Is Video Killing Community?

A few weeks ago, before I canceled my Twitter account, I saw an informal conversation taking place between a few of the UK Microsoft community 'leaders' on the subject of an overall decline in attendance and interest in community events over the last year.

I've noticed the decline in some of the user groups I attend and apparently more country-wide events like Developer Developer Developer are also seeing a decline in interest. This manifests itself either through less bums on seats (like the recent Windows Phone 7 event), or through a longer period before the free event 'sells out' (like the upcoming Special .NET event aka DDD8a).

I have my own theories about why the interest hasn't been as great over the last 12 months as it has in the preceding 12 months, but it was interesting to see speculation that video might be one answer to this loss of interest. Could it be that video is encouraging people to stay away and just 'watch the video' instead?

I must admit, the same concern that video might encourage people to 'miss' meetings had crossed my mind when I first started doing video for London-based user groups a few years ago. It's one of the reasons why some user groups specifically told me 'Thanks for the offer but we don't want video'. These user groups feel that video in some ways detracts from the main objective of the meetings which is networking, albeit packaged around a couple of more formal talks. This makes sense to me, and the 'rule' is usually bent when a high profile event, such as Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie flying into town, takes place and it's assumed ahead of time the demand for places can't be met.

As a video consumer I have to confess that video has meant that I'm unlikely to be attending big events like MIX or PDC again. It costs far too much money to sit in a room hearing mainly marketing material presented badly, when a free video means you can at least stop things a few minutes in and move onto something else if the content isn't what was initially advertised.

So far as 'free' community events are concerned though, my personal view is that the impact of video on actual attendance numbers is minimal (but then I would say that!), and when many user groups only have access to premises that limit live attendance to 30-50 people, but even the poorest performing video can garner over 100 views (with the most popular grabbing over 7000 views) then doing video of a talk seemed in the early days like a win-win for both the user group and its members and the speaker wanting to reach as wide an audience as possible.

At the last meeting of the user group I attend as a priority, The Silverlight UK User Group, attendance was lower than normal and for the first time in a long time we had some empty chairs. This is possibly because of a clash with another user group that same evening, possibly because of a clash with a high-profile football match that same evening, or possibly because it's becoming increasingly obvious that what Ray Ozzie described this time last year as 'Microsoft's premier UI' is clearly anything but that. Or it could, conceivably, be the fact that people knew ahead of time I'd be videoing the talks presented at the meeting.

Whatever the reason, the Silverlight User Group organisers asked me to hold the video publication back for a couple of weeks (which then turned into four weeks because I've been lazy!) instead of rushing to get it online as quickly as possible, the way I usually do.

In many ways this debate about video being a possible cause of declining attendance gives me a good excuse to retire from doing community video. Those who followed me on Twitter for the last 3 years (before I deleted my account a week ago) know how disillusioned I've become with not just Microsoft over the last 12 months, but also the current 'community' eco-system that seems to be far too reliant on 'partnership' with Microsoft. I think it's time for me to move on and use my spare time to support things I actually believe in.

The truth is that while it's been a privelege producing video when the subject matter and speaker have been as high as it often has, there have been rather more occasions than I'd like where the talks have not been good and when I've been faced with hours editing, rendering, compressing, uploading and transcoding video that I know nobody will watch past the first couple of minutes. On such occasions, it's hard not to resent the fact that you're stuck at a PC when the sun's shining outside and you know you're wasting hours on something nobody will have any real interest in.

I think it will be interesting to see what happens over the next 12 months in the Microsoft 'community' space. I am totally unconvinced that it's video that's killing user group attendance, but in the meantime I'm happy to finish my community video efforts with a really excellent couple of videos. These last two videos feature Guy Ferrier-Smith giving an excellent 90 minute talk (split over two videos) on the subject of Silverlight Internationalization. This is well-researched material that the blogs and the official Microsoft documentation have largely ignored and there's a LOT of hard work and experience gone into Guy's talk. It's exactly the sort of talk that got me excited about doing video for community a few years back. An opportunity to get the really good stuff out to a wider audience that otherwise wouldn't have access to it.

The latest videos, along with the other most recent user group talks, can be seen on my hosting page on Exposure Room. Enjoy!

Silverlight 4 Books - Whatever happened to Proof-Reading?

I read a lot of books, and at one point, unhappy with the lack of good technical book reviews available, I was going to review each new Silverlight 4 book as it became available on this blog. However I was getting so much flack about my 'negativity' on Twitter I abandoned the idea when I found each new book I intended to review was just not worth the money I'd paid for it.

About this time last year, one book author asked me via a private message on Twitter for an 'honest' opinion on his book, which at the time had received two or three five star reviews on Amazon USA.

So I gave my honest opinion! I pointed out that the book was out-of-date with even the public beta version of the software it was claiming to exhaustively cover. I also pointed out that the back cover jacket sales blurb mentioned stuff that wasn't even included in the book, and that the book's biggest chapter was irrelevant because it was all about the WPF version of something, NOT the Silverlight version, when this was supposed to be a Silverlight-specific book (and so was clearly written for the convenience of the author, not the audience being asked to pay good money for this irrelevant nonsense). I concluded by pointing out that two adjacent chapters had whole paragraphs of identical text, indicating both bad cut-and-paste writing and that no proof-reading at all had been done on the book.

To say the author wasn't happy with the 'honest' feedback he'd asked for is putting it mildly. I got the usual 'hero justification' about how many hours the author put into supporting the book, answering all his readers emails to correct things and help them, producing supporting screencasts and even downloadable extra chapters, speaking to community etc as if that were justification for selling a book that didn't meet its basic remit and which people were expected to pay a hefty fee for.

Apparently I was just a 'hater' for answering his direct question honestly instead of behaving like a shill and saying 'Your book's faaaabuloous, dahling'. The sad thing is that I actually think the author has talent, and could have produced a stunning book, if only his publishing company had bothered to get someone to do a bit of technical editing and proof-reading instead of trying to gouge the market by rushing a title to print before it was ready.

Accused of being alone in my opinions, I directed the author to the average Amazon UK review of just two stars (which contrasted wildly with that five star average on Amazon USA - hmmm! I wonder why!) I was accused of having written the three Amazon UK reviews which resulted in this average rating, along with the accompanying justifications from named readers, myself! Yeah, right (rolls eyes)!

When the author had had a few days to simmer down and deliberate on my feedback he came back to me and asked if I'd like to make the next book, intended to cover Silverlight 4, better by co-authoring it. I began to feel better about having given 'brutal, but honest' feedback. But I had to explain that I just didn't have the time. I know that technical book writing is a LOT of hard work. It pays peanuts and is really only recommended for those who want to boost their profile as a trainer or conference speaker, or help towards getting an MVP - I have no interest in either of these things! However I said that as a favour I'd be more than happy to help with technically reviewing the book, and doing some much-needed proof-reading on it.

Unfortunately the author didn't take me up on the offer.

The latest version of his book is now out, and as a simple exercise I decided to select a page at random (page 51) and critique it the way I would if I WERE a proof-reader. I think the results below speak volumes with regard to the current state of proof-reading in the technical book industry:

It's probably unfair to pick on this particular book, because I've seen much, much worse (and initial impressions are that the book is a HUGE improvement on the Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 versions, with the author actually having a very natural writing style)! If I'd tried the same exercise on a page from the Silverlight 4 User Cookbook (from Packt Publishing) for example, the snapshot of a page chosen would have made the original text unreadable for a sea of red corrections all over it, even if I ignored the fact the contents really didn't live up to the title at all and just concentrated on the appalling English.

The point I want to make is this: I really cannot understand why publishers spend so much time and expense in printing and marketing such titles without getting a native English speaker to at least proof-read the wretched thing before going to press, even if they can't technically evaluate it. Heck, I'll even do it for free if it stops some of the over-priced, incorrect dreck I've seen getting out into bookstores where it can do a lot of harm and just rips off punters who rightly expect far better value for money than they're getting.

I said about a year ago, I was going to stop making negative posts on this blog (which is why you've seen no comment on this blog about the whole Silverlight 4 vs HTML 5 fiasco that Microsoft have stirred up), but there comes a point where you just have to ask why we as an industry put up with this crap.

Last night I started reading seven 'alpha' chapters from an Apress book dedicated exclusively to MVVM and which I had to pay £26 for to get in electronic form - and it's crap, clearly written by someone who doesn't care about his subject, doesn't have the depth of technical knowledge required, and hasn't got the writing skills necessary to produce something that educates his readers.

What I will say, to try and end on a positive note, is that I've recently read two Silverlight 4 books that, whilst still containing the sort of proof-reading errors I dislike intensely, are well worth the asking price for the technical information they contain and the obvious passion the authors have had about writing a good book that genuinely educates and even entertains. Those books are Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown from Manning Publications, and Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4 by Chris Anderson from Apress.

So far as I'm concerned, anything else with the word Silverlight in the title is pretty much an 'Avoid' and 'Don't waste your money on this' right now. No wonder illegal free pdf downloads are the first thing you see when you do a search on a Silverlight book title these days! :-(

"Silverlight 4 Fundamentals" course coming to the UK

It's always feast or famine on this blog - and it's been famine for quite a while, mainly because I've been working away from home for most of the last 4 months.

Anyway I hope to rectify all that over the coming weeks, with a series of Silverlight 4 book review blog posts, now that titles are finally starting to appear on the shelves. Expect the first review next Monday!

However, first off I wanted to highlight the fact that there's a new Silverlight 4 Fundamentals course coming to the UK next month. We've just had the Silverlight Masterclass (which I didn't attend but heard good things about) but this new course from the folks at Pluralsight is aimed more at those who are new to Silverlight. I'm often asked about the 'best' way to train up for Silverlight 4, and asked if there are any good courses or books that I'd recommend, and this looks like a great way to learn the technology.

I've been very impressed with the on-demand training I've sampled from Pluralsight (their LINQ course is the most comprehensive, and beautifully explained treatise I've seen on the subject) so I expect their new Silverlight 4 Fundamentals course being run in London on the 27th September will be a good one, especially since the instructor is Ian Griffiths. Ian always does a good job, and really knows his stuff when it comes to WPF and Silverlight. I had a quick look at the on demand online web training for Silverlight 3 that Ian produced for Pluralsight and it was good, comprehensive stuff so the portents for this new Silverlight 4 course are good.

There's a special reduced rate of £1700 (down from £2100) if you book early, so if you want professional training on 'Microsoft's premiere UI', as Ray Ozzie calls it, then now would be the time to book. More information about the course can be found on the Pluralsight web site here.

And if anyone knows of any good Expression Blend training, aside from the Channel 9 design.toolbox training (which is very good, but needs updating for Blend 4) please let me know. I'm always being asked about good Blend training, and the one book on the subject that's available is not one I would feel at all comfortable recommending.

UPDATE 10TH SEPTEMBER 2010 This course is now going to be hosted virtually (ie accessible from anywhere) and the price has therefore been reduced to £325.

Microsoft's Free Silverlight 4 LOB Training Course (and dealing with possible Database Issues)

I'm often asked for advice on how best to learn Silverlight, and with the release of Silverlight 4 last week folks are keener than ever to get to grips with the technology, particularly for writing line-of-business applications.

At the time of writing, the only book available for Silverlight 4 is Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development. Although the book advertises itself as a 'Beginner's Guide', and has been written and technically edited by folks boasting the usual expert 'MVP' and 'Insider' credentials, I would NOT recommend this book for beginners, despite the pedigree of the authors and the basic step-by-step and subsequent analysis structure which I like. The book went to print before Silverlight 4 had RTM'ed, and contains a number of, frankly, quite basic errors that will only confuse those new to Silverlight. These include claims (and screenshots) implying that Visual Studio 2008 can be used to build Silverlight 4 applications, that Blend 3 is a 'required tool' for Silverlight 4 development (Blend 3 does not support Silverlight 4), and a confusing set of step-by-step exercises where the authors and reviewers don't seem to have realised that when working with font sizes Blend 4 (which has to be used for Silverlight 4) works with point sizes which are different from the underlying Silverlight XAML pixel sizes), or that if you put a TargetType of UserControl on a resource style Blend isn't going to then let you use that same style on a button!

Microsoft are obviously aware of the 'learning curve' problem with Silverlight 4 and have launched a free Silverlight 4 training course. The course includes 8 modules around 'Building Silverlight 4 Business Applications' which they estimate comprises 2 days worth of training, and has been written and presented (it includes videos as well as step-by-step follow along exercises) by Ian Griffiths, who has an excellent reputation as a Silverlight and WPF trainer (his Silverlight 3 'on demand' training course for Pluralsight looks very good indeed, from what I saw of it, and apparently a Silverlight 4 version of that 'soup to nuts' material is on its way if you sign up for Pluralsight training).

Ian and Microsoft are keen to point out that the free training course that's been provided through Microsoft's Channel 9 outlet is NOT a 'soup to nuts' Silverlight training course, and that there are assumptions you've done at least some of the 'Getting Started' Silverlight tutorials available at the Microsoft site. However the course does introduce the MVVM pattern, make good use of WCF RIA Services and in its last module even introduces MEF - all stuff that typically gets missed out from basic Silverlight training. Last night I decided to give it a quick look.

Unfortunately I hit problems almost immediately because of the configuration of my local machine, and so the main purpose of this blog entry is to document how to fix these problems for those who may find themselves hitting the same issues.

I do still have one outstanding problem in that Visual Studio 2010 never seems to 'remember' the changes I've made to the database connection string, and requires me to make the same modifications every time I restart it. To me this looks like a bug (I've made the mods and happily run new builds that work - why is Visual Studio 2010 ignoring them on restart?) but if anyone knows different I'd appreciate a reply in the Comments section of this blog post.

Very early on in the first hands on lab (actually Module 2, since Module 1 comprises a simple video introduction to the course and nothing more) you are asked to add an .mdf database file to your project. When I attempted to view this database using Server Explorer a nasty, and somewhat confusing error dialog appeared, implying that the database file was too 'new' for my installed software (SQL Server 2008 with all the latest service packs and updates applied):

It turns out that his message is the result of the database file being opened with SQL Server 2005 Express edition, when it is a SQL Server 2008 Express edition database. Although I'd updated my machine with an installation of SQL Server 2008 some time ago, and then installed Visual Studio 2010 I'd never installed SQL Server 2008 Express Edition.

The fix appeared relatively straightforward: change the connection string to use the installed version of SQL Server 2008 rather than the version of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition it seemed to have decided was the preferred option. This is achieved using the 'Modify Connection' context menu option in the server explorer:

The resulting dialog box has an Advanced properties tab which you display by clicking on the Advanced button:

From here it's a simple matter of selecting the appropriate SQL Server instance from the drop-down list box. The dropdown list box initially shows the SQL Server 2005 Express instance it has decided to use:

It's a simple matter to change it to the SQL Server 2008 instance:

However this then introduces a new error when 'OK' or 'Test Connection' is selected, as shown below:

It seems there are some ASP.NET user authentication security precautions with the developer/full versions of SQL Server 2008 that aren't there with the SQL Server 2008 Express edition, causing this error to be displayed. The only solution to the problem appears to be to install SQL Server 2008 Express edition as well as the full edition already installed. Make sure you download the Sp1 version of the Express edition (which can be found here to avoid warnings about an out-of-date incompatible version) and be prepared for a restart before the install will fully run.

Once you've installed the Express Edition you can change the connection string, as shown previously, to point to the newly installed Express instance, and happily proceed with what looks to be a fun training course.

Now when you click on the 'Test Connection' button the errors have all gone away:

As indicated earlier, the only problem is that every time you restart Visual Studio 2010 the database connection string seems to reset itself to the SQL Server 2005 Express instance, causing the initial 'version' error that kicked off this whole blog entry.

If anyone knows how to make this error go away for good I'd be happy to hear from you (and will update this blog entry accordingly).

Visual Studio 2010 Hanging On Splash Screen (Add-in problems)

Last week, in the middle of a manic week of Microsoft TechDays Visual Studio 2010 finally got released to manufacturing (RTM'ed) and being conveniently 'between contracts' with no client software dependencies needed on my main PC, it seemed a good time to install it.

I hit a problem just after I installed the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010 which went to 'Release Candidate 2' status just a few days later. Visual Studio 2010 would 'hang' on the splash screen. Task Manager showed no sign of Visual Studio on the Application tab but the Processes tab showed devenv.exe stuck at 50% CPU and nothing would happen until I killed the process.

A quick search on 'Bingle' (;-)) showed several reports of others having a similar problem - but only with earlier versions of Visual Studio, and none of the causes seemed relevant to my particular situation. I suspected that something about the Silverlight Tools installation had gone wrong.

In the event it was not the Silverlight Tools that were the source of my problems, but the combination of a couple of third party add-ins.

Three Visual Studio add-ins I use are JetBrains Resharper, Red Gate Reflector Pro and NDepend 3. All are excellent tools that worked fine in Visual Studio 2008 and which I've come to rely on when writing my code. In different ways they all help me write better quality code and whenever one of them isn't available I tend to miss it.

Removing the add-ins one by one it initially appeared that Red Gate Reflector Pro was the cause of the problem, so I removed the add-in, raised a support call and was able to work pretty much as normal.

Red Gate responded very quickly to my support call. 'Was I by any chance using NDepend?' they asked. Well yes, I was. 'Have you got the latest version? There was a point release update to NDepend 3 which fixed a co-existence problem'. A quick test, removing NDepend and then adding back Red Gate Reflector Pro proved that it was actually running the two add-ins together that was the cause of my frozen splash screen.

I hadn't updated my copy of NDepend 3 since it had first been released. There is a message box on the visual panel that indicates if you are using the latest version or not, and this was indicating that I was on the latest version. Of course it turned out that this was an early bug - one fixed in a later release, but one which I hadn't downloaded because I wasn't aware of it.

Sure enough, downloading the latest release (from 15th April) fixed all the problems and I'm now able to use all my add-ins with Visual Studio 2010 which I'm loving (apart from the very slow start-up time which seems much worse than Visual Studio 2008).

Although the experience was initially disconcerting I must say I was very impressed with the swift responses from the producers of those third party add-ins. A couple of tweets about the problems and Stephen from Red Gate and Patric from NDepend were immediately in touch. That their products are working, and working well, with the latest version of a complex, largely rewritten, IDE on the day it finally released is pretty impressive by any standard. Well done to both!

I still have one problem with Visual Studio 2010 add-ins. JetBrains Resharper 5 flags false errors in even the most basic XAML. This is a step backwards from the 4.5 release in my view, but the portents for the problems being fixed are good - the company contacted me on a Sunday after I tweeted about how the new release seemed to be a step backwards for Silverlight developers, and Support officially contacted me first thing Monday morning. I'm optimistic they'll fix the issues I've reported (they've already fixed a problem with their web site which I reported at the same time) on a timely basis.

If only vendors in walks of life other than Visual Studio add-in tools were so speedy and pro-active when it came to offering their customers support. The world would be a much more stress-free place!

Some Notes for Those on their Way to MIX10

It's around 8am local time here in Las Vegas, and I'm about to head off for a day's shopping/being a tourist. But with so many folks about to head out to MIX10 from the UK thought I'd post a few quick points in answers to various tweets I've received.

The weather in Vegas at the moment is clear blue skies and sunny, but quite cool in the evenings. It's definitely long sleeve shirt, pullover or jacket weather in the evenings, and when I arrived at the airport last night around 5pm a lot of the arrivals in t-shirts were complaining at how cold it was (:-O) Apparently the last week has been untypical weather (I'm told it rained on Wednesday) with grey cloudy skies all week. Not so today with a warm sun and clear blue skies. The forecast throughout MIX is good. I'm probably going to venture out today in shorts and sandals :-)

The Mandalay Hotel (at least on arrival last night) has a very different vibe from The Venetian, home of previous MIX conferences. The hotel looks the same internally (except that scantily clad go-go dancers near the poker tables, presumably to distract those playing, now seem de rigeur in the gambling halls) but the Mandalay seems to attract a much younger crowd (I'm told the pool area aka "the meat market" is the main reason!) If my arrival last night was typical, expect to bump into a lot of loud, drunken (but happy!) youths in late teens/early twenties throughout the hotel which is something I never experienced at The Venetian. Some of the elevators even seemed to be hosting their own frat-house style parties! Try and wangle yourself an invite if you can ;-). The rooms themselves are big, clean and modern by UK standards, but definitely nowhere near the 'over the top' luxury status of The Venetian (at least if my experience is typical).

The wireless internet in the hotel is USD15 for 24 hours, but is excellent - the best I've ever experienced and I'm in a room at one extreme end of the hotel (as far away as possible from the noise and the elevators).

If you're flying Virgin Atlantic from Gatwick beware the £30 'more leg room' offer you may be given at Baggage Check-in. These seats are around rows 49 to 51 (9 each side) which unfortunately is next to the dispensing area for the 'free booze' dished out during the flight until it runs out (which thankfully it finally did around 5 hours into the flight). If my trip yesterday is typical you'll have a bunch of stag party crowds on board who treat this area much like the kitchen area at a very busy, rowdy, drunken party. Great if you're getting drunk and want to freeload, a nightmare if you want to arrive sober, snooze or try and get work done! Personally I don't understand why Virgin Atlantic encourage the sort of behavior that means they inevitably create a problem for themselves (well, duh! Drunken passengers assaulting female cabin crew - who saw that coming?!). If the airline charged for the booze it would make the flights much cheaper for the rest of us, and avoid the nightmare of their staff having to deal with drunken passengers.

Anyway, to everyone on their way out here: Have a great flight, a great MIX and hope to meet you in person (DM me on Twitter id @irascian if you need my room contact number or US mobile phone number).

View from my hotel room at 7am this morning

Updated to add link to my Flickr Stream of Photo's from the Hotel Pool area

Heading for Microsoft's MIX10 Conference

Today, I'm finally heading off to Microsoft's MIX10 conference in Las Vegas, where developers and designers get to "mix" it up. The pre-conference buzz this year has been even higher than usual, and not just because people have been getting carried away drinking the Microsoft Kool-Aid.

Early leaks about Windows Phone 7 Series (FINALLY, something to compete with the Apple iPhone), Silverlight 4, Internet Explorer 9 and a whole host of announcements around the upcoming Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4 release mean that anticipation is high, especially amongst those of us who earn our daily crust from Silverlight Development. It looks like our early gamble that this was a technology that was going to prove to be crucial to writing state-of-the-art applications is now finally starting to pay off.

And then there's the Microsoft Courier device, which makes the forthcoming Apple iPad look extremely sub-standard, ASSUMING IT'S REAL! Hopefully we'll find out how real the device is over the next few days, even if the rumours suggest it isn't planned for launch until 2011.

I'm still undecided as to which sessions I'll be attending - every time I think I've narrowed my choices down, new sessions get announced. Talks on Real World MVVM, Silverlight Testing, a new Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework, MEF, WCF RIA Services and, of course, Windows Phone 7 Series are all at the top of my wish lists, but frequently clash. With video of each session being made available online within 24 hours of being delivered, final decisions aren't that important and will likely come down to which rooms have seats left in them, and other logistical issues.

What I can state with certainty is that I'll be attending the Silverlight 4 bootcamp and ASP.NET MVC Bootcamp pre-conference workshops on Sunday, 14th March.

However the sessions and workshops are not the reasons for my attending MIX10 (I still think you get a better experience of these by being a 'virtual' attendee, and with The Channel 9 Live From MIX Show streaming continuously every day of the conference I think that's even more true. What I'm most looking forward to, and the real reason I'm flying over 5000 miles to attend, is meeting many of the Silverlight developers I've 'spoken to' via Twitter, as well as those I already know from having attended MIX in previous years, or through the London community scene.

Party-wise, I know I'll be attending the EMC Consulting Oasis and MIX Tweetup on the Sunday night, as well as the Brits Booze-up and Main MIX Party on the Tuesday night. I hope to meet some of you there!

I will have the loan of a mobile phone during my stay, so if you want to make a specific arrangement to meet up send me a message on Twitter (@irascian) and I'll be happy to send you my number.

I'm hoping to blog each day from the conference (and pre-conference, although pre-conference blog entries are more likely to be appearing on my personal blog rather than this work-related one).

All the early indications are that this is going to be one of the best, if not THE best, MIX conferences held to date. I can hardly wait!