Ok – what about this Silverlight thing?
As you can see I concluded my "short story" blog post (previous post) saying that I'm at TechEd – and that is correct. I'll be at TechEd 2008 all this (June 2nd through June 6th ) week. I'll be presenting on Tuesday about Silverlight 2 so please come by and listen (3pm to 6pm EST in S210). If you are a Windows Forms (winforms) user and are interested in Silverlight – stop by also. If you have followed what DataGridView stuff – way till you see the Silverlight DataGrid. Hats off to Scott Morrison who has been driving that.
Moving from being a Program Manager for Windows Forms to Silverlight has really done one thing: Made me excited again about client technology! It seemed there was a point where Windows Forms was getting outdone by Ajax and html sites. Even though Windows Forms was about "smart clients" and Click Once is a really cool feature for deployment, I felt that application development strategies were slowly giving up on client apps. My involvement (read: job) with Silverlight and Silverlight 2's support for.Net programming are the two things that have me excited again about client development.
A few of the most geekest things that I love about Silverlight in probably the correct order:
· there are no hWnds to worry about.
· Displaying a rectangle doesn't involve an hWnd or me making GDI calls
· Animation
· Easy gradients
· Rewriting TextBox from scratch
· Learning way too much about text and glyphs
Well, I'm going to run through my slide deck one more time before my talk. I hope to be more active on my blog. I know it won't be a "blog entry a day" but more like "a blog entry every now and then"
-mark