'09 blog housekeeping & thanks

3 January 2009

I hope that you've had an excellent new year; I'm pretty excited for what is in store for the next twelve months. Here's some general notes & blog information.

Last year we took Silverlight from a simple plugin & a brand name to a complete platform powered by .NET.

With a tough economy, the pressure is on to actually deliver value and make sound investments, and the open source work that we're doing at Microsoft on the Silverlight Toolkit definitely is a good value.

I'd also like to take a minute to thank the thousands of subscribers and site visitors. I always welcome your feedback and post suggestions.

Jeff Wilcox's RSS feeds

Last year I delivered a large set of tutorials, Silverlight guides, and overall I'm very happy with the content. I'd like to take this chance to present three key RSS feeds for my blog, in case you're doing some RSS reader housekeeping.

Recent posts RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JeffWilcox/ 

Silverlight-only RSS:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/JeffWilcox/Silverlight/ 
This is the RSS feed that is syndicated on the http://www.silverlight.net/ homepage and this Microsoft feed. This is a good subscription choice if you're less interested in other technologies and topics (Apache, PHP, Seattle weather, you name it)

Recent comments RSS:  http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/comments/feed/ 

Silverlight Toolkit team RSS:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/SilverlightToolkitTeamMembersBlogFeeds/ 

Site updates

If you visit my web site, http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/, or click through to individual blog posts, you'll notice that I spent some time in the month of December to refresh the visual design, styles, and functionality of my site and blog.

The pages have a true #fff white background now, archive pages and other pages list more topics, have excerpts, and the blog remains advertising-free.

Best way to deliver code snippets in blog postings?

Back in May, I announced that I was moving from screen captured code to JavaScript-enhanced post <pre /> content.

I'd appreciate it if you could share any comments on the format, I'm open to spending some time changing the process again. The experience today is a simple <pre /> text block for RSS readers, and when viewing the actual post web page, JavaScript powers value add (syntax highlighting, additional options, clipboard features).

Disclaimer reminder

Just a reminder to those that subscribe to these feed: as reproduced on all blog and site pages: "The content on this site represents my own personal opinions and thoughts at the time of posting, and does not reflect those of my employer in any way."

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Jeff Wilcox is a Software Engineer at Microsoft in the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), helping Microsoft engineers use, contribute to and release open source at scale.

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