As luck would have it, I'm currently masquerading as Max at CommunityNext in Sunnyvale. The underlying drive behind the entire event is to discuss some of the intricacies behind a locked-down platform like Facebook's. CommunityNext is interesting in that Noah Kagan, one of the organizers, did a really good job of finding, and bringing a lot of the upper tier Facebook Platform developers to Silicon Valley from Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, etc.

If nothing else, CommunityNext is rumored to have great parties, and there just so happens to be a BBQ later today down here in Sunnyvale. It's somewhat late to suggest that everybody I know to attend, so I'll just mention that you're missing some good fun in South Bay, and leave it at that.

Turns out I'll be attending Remix 07 Boston next week but unfortunately my mega-cool-Silverlight hack won't be finished due to some scheduling complexities involved with working 130% of my time at a start-up in San Francisco (turns out, not too conducive to side-projects). I will be arriving bright and early at 6:30a.m. pounding down a gigantic (and expensive) airport coffee, and then heading to the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, so I apologize in advance if I look exceedingly tired Monday morning.

It'll be a great opportunity to get a feel for where Microsoft thinks that Silverlight is going, and how they intend to get there. It's a long hard road to even become near where Flash is in terms of market entrenchment, but Microsoft is one of three companies I believe currently capable of acheiving it (the other two being Adobe itself [bought Macromedia, they cheated], and Apple).

I would also like to give those Popfly guys an earful but I may spare them depending on how busy I am trying to find some fellow Facebook developers that live in the Boston area, or Miguel, who I'm pretty sure doesn't exist, but is merely a robotic creation of some wacky laboratory in Mexico.

If you'd like to meetup and have lunch, or a beer in the evening Monday or Tuesday, feel free to send me at email (tyler@slide.com) or track me down during the actual conference (i'm this guy).

Special thanks to Anand for what us young-folk call "the hook-ups" and I look forward to seeing both of my blog readers in Boston next week ;)

As one of the developers behind a big Facebook application or three (1, 2, 3), I've tried to share the love as much as possible. I can be found regularly on the #facebook channel on Freenode as well as in various tea lounges and bakeries. Through our Indie App Promotion in Top Friends and some other projects still developing, I'm trying my best to help ease the transition from web developer, to Facebook Platform developer as much as possible for my fellow hackers out there.

So, partially because my employer has been gracious enough to allow me, and because Dave McClure has given me the opportunity, I will be hosting a workshop at the Graphing Social conference in San Jose, CA, this upcoming Sunday.

The workshop is titled "Facebook App Dev 101: Intro to Platform / Building Your First App." In the first half of the workshop I'll cover some of the basics, with an introduction to the Facebook Platform, some Facebok Platform developer resources that are available, and then I'll touch on the various frameworks available for the Facebook Platform ranging from Facebook's PHP4/5 client library, to PyFacebook (Python), rfacebook (Ruby), and the Facebook Developer Toolkit (.NET). The second half of the workshop will cover building a sample application from the ground up, i.e. from setting up the developer version of the application as well as the live version, to writing a basic feed-postin', invitin', profile updatin' Facebook application in PHP and finally to running some basic tests and setting up basic metrics for the application.

Regardless of whether the workshop is recorded on video (it's going to be two, hour and fifteen minute, sessions, so most likely not), I'll be sure to post my "workshop materials" here after the fact. Hopefully they become as useful to novice Facebook Platform application developers as I hope my previous presentation "Coping with Success" (video) has been.

If you're in the Bay Area, I would highly recommend at the coming to Graphing Social as most of the bigger players on the Facebook Platform will be there, and it should definitely be an interesting conference, and if you're a developer who wants to get the scoop on developing Facebook Platform applications, be sure to come to the super-mega-awesome workshops we'll be doing this Sunday preceding the two main days of the conference.

Hope to see you there :)

Where's the call to war to freedom for our fellow democracy seeking people in Burma?

Instead, we should start a war with a country begging for a reason to show off it's developing nuclear arsenal?


What the fuck.


My old life-goal was to get filthy rich and waste it on ridiculous stuff like a t-rex egg, but I think I'll just try to get really rich and start buying Senators.

I remember watching a Channel 9 interview about Popfly with my coworker and former landlord David Young just after the original Facebook F8 Platform Launch back in May, laughing hysterically at a user-interface that used grass as an interface element, but at the same time thinking it was a very cool use of Silverlight as an application platform, instead of a Microsoft reply to Flash. Since that fateful day in May when a Microsoft Vice President of Business Development unveiled Popfly (exactly who should be unveiling a developer tool), I've heard close to absolutely nothing about Popfly, but loads about Silverlight.

Waiting to build a new version of Mono from trunk, I figured I'd check it out again, hoping their ludicrous "private beta" period would have passed, and I could finally use the technology that was unveiled almost 5 whole months ago. Alas, despite having the Silverlight plugin for Safari, popfly.com doesn't support Safari (I thought people wrote cross-platform web pages these days). Admitting my defeat, I popped open my VMWare instance of Windows XP, and Internet Exploder 7, only to discover that yes, Popfly is still invite-only or they're having server difficulties? Despite their about page jokingly referring to themselves as the developers behind products like Microsoft Bob, I'm starting to wonder if they weren't joking, as Popfly's introduction at F8 was either woefully premature or Microsoft decided that a developer environment where you draw lasers in-between boxes that represent stuff is too silly.

All my criticisms aside, the product does look interesting enough for me to be excited about the Popfly session at ReMix Boston '07 in October, if for no other reason than to ask for an invite, and maybe even wtf?

Given the insane amount of buzz around the Facebook Platform, and independent developers struggling to get cool applications into users' hands fast enough, Microsoft screwed up royally on a chance to sow the seeds of the next generation of developers on the web with Microsoft technologies.

Dear 800lb Gorilla,
When you announce something at a tech event that could possibly turn out to be industry changing like the Facebook Platform Launch, actually have the product ready for people to start using, otherwise, why bother?

While catching up on about 2 weeks of Mono Subversion commit emails (about 1000), building Mono, and writing a new Facebook REST client library, I came across ReMIX 07 in Boston, which certainly looks interesting. I haven't been to Boston yet, and it'd be nice to at the very least, to try to buy Miguel and some of the Boston-based Mono team a beer, maybe to make up for some of my anger that sometimes blurts out into the IRC channel:

05:48 <rtyler> god [expletive-deleted] damnit, I'm going to beat somebody up

(Which, in all fairness, usually stems from some idiot mistake on my part)


The sessions on Silverlight by Adam Kinney, who I did this interview with, are definitely looking enticing, as I'm still trying to figure out if it's worth my time and effort, or if Microsoft is going to screw developers again (ActiveX for Mac OS anybody?).

Most of the sessions seem to be targeting web developers, which is a role I find myself increasingly definable by, despite my role being clearly stated on my business card:



Regardless, seeing what developers are doing off in la-la-Microsoft land should be interesting as most of my web development work is either in Python or ASP.NET(Mono).

I am a little disappointed in the lack of sessions on IronPython and where that project is heading; it probably lost out to mega-mind-boggling sessions like "Stop Building PowerPoint Backgrounds & Start Selling High-end Presentations", which means I would have to settle on "Just Glue It! Ruby and the DLR in Silverlight" for my DLR fix.

That said, will it be worth a trip across country and a couple of hundred dollars out of pocket? Any couches available in the Boston are? And of course, are Microsoft conferences that awesome?

Rumor has it that there will be a little meetup in Palo Alto tomorrow to hack on some Facebook applications. The hackathon will be at Happy Donuts in Palo Alto, which is a hop skip and a jump away from the California Ave. Caltrain stop. I am planning on attending to hack on my Bug Tracker application (written in ASP.NET on Mono, which I will dissect and discuss later) as well as help out anybody that needs a good kick in the pants. Other than that however, it should be interesting how many folks show up and for what reasons, I'd like to discuss and share some of our sicker FBML hacks and maybe collectively play with (read: break) the Facebook Data Store API. Should be fun, come down and hang out :)

At the closing of SilverlightDevCampSF Microsoft Evangelist Adam Kinney did a brief video interview with me about my silly Silverlight hack. I had just started with Silverlight the night before, and didn't even have Moonlight virtual machine up yet, but I did have a Windows XP vm kicking around.

After the, roughly, three hours it took me to get Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), Expression Blend, and a couple of other tidbits installed on my vm, I finally got to my Silverlight hack. Starting with something I presumed would be exceedingly simply, I created our "collage" transition in Silverlight (you can find a "sample" here).

The hack is relatively simple, a new randomly generated storyboard and canvas are created for each image, then added to the root element; after 15 images have been added the canvas is cleared and repeats. I used Silverlight 1.0, since that's all that is released right now, so everything is in Javascript (argh!), but I intend on revisiting the hack once Silverlight 1.1 is a bit more stable (and rewrite it in IronPython!).

Anyways, here's the interview.

At the SilverlightDevCampSF this past couple days, I discovered a couple things while hacking around with both Moonlight, and Silverlight.

The first of which was that I don't know nearly enough about Silverlight, XAML, and WPF in general (crap). The second of which, was that with WebKit on Mac OS X, any application that embeds WebViews inherits plugins that are installed on the system. Extending this idea further, WebKit can inherit plugins that are bundled with a Cocoa application (inside Application.app/Contents/PlugIns), woohoo! What this means, outside of a purely Silverlight-related context, is that you could theoretically bundle a WebKit-plugin with a WebKit-based application and just have that plugin purely application specific, or bundle up a WebKit application with different versions of Flash and Silverlight for testing purposes. Unfortunately, there are some issues with clicking through to the Silverlight canvas in an embedded WebKit view, you can still try it out inside an application, without having to install the Silverlight plugin and restart your instance of Safari.

That said, are you thinking what I'm thinking? Of course not, you're probably sane, but I'm not, so I'd like to introduce SilverSurfer 1.0, an embedded version of WebKit that loads in the Silverlight 1.0 plugin for Mac OS X. It doesn't install anything on your computer, so you don't have to restart Safari, or futz with plug-ins, this is especially useful if you just want to try Silverlight out and see what it's about without installing anything.

Running SilverSurfer

Visiting a Silverlight page in Safari

Visiting the same page in SilverSurfer

Complex Silverlight in SilverSurfer

I think it's a neat trick, the only downside is actually having to bundle up the entire Silverlight.plugin bundle with the application bundle to make sure you don't have to install it, but other than that I hope you can find it useful when trying out Silverlight, or just testing it in Safari!

A bit late to bring up, but later today and tomorrow here in San Francisco, "we" (using that term loosely) will be holding SilverlightDevCampSF, one of the first BarCamp-styled events that I'll have ever attended where I've not played a part in it's organization.

In case you're unfamiliar with BarCamp events, they're loosely organized meetups/conferences to which geeks flock to normally for the booze included, but sometimes for the technical aspects as well.

I'm showing up particularly for Kevin Marshall's session on "Silverlight Facebook Apps" for obvious reasons, as well as to try my best to enlighten my fellow developers on the joys of Mono and Moonlight (that last part might not work out, time permitting). Overall it should be fun, and I hope if you're in the bay area you can make it down to 1 Market St! (map)

In case you're showing up, here's what I look like:


I'm with stupid ^