DarksideCookie

Today has been a ridiculously long day, and it is far from over… Cab picked me up at 04:45 and headed towards Arlanda, where the plane headed skyways at 06:25. And after a couple of hours in Frankfurt, the trip went on to LAX. In the shuttle to the hotel, looked at the time on my phone, it said 12:22 (thank you WP7 for picking up the time zone change that fast). So even though I was feeling less that great, I still had almost a whole day to kill…

That whole day has so far gone to checking in at the hotel, registering at BUILD and getting a prepaid sim-card for my phone (after a semi long walk in warm weather, and a $36 cab ride)…

So far I have little information to give away. The program still only says things like “keynote”, “Big Picture” and “sessions”. So that will have to wait until tomorrow…sorry! But I really don’t know more than you.

There is a lot of speculation at the moment, but I can honestly say that the only information I can give you is that it is nice and warm, and that I can see the back of one of the Disneyland rides from my 9th floor balcony. Maybe I will have a bit more to say, or gossip about after the Swede meet up tonight, but I don’t know… Stay tuned!

Ok, so I have finally got myself settled in Stockholm (Sweden) and started my new job at Active Solution. It has started slow, but it is looking very promising after having been here a day and a half. It might even give me a bit more time to keep my dear blog active, which has unfortunately been a bit neglected during the whole move from Sweden.

One of the first things I am going to do for my new employer, is to go to the BUILD Windows conference in Anaheim, and blog and tweet as much of the information I get my hands on as possible…with my personal views included of course (not that they really asked for that)…

So I went to the BUILD website and registered myself, something that went very smooth. I guess that is to be expected. Whenever someone wants you to give them $1595 (or whatever it was), they generally remove any friction from the process.

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I really tried not to write this post. A lot of other Silverlight devs have already written it so I shouldn't, but I have had enough… I have finally got asked about the death of Silverlight so many times that is has pushed me over the edge…

Silverlight isn’t dead… It isn’t dying… It isn’t about to be killed…

How do I know this? Well, except for some of the information I am hearing from Microsoft about it, it doesn’t make sense… It makes no sense at all!

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Earlier today I got word that some of my sessions, that I had sent in as a part of the Open Call for MIX11, had gone past the initial round and are on the MIX11 website for voting. And the sessions that get the most votes gets to be presented at MIX11.

So this obviously means that I need a LOT of votes. And that means that I need you to vote on any of my sessions  that you find interesting. Or all of them if you just want to help me to get the possibility to present at MIX11…

The sessions are available here: http://live.visitmix.com/OpenCall/.

And what are my sessions? Well, I am glad you asked. They are…

Silverlight and Windows Azure - Tips from the Trenches
Join Chris Klug as he share his expertise in combining Windows Azure and Silverlight. This session will provide practical insights on using Silverlight with Windows Azure. It will include guidance on using Silverlight applications with Azure Web and Worker roles as well as approaches for using Windows Azure storage directly from your Silverlight app. This session will also cover the use of Windows Azure as a delivery mechanism for Windows Phone 7 push notifications and as a delivery mechanism for streaming media. Vote

From Phone Zero to Phone Hero in 60 minutes
Join Chris Klug & Chris Auld from Intergen as they build a real Windows Phone 7 app from scratch in 60 minutes. This is a hard core, dual data projector, coding marathon. Chris and Chris will build a Windows Phone 7 series application including Windows Azure hosted push notifications, a rich Silverlight UI and partner integration. You'll see how to take an idea from concept to the Windows Phone Marketplace in just an hour. In other words, not your general 'Hello World' application. Vote

MVVM - The Naked Truth
Model-View-ViewModel is the pattern of choice when writing Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 applications. It offers the developer a structured way to implement UI functionality and logic. It especially well with the mentioned technologies, as it uses built in features to enable a clean separation between form and function. During this session you will join Chris Klug, a Silverlight Solution Specialist from New Zealand, as he tells all about how you get started with MVVM. The goal is to get an understanding of why it is useful and how it can make your life simpler. And it will be presented in a naked form, no frameworks or helpers, enabling you to focus on the basic ins and outs of the pattern. Vote

Building Composite Silverlight Applications
Silverlight is a great platform for rich internet applications, but a lot of developers seem to forget that we can use many of our advanced desktop app approaches too. By adding a plug-in architecture we can make our apps easily extensible for future requirements. This session provides an introduction to plug-in approaches in Silverlight. It explores both PRISM and MEF as tools for implementing this pattern. You'll leave with the practical knowledge you need to add a plugin mechanism to your new and existing applications. Vote

The Phone Zero to Phone Hero will probably not be presented together with Christ Auld though as he probably won’t be able to go to MIX this year. But I will try and find a worthy replacement if that session were to get picked. And I really hope it is, cause it is a very entertaining session that is very far from your normal session. And also because it seems to polarize the crowd a lot. We have got feedback that ranges from more or less “the worst session ever attended” to “the best session ever attended”. Luckily, the good feedback seems to come from people who go to a lot of conferences and have a bit of experience, which is sort of required to grasp the information at the speed that it is presented…

That’s it for now. More coming soon… I hope… I have a little too much to do at the moment…

I continuously get questions regarding HTML5 and Silverlight. Especially after Microsoft’s somewhat brilliant comments at PDC. How is Silverlight going to survive now that HTML5 is coming? Why would you chose Silverlight over HTML5? Are you going to lose your job now that Silverlight is dying?

Well, I have finally decided to state my opinion  on my blog. It is obviously a biased opinion as I believe Silverlight to be a better choice in a lot of situations. So this is obviously a risky engagement, but I guess I will just have to endure the flaming I am going to get from a lot of people. Even a lot of people close to me.

But before I go too far, I do want to mention that we are living/working in an ever changing world. My opinions regarding the different technologies will probably change over time as the world changes. But this is my current view of the situation…

So…here we go…let the rant begin!

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Next Wednesday, October 20th, I will be presenting at the .NET user group here in Wellington again. This time the talk is all about smooth streaming (same talk as I presented at TechEd NZ). It covers everything from encoding your media, to publishing it on your server and of course also how to consume it from Silverlight. It will also be covering how to get your first live smooth streaming event going.

The talk does, as you can see, cover a wide array of things that has to do with smooth streaming. And to make it even broader, I will show off the Rough Cut Editor (an open source rough video editing tool built in Silverlight). And it would of course not be complete with out touching the cloud. So to finish it off, I will show you how you can deliver smooth streaming media out of Azure blob storage. A very cost effective and good way to share your media.

So if you are in Wellington, or close by, feel free to drop by if it sounds interesting. More information is available here: http://www.dot.net.nz/UserGroupPages/WellingtonNET.aspx

As you probably know, TechEd US has just passed. I didn’t get to go (like always), but I did get to make my mark on the conference. I got to build one of the apps that Microsoft demoed on stage. I have actually built a bunch of demo apps for Microsoft and their conferences the last year. At some point, I will actually try to find them at some point a post some videos of them here. But they involve a CRM demo with a phone company, a SharePoint demo with a racing team and some other bits and pieces. Anyhow…this year my demo was a Word add-in, and my personal opinion about this project, before it got started, was that it sucked. I I’m not very fond of building Word add-ins as you might have guessed.

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That is the name of a blog post I have written for Intergen’s blog. And since there is a competition going at the office about who can get the most hits on their post, I would love it if you could head over there and take a look at it. It isn’t as technical as I normally write, but should still give some developers a few things to think about… So head over there and take a look - http://www.intergen.co.nz/blog/chris-klug/dates/2010/3/software-development-action-hero-style/

And yeah…don’t forget to vote… if you like it that is…

First off, I need to say that these are my personal thoughts. They might contain erroneous information, they might be way off mark and they might be missing out on a lot of things, but this is what I am thinking of the platform at the moment. I also have to mention that however this post will sound, I have VERY high hopes for the phone, and I think that it will be very successful. One should also remember that it is not yet released so a lot can happen, and also that it is the first release of a whole new thing…

Please read the whole thing, don’t just take out small parts of the post. I will try to put down as much of my thoughts as I can in this post, and if you just read parts of it, you will probably get a somewhat distorted view…

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I just wanted to explain why my blog has been completely quiet for a pretty long time until tonight. Me and my other half har just migrated from Stockholm (Sweden) to Wellington (New Zealand). I’ve started working at Intergen as a developer, which means that I get to be in the real world instead of just teaching like I have for the lest 2 years. So the move has taken up a lot of my time, and then when I got here, it  took about a month to get an apartment and the internet connection. So…that’s the reason…

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