A Twitter-style Blog Post from a User Group

Larry Clarkin is a developer evangelist for Microsoft based out of Milwaukee.  He gave a talk this evening to the IndyNDA group at the Junior Achievement center on Keystone.  He spent the first twenty minutes of his talk showing us Microsoft's Virtual Earth maps site.  To use the Virtual Earth client libraries you need to include their script library and create a DIV to contain the map renderings.  A very informative site for learning Virtual Earth was demonstrated; it's called "The Virtual Earth Interactive SDK".  Very cool.

He's showed us a pretty tame example of overlaying a Silverlight control on a Virtual Earth map.  The Silverlight control references the map via Javascript.  Pretty simple, but I believe the concept is solid.  You could really have a lot of fun with this approach.

7:09pm and we've been enlightened that SOAP has lost the battle to REST on the public web.  Now we're getting some of the Twitter hype...  boring.  More Twitter, more boring.  I guess I just don't get Twitter. It seems like a way to fill the gaps when you are alone with yourself.  What's next--a microphone for your thoughts?  I will never waste my time reading that crap.

7:23pm and we're learning that RSS is gee-wowie!  "We need more things like RSS."  Good to know.  Larry likes Flickr.

The guy sitting behind me has returned to his seat and reeks of cigarette smoke.  Joy!

Oooh, now I'm learning how to get an ugly slideshow in Blend from a Flickr RSS feed.  It's 7:37pm and he's done--felt longer but under an hour.

The highlight was hearing guys get excited about being able to update Twitter via SMS.  They thought, "Wow, I can point my applications at that feed and then send control codes via SMS."  It feels like you should probably skip the middle-man.  Though, a free SMS to RSS gateway is a fun idea for homebrew mash-ups.

Well, the pizza was better this time.