Josh Holmes - Sometimes respectable passionate technologist…

April 28th, 1988 was a break through year for Windows programming. Windows had been out for close to 5 years is some form or another, the current iteration was Windows 2.0 for the 386 processor. At this point in time, it was hundreds of lines of code talking to undocumented APIs and lots of voodoo to get a simple Hello World application up and running. Charles Petzold released the first edition of Programming Windows. It was 860 pages of black magic distilling goodness that really enabled the giant leaps forward in Windows programming enabling a whole new generation of programs being written. He did it again in 1992 with Programming Windows 3.1 and again in 1998 with Programming Windows Version, Fifth Edition.

I, fortunately, didn’t have to read any of those because I was doing either VB or web programming. I started reading Charles’ books with Programming Windows with C#. It was the must have book for Windows Forms development if you wanted to really understand what was going on and why things did the things that they did. Now, it was not a style guide and it was not going to help you build Windows applications from a design perspective. It was hard core how the System.Windows.Forms and System.Drawing namespaces are put together. Even today – if I need to understand something deep in .NET Forms programming, I pull this book out to understand how the base controls work or how GDI+ works or how to work with images or anything else deep and black belt.

While he’s written a number of other books, the must have book that you need these days is 3D Programming Windows. It’s not going to teach you how to use Expression Design or Expression Blend to build applications. Rather it’s Petzold’s style of really going deep and explaining the underpinnings of the technologies and dispels the black magic. He explains the math behind the 3D objects, lighting effects, movements and more that you a creating. He dives deep into the controls available and lays out the best practices for the best performing 3D applications. It’s a great book and if you have any 3D work that you are working on – you should definitely pick this book up.

Now – why am I talking about this today? Turns out, Charles Petzold is going to be coming out to Memphis, TN to the Memphis Day of .NET. That’s quite a score for them. I can’t wait to hear his keynote. I’m sure that it will be deep and enlightening and I’ve always enjoyed hearing him talk.

Hopefully I’ll see you there.

Keynote Speaker Announced: Charles Petzold

As many of you know, I’ve been playing with Dynamic languages with the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime). It’s fun learning about new languages. Furthering that goal, I had the pleasure to sit down with Jay Wren about the Boo Programming Language and interview him for Code to Live. I intended to make it a 8-10 minute interview and cut him off so that I had very little editing to do. 46 minutes later, I cut off the camera. It was a fun interview with lots of code. I found out that the language is a dynamic language but it’s statically types. I thought that was an interesting twist on the language scenario. The syntax is based on C#, Python and even F# pulling a lot of the best practices from each of these languages. The most fascinating part of the language, however, is it’s extreme extensibility. The first example that Jay showed me was how to extend the language itself with With block style syntax ala VB.

I’m a better .NET programmer because of the things that I’ve learned about Ruby, Python and now Boo. I really understand the C# 3.0 features that are coming such extension methods. I understand how LINQ works better as a result of these languages. I’m thrilled!

I challenge each of you to investigate a new language. If nothing else, it will change your perceptions and improve your ability to write code in your primary language.

Check out the show and let me know if Boo is the next language for you to check out…

Code To Live: Jay Wren on the Boo Programming Language

 This past weekend I was privileged to attend and speak at the third iteration of the Day of .NET. I was one of the original organizers of the Day of .NET along with John Hopkins and Jason Follas a year and a half ago. They have far surpassed the original vision which was to just do a cool event for South-Eastern Michigan. The Ann Arbor Day of .NET is now one of the staple events in SE Michigan and they have moved it up to an every 6 month cadence.It’s even being exported to a number of other locations including Grand Rapids and Memphis.

The basic tenets are that:
A. Content is king. Over glitz and sponsors and everything else, this conference makes it’s mark by delivering rock solid content year after year. There were talks about .NET 3.0, WCF, LINQ, Astoria, Story Driven Design and Fitness, the Dynamic Language Runtime (my talk 🙂 – more on this topic coming soon), and even XNA. 20 sessions in all + 5 vendor driven half sessions. That’s a lot of fantastic content.

B. See rule A. 🙂

C. Leverage sponsors to cover the costs of the venue, food, T-shirts and more. I know that there’s been talk of requiring some type of registration fee of all the attendees. So far that’s not happened. There are a lot of benefits to the fee based attendance. It means that the variable costs (food, T-shirts and the like0 are covered based on the number of attendees rather that coming out of the flat fees that the sponsors have put in. There’s about 30-40% drop off from registration on free events. That’s because the people registered don’t have any skin in the game and decide that they don’t feel like it or it’s not a priority to show up. This is frustrating to all the organizers because it makes capacity planning really hard and it’s a slap in the face with all of the hard work that they’ve done to make this event amazing.

D. Nobody makes any money off of this. At different points, we discussed paying for different speakers to come in but we keep getting such great speakers that we haven’t ever resorted to that. I’m really hoping that we never have to. in the

E. Maintain your independence. While sponsored in part by Microsoft, there are many sponsors and none of them control the content or anything else – just get their name on the web site and other publicity. The independence of this conference and others like it is crucial. It means that they are able to take chances on “non-approved” content, maintain some level of credibility and attract an audience that would not be interested in a Microsoft or other sponsor driven marketing style event.

All of that being said – the community run aspect of this means a lot of work for the guys that are running the event and it really requires a good committee to do it right. John Hopkins and Jason Follas do a fabulous job year after year and should be proud of their work. I helped out the first year but was too busy with new job to help out last spring so Darrell Hawley stepped up, responsibilities were shifted and they pulled off an amazing event. This year Darrell Hawley was busy so they pulled in Patrick Steele, Chris Woodruff and Jeff McWherter to help out. At this point, there are parts of the event that were really hard that are on autopilot such as the registration system. The first two years were interesting because they didn’t have a registration engine and had to scrounge for one. Now they have one written that is just flicking a switch on and off to control the registration. That’s cool and needed. The web site was really hard the first year and now it’s pretty much writing itself when they add in the speakers, sessions and assignments. The giveaways were really hard the first couple of years but there have been a lot of great strides making that as automated as possible. I’m really impressed by the organizational and leadership abilities demonstrated by John Hopkins and Jason Follas to really make this a repeatable and sustainable event.

Thanks guys!

Day of .Net in Ann Arbor Fall 2007

It’s been a long but fun month.

9/30/2007 – 10/3/2007 Adobe Max

This was the first Adobe Max that I’ve attended. It was a lot of fun to catch up with James Ward and Ryan Stewart. Even though we are evangelists for different (and even opposing) companies – they are great guys and I enjoy hanging out with them. Actually, I got to meet a lot of the Adobe employees and they were all pretty nice even if they were nervous/suspicious/confused about why I was there. I saw a lot of cool technology there. Obviously, Thermo was the prettiest girl at the dance but some of the ‘Sneaks’ were pretty slick. My favorite technology that I saw was called seaming. The short version is that this guy figured out how to remove seams from pictures rather than crushing them during a resize. His app will, as the picture is resizing, remove areas of low “energy” rather than squishing all of the figures in the picture. This means that he’s not resizing the people, cars and the like and does remove things like part of the sky or beach or building and so on. It was very cool. He can also “paint” an object in the picture and remove enough other seams to pull the rest of the picture in to cover that object and it completely vanishes. As it was a “Sneak”, Adobe has not committed to releasing it but it’s on the horizon and it’s very cool technology.

10/8/2007 – 10/9/2007 Boston Remix

I really wasn’t sure exactly what to expect with Boston Remix. This was a recreation of the developer parts of MIX, which happened in Vegas in the spring. I was really impressed with how smooth the event went, the quality of the presenters from the keynotes to the regular sessions. I was privileged enough to pick up one of the sessions where the presenter bailed. I did the Web 2.0 talk that we’ve been doing with ArcReady. I really enjoy that talk these days. I leverage it as a conversation to see what everyone in the room things of Web 2.0, how they are doing their development and more.

I met Mark Frydenberg who is a professor at a Bentley University. He is leveraging Web 2.0 to teach his classes. By this I mean that he’s leveraging Wiki’s to do class notes, allow the users to contribute possible test questions and more. He’s looking at Popfly to do teach the class the basics of mashups and programming. It’s a very cool idea and I’m looking tracking his progress through-out the semester. I’ve also caught part of this for a future Code to Live show.

10/12/2007 – 10/13-2007 Devlink

This was an amazing event. John Kellar started off in Little Rock, AR (in fact he went to high school at on of the big rivals to my old high school and we know some of the same people from high school… 🙂 ) and started the Little Rock Techfest. He grew this to be a very successful event and then took a job in Nashville (or Nashvegas as Rob Foster puts it). This is the second year for DevLink and it surpassed expectations for the second year in a row. There were 350 people that paid $50 a head coming together for 2 days worth of rock star material. It was an honor to be listed among the speakers that we had here. You probably already saw my post on Brad Abrams, but I didn’t talk in depth about Ron Jacobs, Rocky Lhotka, Billy Hollis, Tim Huckabee, David Laribee, Wally McClure, David Silverlight, Rob Foster, Mark Dunn, Todd Fine, Jon Box, Kathleen Dollard, Keith Elder, Rob Howard, Ted Neward, Alan Stevens, Rob Winsor and I’m probably (almost definitely) forgetting someone else important. The buzz and conversations at the event were fabulous.

10/13/2007 – Indy Techfest

This event was organized by the user group in Indianapolis run by Brad Jones. Brad and I go back to an MVP summit 3 or 4 years ago. The Indy Techfest cut off registration at 563 and they had a large waiting list on top of that. Damn the space constraints. I showed up during the last session of the day. I did my pitch for Code to Live. It was pretty cool because we got to actually bring the bike inside the venue. You can see in the picture Dave Bost, Bill Steele, Larry Clarkin and me. Notice the DevLink jersey… 🙂

After the event I went to dinner with Brad Jones, Steven Fultcher and the rest of the organizers and some of the speakers. It was a fun time.

Jeff Blankenburg already did a fantastic post on DevLink. John Kellar and his crew did a fantastic job pulling this conference together. In its second year – I was impressed with the whole event from the speaker’s dinner to the quality of speaker that this event was able to attract. There were 5 regional directors, 19 MVPs and some of the heavy hitters from Microsoft including Ron Jacobs and Brad Abrams. For some reason they let me speak too.
Have I mentioned that Brad Abrams is my new hero! I’m not belittling any of the other speakers because there were some amazing speakers and things that happened but I feel compelled to brag on Brad a little here.
I saw Brad at Boston Remix but I got to actually meet and spend some time with him at Devlink in Nashville, TN. This is a community conference, large for a community conference but a community conference none the less which is what makes this all the more special. First, someone on Brad’s level is actively engaging the community is very cool. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he was one of the original 5 on the CLR team. He has moved all the way up from writing the String class to his current position as the owner of the entire UI platform. That’s WPF, Silverlight and AJAX.  Between him and Scott Guthrie (his boss) – I can’t think of another company whose brass get out into the community the way these guys do.

Anyways, back to the story. Brad did the opening keynote where he did a fabulous job. He also did some other sessions with a lot fewer people in them. When he wasn’t talking, he was attending sessions like a normal attendee and between sessions and at lunches he was hanging out in the lobby and just talking to people. It was fun sitting in on a lot of those conversations as they ranged from Test Driven Development to the Dynamic Language Runtime to Kathleen Dollard and Billy Hollis taking him to task over complexity in the frameworks, timelines and more. At this point in the conference I’m really blown away by Brad and how approachable he is. He told me to call him and chat about some of the questions that I have around Silverlight road mapping. I know that he meant it and I’m going to take him up on it after we’ve both had a chance to recover from our travel this past couple of weeks.
Then I heard the about what he did on Saturday afternoon and was completely blown away. John Kellar, the main conference organizer, wrote me to tell me about it and I found Brad’s post on it. Brad went to listen to a talk on AJAX but the speaker didn’t show. There were 30 people in the room that were, understandably, getting bent out of shape about it. So Brad steps up and asks – “Who wants to see me do some AJAX demos?” An hour fifteen later – the crowd was completely jazzed by the stuff Brad was showing off the cuff. That’s very cool of him and shows that he is truly invested in the community and still has the technical chops to backup any of his things he says.
It’s truly impressive and that’s why Brad Abrams is my new hero!

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.

Technorati Tags: codetolive

Code to Live!

Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team

cordially invites you to

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 19^th 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.

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

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.

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.