www.nickhodge.com

After Neil Finn, JD comes Nas. She is smart and really funny.

She’s star­ted her blog, Flickr’ng and met her hero all in the same week. Not to men­tion some­thing with fish. Here she is choos­ing lunch, or find­ing Nemo. Or prob­ably both.

WPF and Sil­ver­light for Design­ers. Remov­ing the “bloke-i-ness” of Sil­ver­light and mak­ing it real.  Excel­lent topic Nas.  I am watching!

1. Add more micro­formats to this blog (John All­sopp)
2. Sil­ver­light myself up. Maybe not to this extent, how­ever.
3. Become Mr Pop­fly Aus­tralia, and do more demos
4. Thanks to 2m20s Philip Beadle, dot­Net­Nuke is on the list, too

Rea­dify have a 3 day train­ing course to learn Sil­ver­light.

On my TBD list for 2007. Since mossyb­log refuses to show me his l33t sk1llz.

Notice the key­board and t-shirt. In the above photo he’s in Orcas doing some piece of Sil­ver­light. On the screen in the back­ground are a whole bunch of fig­ures that is enthralling every­one else in the internal meeting.

I’ve been dog-fooding (that is, intern­ally test­ing) Win­dows Live­Writer — for cre­at­ing edit­ing and post­ing to my three Blogs. Install, and it just works.

Tim Heuer’s Flickr4Writer plu­gin is a must-have. A major time saver.

There are many pos­it­ive stor­ies about Live­Writer, this how­ever James Clarke’s takes the cake: Jet­Fuel: Sil­ver­light plu­gin for Live­Writer.  Some­thing else to play with!

Watch the video here of Frank Arrigo and Monique Eagles here. Yes, you will need to install Silverlight.

This is my first exper­i­ment with Sil­ver­light and the Microsoft Expres­sion set of tools. Using the inbuilt play­ers in Media Encoder saved many days/hours of hand cod­ing; yet I am sure there is more in there that will tickle out over com­ing weeks.

NOTE: Sil­ver­light 1.1 is alpha-release!

Work­flow (all on Vista Ultimate):

• Edited foot­age in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0
• Export Sequence from Premiere Pro using Adobe Media Encoder 960×720 WMV9/WMA9, very light compression.
• Import into Microsoft Expres­sion Media Encoder (May preview)
• Export foot­age as VC-1 Web Server High Speed (using a nor­mal web server). This set­ting is 640×480. Obvi­ously, I could com­press this more.
• Edit the Default.html to cor­rectly ref­er­ence EmePlayer.js (note: this got me for an hour. Linux web serv­ers are case-sensitive, and the Default.html points to emeplayer.js. 404! Bug reported)
• FTP files to dir­ect­ory onto nickhodge.com (could have used Expres­sion Web, but I was debug­ging the prob­lem with upper/lower case file nam­ing above)

Thoughts? Com­ments?  I only have Sil­ver­light 1.1 alpha installed. I’ve tested in Win­dows IE/FireFox and MacOS X 10.4 Safari/Firefox. The Mac’s audio might be out-of-sync. Again, this is reported.

Microsoft’s John Lam and Jim Hugunin go large with the DLR at MIX07. Here are my notes whilst listen­ing and watch­ing the presentation:

What to expect: a Mac, Text­Mate, Javas­cript, Python, Ruby, Safari and Silverlight.  Text­Mate equals text edit­ing. Sil­ver­light is not bin­ary, its just XML and text. You can break it apart and look at the gooey­ness inside. And some friendly Microsoft people ban­ter­ing about Ruby vs Python.

And DLR is going Open Source, like Iron­Py­thon.

What strikes me the most is that the lan­guage that people are com­fort­able with: Javas­cript, Python, Ruby, C# — you can code your cli­ent side in the same lan­guage as server side.

Also, hav­ing Ruby instan­ti­ate Javas­cript and call func­tions. Wow. With a C# object doing UI. Tech­nor­ati via XML through Yahoo!Pipes to JSON to Sil­ver­light on a Mac. Retriev­ing from the JSON object deseri­al­ised and quer­ied via LINQ.

Let alone doing Basic, with REM and all.

In their only Power­point slide, Jim details the per­form­ance gains of Iron­Py­thon on the CLR engine. I won­der if the perf gains are going to match to Ruby, too? Is the DLR/CLR going to be the saviour of the scal­ing bumps of Ruby?

Parts of the DLR (from Jim Hugunin at end of video):

1. Dynamic type sys­tem, shared object system
2. Shared host­ing API; host one, get all of ‘em. ruby bits are com­ing together now.
3. Bunch of help­ers for com­piler writers, so dynamic lan­guage runs fast

Ques­tion: can use DLR inside con­sole, ASP.NET?

Answer: yes, you can use DLR any­where you are using .NET. More con­strained in Sil­ver­light, due to the sandbox.

Ques­tion: is it com­pil­ing an assembly, or execut­ing script

Answer: Dynamic meth­ods in .NET 2.0, for code gen­er­a­tion lazily; and is a dynamic method. Only held whilst there is a live ref­er­ence. ASP.NET scen­arios with stress test not held onto. Not using method rental; System.Reflection.EmitDynamicMethod

Ques­tion: JScript.NET vs. new Dynamic Lan­guage Jscript?

Answer: Developer want lan­guage pur­ity, not tight integ­ra­tion and fol­low­ing .NET. So fol­low the ECMA 3.0 spec. That’s Javas­cript. vs. Ruby “freelove” spe­cific­a­tion of Ruby is its imple­ment­a­tion, not a spe­cific­a­tion document.

Microsoft has changed, big time. My head is spinning.

Keep­ing secrets is tough. Hear­ing about the Dynamic Lan­guage Runtime (DLR) from John Lam in Feb­ru­ary this year was one of those secrets that kept well.

John Udell inter­viewed John Lam, and has a back­grounder here. Some in the Ruby com­munity didn’t see this com­ing.

Jim Hugunin has a post­ing on the new DLR, open source nature of the DLR on his “Think­ing Dynam­ic­ally” blog.

In addi­tion to the Sil­ver­light release, we’ve also made the full source code for both Iron­Py­thon and all of the new DLR plat­form code avail­able on code­plex under the BSD-style Microsoft Per­missive License. All of that code can be down­loaded today as part of the Iron­Py­thon pro­ject at codeplex.com/ironpython.

The real­ity of being able to debug Ruby in a client-side UI frame­work on Safari on a Mac using Microsoft Sil­ver­light tickles me, and oth­ers, greatly.

Blog from the key­note today, with all the ups-and-downs. Good to see I am not the only one who craves demos and has sub­vers­ive thoughts in the midst of formal sessions.

Ryan Stew­art has com­ments, and fur­ther links. The DLR adds 400K (what the!) to the Sil­ver­light down­load. Wow.

zdnet has a sort of tran­script of the Q&A that occured with Mike Arring­ton, Ray Ozzie and Scottgu.

Does Microsoft get Web 2.0? Yes.

Dumb Video is hard. You spend all your time edit­ing, fix­ing audio, encod­ing and uploading.

Smart Video is going to be easy with this Microsoft Sil­ver­light stuff. URLs, chapters, and deeper sub-tagging. All these ideas are flow­ing through my mind from this con­ver­sa­tion from Uncle Dave, the Life Kludger.

Ima­gine a can­vas of videos and pod­casts. Zoom into one, and see the “sub-tags” or links to other videos, or gen­eral searches. Sort of a doing what HTML does for text for other, non-textual content.

Time to learn some new stuff.

Well, it’s not quite a nor­mal Monday. Today is the first day of NAB2007, Las Vegas in the US.

Apple has new soft­ware toys. Shame I don’t do pro­duc­tion on a Mac.

Adobe has pre-release Premiere Pro and AfterEf­fects CS3 to help you use up spare bandwidth.

And Microsoft has announced some­thing new called Sil­ver­light! Well, actu­ally it’s that strangely named WPF/e with a name that actu­ally works.

Addi­tional (6:30pm)

• Microsoft Sil­ver­light demo video on10.net
• Tim Sneath on Silverlight
• Offi­cial Microsoft Sil­ver­light site
• The story behind WPF/E’s Javas­cript “aghost.js“  Ag == Silver.