Back to blogging - my book and other news…

I have been inconspicuously absent on blogosphere for a while now. For my handful readers – I hope you missed me :-). I am back to blogging and hope to put out some more interesting stuff for you guys in the coming weeks.

First for exciting news. We are close, very close to finishing up Silverlight 2. The product team just made the first release candidate available, and you can download it here. You can read more about the release in Scott Guthrie’s blog post here.

We also just announced the first service pack to Expression Encoder 2. Video is very important to my work, and there are some tremendous changes to be included in the SP. H.264/AAC output – finally !!!. Read more about it in Ben’s blog post here and James’ post here.

I have also been busy finishing my book on Silverlight 2, that I have been coauthoring with my teammate Rob Cameron. You can pre-order the book here. We are in the final phases of editing, but APress is also planning to put out an e-book version in their Alpha book program that allows you to pre-purchase the book and progressively read chapters as they are being edited. You can find more details at the APress web site. Rob and I are really excited about the book, and for those of you who decide to give it a try, we hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it. It was hard writing a book targeting the RTM version of a technology that was still being built while we wrote. But we are pretty proud of the end product, and if you are planning to work with Silverlight 2, we are confident you will find the book useful.

Until the next post…