Whew! It's been a great year and I have been meaning to get back into blogging. I finally remembered my blog password , and this is a test post.

It's also a statement that that I am going to be doing some more blogging soon. Silverlight 3.0 drops tomorrow and I've been playing with an internal release for a couple weeks now.

 Good things are coming!

Faithful readers of this blog, (both of you) may have noticed that I haven't posted since the big Mix08 conference which coincided with the release of Silverlight 2.0 Beta1.

I've been busy "drinking from the Silverlight firehose", getting up to speed on all the new stuff and working on my big silverlight project which is called: (drumroll please...) Slidie.com.

What impressed me the most about Sliverlight (and all the more so since 2.0B1) is that it doesn't feel like a toy language like javascript/actionscript/etc. This is the real deal. You get a real strongly-typed first class programming language, a real development envoirnment, real debugging with breakpoints and everything.

This is real programming!

So what are we going to do with it? Wouldn't it be a shame if all it was ever used for was stupid "punch the monkey" banner ads? No! And again I say, NO! We have a real programming environment, so let's build real applications.

This was my revelation. But this let me to a quandary... exactly what should we build? I've built a lot of windows apps in my day, and I've also built my share of web apps. But this is neither. I don't want to build the worlds coolest web shopping cart, and neither do I want to rebuild an "Excel in a Browser".

So I am building a slideshow builder. My project is called Slidie. It is an editor that allows any web user to pull together images and media from the web and embed a slide show player in their page or blog or whatever.

The big feature is that the editor just puts together a "ShowFile" which is a xml file with links to the image files used, and the image files are downloaded to the client browser on demand. This means that I can run a slideshow application without having to be in the hosting business. Just post your images to Flickr or wherever and then add the links to your slide show. The FunnyHats sample is an example of this. If you look at the showfile, you'll notice the picture links do not load from this webpage.

More info about the project is on the Slidie project page under the gallery link above.

Enjoy, and please post feedback!

Oh boy, mix08 starts tomorrow and I really wish I could go.

But just incase tickets don't drop in my lap in the next 12 hours, I am going to be hosting my own Mini-Mix at home!

Here is what I am planning on doing tomorrow:

1. Call in sick!
2. 8:00 AM (ish)- head to the Kirkland Ladro for a Grande "shot in the dark".
3. 9:30 AM - Be online and watching for the Keynote: 750kbps, 300kbps, 100kbps.
4. Rest of the day, start checking blogs feverishly looking for content and samples, and most of all, trying to get the 2.0 Beta1 release.
5. No sleep until I get a 2.0 Beta1 Sample posted!

I can't wait. I can't wait.