Dan Rigsby - Coding Up Style

This past Thursday (January 10, 2008) Larry Clarkin (our local Microsoft Architect Evangelist) came down for our monthly Indianapolis .Net Developers Association (IndyNDA) meeting.  His topic was “Programming in the Cloud - Tapping into Internet APIs”.  Here was the description given for the event:

Services are becoming increasingly important in software development today.  The Internet has numerous interesting APIs that you can “tap” into as part of your Internet and enterprise based applications.  In this presentation Larry Clarkin, an Architect Evangelist for Microsoft, will explore a number of these APIs and how to consumer them in your application.  We will look at some popular APIs like Virtual Earth, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr and what it takes to start using these APIs.  We will also plug into them with a variety of UX (User Experience) platforms like HTML Pages, Silverlight and WPF. 

The IndyNDA president, Brad Jones, was out of town this month.  The vice-president, Bob Walker, took over the event with the help of Dave Leininger and myself. 101 people were in attendance which is about 10% more than usual and is high considering that this wasn’t a “special engagement” nor were there “big” prizes.

Larry did a good job covering the gambit of what is possible with web APIs. I really like that more and more people at Microsoft are open to talk about other companies and competitors in a positive light.  The biggest threat to Microsoft has always been Microsoft itself.  Working with other companies, sharing ideas, and showing love to competitors is showing that they are not as close minded as they once were.  Below is a run down of the highlights of the meeting:

Upcoming Events:

1. MSDN Event - What’s New in IIS7 and Extending ASP.NET 2.0 Application Services

Thursday, February 07, 2008 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Central (Why in Central time?)

2. ArcReady - Software Lifecycle Management

Thursday, February 21, 2008 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM Eastern

Plugs:

1. ThirstyDeveloper - A podcast from by Larry Clarkin and Dave Bost.  They are doing a good job with this.

Topics:

1. VirtualEarth Demo - Showed off some 3D maps of Indianapolis and covered major competitors Google and Yahoo.  There was a demo with Wpf consuming VirtualEarth data.
2. Soap vs Rest - Microsoft is now embracing Rest. Soap is still a very important technology but is used more for internal needs.  Rest is best suited for “the cloud”, especially where security is of no consequence.
3. Facebook - There wasn’t much talk here, but the Facebook Developer Toolkit was mentioned.  If you are interested in developing a Facebook application this is a good place to start.
4. Twitter Demo - I was amazed to see how many people didn’t use or had never heard of twitter.  Larry spent a good chunk of time giving an introduction to what twitter was and how it could be used.  This spawned a number of smaller discussions about using twitter for other things such as a content management system and feeding other applications.
5. Silvertwitter - This is a twitter reader written by Dave Bost in Silverlight.  He hasn’t posted the source or the application yet, but you can see it in use on his blog.
6. Rss - There was a small discussion about Rss and why it is the best thing to happen to the Internet.  While Atom is a superior format, Rss is well known and well adopted.
7. Flickr - There was a demo using Blend and Wpf to create a simple flickr viewer.  FlickerNet was also mentioned.

After the meeting some of the IndyNDA officers and sponsors got together for a couple of drinks with Larry.  I love these outings as they really give us a chance to discuss things going on at Microsoft and open the doors for a lot of good questions and discussions.

(From left to right: Jon Cooper, Aaron Lerch, Paul Hacker, Larry Clarkin, Dan Rigsby, Bob Walker, and Mark McClellan.)