ttrashh

I wonder how the apps are going to play out. XNA is used for the games and there are plenty of shops out there creating for xbox. It looks like porting existing XNA games to the phone will be fairly straightforward. I'm expecting Windows Phone 7 to be a big player in handheld gaming because of XNA/Xbox.

I'm primarily a .Net/Silverlight dev myself so I'm biased but the core development experience is better than Apple/Google IMHO. They do need to get off their asses and release more controls (like the pivot) or they aren't going to have standardized UI across apps.

I'm using Visual Studio unit tests (mstest) to test my viewmodels. Nunit would work too. I use model-view-viewmodel so I have very little (or no) code in the codebehind. If you want to take testing further look at the silverlight unit test framework in the silverlight toolkit. I haven't tried that but it seems to get updated with every version of the toolkit.

My experience with Silverlight has been different. I like it enough that I'm actively looking for a full time Silverlight job now.

-- HTML/CSS/JS cross browser issues are a huge problem. As a web dev I waste an INSANE amount of time dealing with them. Silverlight solves that issue (I've never seen the mac issues you spoke about though).

-- Javascript debugging is horrible. Firebug helps but it's not even close to using Visual Studio to step through a problem.

-- C# is a great language. I can use Ruby/Python/F# as well. The backend and the UI can both be developed in the same language.

-- It's a stateful environment. This one takes a mindset change but makes life so much easier than a stateless webapp. This one is huge IMHO.

-- XAML and the layout/databinding system are awesome. I don't need a phd in css and a pile of hacks to make a complex layout. Efficient and elegant layout are huge for productivity.

-- I like to unit test and it allows me to do model-view-viewmodel. Almost everything I write is testable and it feels elegant.

-- It's easy to make apps look good. The styling system is well done.

-- It's easy for ux challenged folks to make some decent looking animations and real ux guys can seriously impress. The animation system is awesome and Blend is a great tool for ux. The ux and animation support in Silverlight is something traditional webapps can't do.

Microsoft as a company deserves the bashing that it gets but it's developer division is top notch. Silverlight/WPF and the tooling to support it have a good lead on everyone else. I don't know that Silverlight will become a dominant player but I do think that people are underestimating windows phone. Silverlight/XNA are better than what Apple/Google are offering for mobile development. I also have a feeling that you'll see Silverlight on Android before long. Apple is going to be peering over there walls as Microsoft and Google pull away.

I think it's confusing speak for a query language using a rest model that returns data in various formats such as atom/json.

Fight Club. The Pursuit of Happiness.

One of the comments from the techcrunch post:

there is no hypocrisy here. We have an API that gives users 100% access to all their content on Posterous, including the original media that was uploaded, in it's full size.

This API can be found here: http://posterous.com/api/reading

There is nothing stopping people from writing Posterous exporters that go to other services. In fact, Wordpress released a Posterous importer a few months ago.

We support data portability. It's the user's content, not ours. It's our privilege to host it for our users, and we are working hard to be the best service out there.

Microsoft seems to be working on it. They are pushing design HARD for their devs. Silverlight and WPF were designed with design in mind. I went to Mix a couple years ago and half the sessions there dealt with design or user experience in some way.

Their hardware is not shabby either...zune, xbox 360 (well hardware quality aside), mice, keyboards.

Asp.Net MVC for web has everything you just mentioned. The real push is towards Silverlight for web apps.

Doesn't look free to me. Microsoft and Google don't require you to pay 99$ to watch their conference videos.

MySpace. They were ColdFusion but moved to Asp.Net for performance. They were running blue dragon as a hybrid for a while...not sure if they still are.

Yeah. Probably 5$ so he could say "I donated!".

Bingo.

> "On the one side, this rule should be good for quality. Cross-platform software toolkits have never ever produced top-notch native apps for Apple platforms. Not for the classic Mac OS, not for Mac OS X, and not for iPhone OS."

This is a silly thing to say. From what I've seen of MonoTouch the UI looks like the same Apple chrome to me. Unity seems like a good choice for gaming and most of the games look great.

I'm a .Net developer and this is based on light work with it a couple years ago so...

It wasn't great. Developing modules was confusing and overly complex. The documentation was horrible. The data access stack was plain stupid if you follow the "correct" way. It's written in VB.Net and many of the examples were in VB.Net. (the VB.Net thing was a big reason I didn't continue)

Anyone else notice Carbonite is a sponsor? I'm going to move to another backup solution.

I'd say you haven't looked then.

Silverlight is well done. It isn't a half-assed idea. The separation of xaml from viewmodel (using the MVVM pattern) is clean. You can unit test the shit out of everything. The commanding system and data binding implementation is beyond any other tech I've seen. They took the best parts of web dev and desktop client dev and made it work well. Combine that with the .Net framework and the fact that you can develop in a variety of languages and you have a winner. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company but their developer division is sharp. The tools (Visual Studio and Blend) are great too.

I'd say they definitely followed here but to say they created an inferior product is harsh. The Zune UI is actually better than the iPod imho. That's why they took it for Windows Phone Series 7. The Zune software is FAR better than iTunes...I won't even add imho to that one.

Ha. Using the tool for google.com doesnt work.

Facebook is getting 320 Billion page views a month worldwide...

1. Raising Arizona

2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

3. 12 Monkeys

Slices.

I'm not sure when you last used IE but IE8 is as good as the others listed. Their marketing department can suck my ass though.

This guy happens to be a damn good software engineer. He shouldn't have to recompile Firefox to use it. His choice in typography and blog design sucks ass though.

eatingwords.com papersubmit.com (never finished it...anyone with drupal experience who wants to finish let me know) weheartthings.com

Second Life... Linden Scripting Language gets compiled down to bytecode now, and you can use other .Net languages.

Where do you live? I'll hire you ;)

Very impressive. I tried a word doc and a web page...nice UI.

I'm curious about the architecture. Did you use Model View ViewModel?

How are you converting the word docs? Do you convert every type of resource to an image?

I had very little time since my wife just had a baby, she wanted something to do besides blogging while she is home, and I wanted to learn a bit about drupal so...

http://papersubmit.com

It's not finished but it's close. My wife will edit the content and post it. I figure it'll be a way to get some original content pretty easily. Maybe a few flyers at the local colleges. Anyone have any suggestions for getting some inbound links?

I'm an asp.net developer by day...I gotta say drupal is very nice. You can do a lot quickly with CCK + Views.