Ben Cornwell

This thusrday (12th July 2007), I’ll be presenting some of the discoveries I’ve made in the last few weeks playing around with Silverlight & PHP at the Melbourne PHP User Group. Dave Glover, the local Microsoft Developer Evangelist, will be coming along to talk about Expression Studio and Visual Studio Orcas.
From phpmelb.org:
When/Where

Date: Thursday 12th July 2007
Time: 7.00pm

Address

Hitwise Melbourne
Level 6, 580 St Kilda Rd
Melbourne
Expression Studio Round Up - Dave Glover - 7:15 - 8:00pm

Coinciding with the official release of Silverlight, Microsoft have recently launched a bunch of brand new tools for web development work called Expression Studio, with the express purpose of enabling collaboration between developers and designers in creating standards based websites. Featured in this suite of applications is Expression Web, a web authoring tool with comprehensive support for CSS and… PHP!

Dave Glover will be coming along to give us the low-down.

Doing Silverlight with PHP - Ben Cornwell - 8:15 - 9:00pm

Silverlight is Microsoft’s offering in the world of rich-client platforms like Flex and Open Laszlo. Based on XAML, Silverlight provides a framework for creating user interfaces for the web that are standards compliant, great looking and encompass complex animation, audio and video.

Ben’s presentation will provide an introduction to Silverlight and a live demonstration of how to create Silverlight interfaces with PHP and AJAX.

Socialising & Networking - 9:00pm onward

After the meeting we’ll be moving downstairs to the Cartel Bar, for an informal chat over a few cold ones.

Pizza, softdrink, tea, coffee and comfy swivel chairs will be provided
with compliments of our major sponsor, Hitwise.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be attending Microsoft’s Remix07 conference - the Australian format of a similar confernce called ‘Mix07′ held in Vegas last year. Its a quasi official-product-launch of the brand spanking Silverlight rich client platform, and it should prove pretty interesting.

For anyone not familiar with Silverlight, it’s a new .NET and xaml based platform/framework for delivering rich client content to the web. The basic gist is that it allows developers to create client applications, running in browser space, with all most of the features of the .NET platform - and if you buy the hype, means the end of ajax as we know it. I’m not as knowledgeable on the subject as I’d like to be, but it’s essentially Micosoft’s answer to recent developments in rich client platforms like Flex and Open Laszlo, with a few cool distinguishing traits like the bringing of all the .NET goodness and the ability to use isolated storage on client machines - typical security concerns aside, sounds positively kick-ass!

Possibly a unusual choice of conference for an OS developer and Linux fan (qualified by the fact that I’m currently sitting MCSD certification) but I’m very interested to find out whether it lives up to all the hype. There are a couple of PHP-related presentations that look promisin - ie, ‘PHP & Microsoft’ being presented by Steve Marx, which beyond technical details, will be interesting to hear Microsoft’s official line on PHP.

More to come.

As a side note for anyone interested: Dave Glover from Microsoft will be coming along to the next PHPMelb meeting ( 13-07-2007 ) to talk about Silverlight and some of the other ways PHP fits in with Microsoft technologies.