’s WPF Designers Blog: Eastern Michigan Day of Dot Net

I’m sitting in the back of a Dynamic Languages session by John Lam and Jim Hugunin called “Just Glue it! Ruby and the DLR in Silverlight”. John Lam was a recent hire (January) to Microsoft. Prior to this he was working the Ruby CLR. Jim Hugunin is an architect on the CLR focused on DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime). He joined Microsoft specifically to work on Iron Python and make sure that the CLR was one of the best platform for dynamic languages such as Python.

They are showing a ton of very cool stuff. They are doing all of their programming in TextMate on a Mac. The samples so far have been in JavaScript, Ruby, Python and even Dynamic VB.

I recommend that you check out this session on the http://www.visitmix.com site when the recording gets up there. They do a fantastic job showing the power and ease of dev as well as poking a lot of fun at each other.

What’s a lot of fun is the interplay between all of the different languages. For example, they created a library in C# that they could pull in and leverage from Ruby and a JavaScript lib that was doing some 3D work that they pulled in and did some quick and easy work.

Link to Visit MIX07

I know that I already mentioned this – but I thought I’d call it out specifically as it was part of a much larger post.

Silverlight 1.1 Alpha supports Ruby and Python on the client side so people can write their RIA (Rich Internet Applications) in their own language. If you have not looked at dynamic languages – you should. There’s a lot of power there. Obviously, with power comes danger. I’ll be blogging more about Dynamic Languages later.

I ran into David Laribee who wrote about MIX07: Silverlight, IronRuby, and Dynamic Languages. He’s really geeked about Iron Ruby.

BTW – long post! Too many announcements!

I’m just out of the MIX07 keynote featuring Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie (Yes I find it a lot of fun that the top guys at Microsoft on the technology side blog about what they are doing). I’m still trying to get my head around what I just heard. They have far exceeded my wildest expectations.

First – the client demos were sweet!

Neil Hunt of Netflix got on stage with some guys from Razorfish and demoed the great rich media and interactive video support in Silverlight. One of the cool things is that it was completely integrated into the back-end Netflix site for ratings, ordering and so on, has a chat app inside, collaborative movie watching where two people can watch the same movie from different parts of the world and it will keep them in sync and let them IM during the movie. That was cool and Netflix is a fantastic backer as they are very demanding on their systems and need the highest quality experience for their clients.

CBS got up and showed how they are integrating pro media with community contributed media tied to that pro media so that they can all of the sudden get content and points of view from an amazing number of sources instead of just their one camera guy.

Top Banana – I was already blown away when this section of the keynote came up. It’s one of the first managed applications with Silverlight and written with XAML and C# in Expression Studio, VS.NET and more. It’s a full blown video editor written in Silverlight. Wait – video editing in the browser? This is really blurring the line between desktop and web application. It’s only 50 kilobytes worth of payload to do all of the video editing. Yes – that’s 50k worth of code that’s downloaded. It does film stripping, frame by frame stepping, cutting, mixing, merging and everything that I could do with video. The did all of this in a month.

MLB.com are doing a ton with Silverlight as well. It has integrated overlays so you can watch the full screen video with overlays of your fantasy teams, pitch counts and more. It even ran on a phone! It’s a great experience and I’d love to talk more about it but I’m numb at this point with all the cool stuff.

Second – the Silverlight Beta (the cross-platform plug-in formerly known as WPF/e) is going to have much richer support for JavaScript and AJAX. That we expected and needed.

Third – there had been a lot of rumors and speculation about the next bit of business and that is that the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha is going to have the same exact CLR as the desktop version that allows you to leverage your existing .NET skills in VB.NET or C# to build RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Read that again slowly though. You will be able to write .NET to run in the browser on the client side of one of these RIA’s. In other words – you’ll be able to run .NET on a Mac in a Safari browser! That includes LINQ and the whole ball of wax! That just put Silverlight RIA’s in reach of any dev shops that are currently doing WPF with C# of VB.NET. And we are going to have support for Silverlight in VS.NET Orcas with a free download called the Silverlight Tools Alpha so we have proper tooling for the developers.

Fourth – The tooling is amazing. Expression Blend can export to XAML directly for Silverlight. That means that I’m not nearly as constricted by the limited number of controls and such that are available for Silverlight compared to WPF. It also manages and writes out all of your timelines, media integration, graphics work and so on. Expression Media does a great job of managing and encoding all of your videos. Expression Web has an AJAX Silverlight drop-in bit that can just drop in an RIA inside an existing application through drag and drop. As mentioned, VS.NET Orcas has support for development.

* Big point here * – Cross-Platform Debugging so you can do live debugging across the network to actually debug on the code that’s running on the Mac. You have access to the memory, objects, single stepping code and the whole nine yards! That’s amazing and it truly enables cross platform development!

* Another big point * – all of the tools from a SOAP perspective

Fifth – the Silverlight Streaming,  a companion service for Silverlight makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. Silverlight Streaming is a storage and video delivery service that will enable developers and designers to upload their application to Silverlight Streaming and then deliver this application to any website globally. Silverlight Streaming will provide 4GB of free storage as well as unlimited outbound streaming at 700 Kbps. For the first year, the service will be free. As the service moves out of beta it will be offered as part of the overall WL Platform offer, with continued 4GB free storage and free streaming up to 1 million minutes of streaming per site per month. Once a website goes over the 1 million minutes of streaming threshold, the site will have the option to take ads and revenue share or pay a small fee to help cover MSFT costs. Check out silverlight.live.com for more on this!

Fifth – and this one came out of the blue for me. The CLR will have full support for the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) including Iron Ruby, Iron Python and Managed JScript! Yes, you read that right – I had to ask for clarification when I heard about this too. You will be able to write your applications in C# or Vb.NET or Ruby or Python or Managed JScript! Sweet! That just put WPF and Silverlight (since it’s running the exact same CLR) in reach of any shop who knows XML so that they can write XAML and does programming. I’m not saying that there won’t be a learning curve, but HOLY COW you can write Ruby to run in the browser on the client side of your application! For those of you who haven’t looked at Ruby and Python, you really need to take some time to delve into those languages and figure out some of the power and flexibility that dynamic languages bring to the table.

Sixth – Silverlight for Mobile!

I’m out at MIX and got to met Eric Burke. Eric Burke is the lead developer on the WPF version of the Yahoo Messenger. It was fantastic! I was wearing a Visual Studio sweatshirt when I was getting on the plane in Detroit headed out out to Las Vegas. Eric spotted that and asked if I was going to MIX. We ended up hanging out a good part of the day. It turns out that he works remotely from Michigan for his team in Sunnyvale, CA. They have been working on a WPF version of the Yahoo Messenger for about 9 months now and have been knee deep in .NET 3.0. It’s been fun listening to the evolution of the application and the workflow with the design firm. He talked about how it’s been a fun and interesting ride.

I’m looking forward to seeing his presentations tomorrow and Wednesday. One’s called Windows Presentation Foundation in Real World Development. I did a small podcast recording with him that I’ll post in the next couple of days. He’s got a blogroll of a ton of blogs that he watches for .NET and WPF (Eric’s Blogroll) but you’ll have to listen to the podcast to get his pick of the top 3…

One other quick and interesting note – all of the sessions, including Eric’s, will be up on the web site for the general public in raw form 24 hours fter the session.