No joke, this is an actual title of a presentation taking place today at the Enterprise Data World conference:
You’ve got to hand it to presenter Jim Goetsch: there’s no doubt as to what his session is all about.
Karen “DataChick” Lopez took a photo at the session and threw in a Ken doll for surreal good measure:
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Microsoft’s MIX conference, a gathering for web, mobile and UI-focused developers and designers, takes place next week in Las Vegas, from the 12th through 14th. You can expect to hear announcements and see sessions about Microsoft’s web and mobile technologies, from Internet Explorer to Silverlight to Windows Phone and more at this event. If you’re going to be there, we’d love to catch up with you!
If you can’t make it, there’s no reason for you to miss out on the keynotes and sessions, because you’ll be able to catch them online:
Creative Commons photo by i_yudai. Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
By now, you’ve probably read the article titled Standards-Based Web, Plug-ins and Silverlight, which was written by three heavy-hitters within Microsoft: Walid Abu-Hadba (he runs Microsoft’s Developer & Platform Evangelism group), Scott “The Gu” Guthrie (Corporate VP of the .NET Developer Platform) and S. “Soma” Somasegar (Senior VP of the Developer Division). In the article, they talk about HTML5, Silverlight, and where they see both fit in the grand scheme of things. Their timing is intentional: the MIX conference is next week, and we’ll be doing a lot of talking about Silverlight and HTML5, and people have been puzzling over Microsoft’s stance on the two.
(If you haven’t read the article yet, go read it now, then feel free to come back here.)
In the end, what it all means is that you, the developer, have options:
If that message sounds familiar, it’s probably because you saw an amusing little video I made last year, titled HTML5 and RIAs: Friends with Benefits…
(Really, I need to make more amusing little videos. It’s fun.)
In their commentary on Standards-Based Web, Plug-ins and Silverlight, InfoQ point to some market research from Telerik (if you’re not familiar with development in the Microsoft sphere, they’re a vendor of components for .NET programmers) in which they confirmed that:
Whatever you love, we’ve got you covered with a commitment to both HTML5 and Silverlight.
Creative Commons photo by Friends of San Jacinto. Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
The “It’s Your Call” philosophy extends to Windows Phone 7. Silverlight shines on the Phone as a way to build apps with standard controls and user interfaces, but we’ve also thrown in XNA for games and graphics-intensive apps as well. Pick the framework that works best for building your app and run with it!
And yes, we’re going to have the mobile web covered with IE9 for WP7. Joe Belfiore demoed it at Mobile World Conference in Barcelona back in February. It does HTML5 and it’s got the hardware acceleration goodness that its desktop counterpart has, too.
Creative Commons photo by Samantha Marx. Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
As is the tradition, there are always some interesting announcements at MIX, and you may be pleased at the options you’ll soon have. Keep an eye on the conference through this blog to find out what else is your call!
I never met Ryland Sanders in person, just online. Still, I feel that his passing should be noted because a) he often made me laugh, and b) he often made the internet laugh with his site, Says-It, and the many sign/sticker/seal generators he created for that site, including the ever-popular Church Sign Generator.
He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for some time, and as a result died this weekend – twice. Once in the ambulance, and after being revived, for the second and final time in hospice. True to Ryland form, his last words were written in a note to his family: “WTF?” He was the same age as me: 43.
In his honour, here’s a “Church Sign War” purportedly between a Catholic church and a Presbyterian one. It was created with his Church Sign Generator, got forwarded like mad in a zillion emails and caused such controversy that Snopes had to step in and debunk it:
Requiescat in pace, Ryland.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Charcuteroulette is a site that displays random charcuterie. What’s not to like?
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
For today only (Tuesday, April 5th, 2011), O’Reilly’s making all their “Head First” books in ebook form available for half price. Here’s just a taste of the Head First collection and what today’s discounted prices look like:
I like O’Reilly’s Head First books. The brainchild of the exceptionally creative team of Bert Bates and Kathy “Creating Passionate Users” Sierra, the series presents its material in an oddball, joke-filled, exercise-driven, self-learning-focused visually engaging manner, and unlike many other books, Head First books don’t induce sleep.
If you’d like to get some Head First books at half price, you have to head to O’Reilly’s online store and do it today, and you have to use the discount code DDHDD when you check out.
All enterprise and no games makes Jack (or Jill) a dull developer, and lucky for you, we’ve got a brand new game dev tutorial over at App Hub. It’s your chance to build a nifty little game called Shooter from start to finish and learn the XNA game development framework (which targets Windows, Xbox 360 and Windows Phone) and game programming techniques along the way!
You can download the Shooter project and take it apart to see how it works, and you can also follow along with the tutorial and videos, which are broken into three parts:
Download the Windows Phone Developer Tools, go visit the Game Development Tutorial, and start making some games!