The MossyBlog Times Archives 2007 - 2009 : Silverlight Team

The back-story about the brand new Silverlight Blog design & development.

scbarnes — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:09:48 GMT

I’ve just uploaded one of the first revisions of the new blog design to team.silverlighet.net. It’s a more focused design this time and one in which i had the luxury of spending more time on than the one before.

In this post I’ll walk through some of the experiences I had designing it and hopefully provide an insight into the amount of effort that went into making it happen.

The Design.

We’ve got a campaign in market with the tagline “See the light” and It’s pretty righteous in my opinion. We had originally commissioned the design to a vendor, but I simply felt that it was heading in a direction opposite to our brands. In light of this (heh), I objected and volunteered to have a go at designing the look and feel myself.

It was accepted the next day, it was also my own stupidity for volunteering as all of a sudden I went from being a peer reviewer to now being the “vendor”.

Bad move if you have more workload than you can handle already.

Suffice to say, I decided to bring back the fun to Expression and Silverlight as I that our brands have somewhat become boring – mainly because I live and breathe them daily.

I went in the direction of creativity as when I look at the Silverlight branding to me in conveys experience starts here. I then look at Expression’s brand and it’s about well, expressing yourself in a creative way but also in a serious manner.

I then looked at our new Silverlight 3 posters and thought, it’s about time we went back to grass roots, put the ubiquity and press politics aside and just focus on how much enjoyment customers are getting from building with both.

Note: Why I choose Green for 3 was that when you combine blue & yellow, it creates Green. Actually It doesn’t it’s a myth, it really creates black. I just thought it was my inside joke given there’s a lot of myths floating around about the products anyway – call it my wit working in over drive.

When you create a RIA or Branded Experience, you can’t but help inject creativity into the mix, and I simply wanted a design that echoed this.

The Development.

Given I’m also the vendor which translates now to being both designed and developer, I then had to come up with the goods of development.

I simply owe a deep amount of gratitude to both Graffiti CMS and jQuery as these two pieces are a C# blog developers dream.

I did hit a few “snags” though in the development lifecycle. The first being the fact that I needed more out of Graffiti CMS than it could offer out of the box, for example – I wanted to put a couple of extra fields in the comments and out of the box it’s not possible.

JavaScript Rox!

I then had to write my own bypass to the workflow, using LINQ to SQL, jQuery and JSON I went about my business.

Passing JSON back and forth between ASMX (Web Services) is somewhat a painful learning curve, but none the less I have it done now so chalk that up to lessons learnt.

jQuery is by far the most superior JS framework I’ve ever used – i’m talking 10+ years of hacking JavaScript to mind you. It’s simple, elegant and flows naturally and am glad we as a company are supporting it more and more.

Graffiti CMS

Graffiti CMS, is simple and elegant for what it does. It lets me get on with the templating UX and less on hand rolling the codebase from the web.config upwards. I’ve reached out to Telligent to see if i can pay for the source code as I’d like to also contribute back to this blog engine as it in my view has way more potential ahead of it.

The Blog.

Well you can now see the blog for yourself, live, there’s still a bit of rawness associated to it but that’s simply due to lack of content for now. As time marches on leading up to our launch, you’ll find a bounty of content soon enough to subscribe your RSS readers to.

Make a wish

A lot of or official announcements will channel through this blog, so part of the features was that I put in what I call the “Wishlist box”. The purpose of this box is to allow anyone whom wants to comment to aslo make a request to the Silverlight / Expression Teams. This data is feed monthly into our planning / review teams, so use it wisely.

Twitter.

I have a few ideas on how to integrate Twitter into the comments, I won’t say more as I want to execute first, tell second – suffice to say, I think it will be fun.

Comments.

The comments themselves use jQuery a lot, for me it was a case of wanting to do something different with blog commenting and so this is first part of the direction I’m heading. There’s more to come and as someone whom sprinkles my comments throughout the blogosphere, I have a few ideas on what I feel would be great if only blogs would change in xyz direction

example: The <textarea> grows as you type as well as there’s a bit of a paper with lines background. I wanted to encourage people to comment and also make them feel part of the blogs design as well.

Good Web Citizen.

Hanging out with some MVP’s recently convinced me that we at Microsoft need to take a more firm stand to becoming better web citizens. I decided to work the extra mile in this blog to ensure it validates with w3c and so if you run the site – as of the time of writing this – it will get the green validation tick.

The Bad.

I’m not happy about the navigation at the moment. I had to pull it today before launch, but it will be there soon. To me this is bad UX, but I hadn’t the energy to debate it further as it was either ship or hold up other campaign dependencies. Ship won.

No Silverlight.

This blog is a great case study for jQuery, but it’s quite weird I don’t use Silverlight right?

I have the Silverlight bits half done, I’ll be adding them soon but I wanted the degraded experience up first, see how that’s baked and then roll out the Silverlight additions.

I’ve adopted this approach for many years, where I always started out with the basic HTML/JS experience. If no disruptions have occurred that are noticeable, i then roll out the Flash experiences. As all to often, when the site failed or people complained, the plug-ins usually get thrown under the bus first where it could simply be bad fundamental design.

Instead, layered approach is cheaper and more focused. It also provides a good baseline to determine the “before” and “after” in terms of measuring success/failure of a given plug-in based experience.

I’ll be layering more and more as time permits, but I’m excited about this design and am quite proud of it.

Check out the blog and leave your feedback!

http://team.silverlight.net

The Silverlight Blog

scbarnes — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:40:16 GMT

Hi All,

I’ve just put The Official Silverlight Blog online tonight. This blog has been an absolute fun side project for me to personally design and develop. The reason being is it rekindled my hidden JavaScript & XHTML passion (with thanks to Damian Edwards for reminding me of the power of semantic markup) along with jQuery is an amazing framework to use.

I’ll let Brian Goldfarb explain the story behind the blog and it’s purpose, but overall I'm going to work hard to ensure it remains a good HTML citizen by doing my upmost best to keep the HTML compliant.

I’ve also kept some additional features off the blog for now, as I want to get more posts inside it before I switch these on as it kind of looks pretty naked at the moment.

We’ll add more as we announce things tomorrow at MIX09.

Feedback is always welcome as well.

http://team.silverlight.net

I am now a Product Manager.

scbarnes — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:55:00 GMT

I've managed to worm my way into Microsoft Corp HQ, as a Product Manager (PM) on the Rich Client Platform team (Silverlight/WPF etc). This for me is a major step forward in my career, as whilst I've enjoyed being one of the first RIA Evangelist for Microsoft, I feel I can offer more impact via this new role than in the field. I will still in part Evangelise Microsoft's offering in the UX space.

What is a Product Manager?

It varies in definition depending on which company a PM works for and what Product(s) they hold in their portfolio. For me, to keep it simple is that I'll be looking to ensure products like Silverlight out-innovate the competitor, as that's my core intent.

Silverlight & WPF have enormous potential going forward, and I will now be apart of this new wave of Microsoft technologies.

What can I offer to this role..

I offer years of experience in this thing we call RIA firstly, but more to the point I have a wide range of technical skills as well as some basic marketing skills. I also have a design portion of the brain, so blending the entire pool together, well, I hope to offer a colourful amount of expertise to the job ahead and looking forward to seeing what level of impact I can make on the product.

Why change?

I'm going to be working with a lot of really smart people, folks whom I've spent the last year working with in a virtual sense. That alone is the strong motivator as I'll be standing on the shoulder of giants. The three that stand out the most though are Brad Becker, Brian Goldfarb and Pete Faraday. These three are insanely smart, much smarter than me and I'm keen to tap their collective brain power for good instead of evil ;)

Will I stop blogging?

No. In fact I'll have a more focused approach to my blogging and my new team are supportive of my blog going forward. Having a my ear, eyes and voice within the community is critical to the success of this new role.

What will be the direction of the content on my blog?

Still the same, I'll be keen to decompose RIA more so than ever. The market has framed the conversation today under the guise of RIA. I personally think RIA is the wrong worldview, but i don't have an accurate answer on what it should be. Suffice to say, RIA fits and you can call it "Bob" for all I care, provided people are keen to explore the rich experiences associated to RIA.

I'll be also looking to highlight UX within Microsoft more, as I have not only seen but met a lot of creative folks within Microsoft whom far exceed my understanding of UX - yet they go unnoticed. Now that I'm on Microsoft Corp campus, I'll be looking to devote some time unearthing them some more.

What about your current role?

No idea what will happen with it. There maybe a vacant position in Australia for the Evangelism team or they may not. It's entirely up to my peeps in the Oz Team to decide. I will be selling my assets locally, so anyone want a big screen TV? heh. The current team I work with are awesome, and can't think of anyone negative thing to say about them - honestly. At the time of writing this, there is no news about replacing my current role, but be sure to check out Microsoft Australia career page (as this will be the first place to advertise it no doubt - we hire on merit, not who you know).

You're in the US now? Customs allowed this?

Yes. Not sure I'm going to fully embrace Seattle's cold weather, but I'll give it an open chance. Did I mention I grew up most of my life in the Australian outback desert? I've made a lot of new friends in Redmond over the year, so I'm looking forward to listening to their wisdom about all things America (specifically hear Chuck & Frank's thoughts from time to time).

Where to from here?

Well, I have to pack my entire life into a shipping container for one. I'll have to put a lot of stuff in storage and lastly figure out which electrical goods are US friendly vs aren't.

I'm looking forward to moving to the other side of the world. It will be a grand adventure! - in a geeky way.

Now to pack for MIX 08 and SxSW

p.s

Nathan Rothlisberg gave me an awesome URL which I'll no doubt make a lot of use of: http://www.simplyoz.com (I can keep my Tim Tams!!!)

A Meeting with the Silverlight brains trust.

scbarnes — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 09:46:40 GMT

Forest Key invited Michael Kordahi and myself to a Silverlight team meeting today (Microsoft HQ, Seattle) and I was able to get a in-flight preview of the brains trust around this product and meet with the folks whom pull the levers behind the Silverlight brand.

It was good to finally meet some of them face to face instead of via internal mail etc, so that was a positive all round. There was a lot being discussed (ie MIX 07 was on the agenda) and I have to say, MIX 07 is going to be the debut party for Silverlight and will be a memorable experience me thinks.

I have to say that these folks have been putting in the hard yards to get Silverlight out the door and into the public eye, and it's a complex thing overall and I for one have enormous respect for all Microsoft staff and partners whom have put their time and effort into this product to date.

Argue what you will around your opinions on Silverlight, but Microsoft have made a milestone product here and in the timeframe that they have done it in, I'll say that it's been amazing. Silverlight and WPF are the reasons I joined this company as to me, being in the RIA space I wanted more options on my horizon and when asked what my thoughts around Silverlight, I simply said "Luv it". I mean, I can see the potential on offer and am extremely excited to be apart of all of this (my small role in it etc) and am loving the experience.

Later that day, we also caught up with ex-Aussie, now Microsoft HQ employee Jeremy Cath for a coffee. Jeremy's an awesome bloke and it appears he has been working his fingers to the bone to get everything ready for MIX 07 from our partners. Overall, a lot of work and dedication has gone into MIX 07 and I'm thankful for being there this year, as funny enough I remember watching last years videos thinking "wish I was there" - yet - wouldn't of imagined it for a second at that time I would actually be there (keeping in mind I was doing everything but Microsoft development!)

Tomorrow is going to be interesting, as I'll be catching up with Ryan Stewart as well as the Live.com folks for an internal briefing.

Love this job.

You can see more of what i've called "Mike & Scott's American Adventure" via my Flickr Account and be sure to check it around MIX07, as I've got a new camera (Nikon Coolpix S50) which I'll be using specifically for this event! (Video blogs if I can)