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Now that the book is finished writing, reality is catching up with me and I am finally able to work on the backlog of ideas and projects that has accumulated in the last months. Time to give an update of stuff I do or will do soon. Silverlight 2 Unleashed status On my side, the work is done and I delivered my copy to the editor. We had a small bunch of last minute corrections when Silverlight 2 RC0 made it to the web, and I am happy the good people at Sams gave me some time to clean up a few kinks. I think we're in pretty good shape now. It was not too bad, but it's even better now :) On Silverlight side, as all of you know by now, Silverlight 2 RC0 was released for developers, which can mean only one thing: We're coming very close to the release date. Most changes to Silverlight now will be bug corrections, and the interfaces should not change any more. Stay tuned for new about that. One funny thing I noticed as I was surfing Amazon is that people who bought Jesse Liberty 's Silverlight Read More...
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The news took the community by surprise and the reactions are overwhelmingly positive: Microsoft is going to ship jQuery with the ASP.NET MVC framework (very soon) and with Visual Studio (in a near future). For more details, ScottGu and Scott Hanselman are talking about that in a very complete way. I think it's great news on many levels. First, because I hear that jQuery is a great framework. I must admit I never used it, because I didn't do much web development lately (but I will get back to it in a number of private projects soon) and also because I am usually wary of frameworks and prefer to develop my own JavaScript. Of course this is only viable because I used JavaScript mainly on small private projects for the past few years, and I wanted to have the learning effect of programming against it directly instead of having a higher level framework to "talk to". I think that now is the time for me to look more into it, however, and this is just what I will do for my site www.galasoft.ch Read More...
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So many people blogged about it already (time difference, and fun dinner last night, so I am late :) that I prefer to just point the reader to the best possible source of information: Scott Guthrie's blog . It cannot be stressed enough that this release is for developers only. It might very well be the last release before the final is made available, so it's a chance for people with Silverlight content to update their code. The public runtime will not be updated to RC0 automatically. So do *not* publish RC0 code to your web servers yet, because it will break the user experience! I played with these bits quite a lot and they're really good. Many bugs have been fixed, and many corrections have been added to make it more compatible with WPF, which is really a must. Also added are some new controls (check Scott's blog for more details). With that milestone, the Silverlight team did a really great job. The final version is getting closer and that's really exciting! Read More...
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I am currently attending a workshop for Siemens in Chicago's suburb, and also staying for the weekend. In fact it feels pretty weird because for the first time since a year, I don't feel the pressure of "must write" on my shoulders, and I can actually spend some time thinking of something else than Silverlight 2 Unleashed... Which is why I am now writing a book about Silverlight 2 Unleashed (available on pre-order at Amazon and to be published really soon :) I finished reviewing the very last chapters day on Friday and sent it to the editor. I still have one last round of review to just clean up some URLs, give a last look at the code and maybe find a typo or two... We're really close from the final version, and once this is done, the only occasion I will have to correct errors will be through errata on this blog, so stay posted. The book will also have a dedicated website at Sams, but I don't know the URL yet. I'll post it as soon as possible. In the mean time, I posted the final table Read More...
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My editor at Sams (hey Neil :)) and I decided to convert the book I am almost done writing into an Unleashed. There are multiple reasons for that, the most important being that the book addresses multiple audiences, and has a broad range of coverage, which is typical of the Unleashed series. The content goes enough in depth (according to Neil) to be placed in the Unleashed series. While the Unleashed series usually targets more advanced users than the Teach Yourself one, this book has lots of content that can be useful for a variety of audiences with chapters that lead the user from the start of their journey through Silverlight. We put a great deal of attention in explaining complex concepts such as Object Oriented Programming, Data Binding, Templates, Transforms, the Animation system, Media integration, and so on with many practical descriptions, hands-on demos and figures which is typical of the books from Sams. I was not too sure about that move at first, but after thinking about it Read More...
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Wow. That's an incredible feeling, seeing my name on Amazon :) The book is in pre-order!! I'd better get back to editing it then :) Read More...
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I've been working since September 2007 (more or less) on an upcoming Silverlight book titled "Teach Yourself Silverlight in 24 Hours" at Sams. This book will be aimed at beginners with the technology (and maybe even beginners in programming). The reader is walked (with a lot of code samples and step-by-step examples) through most features of this amazing technology. The book has 24 chapters, each of them taking more or less (maybe rather a little more than a little less, to be honest :)) one hour to read. There are really tons of demos and cool examples, and so far the feedback I got has been really great. Clearly, the whole of Silverlight cannot be taught in 24 hours :) but the book should give a very good and deep insight in this framework, and give the reader a taste for more. I also tried to show where additional resources can be found, and to allow the user to continue their education on their own after they finish reading. Below, you will find the table of content for the first 13 Read More...
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2 years ago, on a Sunday, I posted my first blog post. Since then so many amazing things happened, partly due to this blog: I got the MVP status, I got a better recognition in my firm for my expert knowledge on some topics (such as WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET and C#), I started speaking in conferences... One year later, I got a book deal (more on this soon). I met amazing people, and made a lot of new friends in the industry. I went to Redmond a few times and had the chance to talk to some really amazing talents in the software field. More importantly, I really had the feeling that my contributions were acknowledged, and valued. It's really been 2 amazing years. To all of you reading these lines, thank you. You make my life as a software engineer better, more interesting, and you really help become a better developer. Read More...
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Here we go, Silverlight 2 beta 2 can be downloaded and installed! I had the chance to take part to an "insiders" program at Microsoft, and to play with SL2 b2 for a couple of weeks, and it's a good one. You should switch to b2 as soon as you can! There are obviously incompatibilities between b1 and b2, but much, much less than between the alpha version and b1. We're getting there!! Silverlight 2 beta 2 will be used to build applications related to the Beijing olympics, so it's going to be a real nature test for that version. As for the final release.... it's still very much hush hush, so let's leave it for now :) The best place to start is ScottGu's blog . As usual, Scott describes the new features at length, and has links to all the places where you can download the good stuff. Note that there is also a new version of Blend 2.5 which can be installed next to a "normal" Expression Blend V2. There is supposed to be a new version of Deep Zoom Composer too, but the download seems to be down Read More...
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I am going to take a short break of blogging for a couple of months. The reason is simple: I have been working on a book about Silverlight 2 since September last year, and we are in a phase now where I need to concentrate on that exclusively, and put other activities aside. I might post the occasional article from time to time, but until mid-Summer, it's going to be write write write. Stay posted for news about the book coming up, and don't delete me from your feeds, it's really only temporary :) Read More...
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I just posted today's talk at the RIA conference in the World Trade Center, Zurich. Unfortunately it was not recorded, but the slides and the demos' source code is available on my site. The talk went really good, even though the crowd was rather tough :) Trying to "sell" Windows Presentation Foundation, a desktop Windows-only technology, to an audience of web developers, many of them using Java and open source technologies (and even one Adobe employee) sparkled some very interesting discussions. I can't say I convinced everyone (and it was most certainly not my intention), but I think everybody had a really good time. I know for sure that I did! To all those who stayed until the end of my presentation, and even though mine was the last presentation of the day, thank you very much!! To those who couldn't stay, I hope you'll have fun checking the slides and the demos, and contact me if anything is unclear!! Read More...
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As soon as I had my info page online, I asked Twitter to accept TweetMyPage as a Twitter application, and to mark the messages posted with TweetMyPage with "from TweetMyPage". Note for developers: There is a form to fill on the Twitter API page. It's really fast, and one day later I got the answer that it was accepted. From now on, messages posted from TweetMyPage are marked as such: I got a couple of testers so far, and already got a few requests for additional features. I am now evaluating how I can modify the application to integrate these new features, and will update TweetMyPage as soon as I got time (in 2018) (just kidding). TweetMyPage is in beta for the moment, and if you want to try it, I'll be happy to send you an invite (just leave a comment down here or send me an email . If all goes well, I will make TweetMyPage public next week or so. Read More...
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GalaSoft "TweetMyPage" is a web application allowing you to post to Twitter what you're currently reading in your web browser, on a simple button click. After you install the small "scriptlet" button in your web browser's "bookmarks toolbar" (Firefox) or "Links toolbar" (IE), any time you want to share what you're reading with the world, you can simply click on the "TweetMyPage" button. If it's the first time in this session that you are posting, you will be asked to enter your Twitter user name and password. After that first time, you will not be asked for it anymore, not until you close your web browser. As a result, a message will be sent in your name to Twitter, for example: When you create the "Bookmark button" in the Settings page , you can customize the "Reading" prefix that will be posted, as well as a couple of other settings. TweetMyPage is in beta for the moment, and if you want to try it, I'll be happy to send you an invite (just leave a comment down here or send me an email Read More...
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I have been in very much stress lately and hardly had time to post, but I don't forget you, dear readers... Anyway, this Thursday, I will be talking in a RIA conference organized by the Internet Briefing group here in Zurich, in the World Trade Center. My talk is titled "Ultra Rich Interactive Applications with WPF" and subtitled "When Silverlight is not enough..." . I think it's going to be an interesting talk (but obviously I am partial) about the major differences between WPF and Silverlight, and the added richness that WPF provides. I am a big fan of Silverlight, but I have to admit that it's nice going back to the amazing power of WPF sometimes, without having to worry about "is that feature even implemented in Silverlight"? The talk takes place between 16:30 and 17:30 in the World Trade Center, Leutschenbachstrasse 95, 8050 Zürich. Hoping to see some of you there, maybe! Read More...
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I finally did something I wanted to do for a loooooong time: I cleaned up and put my resume online on my website. Note for Beat (my boss), if you read this, don't panic, I am not leaving just right now :) Anyway. For those of you who like to know my (professional) self better, feel free to take a look . If you want a username and password to check my certificates and awards, contact me . And if you have any comment, give me feedback!! Read More...
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