Xperimentality

They just announced the release of the Silverlight Toolkit at PDC08.  The toolkit is an out-of-release-cycle set of controls and components for Silverlight 2.  Full source code is available.  Check it out here.

Last night I went to dinner with Aaron Skonnard from pluralsight, Jeff Barnes, and Robert Cain.  Aaron and Jeff talking services, Robert covering Database, and me on the UI, we had the conversation covered from all angles!  One of the things we talked about was the limitation on the breadth of material you could precisely cover now, effectively specialization.  On the other hand, we have the need to know things outside of our specialization in order to make good decisions about the use and application of our specialized area of knowledge.

This morning, in trying to get caught up on some reading, I read Jesse Liberty's blog entry about specializing.

So the question blazed even more in my mind.

De-Specializing?

My story, as I imagine is the story of many of us that have been in this industry for 20 years or more, is similar to Jesse's.  I remember a day when you really could know everything about the technologies around you.  I remember being an expert (whatever that really means) in ColdFusion, ASP, JavaScript, Windows Development, SQL, and more.

As time has gone on, it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with all the changes.  At first, it was very difficult for me to give up technologies.  I liked knowing all the things I needed to know to accomplish any task asked of me.  One at a time, I quit trying to keep up with the latest changes in certain technologies.  I started moving more toward a web technology focus, then to a more UI technology focus.  And it continues to this day.  I still try to keep up with ASP.NET, AJAX, etc.  I also have been keeping up with what I call the "XAML technologies", being WPF and Silverlight.  But even this becomes increasingly difficult as all three of these areas, ASP.NET, WPF, and Silverlight, explode into new realms of capability and, thus, possibility!

So what are the implications of specializing in these technologies and why can it be so difficult to specialize and still be effective?

Take Silverlight for example.  It would be possible to narrow your scope to XAML as it relates to Silverlight.  You could dive into the controls, styling, binding, usercontrols, the visual state manager,etc and never even have to use C# or VB.NET (or JavaScript in the case of Silverlight 1).  So do you become a XAML expert and not keep up with the changes to the C# and VB.NET languages?  Possible, but would you be or become an effective Silverlight developer?

So, perhaps that is a bit of a microview example.  So let's get to the real question that is on my mind.  Staying with Silverlight as our example technology, how far do you go and how deep do you go into WCF and REST-ful services?  While "services" is definitely a completely different technology focus than Silverlight, it is my feeling that Silverlight, WPF, and ASP.NET, will be most effective when services are a part of the picture.  This is especially true with recent and soon to be announced advances in the "services" space.  As an example, just think about how "services in the cloud" are going to affect UI development (or at least it's integration with business logic and data).

Specialized Generalist?

I'll admit, I am way behind on the advances in the "services" space and have to get caught up soon.  I imagine next week's PDC may be the fire that ignites my getting back up to speed.  But how far should we go in the technologies that are not our chosen specialization.  Is it possible to become a generalized specialist? or perhaps a specialized generalist?  Perhaps the definition of specialist, or how we define specializing, has to change.

I imagine it won't be long before these questions are answered out of sheer natural progression; given the rate at which new technologies, perhaps we could call it "integration technologies", are emerging and evolving.

What do you think?

By now I am sure everyone who develops with Microsoft technologies has heard of Microsoft Across America.  Next Tuesday, Microsoft Across America is presenting techdays '08 in Atlanta Georgia.  The Developer Track lasts 3 days but you can register for each day individually.  This is a great idea since not all of the topics will be of interest to everyone.  I am pleased to be presenting topic #2, Introduction to Silverlight 2, on the first day of techdays.  I also know that Wally McClure will be presenting the ASP.NET AJAX topic...and who doesn't need a little more Wally!

This is an awesome opportunity to gain a greater understanding of the business value of some of the newest and hottest Microsoft technology solutions.  Not to mention that, but you'll get a look at some of the latest development tools as well!  And it is FREE.  Who says you don't get something for nothing?

As you can tell, I am a big proponent of these Microsoft events.  Let's not try to hide the fact that Microsoft benefits from them.  Sure!  They are in business too!  So sometimes there is a lot of marketing involved.  But I truly feel that the development community can benefit even more.  These free events are a great way to see the newest technologies, and often times have them presented by the professionals in the industry who use them everyday!

Hopefully I have been able to convince you to take advantage of this opportunity to get to see some of the new tools and technologies available now!  What are you waiting for?  Go register!

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 was released yesterday.  This is a significant update.  It is much more than a typical service pack.  It includes not only rolled-up fixes, but enhancements in many areas and technologies:

For the web, there is enhanced designer support and better formatting options for JavaScript.
For WPF, there are improvements to the design interface as well as how you interact with the code.
For SQL, there is support for SQL 2008 which was just recently RTM'd.
There are WCF improvements such as the new Hosting Wizard for WCF projects.
And there are VB and C# interaction improvements.

As opposed to re-listing features that have already been listed elsewhere, Scott Guthrie had a great blog entry about VS2008 SP1 as well as .NET 3.5 SP1.  Keep in mind that this was the written about the BETA release so some things may have changed before final release, but it gives a great overview of what was in the BETA.

Last night I did a presentation for the Birmingham .NET User Group on rapidly building CRUD applications using Linq and SQL Compact 3.5.  The demo we built used the SQL Compact 3.5 Northwind database.  It was a 3.5 Winform application that had a search area, a results grid, and a detail editor area.  The presentation demonstrated how to build the whole thing in 5 or 10 minutes (or less) with very little code and using mostly drag and drop to build the interface.

The meeting went well and ended on time.  We had the opportunity to congratulate Robert Cain in person on his MVP Award.  We had a lot of swag last night so I believe everyone left with something including one lucky attendee who got a version of Office 2007!

I got my email this morning indicating that I had been awarded an MVP Award for another year!  Yeah!  I appreciate the effort and consideration of all those involved.  I also look forward to another year....perhaps even a better year this next year.

Onward! 

I have had a minor release of the Silverlight Code Camp Template for some time and just keep getting side-tracked when I go to move it out to CodePlex.  So I had a few spare minutes today and uploaded the new file.  I know a lot of people wanted the better mouse support.

The only change in Version 0.4 is the addition of the mouse scrolling support libraries.  So now all scrollable regions in the site can be controlled with the mouse-wheel and by dragging the scroll thumb.

More releases will be forthcoming (more quickly than this one)!