fignewtron was here

I'm very excited to hear that there is a Silverlight control for Bing maps!  Here is the link to MSDN documentation. It was just announced at TechEd Europe yesterday!!!!  Here is more on that news.  It takes less than 15 minutes to get up to speed on using the maps control.  I've had some experience creating map control in ASP.Net using Google Maps.  The implementation is similar but even easier to use.  Google requires that you register using a gmail account and a valud URL.  They give you a key for a specific URL, which limits you to registering your development environment localhost:{port}.  Bing maps for Silverlight allows you to register to get up to 5 keys and does not limit you to your development URL.

If you are writing anything in Silverlight, you have to check this out! http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/announcing-the-bing-maps-silverlight-control/

This site was a real collaboration with the team of designers and idea gurus at Waggener Edstrom Studio D.  We all had fun with this one.  It is full of subtle "easter eggs".  I wanted to put a couple more in there but we ran out of time.  The one on the phone callout links back to a site we completed after this one, windowsphonesforstudents.com.  Head over to the link and click on the "8 Months Later" banner when you get tired of the first screen.  Turn the volume up too because Silverlight can do MP3 and Wav Audio!

This site was completed a few weeks ago.  I'm really happy with the challenges it provided and the techniques that came out of working through the challenges.  It is a very eye catching site with one major transition.  It goes from the intro full screen background to a resized background banner.  The background height and margins are changed with a somewhat integrated set of layout controls and storyboards.  I'd love to post the code but it is so specific to the project as to be of little reuse.  It simply proves that such a transition can be done.

This blog site is now updated!  This is a rather big change in direction.  I decided to go with an open source project instead of trying to maintain my own blog engine/site.  So, this site is now running on BlogEngine.Net.  There were several features I wanted to include and the internet entrepeneurs are always adding new things to the web.  There is so much going on this summer and I have really very little time.  Besides, there is a great community around BlogEngine.Net project and I may even be able to contribute to it. 

It took me one afternoon to download the code and alter the settings enough to be happy with something to deploy.  That suits my main requirement.  It has all the ASP.Net providers that I like and I'm pretty comfortable with the ORM model (Object Relational Model).  It is written with ASP.NET 2.0 and C#.  They need more LINQ in the code.  But it is a mature enough architecture that I can use familiar tools to enhance and maintain the site.  It looks like there are more than 25 open source projects which enhance BlogEngine.Net.

Now, the next step is to convert some of the Silverlight 2 work I did on my last site into a Silverlight 3 implementation that sits on top of BlogEngine.Net features.  As many .NET developers know, Silverlight 3 will be out next week!!  After Silverlight 3 goes live and after I spend a little time on it, users with newer computers and who install the new plugin will be able to see a much nicer Silverlight UI theme.  Users with older CPUs should be able to see the HTML version of the site.  I expect the possibility of reaching a much wider set of platforms with this tool (mobile phones, Mac, Linux, and more types of browsers).  SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will just work and all the base features of a blog are covered. 

My Silverlight 2 site was fun to build.  I always knew it would take some work to get the feature set I now have and to write a down-level experience for computers that couldn't run the Silverlight plugin.  With BlogEngine.Net I can now focus on the UX (User Experience) and build on top of it.  Oh, and writing blog entries too. 

Cheers and Happy 4th of July!