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• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Fan Mail

  When you work in public, and you invite people to tell you what they think, they will. It often isn’t pretty, but you better listen up. My previous posting elicited an email (name withheld since it was an email and not a public comment) quoted here in full You're joking, I trust? You've been doing nothing but apologizing for crappy work since we began working with Silverlight last summer. Your job is important to the success of Silverlight. You need to be replaced with someone who's willing to spend the time required to produce quality work. NO MORE LAME EXCUSES. Clearly this is one frustrated and unhappy customer. The key question is why? What cultural or interpersonal differences in the way that I look at things would cause her to think that I’ve been apologizing for 11 months? (Setting aside the question of whether I’ve been doing “crappy work? ”) Please do not reply with how much you disagree with her… your kind words are much appreciated, but have been expressed elsewhere. The last thing I want to do is start a debate about her opinion. The point of this blog post is not about the quality of my work , it is about how to explore new ways of doing things without confusing people or making them angry Experimenting In Public I love my job. One of the things I love about it, is that it is not static. In my experience, there are two kinds of people in the world (one kind thinks there are two kinds of people in the world, the other kind doesn’t). One kind likes to get really god at what they do and keep doing it. The other kind, like me, likes to keep changing and evolving and trying new things. We love a blank sheet of paper; we are inspired by reinvention. The post this woman was responding to was about taking the risk of setting aside 15 years of relatively successful presentations and trying a new approach, one that I think will better serve the Silverlight developer, one that is far riskier, far more work, far less certain and far more exciting. Most important, an approach that is not guaranteed to work but if it does, I believe it will make me a much more interesting presenter with much more to offer. That is the proposition. Terror does not create innovation There is a culture in some parts of Microsoft; perhaps some parts of the entire industry, in which you must never show fear, never show any weakness, never show anything but total confidence. I remember this at Ziff/AT&T we would have meetings and the junior staff was terrified of asking... Posted Jun 26 2008, 08:35 PM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Presentations, Webcast, Opinion

• Presentations 2.0

  Today I had the pleasure (and technical glitch frustration) of delivering the first in a new series of webcasts. I’m trying a number of new things in response to changes I’ve observed in the last few years, 1. I think the days of “here’s how you accomplish this” presentations are drawing to a close.” We’re providing much more of that through our “ How Do I ” videos and tutorials , and the documentation is getting much better, the community support is getting much better, and there is a huge library of books that come out much earlier in the life-cycle. 2. The Internet has changed presenting just as it has changed many other things, and in this case, mostly for the better. Standards are higher, and both sides of the many to many relationship have grown enormously. 3. The material is more complex and there is a much larger pool of potentially interesting material. The need for “how” is being dwarfed by the need for “why” and “what is most important” 4. People are finally fed up with Death By Powerpoint. So, I found myself doing webcasts (and to some degree presentations) that were really un-edited How Do I videos and that was not a good thing. Live TV has its amusing moments, but not when you’re the guy who just lost his place in the script when the klieg lights went out. Sitting on the beach reading PresentationZen I became reinvigorated by the possibilities, and turned my ideas about presenting, inside-out in a rush of euphoria. The idea would be to start fresh; to marry three ideas at once: * Better, More Interesting, Presentations that Tell A Story, with a focus on what and why rather than how * Present them to a virtual audience through web casts and perfect and hone them for live presentation as my understanding evolves alongside Silverlight * A series of Presentations on Programming Silverlight with Blend and Visual Studio Well… it is a work in progress. I spent a few days working on my first presentation, but after all, this is material I know cold. Then yesterday, I really got down to the business of creating the presentation and practicing and timing it. But, it was worth it. Because I practiced, when it was time to do the presentation, my software failed, the audio failed, PowerPoint failed, I couldn’t log in, one of the videos that I had tried twice successfully wouldn’t run and the images that I carefully crafted looked terrible because I forgot to adjust the color settings. If you want something good, you just have to put in the time. Rome Wasn... Posted Jun 26 2008, 08:09 PM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Presentations, Webcast, Opinion, What To Expect

• Don’t Believe Anything I Say

  That is, don’t believe anything I say when you ask me about Silverlight vs. some other technology such as… well the one people keep asking about is Flash (or Flex). Here’s why. 1. Once a person has a stake in a product that person is physically incapable of having an objective opinion . In my experience that is a fact of life no matter how honest, reputable, sincere or incorruptible the person. Set aside cigarette scientists and those who work for (your pick: nuclear power companies, pharmaceuticals, etc. etc.) – when a company is feeding your children you cannot be objective about their product 2. There is more than one way to have a stake in a company, and perhaps the biggest is “sunk cost” and “ cognitive dissonance ” – in short, no one likes to (a) think they made the wrong choice (b) think the investment they’ve made in learning a technology may have been wasted or (c) wants to “start over.” So moving a .NET programmer from ASP.NET to Silverlight takes less force per unit of time than moving a Flash programmer. 3. There is no objective standpoint . No one is standing on a planetoid [1] objectively assessing Silverlight against any other product, nor could they. Every assessment you read, from within Microsoft, Adobe, or from the Media is written by a person who brings their [2] own history, agenda, bias, etc. 4. There are not objective criteria . Even if you could be objective, what criteria would you use? Each company has its own needs, not only for a specific project but also in terms of the staff and budget available. You don’t fight the next project with the team you want, you fight it with the team you have. Oops. A Rumsfield moment. Okay, I’ll say this: I’m may not be the programmer I want to be, but I’m the only programmer I have, and I come to my work with two decades of experience, working in CPM, RSTS, DOS, Unix and then Windows since 1990 and .NET since 2000. If I want to write an RIA, Silverlight is the natural fit; the fact that it is incredibly great , and that it is getting huge support from a very innovative group within an incredibly well funded company makes it a no-brainer – for me . Topic for a different column: The three most encouraging events in the Dev-Div in the past decade are, in my opinion, the creation and release of Xaml, the hiring of Ray Ozzie and the promotion of ScottGu to VP; all of these signal an innovativeness that is almost shocking in an organization of this size. Testimony My personal testimony to Silverlight is... Posted Jun 20 2008, 06:16 AM by Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Filed under: Opinion