The holidays are filled with silver light
In the beginning of December,
Scoot Guthrie gave presentations a number of European countries.
I had the privilege of attending the presentation in Copenhagen, where Scoot gave presentations on ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 Web Development, ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and Silverlight 4, along with Danish developers who gave presentations on Windows Azure and cloud computing. Slides and info on Scoots
blog.
The presentation on the beta of Silverlight 4 had some pretty impressive demos of the features of the new version. The demos are now available for download.
If you, like me, have a weakness for web development then take a look at Scott's blog-post on the demos, and the video from the PDC 09 keynote (link at the top of the post). If silverlight isn't your thing, then take a look at the long list of videos available from PDC 09.
I'm itching to get my hands dirty and with the holidays coming up I should get a chance :-)
The Lack of Words
I've been thinking about blogging for some time now, but never got around to it. So a couple a day ago I decided it was time to do something about. I got a domain and found a blog-engine that I could easily install. Then I spend a couple of day make small adjustments to the configuration, modifying the theme – in short everything but writing posts.
So here I am, trying to write my first blog post. But just how does one get started? What does one write? “Hi everyone, not reading my famous blog!”? It's the chicken and egg thing all over again. Nobody is going to read your blog, if it doesn't have interesting content, but writing content for your new blog seams to be a futile effort, as nobody is reading it.
So I decided to take a look at some of the blogs, that I'm reading on a regular basis. How did they get started? Was is “Hi my name is...” or “Hi guys! Look at the cool code I just wrote”?
After going through about 15 blogs I came to the conclusion, that there were two equally sized fractions. One fraction simply starts with a very shot post, usually one or two lines, saying something like “Hi this is my new blog. Hope you like it. I'm looking forward to blogging about...” and then a word or two about the topic of the blog. The other fraction goes straight into writing content, with no introduction.
By now I realized that my first blog post was going to fall between the to fractions. It was too long to be a non-content introduction and it didn't go write to the content, as it's topic didn't fit the intended theme of the blog. Which, by the way, is coding and technology (yes, yes – I know doesn't make anyone much wiser).
So in conclusion, I would like you comments on starting a blog. What was the first post on your blog, or a blog you read, about?
I'm looking forward to your comments - but until then, I'll just keep writing blog posts that only I will ever read :-)