Tonight, Jennifer Marsman came out and talked to the Greater Cleveland PC Users Group C#/VB.NET SIG about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Although I'm a web developer and I don't typically play with desktop apps, I wanted to see what WPF had to offer. (That and I wanted to see one of Jennifer's presentation, as I hadn't had the opportunity in the past.)

Jennifer started by getting into the technologies of .NET 3.0 - WPF, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and CardSpace and how they come together with the .NET 2.0 core to help make up .NET 3.0.

From there, she brought user experience (UX) into the picture. Whether it's using a can opener to open a can of soup (as opposed to the hardcore experience of using a knife) or getting with technology and using Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition (as opposed to a VCR), the UX should be considered as an integral part of the software design process. WPF, as she put it, brings a unified approach to user experience, with key features including vector-based graphics composition, support for declarative and procedural programming, and easy deployment and application management.

She brought up the classic case of the headaches between designers and developers. Let's say you have a designer who wants a drop-down box with checkmarks within each option; as a developer, you may be prone to say "You can have the drop-down box, but you aren't getting that check mark unless you're willing to accept that it's going to take {insert ungodly amount of time here}". With WPF, that headache isn't as bad, since it brings XAML into the picture. Designers can use Expression Blend to make their pretty controls, and that software creates XAML files, that can be manipulated in Visual Studio on the developer's side. So there's a better chance that the designer will get their drop-down with the checkmarks within a reasonable amount of time.

After talking about user experience, Jennifer got into the three main types of WPF applications - XAML Browser Applications (XBAP), installed Windows applications, and controlled libraries. She must have been reading my mind, as she then got into the difference between WPF XBAPs as opposed to Silverlight. Those differences are:

• Silverlight is a subset of WPF. It doesn't have all the features of WPF, such as not as strong 3D support.


• WPF runs only on Windows. Silverlight has better cross-platform support, working natively on Windows and Mac. There's also a project called Moonlight, which adds some Silverlight support to Linux.


• Silverlight has better browser support. WPF works in Internet Explorer and in Firefox (with .NET 3.5); Silverlight works in other browsers, including Safari for Macs.

After talking about WPF in the first hour, Jennifer used the second hour for show'n'tell - demos showing off various features of WPF. The first demo she brought up was a hospital application, which showed various features of WPF, including 3D pivots of forms, moving graphs, nifty animations (like pages flipping), and working with video. There were graphs that she was able to spin around, and she mentioned that this uses something called Viewport 3D. If you want to know more about it, check out her blog and contact her - Viewport 3D is one of these topics that she likes to present on. Another demo was with Mercedes and building a car. The third demo showed how to create a spotlight in Blend and get it to animate along a path. After creating it in Blend, she opened the project in Visual Studio to show how the XAML is understood by both programs.

Overall, it was quite an interesting presentation. Thanks to Sogeti for providing the location and dinner, and thanks to everyone else who made it possible.

Recommended Resources:

Silverlight:
Silverlight.net

WPF:
Windowsclient.net

"How Do I" videos:
Part 1. Animation Using Expression Blend: How to create an animation

Part 2. Animation Using Expression Blend: How to start animations on events

Part 3. Animation Using Expression Blend: How to make an animation follow a path

Labels: Blend, Channel 9, GCPCUG, Jennifer Marsman, WPF

It's day 2 of Ann Arbor Give Camp, and I'm running on almost 41 hours without sleep. Between working on our project and chatting with many talented people here, I've been distracted and excited enough to not really feel a need for sleep. Not only have I been working with an awesome team - Mark Gilbert, Brian Kriesel, and Kevin Shin - but I've also met a lot more people and have had a lot of laughs.

We had two meetings today as a gathering, to make sure that all the teams were on schedule. If we had any issues, we let them know and other people came out to help us. We helped the SDL EQ team today with some Telerik Sitefinity issues and got them up to speed with the rest of us in the Sitefinity boat. John Hopkins has been a great Sitefinity resource for us this weekend, and if you ever have to implement Sitefinity, I'd recommend you talk with him. He has been so patient with all of us, and even though there are still some outstanding issues, we know that we can count on him to help us out.

Special thanks to Matt from Verio and the other guy (whose name I can't remember offhand) who stopped by and helped us work out some CSS issues. We managed to get a great foundation in place, and I hope our charity - Golightly Academy of IT - really likes our work. We'll get to show off our final website on Sunday to our charity contact, John Mullinax.

Thanks to the sponsors of Ann Arbor Give Camp - Microsoft, Domino's Pizza, SRT Solutions, Verio, Infragistics, TechSmith, Telerik, Washtenaw Community College, Dunkin Donuts, Arbor Brewing Company, Aubree's, Busch's, Trader Joe's, and DevMavens. From providing our meals to helping in other ways, this event couldn't have happened without their help. Check out the Ann Arbor Give Camp sponsors page to see how they contributed.

Thanks to all of those who worked to put the event together - including Jennifer Marsman, Josh Holmes, Mike Eaton, Greg Campeau, Todd from Domino's, and everyone else who helped them in the planning. Planning an event takes a team; pulling off one this successful takes a great team!

This has been a great experience, and I am glad Mike Eaton talked me into coming up here this weekend. I look forward to showing what are team came up with and blogging about the weekend overall.

Labels: Ann Arbor Give Camp, Golightly Academy of IT, Jennifer Marsman, John Hopkins, Josh Holmes, Mike Eaton, Sitefinity, sponsors

So Mike Eaton talked me into coming out to Ann Arbor rather than working remotely for Ann Arbor Give Camp. After a crazy week, I was wondering how I'd handle the 3 hour ride up here. Now here I am, up at 3am, watching John Mullinax and Jonathan Thorndycraft play Guitar Hero down in the break room.

I'm on the team for Golightly Academy of IT. Our charity contact is John Mullinax, and he's been awesome to work with so far. We've got an interesting site design ahead, using Sitefinity. Special thanks to John Hopkins for hooking us up with a license for it.

None of us have worked with Sitefinity before, so we're looking forward to tinkering with it. Our contact at Verio - Matt Lagrotte - is phenomenal. There are a few of us who are using Sitefinity, and Matt's been very instrumental in getting us going, as it doesn't go through the install gracefully without working a little magic.

I'm just hanging out now with Jennifer Marsman, Dave Redding, Mike Eaton, Jonathan Thorndycraft, Chris Roland, Marty Adams, and a couple other people in the break room for a bit. There was some Guitar Hero action going on, and there's talk of Halo.

I'm looking forward to seeing how our project turns out. Golightly Academy of IT will have a web presence by the end of the weekend, and I'll link to it on Sunday to show what our team comes up with! For not knowing anyone I'm on my team, I'm very excited to see that we come together quite well. This has been an enjoyable experience so far and I look forward to seeing how this will turn out.

Stay tuned for more coverage from Ann Arbor Give Camp!

Labels: Ann Arbor Give Camp, Chris Roland, Dave Redding, Jennifer Marsman, Jonathan Thorndycraft, Marty Adams, Mike Eaton

If any of you follow Amanda Laucher (pandamonial on Twitter), you may have seen her comment about meeting someone who didn't know about their MS evangelists. I have to admit - I had no idea of these people called evangelists until just this last December.

Living Under a Rock

When you work for a small company that really doesn't use new technologies nor hears about it, you never realize that you're outside the realm of influence. The only reason why I knew about C# was because my buddy G and I were talking about how we'd never need to know it as long as we were at that company. I remember the discussion clearly, and to this day, G's still there and not using much in the way of .NET (other than probably maintaining my small VB.NET app). Meanwhile, I moved on to a smaller company, bigger technical staff, and am using C# and having fun learning new technologies. There we were, the developers (yep, just the 2 of us) for a manufacturing company of 600+ people, not knowing of all the resources available to us.

Developer Evangelist?

I imagine that if my buddy Russ hadn't mentioned the .NET SIG, I wouldn't have thought to look to see what else is out there. Even so, going to the SIG meetings apparently wasn't enough, as I had been going to the meetings since May 2007, shortly after I started my current job, but still had no idea that there were these people called evangelists. I wouldn't hear about them until December 2007, when this guy Jeff Blankenburg came to the Bennett Adelson SIG and showed us some cool stuff from Microsoft (like Popfly). He mentioned that he is a developer evangelist for the region. At that point, I had to wonder what it was they did. After prodding Russ for more details, I learned that there was some other guy who would come along rarely but apparently not much else happened here in Cleveland. Still, there wasn't much that I could find out from Russ on what a developer evangelist did.

So, some of us lived under rocks or were just out of the realm of influence with the evangelists. (SIGs too far, no evangelists geared for the industry, etc.) If you know people who are left out, mention this post to them, as the Microsoft evangelists (at least those here in the Heartland District) are just an awesome team to meet!

So what do evangelists do?

Before I get into the "who", you need to know what they do.

Just as the title suggests, they evangelize! Seriously, though, they're developers, architects, and other tech-minded individuals who get to hear about the cool stuff ahead of time and make sure that we know about it. Tools and technologies, they're seeing just what the industry has in store, where things are going, and they tell us about it. Through presentations at user groups and events, blog entries, podcasts, videos, forums, and just being themselves and talking about the things they're passionate about, the evangelists get the word out.

Who are our evangelists?

Ohio is in the Heartland District, which happens to have quite active evangelists in the area. Since I'm a dev, I'm going to mention the developer evangelists first - Jeff Blankenburg and Jennifer Marsman. If you're a dev and reading my blog, you ought to read their blogs as well! Jeff's blog may be slow at the moment, as he's out until the end of May, but definitely stay tuned to his blog when he returns, as you never know what he'll blog about - from something about Silverlight to the after-party of a .NET event or a contest for swag at Codemash, his blog covers all sorts of things, some .NET related and some just regular blog entries. Jennifer just started her blog at the beginning of April and has returned to our region after a few months on leave. Something that Jennifer's doing in her blog is featuring women in technology on her Friday entries. Definitely check out her blog as well!

Then there are the architect evangelists. We used to have Josh Holmes as an architect evangelist for the Heartland District, but he recently was promoted to Central RIA evangelist. Josh is one of the guys from Code to Live, and although he has a bigger region now, he still comes around to the Heartland area events. Our new architect evangelist is Brian H. Prince. I can't comment on the architect coverage, as I'm not an architect, but I definitely recommend checking out Brian's blog even if you aren't an architect. He talks of cool technologies like LiveMesh, robots, and even these things known as "soft skills".

There are other evangelists in the area, but I've met the 4 that I mentioned, and I can definitely tell you that these guys (and Jennifer!) are passionate about technology and getting the word out to the community. Sometimes, I think part of their job is to promote the "unity" in "community".

Don't know who your evangelists are? Want to know who the others are in the Heartland area? Meet your local Microsoft Evangelists!

I've sent this info on to my buddy G, so that he's no longer just another dev out of the realm of influence. But there are other devs out there who don't know about these great contacts. So pass this word on and get the word out there, so that they know that there are awesome resources out there for us in the field.

And a shout out to the PA evangelists, especially John McClelland, for getting the word out to their PA followers on Cleveland Day of .NET! Thanks for spreading the word! :)

Labels: Brian H. Prince, evangelism, Jeff Blankenburg, Jennifer Marsman, Microsoft, pandamonial, Twitter