Ever since joining Microsoft back in August 2008 this blog has been pretty quiet and not just because I’ve been rolling around in the autumn leaves on campus but because of this gem, the Silverlight Toolkit.

At its highest level the Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of great controls and utilities that are continually being improved and polished until they are of the highest and most useful caliber.  You can find all the great details about this release over on my fearless leader’s blog and I highly recommend you check it out because beyond saying what the Silverlight Toolkit contains he also explains how it was built, how it will continue to be built and how it will be released in a very agile, very feedback-centric way.

One thing I want to stress is how important you, the developers, designers and those of uncertain vocation, are to this process.  Saying your feedback is valuable isn’t just lip service; we are watching the Issue Tracker, we are reading and responding in the Silverlight Controls forum, we are reading blog comments, in short we are listening to the people who use these controls day in and day out.

One of the features I love most about the Silverlight Toolkit is its iterative nature: We look at feedback, rub our brain cells together, roll up our sleeves and six to eight weeks later we have new controls that are ready to be previewed by the community or existing ones that have been polished to a high sheen by your feedback and continued testing.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what people do with these controls as well as what feedback is out there.  I’ll see everyone in the forums :)

Listening To Robot Rock/Oh Yeah by Daft Punk on Alive: 2007 (Live) in honor of how hard we all worked on this release.  Worked in fact… like robots.

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.

I just saw a quote from Joe Rosenberg via the MSFTextrememakeover that included one of the most asinine and scary things I've ever heard about Microsoft:

Rosenberg said. "The company has lost sight of its principal focus, which is to produce value for shareholders."

What's scary is that this is from a "Chief Equity Strategist" yet after this quote I wouldn't trust anything this guy has to say about money or investing because if there is one common theme among the most successful companies and individuals it's that their primary focus is to do what they love and to be the best at doing it.  Once you start chasing money for moneys sake the game is over and you're done ever making any type of substantial financial gains.  Rosenberg should know this and if he doesn't perhaps he needs to pick up a BusinessWeek and read this article, "The Secret Behind Trump's Success".

So if you ever find yourself starting a venture simply because you think it'll net you millions or because you're secretly hoping you'll be bought out then stop, take a breath and get a grip on reality.  If you really want to make money find your passion and be the best at it, do everything you can with it, surround yourself with others who share the passion and push that passion, be uncompromising with it and don't change your vision to fit into a committee or shareholder view.