Campbell Interactive

It’s been three months at Microsoft now. There has been times where I’ve felt quite isolated and then there are weeks like last week where I was in LA meeting with some really great agencies that I was surprised to see already using MS technology to a large degree. It was a great trip, always happy to be back in LA, can’t wait to be back there for good.

My progress in Silverlight seems to be slow to me. I don’t know if I’m just being hard on myself or not but it seems like it’s taking forever to get a handle on it. Working in Expression Design to create graphics for this project i am working on is actually not that bad, it’s not a head to head rival for something like Illustrator but it’s a solid vector illustration package, the tools feel familiar and the workflow doesn’t really need to be altered in any way. Really it’s just the lack of filters and special effects that truthfully I never used in Illustrator anyway.

Animation in Blend takes some getting used to, if only in dealing with interactions. I imagine myself back to when I began in Flash years ago when AS1 was as complicated as it got in that space. Using the timeline and scenes (not knowing any better) to give the illusion of something more to each piece and to create something resembling a full blown website. I think that if I was to try to follow a similar learning curve with Silverlight and Blend I would be lost. This might not be a bad thing actually but that is something Flash had going for it, a low barrier to entry. I get the sense that if my intentions were to do something like the last flash site I built http://www.jademills.com I might be out of luck on my own. There is a robust development side to Silverlight, it offers the ability to use a multitude of languages thanks to the .NET CLR so there is definitely a larger pool of talent to draw from for that part of the equation but it makes me ask can there be the sort of one man army in Silverlight like there can be in Flash, and if not is that really a bad thing?

It’s been three months at MS, at least four solid weeks on Silverlight. I like working in it if for no other reason than I just love learning new things. It’s definitely powerful but I wonder if we will see magicians like Joshua Davis, Colin Mook, Joey Lott. I wonder where our Gabocorp, from those early days in Flash, will come from or if it even will come. I’ll keep learning, waiting and watching.

Oh I almost forgot the reason I began this post, heh, IE8 is finally here! Rejoice and pray that maybe now the countless IT departments across the world that perpetuate the survival of IE6 have enough ammunition to lobby for an upgrade.

If so you can do that here.