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• Tutorial Feedback – Leave a Comment Why Dontcha?

  I’m incredibly pleased to say that we have implemented a comments section for each tutorial, just as we do for each video Please leave your comments and I will subscribe to the comments list and try to respond as quickly as possible (if your comment goes unanswered for a while, don’t hesitate to send me mail: jliberty@microsoft.com NB: I’ve heard loud and clear that you want to see more advanced topics covered; they are on the way. The current plan calls for a tutorial in September and one in October and then to look at the frequency; either staying at once a month or bumping it up to twice a month. I’m traveling for some of September so will let you know shortly after that.   Thanks! Posted Aug 19 2008, 09:49 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: tutorials, Community

• Visual Thesaurus – Mindware

  When I wasn’t looking this Website/Mindware got a lot better. Visual Thesaurus is an on-line subscription tool (~$3/month) that you can also buy as a desktop utility, that allows you to put in a word and see its related words visually. I put in play and got back a blizzard of related words, (Click on the image to see it full size) Each node can be clicked on to find out what everything radiating from that node shares in common. For example, travel, locomote, go and move all radiate from a common node. Clicking on that brings up a definition that all four share, and an example sentence, What relationships are shown in the diagram is dictated by your settings (as is font size, line size and many other aspects of the diagram), You can see that this goes well beyond just synonyms.   The node colors are keyed to the definition chart (thus, the green that tied together the four words above is listed in the verbs section, and all the verb nodes in the entire diagram are defined there as well. You can reverse the action and find a definition under verb and that will light up the node and thus show you the words associated with it.         Of course, if you click on a word, that word becomes the focus of a new set of associations, allowing you to progress from Play –> Contend –> Debate –>Argument –>Variable->Symbol to Star… This can be either incredibly rewarding for your writing, or a tremendous time-sink. But it is wonderfully responsive and great fun. Posted Aug 16 2008, 05:34 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Recommended Resources, Tools, Community, Opinion

• Candidate for favorite new utility

  I admit it, this has little to do with Silverlight per se, but it is such a useful utility, and I use it so much all day (including when I’m programming) that I thought I’d share it with you, at least briefly. Every time you copy anything to the clip board, it is captured to ClipTrack (though you can create white and black lists to change that behavior). You can find things in chronological order, alphabetical order, by when they were clipped,by when they were pasted, by type (image, text, web, etc.) or you can create folders (favorites, project based, whatever). You can look at web pages in html view, text view or web view, and modify before re-saving or pasting.  It just goes on and on. Area 1 has the menu (which includes some powerful option settings) and four buttons: add a clip (lets you hand create text to add to the clip board), delete a clip, paste and move (move from one folder to another).    Area 2 is the list of folders – there are pre-designed folders (by date when clipped, by date when pasted, by type (images, text, html, etc.) and also custom folders (favorites, by project, etc.). Below Area 2 in area 5 are buttons to create and delete custom folders.       Area 3 is a list of the clips in the folder you’ve picked. Each title can be changed without changing the clipping and the image to the far left indicates the type of clip.         When you highlight any clip it is displayed in area 8 , and can be edited using the tools in area 6 . For complex types (e.g., web pages) and you can switch your view from HTML to TExt to Web which is very nice.   Printing I wrote to the author ( Mark Sweeney ) and asked for a feature in a future release: take whatever is the current clip and let me print it. What I had in mind was that there are times I want to copy and print something from the web that is not well formatted; I’d rather not have to paste it into a text editor and then print from there. Within a day he added the print button (area 7 ) that not only has print setup and print preview, but automatically defaults to “shrink to fit printed page”  along with a host of other useful features.  Truly great.   Please note, while the application is free, it is available through PC Magazine utilities , which is a subscription service. Full disclosure, I was formerly employed by Ziff Davis, which was at one point the parent company of PC Mag and I was, even earlier than that, the WizOp of... Posted Aug 14 2008, 03:53 PM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Recommended Resources, Tools, Community, Opinion

• Tutorials Dive Deep

  The next phase of my Silverlight Tutorials will concentrate on more advanced topics. I’d like to invite you to tell me what topics you’d like to see covered; what is most pressing, most confusing or least accessible?  Feel free to drop me a note at jliberty@microsoft.com – it may take a while to get to your topic (I may try to wrap it up with others) but I will compile a complete list and try to cover them all. Thanks! Posted Aug 02 2008, 05:09 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: tutorials, Community

• Programming Silverlight 2 – Jesse Liberty & Tim Heuer

  I do not pre-announce books. That said, this book is likely to be of significant interest to this community, and so, now that it is officially listed on Amazon , I thought it reasonable to mention that it is on the way, and that Tim and I are exceedingly proud of it. Our goal in Programming Silverlight 2 is to tell the story of Silverlight, not to reproduce the documentation. For me, it is a wonderful opportunity to bring together all that I’ve learned in creating the videos and the tutorials and getting your feedback about what is helpful and what is not. In the book we go far deeper than we’ve had the opportunity to do so far here on the site, but at the risk of undermining sales, let me say that everything we cover in the book we will, no doubt, cover sooner or later here as well. The advantage of the book is that it is all put together in a single place in a single coherent telling. We’re going to hold the book until Silverlight 2 is certified as final, which means we won’t be first to market, but on the other hand we’ll have it right, and that seems worth while. in addition, the book will mark a beginning, not an end, in that once the book is in print, we will continue to build videos and other material that will add depth for the more advanced programmer, and we’ll continue to create on-ramps for the programmers first arriving at Silverlight from .NET and elsewhere. Thank you for indulging my book announcements. We now return you to the technical blog, already in progress. Posted Jul 31 2008, 05:50 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: silverlight 2.0, Learning Silverlight, Recommended Resources, Digging Deeper, Community

• One Team – 4 Books on ASP.NET 3.5

  I just released Learning ASP.NET 3.5 which is very exciting, through I must quickly and freely admit that my co-authors did a fantastic job shouldering the bulk of the task of the massive re-write to bring this book fully up to date for ASP.NET 3.5. The Learning series is O’Reilly’s on-ramp, while the Programming books are targeted at the more experienced and professional programmer. That said, this book is surprisingly comprehensive and we’re quite proud of it. There are quite a few good books on ASP.NET 3.5, one written by my colleague Scott Hanselman ,  that has gotten rave reviews. Then there’s ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed by Stephen Walther, new to our team but not new to writing fantastic books on ASP.NeT     Oh yes, I almost forgot, I’m about to release Programming ASP.NET 3.5 , due out Sept. 15.   I suspect there are even some books by people not on our team. So don’t buy anything until you read through a few books and decide on what you like in terms of style, coverage, approach, exercises and all those intangibles that make for a great technical book.  Enjoy. Posted Jul 30 2008, 04:21 PM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Recommended Resources, Community

• Flecks Flash By…

  There is a posting going around about how some part(s) of Microsoft are using Flash or some other not-Silverlight technology and how even Microsoft doesn’t believe in Silverlight, blah blah blah.  I’ll leave it to people who have investigated and who care to straighten out this silliness, but I will say that from what I can tell, there are a lot of post-hoc ergo prompter hoc errors floating around. The good news is that this prompted a discussion with a very bright member of our community (ew, what a phrase; take two:) with a buddy that I thought I would post here, cutting down his comments and fixing up mine to make them seem much more incisive. After some back and forth, this lead us to a discussion of his desire to choose to work in Flash or Silverlight, but really not to try to work in both for any length of time, and did I have any thoughts on the matter. I wrote… …for me it was never a question. Microsoft’s commitment to Silverlight is unquestioned and core; and as a developer I focus on (a) the commitment, (b) how does it fit into the lineup of development products and (c) what tools can I use and (d) what is the customer base. As a .NET programmer for 8 years, Silverlight fits in perfectly, and the commitment to Xaml, first for WPF, then Workflow, then Silverlight, and the backflow from Silverlight to WPF, and the promotion of Scott Guthrie to VP, and the hiring of Ray Ozzie, and the creation of the Expression tools and the people they hired to head those teams, and the creation of the Developer Liaison Group that I work in, and more that I can’t talk about in terms of commitment to Silverlight going forward,  all add up to a place I had no doubt I wanted to be and that I still want to be. ….speaking as an individual and not as a Microsoft employee (which I’m told is not possible) I personally would base my decision [as to which to commit to] on what is predictable and not on what is unknowable. So, what can we know with reasonable certainty: 1. Both companies are likely to be around in 5 years, as are both products in some form 2. Both products are likely to evolve, especially in response to one another and for all we know there will be an unexpected third player to come along when we least expect it 3. There will never be an objective view point (who would provide it?) – see my blog post on don’t believe anything I say While I have a friend who has made a great living by being a jack of all trades, that never appealed to me. Like you, I... Posted Jul 30 2008, 11:17 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Community, Opinion

• Four Twitter Silverlight Blogs

  Because I’ve probably introduced more confusion than I have any right to, I’ll tell you quickly about 5 Twitter blogs I’m associated with… SilverlightNews – very popular and closely connected with one of the premier Silverlight aggregators: Silverlight Cream. Silverlight Events with a Twitter feed and a web page all managed by the extraordinary Adam Kinney The SLMicroblog :  an experiment in “what can I blog that is useful to say in 140 characters. To be honest, it moves among a few different states: Tips of the Day , Very short Blog entries, references to longer blog entries, and short periods of rest.  I’m hoping for more of the first two as they are what make it worth while. The Silverlight HyperBlog explained in here , but the essence is to record everything and anything I’m working on, thinking “out loud” into the blog, including ruminations, absurd speculations, etc. I have no idea why anyone would want to subscribe, that is part of the experiment; is this the least bit interesting? What I’m finding is that I’m interested in the process, at least from time to time, though I fully admit that there are other times I just work and the Hyperblog goes (blessedly?) silent for a while. Finally, I should mention that I do have my own Twitter account , but I really only use it when I’m at a conference. As for keeping up with any/all of this, the best tool I know of is Emil Stoychev that I wrote about here . Posted Jul 27 2008, 11:09 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Recommended Resources, Tools, Ramblings, Community

• Check out our new Learn page!

  We listened, we heard, we acted. The new Learn page is designed to make it easier to get started, and easier to find what you are looking for. It is also pretty snazzy.  I’ve shrunk it to point out a few features that I think will go a long way towards making life easier for folks trying to find the information they need. (This image has been cropped and reduced to fit and to focus on the areas of interest) I personally think the folks who did this did a great job, and I’m very pleased and proud to be associated with it. That said, after a couple days of living with it, we’d be happy to have your feedback, suggestions, ideas and etc., as always! In the meantime, I’ll enjoy what I think is a pretty significant improvement. Hope you find it not only more attractive, but (much more important) more useful. Posted Jul 21 2008, 11:20 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Recommended Resources, Community

• Web 2.0 Run Amok

  In the past few months, I’ve dramatically increased the number of channels from and to the community and since they are likely to cause some confusion, this post will briefly review and explain my intentions. First, the list: Tutorials Books Videos Webcasts Presentations Silverlight Blog O’Reilly Blog My Other Blog Amazon Blog Private Twitter Silverlight MicroBlog Silverlight HyperBlog  +Email +Forum Portal Book Support Email Phone Emergency IM Other IM Technorati Facebook DotNetSlackers CommunityCredit Plaxo Linked In Del.icio.us DiggIt Wikipedia Flikr etc. Formal, Mostly One Way, High Value Communication A large part of my job is to produce what we call “content” (though I bet I’m not supposed to say that out loud) which includes our Tutorials , Videos , Presentations and Webcasts .  You can always find links tot he latest of these on the sidebar of my blog In addition, Tim and I are under contract with O’Reilly to write the forthcoming Programming Silverlight 2 which has been embraced by Microsoft and is also (isn’t this cool?) part of our job here. I try to keep my Blog reasonably focused on Silverlight, but I do include the occasional article on anything from technology rants to just rants .  That said, if the signal to noise ratio falls too low, let me know!   Other Connections In addition to the big 5 (Tutorials, Book, Videos, Presentations and Webcasts) I’ve created as many innovative connections as I can think of or steal from others. These include a few that require explanation… The Twitter Family Private Twitter – I use this for occasional outbursts, but mostly to let folks know where I am when I’m on the road Silverlight MicroBlog – an experiment in “how much blogging can you do in 140 characters” – that I’m still working on but that is an interesting idea I keep coming back to Silverlight HyperBlog – a new experiment in blogging my work day in some detail supported by a dedicated email address to get feedback and a dedicated community forum in case subscribers want to discuss anything that comes up in the blizzard of tweets.   This is clearly experimental, but interesting. Other Blogs O’Reilly Blog and author site is often neglected in favor of this one. However, it does  contains links to book information, old articles and can be useful (at least to me) from time to time. The  Amazon Author Blog is mostly a “fan” site, with reproductions of blog entries from elsewhere, the occasional original entry and such... Posted Jul 14 2008, 09:12 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Recommended Resources, Community

• Over The Top Twittering

  I see my job as, in part, community building, and as part of that, lots of experimentation. Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new (experimental) HyperMicroBlog named SLGeek (join now) I will be blogging everything – all blogging all the time, at least while I’m working, often when I’m just thinking about work --- though topics may range beyond work, and you are fairly warned that you may learn ore about me than you care to know. (Intensive blogging begins later this morning and won’t stop for at least one week) The goal is that I’ll be recording not only what I’m working on but what I’m thinking about what I’m working on; as well as who I’m talking with, what we’re talking about (when it isn’t confidential), and anything else I can possibly tell you about what is going on.  Expect the blogging to come in bursts, but there will be lots of it. Sign Up Here To keep this from being entirely absurd, in this blizzard of words you should (if this goes as I hope) find tidbits about what I’m working on that won’t be posted for a while, what my team is thinking about that isn’t a big deal secret, what I find interesting that you might (or might not) and most important, have a chance to feed back to me and even more important discuss with others where I’m nuts, wrong or just off the rails.  To facilitate that, I’m setting up two places for community feedback: First, you can write to me directly, but I almost certainly won’t respond (except when I grab your email and plunk it into this blog) at slGeek@jliberty.com . Second you can post your thoughts, but I almost certainly won’t respond, and my not have time to even keep up to date)  on a public  discussion site I’ve created (you may have to join to post, but it is free). It is the forum that I hope will prove most interesting. Feel free to discuss anything there and if you need more folders, write to slGeek@jliberty.com and let me know.  NB: This is an experiment. We’ll see how it goes. Posted Jul 13 2008, 08:25 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: silverlight 2.0, Recommended Resources, Ramblings, Community

• The 5 Levels of Technophilia and Silverlight

  I used to work for a man named Larry Weiss at Citibank, who did a number of magical things (including creating the best ATMs in the world in the 1980s that still surpass anything I’ve seen other banks do yet!).  One concept that he talked about a lot (I have no idea if it was original) was the 5 levels of Technophilia, which he described as a pyramid but probably is better described as a bell curve and in fact a quick Live-Search turns up many such images. Doesn’t matter; it was his labels, and more important his one sentence examples (which I’ve paraphrased and updated) that I cared about: I – First Buyers  Technology for its own sake. Gotta’ have it. They’re the ones on line right now buying the new iPhone II Technology Lovers “Show me any any good reason, and I’ll buy it.” These folks already have FIOS and HDTV and don’t understand why anyone thinks that is odd. III Technology Comfortable “If there is a good reason, I’ll buy it, but show me the reason. After all, there is some cost to learning, some hassle to maintaining, but if you overcome my hesitation then I’m happy to buy.”  These folks are buying DVRs now and considering a GPS for their car. IV. Technology Resistant “I don’t like it, I don’t want it, but if you can really convince me that I have to have it,  I’ll complain a lot, but I’ll buy it.”  This is my mom.  Has a VCR, won’t take a DVD player as a present.  V. Go Ahead, Pull The Trigger, I’m Not Using It. Forget it, they don’t even have answering machines. So? I’ve found these quintiles to be totally   arbitrary and inconsistent, and yet a guiding principle for the past 20+ years. The fact is, I’m a Quintile I, my wife is a Quintile III and most folks fit pretty easily into one of these descriptions. Here’s how I know I’m a Quintile I.  I leave my GPS on all the time, even when I know just where I’m going. Why? Because I am totally gassed by what it is. The fact that this tiny little box is sitting in my car is just too fantastic. Think for a moment about how it works (which I only know to a first approximation: Satellites in the Global Navigation Satellite System continually transmits messages to the tiny box in my car. Each of these messages encodes the time the message was sent, as well as the satellite’s precise orbit and the almanac of the orbits of all the other satellites. Given signals from four satellites, that tiny box not only computes its position in 3 dimensional space, but also the... Posted Jul 11 2008, 11:24 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Learning Silverlight, Ramblings, Community, Opinion

• July 9. Celebrating A First Very Happy Year At Microsoft…

  and thanking you all for your support and shared excitement as Silverlight evolves.     istockPhoto; rights reserved Posted Jul 08 2008, 09:01 PM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Ramblings, Community

• I love my work but it is a good thing I have a family

  They went away this week (visiting my in-laws) and I stayed home to catch up on videos, tutorials and etc. I’m not quite sure I realized how much time I was spending in front of the computer – nor how easy it is to eat up time getting things quite right, but here is my log for July 3 oops. Never leave a geek home alone I just looked at the garbage; not a good sign. The guy from Dominos knows me by first name and I don’t like their pizza. I sure hope their flight is not delayed, I can’t keep this up for much longer. photo info: Dash camera, Photoshop, mild posterboard. Original photo: Jesse Liberty July 5, 2008 No rights reserved. Posted Jul 05 2008, 04:53 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Ramblings, Community

• Zen Presentation

  Another in a series of ruminations about how to Present Silverlight . One of the brighter Silverlight coders and MVPs asked me tonight “what is all this about your changing how you present at conferences and web casts.”  In answering him, I realized that my thinking continues to evolve, and that it might make a somewhat interesting post, so here it is[1] What I have in mind begins with refocusing on Silverlight capabilities and the application of those capabilities rather than the syntactic specifics . We do a great job drilling down in our  videos and the tutorials ,  and I don’t believe that is why people come to our presentations or Webcasts . To create a 45 or 60 minute presentation that grabs a programmer and lights up the imagination, I believe you need to start with some form of limiting discipline. The one that works for me is to grind down my idea until I can state it clearly in a single simple sentence.  The harder task is to then keep that single idea driving every aspect of the presentation. What you value is what you’ll deliver --- [1]  Almost none of this is  original and my thinking on this was most recently and positively influenced by two great presenters: Garr Reynolds and Scott Hanselman ) Posted Jul 02 2008, 08:32 PM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Presentations, Webcast, Community, Opinion