My first weekend living in Seattle is drawing to a close and as the sun very, very slowly sets I figured I'd give a wee status report.

Right now I'm living in an apartment provided so nicely by Microsoft in an area of downtown Seattle called Belltown in a place The Shelby.  It's a fairly modern, clean, 1 bedroom place with a kitchen and dinning nook that fits two people rather well.  Fully furnished though someone should talk to whomever outfitted this place, we need more towel racks, seriously people.  Towel racks.

The area is pretty much full of hipster kids, upscale restaurants, hidden gems, halfway houses and the fire station.  Lot's of scooters go zipping around the place as well so scooter mania has hit here hard as well.  I can walk five blocks into the heart of downtown, six blocks and I'm in the famous Pike's Market, three blocks to a killer Mediterranean restaurant, eight blocks to the Puget Sound waterfront and most importantly one block to my new favorite watering hole, Two Bells.  From the front door I can see the Space Needle just a few blocks away.

First, the food.  The food here is amazing, we have yet to eat at a bad place in downtown Seattle.  First day lunch was at the Zeitoon Cafe where I had a killer panini, dinner at a great sushi place that had items I've never seen before plus three Japanese business men were dinning which is always a good sign.  Next night was pizza at Serious Pie, a small, quaint upscale pizzeria where everyone sits at shared tables while enjoying entirely unique appetizers and pizzas.  A warning though for my purist friends (Jeremy, I'm looking at you) there is no classic New York or Chicago style pizza on the menu so I'm still on a quest for the best New York slice in Seattle.  Tonight's dinner was at Two Bells, a bar & grill that captured my heart and stomach.  Low-key, no pretension bar & grill with killer hamburgers, Guinness on tap and a great mix of people from tattoo'd lasses to couples in Dockers.  It's only a block away from The Shelby and has a high probability of becoming my favorite local watering hole.  Kevin, Billy, Ben, Sean, this is where we'd meet for a pint after work.  I wish like hell we could.

The weather has been great, only the smallest amount of rain, comfortable temps and sunshine.  In fact the first day here I was missing our nice AC unit back in Colorado.  Even downtown there are trees everywhere and when walking by Bell & 4th (one block over) you can look right down to the Sound, or turn your head a bit and on a clear day make out the mountains.  All in all it's a beautiful city and I can see why so many people love it.  I'll report back tomorrow about the traffic though, I'm sure all these people equals one huge traffic problem of evil. 

In fact I'm surprised there is no cohesive public transportation.  There are a half dozen small networks but nothing like the London Underground or D.C. subway system.  A nice gentleman on the plane who bought be my Jack & Ginger attributed this to all the tree huggers who quite literally can't bare to part with a single tree to make way for unified light rail or subway system.  It's the classic curse of the West, since it was developed so much later than the East more people could afford personal transport and so the need was never as great.  Plus the West wasn't exactly settled by socialites and debutantes so finding a nice communal way for everyone to get around probably wasn't on the top of any of these anti-social explorer's lists.

This is my first time as a true Urbanite, living downtown, walking to the local market (Ralph's), being able to stumble home from the bar (Two Bells), walking to the bus for work (The 545 Express), hitting up the clubs (I hear them at night so I know they're around) and generally enjoying not having to fire up the car or spend money on gas to get to 90% of what I need to.  I'm sure once the constant rain and snow hits I won't be whistling such a merry little tune but I'll let the city court me a little while longer.

It still feels surreal, like I'm on some huge extended vacation and that I'm just staying in a suite at some hotel for awhile but I have a feeling after tomorrow that illusion will come crashing down.  A few days of work I'm sure will bring me right back down to Earth :)

It's all about the snappy opening line, watch any classic movie from the 40's and you'll realize the importance of the opening line.  If you need some evidence check out 'His Girl Friday', at least the first 20 minutes, for some of what I consider some of the back & forth dialog around.  Of course the classic for lines from the 40's is arguably 'Casablanca' and if you've never seen it you owe it to yourself to watch it with a bottle and some friends, you'll be amazed at how many lines come from just that one movie.

The point, if I must make one, is that I've been trying to figure out a snappy black and white, soft focus opening line that says, "Well kids, seems the Universe has called my bluff and it's time to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to Microsoft."  Starting August 11th, 2008 I'll be an official Microsoft employee working as a program manager on the Silverlight team in Seattle, WA.

I'm not sure exactly what that means except that I hear rumors from my new boss Shawn Burke that it's something to do with controls and being open and agile and designing these fancy little usability bundles of love.  Even though my title says "Program Manager" I have a feeling I'm still going to be very code heavy, since code is and always will be my #1 passion and I'll do everything I can to make sure I'm still slinging lines of code on a daily basis like a monkey flings poo.  They probably won't be the production lines of code but that's OK, I can finally admit that while I think my coding kung fu is deadly I have this odd tendency to drop a project once I figure out the core problem.  After that it's just typing and I get a much bigger thrill out of problem solving than solution implementing.

Oddly enough the whole Silverlight mumbo-jumbo isn't what I want to talk about (though I'm sure I will soon enough), it's the uprooting of my life from Denver, CO to Seattle, WA.  It's leaving a job I worked at for 14 years, where I had a team of friends that were more like brothers that oddly enough gave me free rein to try out any crazy design idea that popped into my head.  It's leaving friends that I could count on for anything from making me iced coffee to helping me tow a clutchless car home from Lusk, Wyoming and everything in between.  A huge family, aye, more a clan, that made every family gathering something to be looked forward to rather than dreaded, with everything from some of the best food you've ever tasted to Irish step-dancing to smoking Blues to ballet to a nephew that's obsessed with any kind of construction equipment, preferably in 'Tear Shit Up' yellow.  To all those still in Denver I love you, dearly and deeply.

I will miss Denver, the people, friends, family, the exploding cultural scene, the moments that can't be captured over XBox Live, and yet I'm also excited to be in Seattle, at Microsoft, trying something new, creating new stories, meeting new people, finding new dive bars, playing host to all my visiting friends and family, bringing whatever it is I am to Microsoft (which is usually only bad singing and a love of strong drink) and generally starting a new chapter in my life.

Today is my first day in Seattle, let the adventure begin!

As I've been working my way through the Silverlight & XAML landscape inside of Visual Studio I've come to realize how much better tools like TextMate, InType & E are at editing straight text. 

I was reminded of this today when I was trying to create a simple code snippet for XAML.  I whipped up a quick little snippet and went to use it how I always do, by typing the shortcut then pressing TAB.  Well, I tabbed and nothing happened.  OK, something happened, I got a tab, which I didn't expect at all.  It should have expanded my code snippet.  TAB TAB just got me two tabs and while I could get it using the highly awkward Ctrl + K, Ctrl + X that seemed just as much work as actually typing it so I ignored that.

After much searching I discovered that I need to put the angle bracket first and then I could get my tab completion to work.  This about blows my fragile little mind since one of the best uses of snippets is to avoid typing those silly brackets in the first place.  I can almost see how the decision was made to require a bracket but it only makes sense from a engineering stand-point, not a usability one.  It completely ignores the fact that angle brackets are not the easiest things to type quickly.

My solution to all of this is two-fold.  First, once I get to Microsoft I'm going to hunt down the XAML IDE team and second to stop using Visual Studio 2008 for editing XAML.  I've setup a good handful of snippets in InType and discovered something odd yet not all that surprising: I can build a full XAML UI by hand in Intype faster than I can do it in Blend and much faster than using Visual Studio.  Anyone that hand-codes HTML won't be too shocked by this because it's fairly common knowledge that a skilled HTML coder can bust out a page faster in a good text editor than in Dreamweaver.

I really hope the Visual Studio IDE team is looking hard at the new wave of tools like Intype & E, they really are that much more productive.

I've been putting myself through a crash course on Silverlight\WPF these last few days and here are a few random thoughts.  All of this is after a 60 minute breakneck tour of WPF\Silverlight so I'm more than likely missing a whole bunch of things and probably doing things bass-ackwards but hey, that's why they call it learning.

• There are three stock layout managers (used for placing controls): Canvas, Stack & Grid.  Where is the CSS-style panel?  If designing web pages has taught us anything it's that the grid quickly gets cumbersome.  Note to self if I get hired at Microsoft: Create a CSSLayoutPanel that uses stock CSS to position the controls.
• I forgot how painful an experience it is to enter XML in Visual Studio.  I've been spoiled by Intype and E TextEditor where you don't need to enter the opening angle bracket to get code completion.  Also, I must be doing something wrong because entering XML attributes is downright painful in Visual Studio.  This is where I'm stuck:
  • Type "<ColumnDefinition "
  • Type "W", brings up Intellisense
  • Tab to complete, you now have Width=""
  • Type "50"
  • Now what?  How do I get beyond the ending quote without a lot of keyboard gymnastics?  I can press Right Arrow or End but they're not quickly reachable from the home row.  I can just type another quote but instead that'll just add a second ending quote which isn't what we want.  What should really happen is that I should be able to press Tab to tab out of quotes and put the caret one space past the ending quote.  This is how TextMate, Intype and E all handle this and it works wonderfully.
• There needs to be a nice bundle of XAML specific code-snippets.  The argument that all "real" design work is usually done in something like Blend is crap because even with all the great GUI builders like Delphi, Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, etc. people are still constantly dropping down to the code to get that pixel perfect design so might as well offer up some snippets to make it easier.
• I'd like to talk to the person that decided that Silverlight's margin property should list margin in "L T R B" order while CSS defines it as "T R B L".  It's not exactly a horrible idea but why pollute the knowledge space needlessly and make people remember two almost identical things?  There are obviously a lot of similarities between XAML and semantic XHTML yet instead of easing the transition by reusing common usage patterns they decided  to make things just a little different.  Annoying.
• For all my whinging defining UI via a markup-style language is definitely a plus, regardless of the angle bracket tax.
• I wonder if you could represent XAML or WPF as YAML instead?  Staring at all the XML about breaks my head in two.
• Printing, is that even a possibility with Silverlight?  How many times have I printed something from a web page with zero control over margins, headers, footers, etc.  Seems some very cool label printing applications could be whipped up in Silverlight as well, CD labels, shipping, etc.