Hello world

To those that already know me I apologize upfront for this re-introduction, but to those that don’t let me introduce myself.

My name is Jose Fajardo, I live in beautiful Australia, I’m easy going and I love my family, friends and … my technologies.

I’ve been a windows guy for over a decade, and pretty much a .Net programmer all that time.

About 4 years ago I came across a relatively unknown technology called WPF/e , this technology intrigued me .. it was new and unknown … it offered you a way to do flash like user experiences BUT in a .Net way… it offered me a way to be creative in the .Net space, which was seriously un heard of in those days (WPF was there but long story short I chose Silverlight … )

I’m going to take you on a brief tour down memory lane of the last 4 years … It won’t take long honestly, and there’s a lot of pictures to help ease the trip..

Also a lot of my demo’s that I’ll mention use to work at a point in time BUT i have failed to maintain them . Code is there and with effort I know I can get them to work again, but not right now.…

One of my first projects was a series of 28post’s where I took Silverlight 1.1 and tried to recreate the iTunes application. It was my first experience building a Silverlight app and boy did I learn a lot. I even got mentioned by Scott Guthrie on his blog

[ref: iTunes built with Silverlight]

Towards the end of that iTunes project a very cool flash/flex project was unveiled to the world. This project really pushed peoples expectations of business class RIA’s. It was called Buzzword and was quickly bought by Adobe. I wanted to recreate this using Silverlight, I called the project ‘silverword’

[ref: Silverword]

By this time I was starting to really get into the creative side of RIA’s. BTW Silverlight is considered a RIA technology, it enables Rich Internet Applications .

I really wanted to push myself down this creative path in particular with the tools expression design & blend. So the following weeks/months were largely devoted to design heavy posts & learning …

‘Blend candy’ is basically me pushing my skills in the vector animation area. It’s a series of 10+ posts that really challenged me to be creative with Blend.

[ref: blend experiments ‘Blend Candy’]

Apple at the time was a great influence on me because of their brilliantly designed website I took a lot of their website UI’s and tried to recreate it in Silverlight just to see if I could enhance the experience with RIA concepts etc..

[ref: apple website experiments with Silverlight]

By this point I had spent around 1 year with Silverlight, pretty much playing with it any spare second I could. Also it was at this time that Microsoft offered me an MVP of expression blend, which soon after was swapped over to Silverlight MVP .. Thanks Microsoft for that

It was also at this time that I knew I wanted to pursue Silverlight in a full time capacity, up until now I was doing it all in my spare time .. So I set forth to find a company willing to invest in this unknown technology … along came Cynergy Systems …

It was perfect timing and I was in the perfect place, Cynergy were starting a Microsoft practice specializing in WPF/Silverlight and I happened to be skilled up in Silverlight

For the next 3 years I worked on cutting edge secret WPF/Silverlight projects that I wish I could show you, however during that time I did find time to blog and post via the Cynergy blogs.. Here’s some of those posts (plenty still exist but scattered throughout Cinergy’s blog site …

[ref: COVERFLOW WITH SILVERLIGHT 2.5D]

[ref: Silverlight DIGG ]

It was during my time at Cynergy that a special secret feature was being added to Silverlight that had the potential to change the way people experienced the web in a profound way.. the technology was DeepZoom! And I was privileged enough to be there when it was unveiled..

[ref: youtube video of the deepzoom demos]

Fast forward to today where I take all my Silverlight experiences and apply it to new technologies such as HTML5. It is because of the skills I picked up with Silverlight that helped me venture into new territory..

In a series of 20+ posts I investigated how it would feel to create a Windows 8 metro dashboard in pure HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript. I did this to experiment what HTML5 Canvas was capable of.

[ref: HTML5 Windows 8 Dashboard]

Almost 4 years have passed !!! What a trip!!

Silverlight for me personally has always been about a way to express my creative side, no other technologies gave me such joy and satisfaction. Or for that matter continues to give me

Silverlight has reached version 5, it’s been a joy watching it get here and along the way I like to think I’ve helped influence its’ evolution.

Silverlight 5 truly is a mature product, it has everything it needs for the foreseeable future BUT a lot of people sadly glance over this fact…

There will be people out there that will forever sing doom and gloom about one thing or another, unfortunately the world is filled with people like this. I quietly and patiently listen to these people, some of them I deeply respect (Scott Barnes ) .

<true_story>

About 1 year into my adventures with WPFe/ Silverlight I met a guy that pretty much convinced me to go full time with it and seek a full-time job using it (with Cynergy Systems), he was also going full time with Silverlight moving to MS corporate in Seattle …. His name was Scott Barnes

</true_story>

With all this negativity surrounding Silverlight it’s easy to loose site of the good things that it’s brought about.. And as i reflected on these past 4 years I was quickly reminded of these good things …

I started with Silverlight when it wasn’t called Silverlight and when adoption of it was below 1%, it never crossed my mind to give up on it back then, and I don’t plan on giving up on it now..

I love the experiences this technology allows me to create, no other technology on windows allows this with the ease that it does …

The message from build regarding Windows 8 is simple, whatever technology you choose to express yourself with you can find it on Windows.

HTML/ JS/ C#/ VB.NET/ C++/ XAML/ WPF/ Silverlight

…. it’s all there!!

For me, as long as my imagination continues to seek an outlet … Silverlight will be that outlet. And nothing anyone says will change that

Jose Fajardo

Silverlight MVP !