Todd Anglin's Code Campground

In keeping with my apparent "theme" this week of providing you with some Silverlight detail refreshers, I want to bring-up the topic of Silverlight for mobile platforms. While it has been widely known since the earliest days of Silverlight that mobile platforms would be supported, little attention (or scrutiny) has really been applied to the portable plug-in. In fact, if I were to ask you to tell me about Silverlight's mobile plans right now, you'd probably list these details:

This isn't exactly what you call "breaking" news, but it is news that I don't see getting enough coverage. I also just noticed that I've been doling out bad info in my recent Silverlight 2 beta 1 presentations, so I wanted to take a minute to correct the record and set things straight.

Even though Silverlight 2.0 has yet to see the "official" light of day, we know that the beta introduced at MIX08 represents a "feature complete" version for this release cycle. Between beta 1 and the RTM expected towards the end of summer, Microsoft will not add any major new features to the Silverlight platform. Instead, they'll focus on performance improvements, platform stability, and a number of other "polish" issues like ClientBin security.

File this under "used to be easy with XP" tips and tricks for Vista. As a long time web developer on XP (all the way back to "classic" ASP), I feel I am pretty comfortable around IIS. I've successfully configured many a development site over the years and never really had much trouble. That's all changed with my recent upgrade to Vista Business and IIS7.

With MIX08 less than a week away and, in turn, the expected arrival of the Silverlight 2.0 beta, I thought it would be fun to ponder how Microsoft is planning to use their new browser-based, cross-platform plug-in. After all, history reveals that many Microsoft platforms have their roots in satisfying internal Microsoft project needs (we owe the "X" in Ajax to the Outlook Web Access team), so it's only fair to assume that from the get-go Microsoft saw the opportunity to use Silverlight to build (or enhance) new products. The question is, which products will get the Silverlight treatment and when?

This is a bit of a late notice, but for any of you in the Houston area here's your official reminder that the newly founded North  Houston .NET User Group will be meting tonight (Thursday) at 6:30 PM. This is the second official meeting on the new Houston-area DNUG, and if the turnout is anything like week one, we should have a full crowd and a good time. Tonight's speaker is Claudio Lassala who will be talking about test driven development (aka TDD). The subject of TDD is increasingly becoming more common in .NET conversations as Microsoft introduces technologies that make it easier to do (such as the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC and the inclusion of VS Test tools in all Pro SKUs), so this is a great opportunity to come learn more about an important .NET topic.

One thing you learn quickly when you leave a Fortune 200, well recognized Enterprise and join a smaller, much more exciting software company is that it is a lot harder to answer the inevitable "what do you do?" question. That is no more true than during the holidays, when you're visiting with distant relatives, many of whom still think of AOL as the Internet and think software is written by geeks in basements. Plagued by this problem, I have constantly sought the "perfect" metaphor for "what I do" so that anyone can understand software UI components. And at last I have the answer.