Microsoft TechEd will start next week and I’m pretty excited because I’ll be a community facilitator at the WomenBuild event on May 14th. Only registered attendees can take part in the event, but the event is open both to women and men, who want to grow the number and visibility of women in IT.

 As a facilitator I will lead a table (up to 10 attendees) through a series of building / sharing activities around the issue of Women in Technology that have been pre-determined by Robert Rasmusen from Lego SeriousPlay in Denmark.

The  WomenBuild program is specifically designed to address the decline of female talent and leadership in the computer science industry.  Microsoft partnered with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) through Robert Rasmussen & Associates to create a unique interactive workshop, using LEGO® Bricks to model solutions for growing strong female leaders in the software industry. WomenBuild’s principal goals are to drive awareness that diversity is important in the field of technology and to build a community to help attract, retain and empower women in technology. Reading through the WomenBuild information, I couldn’t help myself and note down some points for future reference:

The importance of diverse opinions and respect in achieving common goals.

Having your voice heard as a woman and discussing differences in communication style.

Diversity isn’t about celebrating what’s different about us, but celebrating what we have in common.

Diversity is about celebrating differences in opinion. You can’t have a solid solution based on only 1 type of opinion.

Up till now, there have been WomenBuild events in the following cities: Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, Boston, Washington DC,  Orlando, Dallas,  San Francisco and Seattle. Yet the WomenBuild event next week at TechEd 2009 will be the largest event to date!

 WomenBuild in DC was featured in the Washington Times on Inauguration Day – January 20, 2009.  The line -an event to find and develop female software “stars” for the future- in the article meant a lot to me! Who doesn’t want to be a genius with star quality? I’m not sure why, but I think we need constant reminders that being a genius (girl) geek is something highly desirable and extremely enjoyable.

Here is a series of  mixed links:

Lego Serious Play: http://www.seriousplay.com/

Video about previous WomenBuild events:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LauraFoy/Tech-Ready-8-and-WomenBuild/

Video about WomenBuild at MSDN Developer Conferences (with Asli Bilgin and Stephen Forte): http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LauraFoy/WomenBuild-with-LEGOS-at-MSDN-Developer-Conferences/

You can also join the WomenBuild Facebook group, if you want to promote WomenBuild events!

I thought I spice up my MIX09 UX notes with more evidence today.

I loved the keynotes with all the cool product announcements on day 1 and 2 at MIX09, but I especially thought Bill Buxton’s and Deborah Adler’s  talks were very inspirational. Daily life overcomes us too fast and we forget very soon our reinforced inspiration and ambition, which we need to put our ideas into reality. Yet this time I have something to hold on to! I had the chance to get a photograph with Bill Buxton and he even remembered me the next day, so that I got an autograph with an extremely meaningful message. Since – “Verba volant, scripta manent” (Words fly away, the written remains); my newly fueled energy and ambition should endure for quite a while I hope.

Bill Buxton@MIX09

Inspiration Boost

Additional Note: What I love about Silverlight is that it gives me the option to do coding, while practicing design basics and doing my RIA experiments with a lot of fun. For those interested, there is an all day .NET Master Series event on April 4, 2009 at the LA .NET Developers Group with Jason Beres. The event will cover rich interactive web development with Silverlight, and working with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to transport data across the wire.

Due to the crazy list of releases and announcements (Silverlight3 Beta1, SketchFlow in Expression Blend, Blend 3 Preview, Super Preview, IE 8, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 etc.) at MIX09, there is already an intense overload of information out there. Some blog entries were posted the minute the keynote was over. So I decided to let the storm cool down a little bit, before I write about my first impressions and experimental samples. I truly plan to keep this wait short… But until then I want to share personal UXs of my MIX09 Adventure, which turned out to be inspiring, unique and … yes, they are all mine! First thanks goes out to my geeky MIXDIVA – Developer Evangelist Lynn Langit.

Let’s start off with my Silverlight UX:

On the last day of MIX09, I finally had a chance to meet Dave Campbell(Wynapse), who spent almost two hours to introduce me to a brilliant Silverlight crowd. Right at this moment, I still blush, as he has even mentioned this encounter on his blog.

I should thank him once again; I guess I got a real-time demo of a sincere developer community involvement action. As a matter of fact, he is always very kind to include my Silverlight entries in SilverlightCream.

Here’s a list of Silverlight Pro’s I had a chance to meet:

Jesse Liberty: Silverlight Geek” and “Developer Community Liaison

Tim Heuer: Microsoft Silverlight Program Manager

Laurent Bugnion: Author of Silverlight Unleashed. Surprisingly he is from a German speaking country (Switzerland); which was so refreshing!

Shawn Wildermuth: Microsoft MVP C# and he is the one, who’s behind the Silverlight-Tour workshops

Mike Harsh: Silverlight Program Manager

Corrina Black:  Silverlight platform – Lead designer

John Papa: Microsoft C# MVP, Author of Data Driven Services with Silverlight 2

Corey Schuman: Author of Microsoft Expression Blend 2 for Windows:
Visual QuickStart Guide

Pete Brown: Microsoft MVP for Client Application Development (Silverlight and WPF)

Koen Zwikstra: The Silverlight Spy guy

Corey Miller: Senior Consultant Magenic Technologies

Bryant Likes: UX Developer for Avanade, Co-author of SQL-Server 2000 XML Distilled

I even have some pictures to support or should I say prove:) my happy ending SL UX. To recognize me, just look out for the girl, who doesn’t know where to put here hands; isn’t that funny?

Certainly, it wasn’t only me, who took pictures… So I discovered myself on Jesse Liberty’s Photo Essay blog entry as well…

It seems – what happens at MIX, doesn’t stay there! Luckily all content is also available to everyone. You can check out tons of Silverlight video sessions right here! Get ready to be surprised!

I have spent some time reading about + playing with Silverlight video player applications. There is lots of info out on the Web about Silverlight video players and it is really hard to work your way through all of them. So I thought I should share the links, which proved to be the most useful for me.

Jesse Liberty’s Hypervideo Tutorials

These video tutorials are pretty awesome. You get a chance to see how to edit Expression Encoder templates in Expression Blend and add hypervideo links and markers to your video. By the way; if you haven’t been to the How do I? section of the Silverlight.net web site, you are missing out on very informative plus free learning material.

Streaming and Progressive Download Info

Vertigo is a company, that has lots of cool Silverlight projects like Hard Rock  Memorabilia using DeepZoom, Slide.Show/Video.Show and the most recent one, HD quality live streaming player for the Inaguration of Barack Obama. They teamed up with CBS, Microsoft and Move Networks to make that happen. A while ago, scanning through their blogs, I discovered Elisabeth Boonin’s entry titled “Streaming, Progressive Download and Silverlight“, which provides a brilliant clarification of the differences between video download, progressive download and video streaming. Especially if you tried to start off with streaming through Silverlight’s Streaming web site, you might be dazzled with the misnomer. The Silverlight Streaming website provides progressive download services and not (live) streaming; to do streaming you actually need a streaming server. The article is a quite detailed orientation to video delivery mechanisms and I enjoyed reading it.

The Open Video Player Initiative

This is  a community project that concentrates on sharing best practices for video player development and monetization. The website has source codes available for a video player in Silverlight and Flash, which can be downloaded from SourceForge. The Silverlight open video player includes a ready interface for setting parameters and I could replay videos with progressive download and streaming without any problems. Yet I did not look into the source code in detail; therefore I cannot comment on the coding so far. You can check out the SmoothHD site to experience an Open Video Player sample in action.

Silverlight 2 Video Player

Currently I am checking out the Silverlight Video Player 2 source code, which can be found on CodePlex. The video player features include support for streaming video, startup parameters, full screen playback and timeline marker support. The player is resizable and rescalable too. The participating developers in the project are Joel Neubeck and Tim Heuer. Actually, I  always find tons of Silverlight media goodies on Tim Heuer’s blog and it’s always worth a visit. Recently I also read on Joel Neubeck’s blog that their video player is now used on Microsoft’s MediaRoom site.

Once I come up with my customized sample of the Silverlight 2 Video Player; I plan to share more bits and pieces about my own development experience.

♥ Happy Valentine’s Day! ♥

February is starting off good! I am going to MIX09 in March – thanks to Lynn Langit; who is now not just SocalDevgal but is also nicknamed MixDiva.  I’m already excited about the Silverlight 3 announcement and the Silverlight sessions. And who knows – I may get a chance to network with some Silverlight and UX Pro’s? Just to mention, I am one of the 10 readers Adam Kinney was talking about in his Silverlight 3 blog entry; however I am not sure if he knows that and actually will say hi? Well, will see.

There is a lot more information about the sessions and speakers on the MIX09 web site.  Here are a few sessions that caught my eye:

Building Microsoft Silverlight Applications with Eclipse – Shawn Wildermuth. A few weeks ago, I played with the Eclipse Silverlight plugin; so I am really looking forward to this one!

The Future of Microsoft Expression Blend – Douglas Olson

What’s New in Microsoft Silverlight 3 - Joe Stegman

What’s New in Microsoft Silverlight 3 Media – Larry Olson

Integrating Microsoft Expression Blend with Adobe Creative Suite – Joanna Mason

Go Beyond Best Practices: Evolving Next Practices to Prosper in the 21st Century – Lewis Carbone

Escaping Flatland in Application Design: Visualizing Data – Peter Eckert, Eric Gould Bear

Building Accessible RIAs in Microsoft Silverlight – Reed Shaffner, Chris Auld. Lately I am trying to get some insight into Web Accesibility and having an accesibility + silverlight combo presentation sounds fantastic.

There is also a section called SHOWOFF, which gives you the chance to share bits and pieces about your uber-cool projects with a video. You can find more details under the Mixtify tab on the MIX09’s website.

I feel that the MIX Conference is so much different from many big geek events. The overall concept seems to be more colorful, inspirational and crazy creative! Probably bringing developers and designers together makes it so devign (=divine).

If you register until February 13th, you can save $400 or try to look out for some geeky angels without wings!

While reading Laurence Moroney’s blog entry about MIX09, I discovered “Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight” (Eclipse4SL). I have to admit, I wasn’t aware that there was an ongoing project for cooperating Silverlight technology into Eclipse. I think that’s really exciting news!

I have been working in .NET projects, however most of our web development in my former full-time job and my freelance assignments in 2008 were mainly in Java and Eclipse was our principal IDE. My Silverlight experiments from last year solely were due to my personal curiosity. Now getting the chance to integrate hip Silverlight features to my long-time IDE buddy Eclipse is definitely an amazing opportunity. Especially if you are not taking any sides! There are just to many developers, who will talk the “other” IDE/programming language down whatever that might be. I believe that being open to different possibilities just creates a totally new mindset and collaborative experimentation may lead to much more creativity in technology.

Eclipse4SL is still a work in progress; however I decided to give it a try. I upgraded Eclipse to version 3.4 to install Eclipse4SL. The installation is quite straightforward just as any Software Update, you would do from Eclipse. I tried to create a Silverlight Web Project, add a Canvas and Textblock and run the project. Everything worked just fine. There is a palette with controls, containers and shapes. You can drag and drop these items to your UserControl elements, get Code completion help in Source view, add attributes to controls just through a mouse-click. What you can’t do is to tweak the design in design view; everything is done through code or through property settings. At least that’s what I have found out so far! But that is just the same in Visual Studio. When you play around with a Silverlight project in Expression Blend, once you move to Visual studio for the actual coding, you can’t do any design changes without some code. Needless to say that IntelliSense features are much more extensive in Visual Studio.

Advanced Media features and Interoperability are listed in Eclipse4SL’s road-map as Spring 2009 milestones. I’ll be waiting/watching with attention!

I have many wishes for 2009; most of them are just [harsh] expectations of myself. As I know, that you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously, I won’t list them down here. I will try to lighten up and I will even try to spread this [+] attitude by sharing a fantastic video.

We all have a couple of minutes to appreciate the beauty of life and human creativity every day.

The Light Show video was created for Electrolabel, a Belgium based energy company, by Famous, Brussels. 

If you want to see the making of the video, click here.

To read more details about the video, you can check out the Inpiration Room.

Just noting down one wish: I want to create beautiful things too.

Merry Christmas. Feliz Navidad. Frohe Weihnachten.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the information flow on the Internet?

Do you think that it’s hard to scan through all the data and filter out meaningful content?

Do you ever so often discover another social media tool you were not aware of, while you are already a member of more than a dozen services?

For me, it’s as if I’m lost between links and redirected pages; posts, tweets and emails from time to time… At some moments I even don’t remember how I landed on a link/page; I don’t recall where it all began… The online world creates a Webosphere (if there’s a blogosphere there can be Webosphere as well), where I am “always” connected online, but in fact disconnected from the outer-space. It all just starts to sound like a science-fiction movie I guess… Simply what I’m trying to say is; the Web is not an imaginary world – it creates trillions of inputs and has zillions of ways to keep you busy.

What do you think – is there a way to digest ALL the information that is made available out there?

I enjoy all conveniences of technology. I definitely love the feeling of “being connected”. As I am far away from friends+family here, I need to be connected… I check out Social Networking sites daily, use Twitter, listen to music on Pandora, search for any question (and I have many questions!) on the Internet (OK- mostly just Google), share pictures on Flickr, scan through blogs on Google Reader, read info on Wikipedia, watch videos/movies online, shop online, read Turkish newspapers online, send many many many emails, find great tutorials on Silverlight.net, watch trainings on Lynda.com …. and it goes on and on and on. But still; I have this restless feeling of “There is so much more to read, listen, watch and learn“.

Just as I said – occasionally I feel lost in the vast ocean of information. There’s always bits and pieces you missed; cause the online medium and social collaboration available today – produces so much more than we can easily process. Or is it just me?

I came across a video called “Did you know 3.0“, which is based on the “Shift Happens/Did you know” presentation series by Karl Fisch  and Scott McLeod. One tiny detail in the 3.0 version, led to my thoughts about the data indigestion problem(!). It says “It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.” I didn’t check any numbers or statistics shared in the video; however it’s an interesting piece to watch.

Some related links to the video:

SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/shift-happens-33834

Shift Happens: http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/

Having easy and extensive access to information is crucial today. We have numerous options for accessing/selecting information. Yet people with limited resources in the past made incredible findings.

Reflecting on the lines of code I wrote, the SQL’s I executed, the reports I generated, the bugs I fixed, the relevant/irrelevant meetings I attended, the hundreds of tests I have taken in school, the formulas I memorized, the essays I wrote, the homeworks I completed, the books I read, the movies I watched, the songs I have listened to, the number of tweets, blogs I can reach…

With all the data available to me:

What did I discover or invent?

What extraordinary finding did I make?

Did I at least find out how to invent myself?

There so much more data everyday; which makes me feel as if  I know less than yesterday.

I wonder if not being able to efficiently filter out so much information makes us lose focus… If it makes us a little more confused.

I’m just full of weird thoughts today.

Writing them down has unintentionally created an excellent example of the information overload I am talking about…

This weekend I decided to use my Buntstifte (colored pencils) to do some drawings… and to stay away from the laptop! Sometimes I just need to reassure myself that the keyboard and the screen are not extensions to my hands/arms and eyes. I need to disconnect myself from the online world on purpose. It’s hard but not impossible!

Back to drawing… I used a promotional picture from OPI’s France collection - or La Collection de France, which I discovered in Instyle’s November 2008 issue. But due to my lack of practice, I just left out some details from the original picture such as the hands, which I have never been good at drawing. I also changed the color scheme to make it a little brighter and because I didn’t have all the color shades!

Here’s the original picture and the end (or let’s say test) result:

Feel free to make comments – but please don’t be too cruel.

As I said – I’m just sharing here some weekend activity… The word ”artist” in today’s title is nothing more than wishful thinking!  Plus – where’s your holiday spirit? Falalalala la lala la…

Microsoft has launched a new contest called “Mix 10K Smart Coding Challenge” for the Mix09 conference. Project entries will be accepted until the end of January 2009. The web applications must be in Silverlight, WPF or run as a XAML Browser application. Applications will be be made available online for “Public Voting”, which means that there will be a “Community Choice” winner besides the “Judge’s Choice” winner. The winners will receive cool prizes; you can check them out here: http://2009.visitmix.com/MIXtify/TenKRules.aspx

So basically you should maximize the user’s Silverlight/WPF experience, but minimalize everything else - cut down/optimize your code, remove irrelevant libraries, comments, whitespaces etc. The code might not be pretty in the inside; but everything is about polished looks these days any way Just kidding!

The 10K challenge info page also gives the following list of similar contests for some inspiration:

Wolfenstein 5K: http://www.wolf5k.com/

5K: http://www.sylloge.com/5k/entries/list.html

Stewart Butterfield’s 5K: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/5k

I googled and searched through tweets to check out some blog entries/news about the 10K contest. Bill Reiss’ Silverlight blog has some tips+tricks on how to cram an application into 10K. The notes really gave me “food for thought”! But I’m not sure if I’m motivated enough to become a contest participant; probably I need some food for courage as well?