Just found out about this little tool that seemed interesting to me: Kaxaml, a lightweight xamlpad alike tool. Apparently it's also free which is always a nice thing.

I found out about this tool by navigating around on the site of Blendables, a vendor of WPF controls. And I got to know about this particular site thanks to Gill.

Grz, Kris.

Just found out about this site about security: Hellosecureworld. Take a look at it. It's in Silverlight (always a good reason to check something out) and it has comics (another good reason). What are you waiting for: click the link!

Grz, Kris.

Wow, this is a cool application. Be sure to check it out and have Silverlight installed. Funny thing for me is that I worked in a team in 2001 that was also into adding/upgrading a software tool for patient handling in hospitals. If we only had the UI possibilities of Silverlight/WPF in those days to work out everything...

Personally, I foresee much more of these kind of applications with these great technologies.

Grz, Kris.

Tim Sneath, a well known evangelist of Microsoft was in Belgium yesterday. I got invited for a meet and greet with him by Microsoft Belgium. The first part was technical, Tim talked about Silverlight and we had the opportunity to ask questions. It was very interesting for me. The other fun side about it was that I got to know new people as well. Something I enjoy a lot since I'm quite a social person.

Afterwards we went with the group to a restaurant and enjoyed a very tasty meal in good company.

Here are some pictures that were taken:

Grz, Kris.

It seems Microsoft recently put up a couple of new sites that might be of interest to you:

• A revamped site dedicated to the Expression family: There's lot to find already, tutorials, starter kits, forums, ... While the Expression family's mostly targeted towards designers I also used Expression Web in the past and currently am taking my first steps in Blend 2.5 preview to get to know Silverlight 2 a bit better.
• TaskMarket: a new place for freelancers to find each other for short term assignments.
  

Grz, Kris.

I just found out about this one: Silverlight Essential Training. Extra video material for free. Man, I really need a couple of weeks off soon to dive into the cool stuff.

Grz, Kris.

Just noticed this one on the blog of Brad Abrams: Silverlight 2 Developer Poster. Always nice to have such very visual representation of the possibilities of a new technology.

Grz, Kris.

It's MIX and that always means great stuff coming to web developers. This year it's the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 and Silverlight 2. Great times are ahead of us.

Grz, Kris.

Scott Guthrie has written an exhaustive series of articles of the upcoming Silverlight 2. I guess this is the version the majority of developers is waiting for. Take a look here to find out about what's coming to you. I'll also be looking at it when I get back home from work this evening.

Grz, Kris.

I noticed on Gill's blog that there's an interesting contest.

Grz, Kris.

Actually I wasn't expecting this one for a couple of weeks but I just read on the blog of Scott Guthrie that they just released it.

Something else I'm waiting for is Visual Source Safe for Visual Studio 2008 so I can install it locally on my new dev machine. Unfortunately it's been delayed for a couple of weeks.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday evening I attended an MSDN event in Utopolis Mechelen dedicated to Silverlight. Not a really deep dive technical session and you could tell by seeing quite a lot of designer in the audience as well. Tom Mertens did a little keynote about the different versions of Expression Studio and where to locate  and Gill Cleeren presented the session. It was very interesting though not very technical but a nice showcase of what's possible with it and which products one can use to visually create stunning RIAs (Rich Interactive Applications).

Afterwards it was a nice gathering in the Movie Café. Nice because I had the chance to see some familiar faces that I haven't seen in years. Afterwards several people hooked up together to get something to eat in La Fleche. They served quite a good lasagne. A very nice evening: some tech stuff, good food, nice company to talk with.

Grz, Kris.

I was just working on my new macBook pro reading my blog news when I stumbled upon this news: Popfly beta by Somasegar. I had the Silverlight plugin already installed on my Windows Vista/IE7 but wanted to try it out on Mac OSX too. I tested with both Safari and Firefox and both worked very smoothly. Nice to see that Microsoft also provides their plugins for other OS.

Talking about Silverlight, did you know that on October 31st my friend Gill Cleeren will be presenting the next MSDN evening about Silverlight? If you didn't register yet you'd better hurry. I already played with some of the quickstarts but hope to start developing with Silverlight soon.

Also I obtained a copy of NDepend. I haven't played with it but after my next deadline, coming wednesday, I'm planning to let it loose on the code we produced during our last SCRUM iteration.

Grz, Kris.

One of the nice things when you gather with a bunch of tech minded people like yourself (Microsoft VIP Community Offsite 2007) is that you get to know urls to interesting tech stuff. Apparently already very known, except by me are the MSDN UK nuggets. Some small, interesting videos that highlight a specific topic in 10-15 minutes. I sure do like the idea as most webcasts are too long or they want to cover as much as possible in an as short as possible time span with as endresult that nobody gets the message.

Another one that I found related to that, and one that seems very new so most of my tech savvy friends don't know about it untill when they read my blog is this Nibbles site. It seems to only have some tutorials at the moment, especially focussed on Blend and Silverlight/WPF. As I'm keen on learning both I'll sure be checking this one out.

Grz, Kris.

One of my personal favorite channels, besides those on tv of course, is Channel 9: a dedicated media platform that developers that work with Microsoft technology just must have in their favorites.

This morning I noticed, probably because MIX is busy (where my buddy Gill Cleeren is currenlty following all those interesting sessions), that there's a lot of new material covering Silverlight:

• Scott Guthrie: Silverlight and the Cross-Platform CLR
• Silverlight Event Handling with JavaScript
• Using AJAX to Dynamically Update Silverlight Content
• Using Silverlight Brushes for Color, Gradient and Video
• Animating Raster Art for Silverlight with Expression Blend
• Adding Ink Support to a Silverlight-based Application
• Delivering Parameterized Silverlight Content with ASP.NET
• Publishing Media Content to Silverlight Streaming Services
• Using Expression Blend to Control Silverlight Media Playback
• ...

Grz, Kris.

The Silverlight forums, where I'll also be playing a moderation role, just went live. Go check them out! Of course there's not only the forums but also a getting started part, a learn section where already several videos are available. Whitepapers and quickstarts are also available.

Grz, Kris.

Somasegar blogged about it. Finally the new name of WPF/e is known and it's Silverlight. I still have to get used to the new name but think it's better this way because it makes it easier to understand for less technical people that it was little to do with WPF. Microsofts hope is of course that it'll be a Flash killer but they have quite some downloads to go. But on the other hand I hope more games will be coming out soon like these: WPF/e games. Of course it'll be Silverlight games then.

You can also see a small video about it on10.

Grz, Kris.