It may be the dog days of summer, but things are hopping here at Wintellect. We just finished another successful Devscovery Redmond, where attendees soaked in lots of Silverlight love and also made a run on the Microsoft company store. If you’ve never attended a Devscovery in Redmond, it’s worth the price of admission just to shop in the company store at employee prices. A big thanks to Microsoft for hosting Devscovery on campus and making all the Wintellect and Infragistics folks and the attendees feel right at home.
We see many of the same faces each year at Devscovery, and this year was no exception. Long-time Devscovery devotee George Handlin made the trip to the west coast and brought along his pal Mik. I think Mik is the first moose (?) to ever attend Devscovery, but I’m not sure. We didn’t charge Mik admission. Animals are free at Devscovery.
I got tickled during a 1-on-1 (special sessions we do at Devscovery in which attendees schedule 1-on-1 time with the speakers) from one of our Russian attendees. She shared with me that “both of my sons are developers. One works for Microsoft. The other programs Linux. We call him our little communist.” It was all I could do to not bust out laughing.
Silverlight 2 successfully withstood the Beijing Olympics and is well on the road to RTM. I’m not at liberty to divulge dates, but Microsoft has publicly said that Silverlight 2 will ship this year, and I’m confident that they’ll make it. Most of my work these days involves Silverlight, and I can honestly say it’s been a long time since I’ve had this much fun as a developer. One of the things I’ve been doing is writing new code samples and porting some of my Silverlight 1.0 samples to Silverlight 2. The latest port (pictured below) is my Silverlight Magnifier sample. You can download a version written against Beta 2 here. Just click the left mouse button over the page to display the magnifying glass and drag the mouse to move the glass. Pretty cool effect, especially given that it’s done without WPF’s handy VisualBrush. This sample and others like it will be featured in my next Wicked Code column in MSDN Magazine.
I have a lot of trips coming up, including one to the PDC in October, where I’ll be doing a precon on Silverlight 2 on Sunday, Oct. 26. If you come to L.A. for the PDC, I’d love to see you at the precon. I have some fun stuff to show and you never know what surprises may await you. It’s Halloween week, and we might be able to talk Richter into wearing a cute ballerina costume. He modeled a bikini for us at this year’s company retreat and it was…well…memorable. Male software developers generally don’t look very good in bikinis, but Jeffrey is exceptional in more ways than one.