I’m on the train on my way home from speaking at the TechDays conference in Västerås, Sweden. Unfortunately my talk about Xaml turned into a spiraling tornado of crap. And you can quote me on that. I guess that trying to prepare a talk at a developer conference at the same time as you are working fulltime, packing up your life for a move around the world as well as trying to focus on a whole different tech area (Prism 2) is not a good solution. It turned out to be a pretty mediocre or even sucky presentation lacking structure. So for all of you who attended by talk, I’m really sorry! I know I shouldn’t come up with excuses, I blew it. But that’s the way it goes sometime…
Otherwise I found TechDays to be interesting. Unfortunately I will not be able to attend the second day as I have to work. But there were a lot of interesting sessions both today and tomorrow. But since I was poorly prepared, I decided to only attend one session, Scott Galloways talk about ASP.NET 4.0. It was interesting to see. Allthough there are things in the next version that I don’t really appreciate, I do understand that they are there to make life simpler for certain developers.
I also had an interesting talk with Fredrik Normén about my CommandManager implementation in comparison to a framework he has built. His framework does look nice, allthough I haven’t seen too much of it. But it does make a move away from the CommandManager and the way that WPF is doing things and I prefer keeping it in line with what WPF is doing. But I would recomment that you check out his blog.
But before I end my little entry I just wanna mention something that came to my attention while preparing my talk (or at least claiming to). A while back I did a screencast for Microsoft called “Introduktion till Xaml”, which is swedish for “introduction to xaml”. It was uploaded about a month ago to the swedish part of Channel9 by Robert Folkesson. And in my preparation, I’ll keep saying that until I believe I actually did prepare as much as I should have, I took a look at the download stats for that screencast. Apparently Xaml is hot. It had over 20.000 downloads, compared to the fact that most of the other videos up there has about 6.000 downloads. So I guess Silverlight and WPF is on the move…Cool!
I have also made a small screencast on Silverlight and MVVM which is hopefully going to go up on Channel9 soon. Unfortunately it, as well as the Xaml intro, is in swedish only. Which is actually sad since my blog is being continuosly read by people in over 50 different countries. So it should really have been in english, but that’s life. I might change in to doing my screencasts in english now that I’m migrating to New Zealand.