Michael Wolbert's Blog » Silverlight

ULab 1.0 Silverlight case published in .NET Magazine

Michael — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:13:15 +0000

Our Silverlight case has recenlty been published in the .NET Magazine of the Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). We got ourselfs a covershot!

Front row left to right: Pieter Brinkman (Software Developer), Dennis Van Baalen (Manager Software Development), Herbert Pesch (Owner of Evident Interactive); back row left to right: me, Bryan Sumter, Ruben De Gooijer

Full article (PDF alert, 3.5mb).

A Day at the Dutch Microsoft Headquarters

Michael — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:55:29 +0000

Last week Bryan Sumter and I received a phone call from Microsoft. We were asked if we could fill in for a speaker who couldn’t make it that day. We seized this upportunity to visit the Microsoft HQ for the first time in our lives. This presentation was almost Identical to our MixEssentials presentation, but this one was a more interactive one.

On our way to Microsoft dealing with the typical Dutch weather scenario..

Coffee
First of all the coffee, served by the Coffee Company, was tremendously nice. I will lie if I told you it was the best I had so far, but it fell in this order of goodness.

Presentation
The audience consisted of about 60 people from the IT educational branch. Most of them were managers and some of them were actually teachers, who all had their own expertise: developers, designers, system administrators, network administrators and so on..

At least you can find the exit in case of..

We showed the applications we built using new Microsoft technologies so that teachers could understand how these technologies could benefit the students in their future careers.

Bryan Sumter, me and Maarten Jan Vermeulen (Microsoft Student Partner)

Drinks
At the reception we had some nice conversations with diverse teachers, who all were positive about our presentation. They asked or we proposed to give presentations or maybe even workshops at their schools.

Tuesday 14 October we’ll have another meeting with Maarten Jan Vermeulen, which I’ll probably cover afterwards!

ULab 1.0

Michael — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:48:55 +0000

There are a lot of things that happend in the past which I will be mentioning in upcoming posts. For example my role in ULab 1.0 from February 2008 till June 2008.

Evident Interactive, a company which primarily focuses on existing .NET technologies, was keen to know the latest ins and outs on new Microsoft technologies, such as Silverlight and mapping technologies (Virtual Earth & Google Maps). Although mapping technologies aren’t that new, Silverlight could deliver the extra punch of User Experience the company was looking for in creating small lightweight webapplications.

Evident Interactive made an agreement with the Hogeschool Utrecht to hire students from IT related studies to study and to develop a pilot given these technologies. We the students, Bryan, Bastiaan, Ruben and I took the opportunity to join the team.

left to right: Ruben, Bastiaan, Pieter (coworker@Evident), Bryan and me

While we where studying and developing we had contact with Martin Tirion, who is a Microsoft User Experience Evangelist. He proposed that we’d demo the pilot at MixEssentials 2008, which was concurrent to the DevDays 2008. So we did!

Short impression of the presentation (video with funky music)
Full presentation (requires Live passport.. booooo!)
Screencapture

It was pretty exciting and cool to demo an application in front of 150 people, trying to take their breath away.. ;-) For all the efforts we received a nice bottle of Prosecco (the bottle was empty next day) and a trip to TechEd 2008 in Barcelona! Pretty nice.. but unfortunately I’m going on a trip to Bangalore, India from the 2th till the 22th of November for my study.. Too bad..