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Looks like it’s time to finally jump into the blog pool. I’ve been thinking for some time now about what I wanted in a blog and how I could contribute value to the .NET blogging community. Recently a couple big changes have happened that have provided clarity to that thinking, and so here I am. First, the release of Silverlight 2 Beta 1 at Mix this year as kicked off a big wave of development efforts in and around this technology. More specifically, a wave of interest in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. The second big change was a recent career move here at Microsoft that has positioned me as a Dev Lead here on the UIFX team… right smack dab in the middle of that Silverlight/RIA wave. So now all of sudden I’ve got something big and interesting to talk about and just as importantly I’ve got a keen interest in listening, learning and trading experiences around this amazing technology.
Who am I?
So, who am I and what do I want to talk about? Well, as you might have noticed I’m a Microsoft employee and have been for almost 18 years now, currently working in the UIFX group as a Dev Lead. I started with Microsoft back in 1990 working in Developer Support helping ISVs write applications for Windows 3.0. Back then MDI and DDE where the coolest 3 letter acronyms on the block, but it didn’t take long for things like OLE, COM and MFC to become all the rage. By the time 1995 rolled along things like MSN, CIS and AOL where changing the landscape of computer usage, bringing real world uses for the PC into the home and setting up a broad base of users just waiting for the Internet explosion and the ubiquity of high-speed access to the rest of the world from the comfort of your own living room. CGI, HTML and ASP became all the rage and not too long after that .NET, the CLR and ASP.NET flew on to the scene and ushered in a new era of productivity for developers.
So where am I going with all this? Well, all that to say that over the years I’ve seen a great deal of technologies come out of Microsoft that resulted in fundamental shifts in the way developers work and what they create. And after 18 years one has a tendency to become a bit ho-hum when new technologies are announced, been there, seen that, done that, kind of attitude. But even with all that history, Silverlight has me excited. Primarily because it carries with it the first glimmers of light at the end of a tunnel of technological promises I’ve been waiting on for many years now: freedom from my hardware. The ability to have extremely rich and compelling applications that run on my desktop, my laptop, my phone, etc… Since my applications can now live in the cloud and be deployed and installed in mere seconds, they are free to follow me around from device to device. We’re not there yet, but it’s easy to see that some of the core scaffolding is starting to fall into place and true freedom is within sight.
Why the Blog?
Well as we move forward into this world of RIA applications that live in the cloud and can follow me around from device to device, there’s going to have to be some change from our old ways of thinking about application development. Just as .NET and C# changed many of our programming paradigms (remember the days when you had to call malloc & free? AddRef() and Release()?), RIAs are going to cause some similar shifts in our thinking. What are those shifts and what are the new paradigms? Well… that’s what I want to talk about here J
Good changes, the kind that last, require exploration, discover, falling down a few rat holes, etc… and that’s what I intend to do here in this blog: Explore, Discover and from time to time go down a rat hole. After 20 years of writing code, I’ve come to grips with del *.*, I’m OK doing that every now and again as long as I learned something in the process.
So I’m going to explore using Silverlight to write a variety of RIA applications, everything from stand-alone utilities, to games and traditional N-tier data applications. As I explore the various programming practices, concepts, patterns, etc… I intend to blog the results here and hopefully that will provide some fuel for discussion.
Beyond the Bling?
What’s with the title of this blog anyway? Well, WPF and Silverlight have enabled us all to build very rich and visually compelling applications. I love this fact because now even graphical neophytes like me can create stuff that looks crisp and nice. But ultimately all that flashy graphics stuff will only get you so far. At some point your boss or your client is going to want a real world functioning application that solves some business need. That application logic/business functionality is the stuff that I refer to as being Beyond the Bling and it’s what I want to focus this blog on. Oh we’ll have bling to be sure, it’s just not the primary focus.
