Back in April of 2008 Spike Xavier and I got together and wrote a song just for fun that we titled (lamely enough), “Silverlight – The Song”. With all this “Silverlight is Dying” talk going around now days we decided to re-release the song in honor of the fact that Silverlight isn’t actually dying. Don’t believe me? Check out the Silverlight Firestarter event above if you want to hear about Microsoft’s future plans for Silverlight.
Note: With all the noise around Silverlight lately I’ve heard comments such as, “Dan’s all about Silverlight and has blinders on that block looking at other technologies”. Sadly, that’s about as far from the truth as they could get. For the record, I use several other frameworks as well, am exploring and prototyping HTML 5 features right now, use jQuery and ASP.NET MVC regularly (I think the recent attendees at my jQuery workshop at DevConnections can attest to that) and even work with SharePoint. Having said that, I really do like Silverlight for internal Line of Business applications…when it fits the needs of our clients. It’s also pretty dang cool to instantly be a Windows Phone 7 app developer!
Here was the original post Spike and I put out back in 2008 and a link to the original MP3:
About 6 months ago my good friend Spike Xavier and I got together on a Saturday to work on a new song since we like to get away from programming now and then and mess around with music for fun. It'd been awhile since we released our last song titled No More DLL Hell and we decided that we needed to write a new song about one of our favorite new application frameworks....Silverlight. After a few hours we came up with some patterns and riffs we liked but we weren't happy with the overall melody. We shelved it, got busy with other work things and didn't do much related to music.
A couple of weeks ago Spike came over and we started up the project again and finished the initial version of the song. I'm a perfectionist (which can be really bad with song writing and recording) so I tweaked it over the next few days adding background layers, experimenting with different drum kits, synth sounds, mix levels, effects, etc. We sent out an initial beta of the song (yeah....we're adding geek terms into the process of song writing) to Scott Guthrie, Adam Kinney and Tim Heuer (all cool guys directly involved with Microsoft's Silverlight product) and a few others but we still wanted to change a few things. After playing around with the song a little more and finding "the" drum kit that we both liked for the intro we got it all wrapped up. It's different than a "standard" song since we wanted to keep it short and sweet with an intro that builds up.
So, without further adieu, here's the world premier of our new song titled Silverlight. Some will love it, some will hate it....and that's music. Add a comment either way and let us know what you think. Thanks in advance to all 6 of our fans (including my wife and kids and Spike's wife and kids).
Update: We've had several people inquire about using the song in talks, podcasts, etc. You're free to use the song in any (positive) manner. A reference to where people can download it (to this blog entry) would be appreciated.
Download MP3
Spike Xavier and Dan Wahlin (with additional help from Heedy Wahlin)
Words:
feed this need for quality
vector based delivery
we write it in xaml, we roll like a caml
we love it like baml
3D dioramma
lightweight subset of the CLR
down the wire with fluidity
you won't believe it, if you can conceive it
your users retrieve it
and their minds receive it.
it's Silverlight
it's strong and tight
they got it right
try it tonight
take the web to a brand new height
Here was our first song (a little rough if you like “quiet” music):
No More DLL Hell (MP3)
Spike Xavier and Dan Wahlin