Popfly -You're Invited!

I have a Popfly account and I'm not afraid to use it! Actually, I just don't have the time. But recently the Popfly team announced that current members will get 5 invitations to invite others to join. Popfly is a mashup, gadget, web app aggregator and it is extremely easy to quickly create mashups that link various services together. Check out the overview for more information and a screen cast.

The mashup designer for Popfly is built entirely in SilverLight which is quite interesting. I've also had a quick play making a mashup using pictures from Flickr. The screen cast demonstrates this.

So apparently I have 5 invitations to send. I figure I'll only send them to people who are actually interested in playing around with the technology. So send me an email to steven@snagy.name if you are keen (or leave a comment) and I'll hook you up!

Technorati Tags: Popfly, SilverLight, Flickr, mashup

SilverLight mailing list

The folks from Readify have created a mailing list for SilverLight called "OzSilverlight". You can subscribe by sending an email to listserver@ozsilverlight.com with 'subscribe' in the subject line. The list owner is listmanager@ozsilverlight.com which goes to Bill Chesnut, Senior Consultant at Readify.

I've subscribed so there's at least one...

And the winner is...

Not me unfortunately.

The Queensland Innovation Centre's Vista Sidebar Gadget competition finished about 3 weeks ago, and my previous posts have given some insight into the design of my submission. On Wednesday the results were announced. I came 2nd, and apparently only just beat 3rd place, which was an entry by John O'Brien who happens to be an MVP.

All round I'm disappointed with a few things. Firstly, naturally, I should have won! I think my gadget was the most pleasing aesthetically and was also the most robust by far (the other gadgets give javascript errors!). It was original (the winning gadget came straight out of the suggestions section on the Innovation site) and was functional (with a little bit of humour!). It even has a support site (still under development).

But the real thing that I found disappointing was that there was practically no entrants. I think a total of 6 gadgets got submitted, with a few of them being half hearted attempts. There must be a great wealth of talent in this state, but for some reason no one participated. This could be because of lack of knowledge about the competition; I only found out about it at a presentation one night (of which only about 10 people showed up) by Scott Barnes.

I mean, what's up with our local development community? Aren't you people crazy about what you do? I love development. I come home from my development job at Zap and I look at more cool technologies, or blog about stuff. Even on the trip home, I listen to developer podcasts. I can't get enough of the stuff. My wife likes to watch TV shows whereas I start to feel weird if I don't have the tips of my fingers touching a keyboard.

I think the community here just needs a bit of stimulation. Scott Barnes proposes to get more interaction between the community and Microsoft over the next financial year, and given the results of this competition, I couldn't agree more.

Scott, the first step is another competition. This time an XBOX for first AND second prize is in order I think (my wife won't let me buy one so the only way I'm getting one is if I win it!)

Jokes aside, I learnt a lot about gadget development and I thank Microsoft for the motivation to get up and learn it. Oh and of course, a big thank you for the 2nd placing.

Technorati Tags: Gadget, Vista, Zap, Scott Barnes, podcast, javascript, SurfWatch

Zap + Me = LINQ

Well my blog has been neglected (more so than my wife) since I started my new job at Zap. So I thought I'd give a quick rundown of the company and how we go about the development life cycle.

Zap's core product is based on Business Intelligence (BI) meaning finding the real information in your (a business) data warehouse/s. Consultants will come to your business and analyse your processes and workflow, and design a cube in Sql Server 2005 Analysis Services. The Zap BI Suite 5.3 allows you to connect to that cube and create meaningful reports, charts, KPIs, Scorecards, etc from that data. Check out the website to learn more about our products.

In terms of development, we have a number of developers working on a single product in .Net. We use tools such as SVN, Cruise Control, FxCop, and Resharper to ensure continuous integration.

Moving towards the next version we are looking at .Net 3.5. Some of the technologies we will look at include Language Integrated Query (LINQ), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Responsibilities for mastering these technologies has been divided out to the developers and I put my hand up for LINQ. This means I'll be able to build an extensive knowledge on LINQ which I can in turn share with you! In the short term (next post?) I plan to provide a comparison of performance between some of the key data binding technologies, such as LINQ, ORM products like nHibernate, object data source, table adapters, datasets, etc. I could compare the ease of use also but this is difficult to rate; I would think this would change per person and depend on their experience.

On the LINQ topic, Scott Guthrie just posted the 5th entry in his series about LINQ. Beta 2 of Orcas will have better support for LINQ it seems, and that should only be a few weeks away. I promise I'll post again before then!

Technorati Tags: Zap, LINQ, Orcas, ScottGu