Juixe Techknow

For the last session of Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008, I attended the talk by Vic Cekvenich. Vic shared his experience of developing rich interactive UI applications with Flex. Vic started out by saying that the Flash development culture is completely opposite than your typical software development project. Any half decent software development project uses version control software, build systems, programming best practices, unit tests, etc. Flash developers are more comfortable with the Flash CS design tool whereas classically trained software developers are more comfortable using Integrated Development Environments such as Visual Studio or Eclipse. Vic stated that Flash CS has an anti social development feel.

Vic also had time to walk through flash 3D 101. He demoed Flex, Papervision 3D, and FlashDevelop.

At the end of the talk, Vic made the following suggestion when working with flash: Use shadows/reflections, encapsulate 3D models in a standard format, avoid Flash CS, allow for repeatable testable and agile development environment, avoid local assets…

Technorati Tags: flash, flex, flashdevelop, papervision, 3d, cs

Jason Mauer set out to destroy the universe with Microsoft XNA at Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008. No, XNA is not a doomsday device from Microsoft. XNA can be a confusing term thanks to MSFT marketing, but in a nutshell it is a next generation game development platform for PC, XBox 360, and Zune. XNA, as an initiative, is set to develop and improve the game development ecosystem. XNA is a pseudo acronym, it doesn’t mean anything.

Prior to XNA, the game industry was seen as very sick, games where mainly sequels much like the movie industry. XNA is set out to revitalize and revolutionize the game industry for casual gamers, hobbyist, academia, etc. Games are supposed to be fun, it is not just about graphics, blockbuster, licensed content, first person shoot and bomb them ups. Goals of XNA is to become the ‘youtube’ of games without the lawsuits for copyright infringements.

This session covered some of the history and basics of XNA. At the end of the session, we did have some time to see some demos created by the XNA Creators Club.

Technorati Tags: xna, ms, xbox, zune, game, development, directx, opengl, graphics, codecamp

At this year’s Silicon Valley Codecamp, there was a large contingent of .NET evangelists in the speakers list. I attended yet another Silverlight presentation, this time given by Lino Tadros of Falafel Software. Most of the Microsoft technologist present at this years codecamp seem to be under heavy NDA, and they make it be known as if they are dropping names, to seem like they are in the know. What they don’t know is that I am also under NDA by the CIA.

The idea of Silverlight is to run an application natively on the client, on any browser, on any platform. It runs on macs, linux, and obviously windows. Silverlight is built on the same technology as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) such as .NET and XAML. XAML is a markup language used to separate, design, and develop UI components. Lino joked that “for a long time development tools did not understand that we developer can not design.” In addition to Visual Studio, Microsoft has made available Expression Blend. Expression Blend is a designer friendly application to create XAML application.

WPF, Silverlight and XAML in particular try to solve many issues of past UI frameworks such as WinForms and MFC. With XAML you can add any content to a button, not just a text label as in most other UI frameworks. The power of this is that the content can be anything, a video, a list, anything… If you want a list in a button, why not, it is 2008, we are supposed to be living in the future, so says Lino.

Instead of subclassing UI component classes to customize the UI, the new model is to use stylesheets and templates to customize the look and feel of your UI. With the Expression Blend you can simply draw new components, or redesign existing components without having to override a paint method.

Silverlight, in essence, is a subset of WPF. If you want a project to work for both Silverlight and WPF, start with a Silverlight project. Many assemblies available for WPF projects are not available in Silverlight.

A current reservation with developing your next application with Silverlight is the market penetration but recently Microsoft paid for all development costs to have CNN and NBC run content, such as the 2008 summer Olympics, on Silverlight so as to start a bandwagon for other development shops to jump on.

Technorati Tags: silverlight, windows, xaml, expression, vs, wpf, flash, flex

Karthik Gurumurthy was at the Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 to talk about Apache Wicket. Wicket is yet another Java based web framework. Wicket has a real nice separation between markup and code and consists of plain old java and plain old HTML. Unlike the other Java frameworks, Wicket has minimum configuration, zero XML files and no annotations. Even though Wicket is yet another Java based web development framework it does not introduce yet another expression language. Wicket templates are the most designer friendly web development view technology that I have seen, it essence they are pure HTML except for a wicket:id attribute that is added to tags for which you are interested in. The Wicket Java component for a HTML form has the same familiar feel as Swing. You first create a an instance of a Wicket page, then form object and add components to the HTML form elements such as text fields, password fields, etc, just as you would add JComponents to a JPanel.

Wicket is a relatively new framework compared with Struts, Grails, Spring MVC, Tapestry, GWT, WebWork, etc but it is getting traction. Currently there are three books dedicated to web development with Apache Wicket.

• Pro Wicket
• Wicket in Action
• Enjoying Web Development with Wicket

Technorati Tags: wicket, apache, webdev, java, html, component

Sriram Krishnan wanted to defrag the room, it was a jam packed house like a tin of binary sardines, all for a new color from Microsoft, Windows Azure. Sriram Krishnan of Microsoft spoke at the Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 on Microsoft’s new cloud computing initiative. From the onset Sriram warned the audience that the technology is nascent, if the demo breaks, his colleague, a technologist evangelist, had to do one push up for each demo that crashed.

A minute of the talk was devoted on how to pronounce azure and Sriram joked how middle management at Microsoft distributed WAV files with the correct pronunciation. After we all had our pronunciation down, Sriram reminded the audience that the hardest thing about web development is not the coding, it is provisioning equipment, keeping them up to date, maintained, and well oiled, setting up load balancers, databases, routers, security, updates and upgrades, etc. Cloud initiatives like Windows Azure and Google’s App Engine remove the system administrator from the startup equation. With Windows Azure you can create application running on Microsoft’s infrastructure.

Windows Azure seems fairly familiar to App Engine, except that Azure has a lot more tooling and utilities to help in development. As you can imagine, many of the tools available are based around Visual Studio.

Sriram said that many of the configuration of Windows Azure application are done in config files, he said “what we learned over several years is that the registry in the data center is an evil, evil thing.”

Even though Azure ware recently announced at PDC2008, the SDK is already available to play with.

Technorati Tags: windows, azure, cloud computing, appengine, google, ms, webdev

Dave Britton of Vertigo was at Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 and gave a presentation on Silverlight 2.0. Dave highlighted that there is a tight integration between ASP.NET and Silverlight. Silverlight also has rich tooling support with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend. Dave also recommended Silverlight Spy, you need to be using Silverlight Spy if you are doing any sort of Silverlight development. A large portion of the talk elaborated how to have multiple Silverlight components coordinate and communicate with each other via a Silverlight/HTML/JavaScript bridge. Also known as the bridge to nowhere. A debate erupted as to having on large Silverlight application versus multiple Silverlight applications working in cahoots in a single web page. The speakers main reason for breaking an application into separate pieces is for code and component reuse.

Some in the audience also questioned the speaker as to why to Silverlight instead of common and mature AJAX toolkits such as ASP.NET AJAX. Again the speaker had to defend Silverlight, this time totting Silverlight’s rich media support.

The speaker also demoed how to bind data to a table grid in Silverlight. After seeing Silverlight in action I thought it should have been called MS Flex. The parallel between Silverlight and Flash runs like the long tail.

Technorati Tags: silverlight, dotnet, flex, flash, ajax, webdev