Ok, so, I found some great Silverlight tips on the afternoon of Day two courtesy of Jeff Prosise (http://www.wintellect.com/TechnicalBioDetail.aspx?Tech=5) .   I am definitely going to be taking his advice on some points and blogging about it as I convert my Beta 1 examples to Beta 2 examples.  Jeff had an implementation of The Game of Life in Silverlight that got me thinking about getting some Concurrency peanut butter into the Silverlight chocolate.  Would the LINQ based ray tracer work without too much modification in Silverlight?  Surely the Task Parallel Library will not work in Silverlight without serious modification and many things will likely not be available at all.  Still, I smell a side project: to what degree could we at least get Parallel.ForEach<> , Parallel.For, and perhaps some of the basic System.Threading.Tasks.Task things working in Silverlight 2.  Possible uses for this include a Silverlight based Folding @home style app and I’m sure there are others.

2008 TechEd MVP Party

I’m writing this on the morning after the 2008 MVP party, hosted in the Voodoo Room at the House of Blues in Orlando.  What a blast!  I showed up and realized that while I knew no one most other folks seemed to already know other MVPs.  Shortly thereafter Carl Franklin walked in the door.  Since I don’t get to meet Internet Famous people often, I said hi and thanked him for introducing me to Steely Dan with his rendition of Home at Last .  He seemed amused and gave me the big High Five when I said I actually bought Aja because of him. 

There were two guys there doing the whole Blues Brother s schtick.  It would seem not as many people came as RSVP’d, so I was able to call The Vanderboom and get him in to the party.  The lower attendance also meant that the free drink tickets flowed in a steady stream for all of us.  There are some pictures circulating of me swing-dancing with a woman who runs a user group in Seattle.  Hopefully no other incriminating evidence exists, everyone remaining when they kicked us out was getting wacky by that time. 

Thanks to Microsoft for putting this event on, and all the MVPs who came for a great time.