I've been promising myself that I'd kick this off for a while now - but there really has been *so* much that's very interesting going on that nothing has really had the chance to crystalise without something else equally compelling coming along to think about, so here's some thoughts on things we've been working on:
Working with WPF ...
The WPF concept we built for Tesco to show at PDC seems to be a big hit! Not only did a room full of card carrying geeks applaud loudly when we scanned a can of 'soda' to add to the shopping basket, but the Twitterverse was alive with some great comments on the demo - notably: hafthor: Wow. That tesco app is like minority report for groceries. #pdc.
It was quite remarkable to see what a tightly knit team from Conchango's Interactive Media group can do with WPF, especially given a tight time frame! I have to say it was a big thrill to see the app running up on the huge screens with HP's multitouch machine and to hear that Matthew Adams got it running on Windows 7 at the event! Shoutouts should go to (in no particular order) Felix Corke, Colm Brophy, Una Walsh, David Wynne, Richard Griffin, Rupert Jones, Matthew Rattcliffe all of whom helped stitch it together - and of course Paul and Nick for getting up infront of the PDC and delivering it flawlessly.
... and Silverlight
With the release of Silverlight 2 in earlier on in October and the Silverlight Toolkit a couple of days ago things are busy on this from with some great projects in the pipeline. There seems to be a bit of a debate across the intarwebz about whether Silverlight matters at all; it's obviously not Flash, though they overlap substantially in terms of what they deliver the rich internet application arena.
Looking at the way the team here have been using it I'd have to say that Silverlight might matter more to the developers than the users for the time being - with the pace of development being furious! The pace at which the opensource version(s) is/are being worked on is great, though in general there is a lot of catching up that Silverlight/Moonlight has to do to reach the ubiquity of Flash. I don't know that we'll see next very very geeky internet meme created in Silverlight - but it might just help!