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Joined 15 years ago

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May 22

Mike Brown is the President of KharaSoft, Inc. (a Microsoft Partner specializing in Virtualization, Cloud Services, and Custom Software Development) and author of the upcoming MVVM Unleashed. He is a 15 year veteran IT who refuses to choose between his passion for hardware and software. He is a WPF and Silverlight pioneer, working with the technologies in their various forms since 2006 (during the Beta of WPF) and a WPF MVP for three years running.

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Recent submissions

The Case for Certification azurecoding.net

1 browniepoints 14 years ago 0 comments

Building The Future Part 1: Windows 8 azurecoding.net

1 browniepoints 15 years ago 0 comments

Comment · 15 years ago

Again, I wasn't targeting this at people still supporting XP and the like. Unlike WPF, I don't see Microsoft back-porting DirectUI especially not to XP. My article was targeted at the people up in arms about the death of Silverlight.

Comment · 15 years ago

Funny story, the original plan was to use Java as the premier .NET language. Then Sun got all litigious and ish. So MSFT made their own. They have the benefit of having full control of C# good thing too. Look at what Oracle is doing to Google over Android.

Comment · 15 years ago

Very good point. But Microsoft has made a STRONG commitment to declarative UIs starting with WPF continuing with Silverlight. Windows Phone 7 was a total reboot of their mobile platform centered around Silverlight. There's no pussyfooting when it comes to Windows 8. They're severing the ties and going all in.

Comment · 15 years ago

There is indeed some speculation on my part...but it is based on diving into what is publicly available. There are threads where people have dissected the leaked builds and shown how to create apps using the same apis that you use today for Silverlight. I personally have not downloaded any of them (though I'm significantly tempted).

True, Silverlight apps may not port directly, especially if you break out of the sandbox and do things that aren't supported within the platform. But because of the fact that Silverlight compiles down to IL...all Microsoft needs to do is bring the Silverlight VM over and boom it just works.

Basically what I've done is looked at the current state of the ecosystem and what has been revealed publicly for the future and connected the dots. If you look at the demo video and observe some of the animations and rich interaction being shown, it's obvious that it's not just HTML on display there.

Comment · 15 years ago

First are the apps that are built in to the device. The Zune Media Player coupled with a Zunepass lets you download almost any song in the library directly to the device. I've been able to consistently name a song, look it up on the zune marketplace and listen to it 30 seconds later.

The Office hub integrates with Sharepoint Online allowing you to collaborate on documents from your phone. Make annotations etc. Included in this is OneNote which becomes a portable notebook.

The Games hub has full Xbox live integration with games from the major publishers made specifically for the phone.

Facebook and Twitter both have multiple clients both "Official" and third party.

Netflix, Kindle, Youtube, and a number of other major media outlets have native clients.

4th and Mayor is a foursquare app that was written as an example app by a member of Microsoft's platform evangelism team (http://www.4thandmayor.com/)

So far there hasn't been a case where I wanted an app to do something on my phone and couldn't find multiple examples both free and paid. The ecosystem is very robust. Microsoft just released tools to simplify porting apps from iOS and Android so it's only going to grow from there.