As many of you know, I've been doing online training for the past twelve years with Pluralsight. I've devoted most of my time to creating courses. It has been amazing and wonderful to do this. But the time has come to diversify what I do.
When I announced my upcoming course, I had a lot of people ask me about what I thought of X framework versus Angular (which I’m covering in the course). I feel like I have to say something.
I do enjoy building things with code. When I started 28 years ago, that’s what I thought was the essence of what a “computer person’s” (e.g. software developer) job was to sit dark in a room and grind out computer code. Of course we know that it just isn’t true.
JavaScript is having a great year. With the continuation of web development, Node.js, and even Apple adding JavaScript as a replacement for their AppleScript.
Back in 2008, I posted an entry that showed what I used for my dev kit. It is about to to update it with what I am using now. A lot has changed from back them, but a lot hasn’t. While I do a lot more web development than I did back then, some of the tools haven’t changed but the hardware has.
In the last couple of years, I've been adding the HTML/JS/CSS skillset to my stack of required skills and my talks and courses have reflected that change. To my readers who are deep in the XAML stack, this change seems to have come at somewhat a shock to many. I've even been accused by some of abandoning the Silverlight, WPF, Win8, WinPhone folks. This has caused me a lot of frustration because I don't believe that developers can or should only know one possible stack. To reach the full breadth of users, sometimes you need to be able to develop across the ecosystems. In this same time, I've also done quite a number of HTML/JS/CSS talks where I didn't use Visual Studio. Some have conjectured whether I am moving away from the Microsoft stack as a result of the lessened use of Visual Studio in my demos. The frank answer is: nope.
With the surprising news of Sinofsky's leaving Microsoft still fluttering in the winds, I knew I'd hear some rants about Silverlight be heard among the XAML-lovers out there. I decided I needed a blog post (albeit a short one) to say my peace.
(UPDATED 11/12/2012: Added links to meetups/groups)
I've always been a big fan of George Carlin. I remember watching one of his first HBO specials when I was quite young. No matter whether you agree with his point of view, you had to admit he had an impressive mind and a way to stay relevant no matter where the country went.
Nearly a week ago I installed Windows 8 as my main laptop operating system. I could finally do this once the Windows Phone 7.1.1 SDK update was released (making the Windows Phone emulator work on Windows 8). So I am not knee deep into Windows 8 as a desktop operating system.
This is the seventh of ten parts of this blog post. The topics will be:
My new article disruptive technologies is now available on Software Quality Connection. If you’re an organization or developer who are worried about what is coming next, my “Which Platform is Next: All of Them” may be a good read for you.
Recently, while working on my Windows Phone 7.5 book, I found the need to display a short URL to some specific documentation. I found that you could use msdn.com to do this but the results were not very satisfying. In fact, if you take a typical documentation ID (e.g. “ff402535”), you can simply do this:
Url: http://wilderminds.blob.core.windows.net/downloads/oddsynccontext.zip