April was a busy month. Looking back and ahead…

Just checking in with folks, wanted to share a little of what I’ve been up to, and lay the foundation for what I hope to be another set of good blog posts. Work’s been a fun challenge recently, we’re working hard on plenty of things and I just haven’t been able to keep the blog fresh. Sorry!

MIX and LoadingPivotItem

MIX was a lot of fun this year, and in my phone performance talk one of the more interesting components I demonstrated was one that I built called LoadingPivotItem. I have unfortunately not been able to share this out yet as the version I have isn’t quite production-ready for most folks to begin using, and I want to cleanup that source.

Stay tuned, sorry I know a lot of people were excited to start using this component.

AZGroups ScottGu Day

I had a great time in Chandler, AZ on Fri 4/22. The 8th annual “ScottGu Day”, the morning had a great set of demos and presentations by Scott Guthrie. After lunch, I got on stage and covered the Windows Phone for a while, followed then by Mark Russinovich who presented on Windows Azure. Lots of info on that day!

Thanks to everyone who came. It was great spending a brief day in Arizona, the temperature sure was nice compared to Seattle and everyone was so friendly. Even better there was a stop to In-N-Out Burger on the way to the airport…

A Niney award for the Silverlight Toolkit

The event isn’t online as far as I know, but before the attendee party at MIX 11 this year at the Marquee Nightclub in Vegas, was the first annual “Nineys” awards. Similar to fun tech award events like the Webbies, etc., it was a lot of fun. Especially seeing the segment on “remembering tech that is no longer with us from 2010” – including the KIN and Microsoft Money. Good laughs.

I’m happy to note that the Silverlight Toolkit won the best CodePlex project award, and I was present to accept the award on the team’s behalf. Thanks to the community for supporting us, everyone was happy for the recognition.

Checking in with Erik Meijer

Erik Meijer runs a fun show, ‘Checking In’, on Channel 9. You can check out the video “Checking In: Jeff Wilcox – Writing the WP7 App Platform in C# and C++” - posted on 4/20. It’s a whole hour long, so get the popcorn out and prepare to hear my wonderful monotone voice!

4th & Mayor

I’ve unfortunately been so busy between work, family, and other commitments that I just haven’t had time to update the app in a while. Hoping to get to that at some point. I am planning to start blogging about some of how I built it, including some of its source. It’s also currently the recommended client to download on Foursquare’s site, which is cool. There’s also a post by someone at Microsoft who works with Foursquare that may be interesting.