Updated 10 December 2009, new contact info.

Vertigo’s CEO, Scott Stanfield, chose last night’s Portland Silverlight User Group meeting to publicly announce that Vertigo is opening an office in Portland. The Richmond Point, California-based company is a leader in developing rich Internet applications (RIA) for some very high profile customers. Their projects include NBC Winter Olympics 2010, NBC Sunday Night Football, the 2008 Democratic National Convention, CBS 2009 Presidential Inauguration, and Hard Rock Cafe’s Memorabilia site. These RIA applications are built on the Microsoft technology stack and typically feature streaming HD video or high resolution imagery, combined with a high degree of user interaction, and exacting business requirements.

Stanfield introduced Cori Taratoot, general manager for Portland, as well as other staff from Vertigo, and explained his goal of having a team of ten developers and graphic designers in the Portland office by mid 2010. For more information on employment opportunities with Vertigo contact Jobs-Portland@vertigo.com.

Thanks for a great presentation at PSLUG last night, and welcome to the neighborhood!

The Seattle Silverlight User Group holds its first meeting tomorrow, Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 7PM. The meeting is on the Microsoft Redmond campus in the Building 40/41 cafeteria (map). The speaker will be John Stockton, senior RIA developer for Ascentium and  Microsoft Silverlight MVP, speaking on What’s New in Silverlight 4.

Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo, plans to be there. How about you?

This morning I rediscovered a shortcut for creating an elevated command prompt. Press the Windows key, type “cmd” then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. Voila!

Works on Win7, Vista, and presumably on Windows Server 2008.

Thanks to Tim Sneath who also suggests making the first command be “color 4f“ so that this window is visually distinct from non-elevated command prompts.

Here’s the extra nudge you might need to attend the Portland Silverlight User Group’s inaugural meeting tonight, Tuesday, December 8, 2009. Pizza and networking at 6PM, Vertigo CEO Scott Stanfield speaking at 6:30PM. Fiserv Cafe, 3400 NW John Olsen Place, Hillsboro, OR 97214.

Rich Interactive Beer to follow at Cornelius Pass Roadhouse.

The Portland Silverlight User Group is hosting its first meeting on Tuesday, December 8, 2009, and they are starting off with a big splash. Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo Software, will be the speaker for the inaugural meeting. If you are not familiar with Vertigo, they designed the Silverlight-powered websites for the Hard Rock Cafe, the 2010 Winter Olympics for NBC, the 2009 Presidential Inauguration for CBS, and Sunday Night Football for NBC. Scott is also a Microsoft Regional Director, very cool.

The user group meeting is at the Fiserv Cafe (formerly the Corillian Cafe), 3400 NW John Olsen Place, Hillsboro, OR, 97214. The evening starts with pizza and networking at 6:00 PM, with the presentation at 6:30 PM. Afterwards there will be socializing at the Cornelius Pass Roadhouse.

Congratulations to Erik Mork and Kelly White for starting the Portland Silverlight User Group. See you there.

There were a number of much anticipated announcements at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) last week, including pre-release versions of tools and technologies that I think are important and interesting. I planned to download some of these bits during the conference, but I was not planning on every attendee receiving a new multitouch tablet PC and maxing out the wifi. The big laptop giveaway was kept under heavy wraps, so I am not surprised that the wifi was not built out sufficient to cover the massive spike – and everyone wanted the new bits.

Now that I am back in the land of bandwidth, here are links to what I am downloading and installing.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 This is a “go live” release, but see the details to find out if that is right for you.

SQL Server Modeling CTP – Nov. 2009, formerly codenamed “Oslo.”

Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1, combining projects formerly codenamed “Dublin” (enhanced application server role) and “Velocity” (distributed cache).

Microsoft .NET Services SDK (Nov 2009 CTP) which contains the Access Control Service and the Service Bus.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (November 2009) for VS2008 and VS2010 Beta 2 for creating services and applications on Azure.

Lastly, I am downloading the PDC Videos, since there were lots of sessions that I could not take in during the conference. At the top of the page there are instructions for bulk downloading the videos and slides.

I’ve got to get a few of the videos encoded on to my Zune so I can listen to them while I’m getting some yard work done.

Much to see and do!

This is a big day for Miguel de Icaza and the Mono team with the announcement of the release of Mono Tools for Visual Studio. This release has features for deploying to Linux from Visual Studio, remotely debugging code on Linux from Visual Studio, a tool called for evaluating your code for migration issues moving between .NET and Mono, and moving from shipping applications to shipping appliances — complete virtual machines with the application already installed and ready to go. More details and links…

Other coolness from Mono. If you happened to miss the September 2009 announcement, MonoTouch is now available as a commercial product that lets you create iPhone and iPod Touch applications written in C# and .NET. Scott Hansleman discussed MonoTouch, among other things, with Mono project manager Joseph Hill on Hanselminutes podcast #181, well worth checking out.

Doug Purdy has blogged that Microsoft’s “Oslo” project has been realigned and unveiled as SQL Server Modeling at VSConnections this week. There will be additional announcements and a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) released at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2009 (PDC09) next week, so stay tuned.

Doug’s post provides a brief recap of the jigs and jogs that have been the history of the “Oslo” codename, starting with the announcement at the 2007 Microsoft SOA and BP conference where it was the term applied to a broad multiple product initiative for modeling. I was fortunate to be in attendance for the initial announcement, and have followed the winding path of Oslo, so I am keenly interested in the Oslo-related keynotes and sessions at PDC to which Doug posted some handy links earlier. And, of course, I can’t wait to get my hands on the next set of bits.

As I see it, modeling and DSLs have been underrated by most of the software development community, and that is largely due to the lack of first-class mainstream support in the form of great technologies and equally great tools. Sure, there have been some great strides, like the Domain-Specific Language Tools in Visual Studio, but you can hardly characterize their use as widespread. And, no doubt, Martin Fowler’s upcoming book on DSLs (which you can read as a work-in-progress) will help raise the level of discussion and general awareness of the concept. And there are many other efforts in the world as well. But there is much left to do.

Why is modeling so important? Because as an industry we work too hard for too long to create applications, using general purpose languages and low-level technologies, essentially from scratch each time. It is high time to evolve past that approach and dramatically reduce the cost and time-to-market for broad classes of applications that businesses need today. That is why I am excited about SQL Server Modeling (née Oslo) and that’s why I want it to be a truly great modeling platform.

A number of years back, Jeffrey Palermo had an idea for people arriving early in town for a Microsoft conference to meet up in a hotel bar the evening before the conference. The idea is to have a beer, catch up with old friends, make new ones, and generally get psyched for the conference to come. From that humble origin, Party with Palermo was born.

If you’re headed to Los Angeles next week for PDC09 and you’re going to be there Monday night, November 16, then head over to http://pdc09.partywithpalermo.com/ and RSVP for this free party. The PDC09 edition will be at The Mayan, 1038 South Hill St., Los Angeles, CA 90015, from 7 to 10 PM. I will see you there!

Josh Phillips from Microsoft’s Parallel Programming with .NET team has posted titles and abstracts for four parallelism talks at PDC09. Exciting stuff: patterns of parallel programming, PLINQ, the state of parallel programming, and F# for parallel and asynchronous programming. Richard Orr wondered if they are all going to happen at the same time. Nice.

I have a lot of books on my shelves that I have come to depend on from both Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media, so I was interested to learn that these two publishers have announced that they will be partners starting November 30, 2009. In the partnership, O’Reilly will become the distributor for Microsoft Press in North America, and both Microsoft and O’Reilly will develop titles for Microsoft Press.

In another aspect of this partnership, O’Reilly is launching a new ebook initiative, an area where they are already active. Quoting their statement (emphasis added):

"There are more than 40 million people walking around the world with a mobile phone or digital device which essentially gives them a bookstore in their pocket. That's an enormous opportunity for publishers today," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly and an influential leader in the Open Source and Web 2.0 communities who has over one million Twitter followers. "We are no longer a print publisher that happens to sell digital books too. We're a digital publisher that also sells print books. All publishing is now digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the web. Books must behave like the web they're now a part of."

"We will apply the lessons we've learned and the knowledge we've gained about digital publishing," added O'Reilly. "And we will remain true to our own values. All the derivative content from each Microsoft Press title--whether it's an ebook, app, webcast or an interactive video--will be issued DRM-free, because that's what we believe in doing."

Their joint press release makes a good case for the strengths that each partner brings to the deal and I wish the partnership great success. I met Tim O’Reilly when he spoke at the Portland Area .NET User Group several years ago, and back then my conversation with him at the get together afterwards was about the challenges of an information age that is rooted in print and struggling to adapt to fickle forces of the digital, online world of consumers.

I am concerned about the decline of print media in general that we’ve been witnessing for a few years. As organizations like newspapers and publishers scale back their organizations, there will be types of activities, like maintaining foreign bureaus in the case of news industry, that fundamentally can’t be supported by smaller organizations. It takes an enormous amount of work to amass, assimilate, organize, and present a book’s worth of technical material. The publisher plays several crucial roles that allow that to occur. As publishers find tough challenges in the digital information age and a poor economy, it is the audience, we the readers, who stand to lose a lot if they don’t meet those challenges. I have read and heard Tim O’Reilly over many years, seen where he comes from, what he stands for, and what he makes happen in the professional community. I can’t think of a better person to get it right for the authors, the editors, the technology developers, and the reading public.

You can meet Tim yourself in the short collection of his writings titled, naturally enough, Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell.