I met with the Finnish Avanade branch yesterday. The turnout was great and we shared a few demos, ham sandwiches and spent a few hours sauna bathing afterwards. Last time I visited Finland, I spoke about Silverlight 4 and made a camera demo. This time, I didn’t bring any new demos since the Mango tools are yet to be released. But by the time that happens, check back here and I’ll make another kind of camera demo.
I depart for MIX11 one month from today. I had a great time last year and this year might just top that. Las Vegas was a fun town to visit and I got some great souvenirs from last year (dice and knowledge, not chlamydia).
I’m going to travel with Michael Björn and Johan Nedin from Avanade. I’ll try to start up my blogging again so I’m warmed up when the show hits. Actually bought a netbook in order to be able to blog properly during the show.
The annual Nordic Avanade conference was this weekend. I’m just returning from it with a few good takeaways. I’ve met a lot of interesting people, heard a few good ideas, a few bad ideas and eaten a LOT of salmon.
We stayed at a hotel/funland in Sarpsborg, Norway. After much struggling, I managed to pull my session on WP7 together fairly well. It generated the most interest of any session during the conference and we actually had to add chairs in the room to seat enough people. I also got to familiarize myself with the WP7 platform a little better. I like how I often find new little things which I enjoy. The demos I showed went very well and I hope I’ll be able to post at least a few of them online soon.
A final note on life in Norway, shit ain’t cheap. Everything was priced like in Sweden, only with the much stronger currency Norway uses. The cab prizes were truly Kafkaesque. Due to the lack of buses on the weekend, a few other people and I had to take a taxi to the airport (which was 90 kilometers / 60 miles) away. The final fare was over FIVE THOUSAND NOK! That’s almost a thousand US dollars for anyone who’s counting. Norway truly has taken the throne over Sweden and Japan as the most expensive country in the world.
Source: http://bigmacindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/2010-Big-Mac-Index.jpg
I’m putting the final touches to my presentation on Saturday.
“… This is one of the benefits of a standardized platform in combination with cloud services. When we know what to expect from the platform, we can expect even more from the applications we create for it.”
I feel like a god damned poet.
I spent an afternoon at Microsoft a few weeks ago trying out the code I’ve written. We were among the first in Sweden to run actual code on a live device. It was choppy, but it worked. I’m posting the censored pics here. I have a few videos which I hope to be able to share some day.
I’ll be giving a presentation on Windows Phone 7 and the application I’ve been working on and off at for the past months. It’s been hell not being able to write or post anything about it since it’s all hush hush. I’m installing the RTM tools for WP7 right now to update the application to the latest version. I’m really looking forward to being able to use a proper panorama control. The faux-panorama has been feeling very shaky IMO.
I’ll attend a planning meeting for the presentation later today where we will detail the presentation I’ll be giving at Nordtech, Avanade’s annual Nordic conference. I’m very much hoping to be able to borrow a prototype from Microsoft for the presentation.
Unfortunately, I won’t be providing the in depth look at my recent Silverlight project that I promised earlier. It still hasn’t been shown to our prospective customer and it wouldn’t be appropriate to show it publically before that.
Instead, I’ll be breaking down some of the lessons I learned from the project into little segments like this. At one point in the project I wanted to do a more advanced color animation than color to color.
Juicy code… and Superman in bondage.
I’m finally finished with the Silverlight project I started working on about a week ago. I was given six hours (!) to work with it. This might’ve been sufficient if I knew exactly what to do and the syntax for everything I wanted to do. But as I’m still learning Silverlight, some key features became big hurdles. I’ll be posting a more in depth article on the project when I get the chance.
Right now, it’s a beautiful Tuesday in Stockholm and I feel great.
This week, I was told I’d be loaned to another project than the one I’m at currently. The new project is a Silverlight project which makes me all giddy.
The new project will last only one week but I’ll try to make the most of my time on it. I’ll be creating a dashboard for a large Swedish client. They want to be able to better visualize the data they receive from different parts of the company.
Usually, this kind of Business Intelligence solution would be handled with SSRS (Sql Server Reporting Services), but I guess this is an exception. Whether or not it will become more common is anyone’s guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this customer demo would be reusable in other situations. Reusable demo ~ more clients deciding to use functionality in said demo.
Right now; Lennart Hedlund, one of my colleagues with a sharp sense for accessories, is sketching up how the dashboard could look. I’ll be getting my hands on files tomorrow afternoon.
I was to give a five minute teaser presentation on an upcoming event tonight. The turnout to the main event wasn’t overwhelmingly great to begin with. Whenever a presentation is outside of normal work hours, only the truly interested and the truly hungry show up.
Tonight’s main presentation was on WPF and on my colleagues’ use of nHibernate in their project. It was a good presentation, but way too long. After two hours and forty minutes (the length of Avatar) I got the chance to give my presentation to a virtually empty room. This isn’t the first time I’ve been in this situation. Going last always means your audience is tired and sometimes less attentive than an hour ago.
I much appreciate my friends taking the time to create such an in depth presentation; but next time, I’ll go first.
Fragile Development 
