The absolute best way to improve your coding skills is to read the absolute best advanced MVVM book EVAR!

If you’re programming WPF or Silverlight, don’t pass up the opportunity to give Advanced MVVM a read. Written by one of the best WPF developers in the known universe, it’s sure to be useful and worth the mere pennies that he’s charging for this gem.

I was watching a session from MIX09 this morning titled “Deep Dive into Microsoft Silverlight Graphics.” The session was hosted by Seema Ramchandani and surprisingly (though, not too surprisingly) she was conducting the session from her 17″ MacBook Pro. She’s teaching the intricacies of a Microsoft product from the comfort of Mac. Wonderfully ironic!

The only reason I bring this up is that I constantly get comments from people about my MacBook while traveling through meetings and offices at Microsoft’s Redmond campus and recently at a Silverlight Training that I was conducting.  I’m sure she got lots of comments as well.  A few things are commonly agreed upon:

1. having a MacBook in a Microsoft office is just wrong – it involves too much cross-pollination of kool-aid,
2. MacBooks are definitely sexy,
3. and Everybody wants one.

Everybody wants one and they want to know how it runs Windows.  “How’s the performance?”  “How’s the driver situation?” Of course, they also want to know what I like about it compared to other notebooks.  The typical “why buy a Mac?” question.

The answer really isn’t that complicated.

One of the immediate reasons that tops the list among the nerdier crowd is that as a developer I feel that I need a machine that can code for the Mac OS and for Windows.  Developers are just more 1337 that way (and coding for Mac is more important nowadays too).

I think this was a cop out for the real reason that I bought a MacBook, however.

The real reason is that I just feel a little spoiled with my MacBook.  It’s like buying an expensive car.  I bought it because I appreciate the craftsmanship, the attention paid to the details.  I don’t just “go fast” – I enjoy the ride.

Unfortunately when the weekend came I didn’t find much comfort in relaxation.  Instead I spent money on buying Twittersort.com.  I’ve proceeded to spend almost my entire weekend coding the website – we’ll see if I can get it up and running tonight.

It’s been a lot of work, but I’ve got all the major hurdles jumped over already.  Twitter API – check.  Website database communication – check.  Proxies for Twitter API and Website database communication – check.  Silverlight front end – piece of cake.

I’m not going to spoil what the idea is, but I’ll be sure to post all about it once I go live, so come back soon so you can check it out.

It was great meeting Adam Kinney, Scott Barnes, Chris Swenson and Michael Bach for the first time.  Take a look at these guys’ websites.  Smart people worth keeping an eye on if you don’t already.

You’ll also be able to follow all of these users at once by downloading this ruby script (originally provided for the iPhone developer Twitter list by David Clement – thanks David!) and running it using the following instructions (feel free to skip steps 2 through 5 if you know you already have the updated Ruby version, twitter gem, and google spreadsheet gem):

1. Open Terminal
2. Update Ruby by typing: gem update --system
3. Install the Twitter gem: sudo gem install Twitter
4. Add the google spreadsheet gem source location: gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
5. Install the google spreadsheet gem: sudo gem install gimite-google-spreadsheet-ruby
6. Open up the .rb file you downloaded from here in TextEdit
7. Enter your google and twitter usernames and passwords (it’s safe, look at the code!)
8. Save the file!
9. In Terminal, navigate to the .rb file you downloaded from here and type: ruby follow_wpf_sl_devs.rb

Let me know if you have any questions. Happy tweeting!  Special thanks to the original iPhone developer twitter list and David Clement for the ruby script.

“The grand prize winner will live large at MIX09 – they’ll receive a pass to the MIX09 event, 3 nights at The Venetian Hotel and a $1500 Visa gift card. The community choice winner will receive a $1500 visa gift card. And, three runners-up will each receive a $500 Visa gift card. Winners will be notified after the close of community rating on February 13, 2009.”

Check out the entries and vote for your favorites!  Here are a couple of my favorite Mix 10K contest entries (though I’ve hardly looked at many of them):

Title: Verdant [click to visit entry]
Creator: Karim Hernandez
Type: Game
Technology: Silverlight
Description: Growth bends toward the sun. Rain water sustains growth. Collect as much as you can. Too much growth slows you down. Succeed and you may multiply.
Rules: From the creator: “The more cells that are visible, the slower the rate of growth.  At the beginning, you have a grace period of 50 rain drops before your ratio of lost over captured drops kicks in. Maintain less than 25% lost droplets or you’ll lose : ) Hope you enjoy the game.”
My take: Sweet little “going green” application.  If only the real life “going green” issues were this easy.  Save the earth? Unlimited retries – FTW!  High score gets elected president.  Ready?  Go.

Title: SilverRubix [Click to visit entry]
Creator: Timmy Kokke
Type: Game
Technology: Silverlight
Description: SilverRubix is a 3D Rubik’s Cube in Silverlight. Drag your mouse next to the cube to rotate it. Click the cube to turn it’s faces. When you’re done, post your time and number of moves below. Good Luck!
My Take: Sweet application, BUT: it was a little difficult to navigate the cube once you rotated it 180 degrees.  Left becomes right and right becomes left, etc…  It actually made it so difficult that I only finished two of the three layers.  Still, this is a great example of work done in under 10K.  I still enjoyed it and played it more than once!

Dont forget to check out all the other submissions.  Vote for your favorites and feel free to leave comments.

Now, I don’t want to downplay the fact that Google actually provides a more tangible cloud computing experience than anybody right now, but I just don’t think Google is in the right spot.  They’re too focused on Javascript.  The world of the future is not going to run on Javascript – sorry.

The Silverlight vs. Flash showdown is much more interesting, as they both provide a much richer experience.  I have yet to see any large application type experience with Flash, but I know they have a lot going on for them with AIR and Flex.

Silverlight is going to win the battle though.  Microsoft has put themselves in a good position. They started Silverlight and Live Mesh completely separately in the community, but now they are merging into the same accomplishment. They have a cloud computing foundation already set up (Live Mesh, Azure), and it can already run Silverlight Applications.  This is a great start and puts them ahead of the competition.  Live Mesh is still in its very early stages, but we’ll soon see some very exciting stuff.

When I see an iPhone running Silverlight connected to Live Mesh running a real application I’ll know we’re “there”.