>> Double checking
broadcast here real quick.
If you just saw my tweet.
Okay, I believe we are
actually set and ready
to go today.
Tweet has been sent out.
Okay, Mr. Scott Barnes.
Number one, it's absolutely
a big pleasure of mine
to actually meet you and talk to you.
We actually go quite a far ways back,
but I don't think that
I've ever actually talked
to you before, outside
of maybe like Twitter.
Have we ever chatted?
>> No, no.
I mean that being said,
I have ran into people in the street
and they're like, oh, hey.
It was great conversation
with you, blah blah blah.
I'm like, I have no idea who you are.
(laughing)
>> You're like, I have absolutely.
>> I would remember you though.
I'd definitely remember you.
No, I don't think we have.
>> So, we've got all kinda of
really cool things to talk about here.
First off, Scott, for any of
those that are just joining
us, can you tell us maybe a
little bit about yourself?
Where you were working.
Which would be here,
and maybe a little bit of
maybe some of the things
you're doing right now?
>> Yeah, so many, many,
many, many years ago,
almost a decade ago,
I applied for a job at the
time I thought was applying
for Adobe, but it turns
out it was Microsoft, sort
of a bait and switch on
their recruitment process.
And I was hired as a developer evangelist
before what we called it
back in those days which was
the Windows Vista LOVE launch.
It was Live Office and
something something.
I forget the others.
Vista and Exchange.
That's right.
And my role at that time,
my metrics at the time were
to sort of get developers
excited about WPF sidebar
widgets and all that kind
of nonsense, and so on.
I did a little bit of
evangelism on a little small
unknown product called Jolt,
project Jolt, which later
became Silverlight, and so
for a while there I was doing
a lot of design agency and
developer engagement sort
of stuff, and then what I
would typically do is I would
go back to Redmond and
complain about all the project
management problems as I
normally do vocally internally.
And eventually one of the
directors of .NET turned around
and said, either shut the hell up,
or move here, fix it yourself.
So, I moved to Seattle
(laughing)
and began on the journey
of fixing it myself,
so to speak,
and that's where I became product manager
of the .NET team.
Did a few years of that,
and then after leaving Microsoft I started
to sort of carve out a niche,
or niche sort of business around
that sort of rich platforms deck,
the WPF Silverlight stack.
Rode that for as good as it could give me.
Eventually, Microsoft
changed its strategy,
strategy shifted, so to speak,
and then started to go
to all management space.
So, I've been a director for
a company and ran developer
teams, and so on and so on.
Fast forward to today,
I'm currently right now in
a large enterprise company
teaching developers how to do React.
>> Interesting.
Okay, one of the things
that you mentioned was Jolt.
So, Jolt became Silverlight.
Is that right?
>> That's correct.
Yeah, yeah.
So, Jolt was the first
incarnation of Silverlight.
That was back in the
days when it was called
WPF Everywhere, essentially,
and we were try figure out.
>> WPFE?
>> Yeah.
WPF slash E. Slash E.
>> WPF slash E.
Yes, I remember that.
>> It was really important
to put slash in there.
>> Yes.
>> And I'm gonna say we
had a branding problem.
That's not a lie.
We did have a branding problem.
And the idea kinda was born
because we wanted to enable
WPF developers to have
a ClickOnce strategy
because that was pretty much a wanted ask.
I said, We love WPF, love
this, this, and that,
but I have a problem.
I'm up against browser-based applications.
Can you help me?
This is not good enough.
So, the strategy at that
time was to create a subset
of WPF to live inside of the
browser through ClickOnce.
Obviously, putting a .exe in
the URL and saying, trust us.
Just click it no matter who you are,
is probably a bad strategy
from security standpoint,
so we had to come up with
something that would pacify
that audience, at the
same time solve a problem.
The best word.
Yeah, WPF Everywhere was born,
which later became Silverlight.
>> Okay, very, very interesting here.
Let me look right here.
I'm seeing bad echo is
coming through, FYI.
So, let me see if I should
switch this over real quick.
Sometimes, you got to do what you got
to do, and apparently.
>> It's a live show.
(laughing)
>> And the apparently the
echo is pretty strong,
so we'll see if we can
fix that really quick.
>> Isn't this old saying,
never work with animals
or children, Twitch.
(laughing)
>> Yes.
So, Let's Code Stuff, let
me know if that audio is
a little bit better now.
Sorry for that.
I think what was happening
was that I had my speaker,
and it was also getting
picked up by my other mic.
So anyway, I think it's fixed now.
Okay, so WPF/E.
You moved to Seattle.
When did you move to Seattle?
Wasn't this all around
like the 2010 time period?
2010, 2011?
>> No, it was 2008, 2007.
Somewhere in 2007ish?
I can't remember, 2006, 2007,
my timeline is a bit off.
And then I left Seattle
around 2010, I think.
Wyatt has all the timelines.
I blacked out a lot of this sort of stuff.
Yeah, it's just all a blur to me.
It feels like yesterday in a lot of ways,
but it's just so far removed
from the fringes of my mind.
Yeah, it was right in 2009, 2010.
It took me three goes to resign.
>> Three goes?
>> So, yeah.
It was a bit of a long way.
It was a combination many things.
It was kind of like one,
my wife and I were pretty much homesick,
it was all picking at small things,
like look at this weather.
Stupid snow.
We should get back to Australia.
Like, you know? (laughing)
Lots of little things like that.
So, yeah, it was around
Christmastime or late 2010
I think it was.
Yeah.
>> 2010.
So, I was an MVP around somewhere around,
I don't know,
it may have been 2010,
but I remember I got
the MVP award and it was
in Silverlight, and I think
I got it for maybe like
three or four years,
but during all of that time
I had always.
So, everybody with RIAGENIC,
which was the rich internet
applications, right?
RIAGENIC, your blog.
>> Yeah, I did trial once a
day before like six months in.
It was it a rich interactive applications.
They just lost their shit at that.
(laughing)
That was my tip to Adobe.
Obvious.
>> So, I remember when
I was in MVP, obviously,
especially when you with
the PM on the product,
I remember like everything
that like you said, was like,
okay, I took that information back,
I was actually a developer
at actually a children's hospital,
and we had already went
ahead and we decided
we were going to invest pretty heavily
in Silverlight, and so this is around
in the Silverlight 3 days,
and I remember we started building
applications, we were
building actually a patient
tracker board which
doctors could use to see
where their patients were
at and some other signs,
other chart information,
and when we were building
those and it was working it was
working great on Mac.
The management team had
really relied on me to stay up
to date with what was the future
of Silverlight, and it was
is Silverlight dead or is
it still alive?
And I think during all of this time,
and again this is like our
first time like chatting,
I really paid attention
to every single thing
that you said, and I don't
even know if it was built in,
it was like a tweet deck or
something where we would set
up alerts, like your name,
and so you were the big spokesperson.
>> Okay. (laughing)
>> Of this whole Silverlight.
>> Not sure that's a good sign. (laughing)
>> No, I'm just saying you were the person
and I'm just saying this,
it was so awesome about
that was that when you were
tweeting things, and that we
were reading your blog post,
I took a look back in
my direct messages and,
let me see if I can like
safely show this part,
may or may not be able to,
but I looked back and
I don't know if you saw
this or not, but back
in September the 17th, 2011,
I put, "Hey, Scott.
"Thanks for the follow up.
"Enjoying your blog,
"and thanks for your fixWPF.org."
So first off,
I've gotta ask, at least
from where I was coming from,
did you create, was
fixWPF.org, was that yours?
>> Yeah, I started sort of, I thought,
I've left the company.
I'm gonna blame another person here.
There was another MVP at the
time called Joseph Cooney.
Joseph.
So, Joseph and I were just
bantering around at one point
at that time, and we were doing WPF work,
and Joseph's a really good
developer, he's really,
really good, and he was getting
frustrated that he can't
finish what he starts in terms of WPF.
He enjoyed the WPF journey more.
We had a lot of fun doing
it and at that time I knew
for a fact that Microsoft had
dialed down massive amounts
of money on the investment of WPF.
Silverlight was getting all the attention
in cycles, as well,
but at that point WPS budget
was pretty much non-existent.
So, it was my sort of
tongue in the cheek to say,
Let's try and do a
community pressure point,
'cause I know these guys
at the time used to react
to a lot of community sentiment.
So let's create a fixWPF thing
and try and, I don't know,
rally the troops inside
Microsoft to somehow get some
funding, sort of go through
and fix some of the quality
of life issues in WPF, or
continue down this path.
Because one thing I did
learn as a product manager
on that team was we were
very insulated in our mindset
about what adoption looked
like across the world
for WPF and Silverlight.
And it wasn't until I left
Microsoft and I went out
into the cubicles all around
Australia, because I
went all the way around.
I was working for a company
that did consultancy
and I was on a plane nearly every week,
and I visited thousands
of teams around Australia.
And I realized WPF was much
more ubiquitous than Silverlight.
A lot more people were using
WPF than they were Silverlight.
So, it hit me that all of our metrics back
in Redmond, and all that data
back in Redmond was very,
I guess, quantitative,
but it wasn't qualitative.
Because these people they don't
volunteer they're using WPF, they'd come
and say, "Hey Microsoft.
"I'm using WPF.
"Let's keep going."
We don't hear anything, so
we assumed no one's using it.
We look at the data and
say, well, not downloaded,
therefore one plus one equals four.
So, we didn't do enough
qualitative analysis.
We did a lot of quantitative analysis,
and that's an error in judgment.
So, after going through that I said,
Look, we've gotta fix this.
This something we should definitely fix.
Let's get some groundswell going.
So, I created the website
and I kind of created
this thing, and there was
some people behind it,
but it just didn't get the
numbers I needed, and I went,
oh, this is just going to be embarrassing.
I feel like this one protest outside
Parliament House or
the White House saying,
"The president should be
impeached!" (laughing)
So, I dialed it down. (laughing)
I took the smart strategy
and dialed it back.
>> So, when you created that site,
that while you were an employee, right?
You were an employee, right?
>> No I think it was--
>> Or was that afterwards?
>> It was after.
So, if I was still at Microsoft
I would've went straight
to a few program managers and said,
look, how much money do we need for this?
And, let me go secure funding.
That would've been my
attack posture, but outside,
you can't do that.
You can't just walk up,
kick some doors open at
Redmond, and say, all right,
I want a million dollars for this.
It won't work.
>> I think sometimes some
people, maybe even internally,
and I'm not saying that with any names,
but they may create some
sites that's similar
to that while they're still working here.
(laughing)
It could happen.
>> When you have 90,000 plus
overachievers in one postcode,
you're not gonna get your
ideas always through.
That's the best thing I
learned being in Redmond was
you're surrounded by a
lot of overachievers.
These aren't people that are jokes.
Even the most incompetent
person you probably work
with right now is still
competent outside Microsoft.
So, you're dealing with a lot
of smart people with smart
agendas and smart ideas.
So getting your voice heard is sometimes
the biggest challenge, honestly.
So, it's groundswell
movements that can help you.
See, I told you they would do that.
>> Yeah, and one of the things.
It's just a big ship,
and it was really hard for
me to understand or to think
that this is such a big ship.
And obviously with that,
that I mean is that in order
to kind of steer this ship
towards change or maybe
wanting to maybe do something
different, it takes a little bit of time,
just as if you're in a physical ship.
It's gonna take some time
in order to get that moved,
and I think a lot of people,
when maybe they they enter
some of the big tech companies
they're used to things
moving at a much faster pace,
and especially for like for myself,
from when I worked as a developer
at Children's Hospital,
and things of that nature,
if we wanted to roll with a
technology or maybe we wanted
to implement something,
it usually came down to
just a couple of people.
And as long as the the dev leads agreed,
we may be off building
something within two weeks,
and obviously the the
larger tech companies,
that's never the case
for that type of speed.
And it's because when
you're starting to work
at multi-billion dollar
corporation, you start
to understand what it
really takes in order
to start turning it.
That can be a large amount
of information to process
in your brain.
>> Well, yeah.
Also, you said you were an MVP and then
you joined the company.
So, as an MVP, you're
used to feeling special.
I'm gonna be a little bit arrogant here,
but bear with me.
There's a point growing,
but you're used to feeling special.
You're used to feeling
being the top of your game.
So, you're used to be in the
community and people look
to you as leadership, and
say, that guy knows that tech.
He's my go-to because he can
help me understand things
better and he can give me
an unbiased, authentic.
You're not Microsoft's pet,
you're not Microsoft boy.
You can give me some
sensibility beyond that.
Then, you join Microsoft
and your game plan changes.
You are now the company name.
You are now gonna tow the line.
You know when we have these
blog posts where we said,
my opinion is my own,
it's not the company's?
No, you don't get to play that role.
That's gone.
You've forfeited that the
moment you were hired.
So, put that away.
You are now speaking on behalf
of Microsoft, and with that becomes power
and responsibility, and a
lot of that also boils down
to frustration because you're
used to being the person
that carries the voice from
the ground up to the company.
You're used to being that grassroots,
I'll take your voice,
I'll echo it to that team,
that team will be influenced.
Now you can't do that as
much as you once could
unless you have your
own equity and integrity
and even titles sometimes,
your own sense of power
inside the company.
That's when you can trade it back.
So, it becomes frustrating.
You see this a lot with MVPs,
especially when they came
to the company,
that would grow increasingly
frustrated with the system.
They would block it, they
would be the radical outlier,
and so forth,
and in years gone past,
it's taken a lot of time
to figure out in hindsight
that you just gotta figure
something out differently,
like you just gotta come at
it from different approach.
But that being said, back in those days,
I don't know what Microsoft's like now,
I feel like Microsoft's a lot more sharper
or a lot more aware.
I feel like the culture's
dramatically changed
since I was there, but back in those days,
we didn't have a plan,
we didn't have this big,
grand strategy, we kind of
made it up as we go each
quarter, were were just
reacting at that point.
The classic case is the
name Silverlight, okay?
>> Oh, yeah.
I wanna get into that, too.
>> It's another word for saying a flash.
It's a silver light.
How do you describe a flash?
It's a silver light.
So, straight away,
so we're tipping our hat
to say we are so entrenched
in Adobe compete issues that
we kind of almost got lost
in that, as well.
So, it was very much a ad
hoc, make it up as you go,
but that being said,
Silverlight for example,
was moving at a cycle around nine months.
It was publishing around at
nine months per iteration,
which was insane.
It was just insane pace.
I remember at one time at Mix, we launched
Silverlight and WPF and were
all at a party and having
a drinks and stuff that night,
and I look over to one
of the program managers
for the Blend team, and he's coding.
I'm like what are you doing?
He's like, I gotta keep going,
'cause you guys may
have got your shit done,
but I'm the guy has to make these two
products come together.
So, see you later.
It hit me then,
the Blend team never once got
a break 'cause every cycle
they were doing, they were
constantly having to play
catch-up all the time,
and it was just such a breakneck speed.
>> Wow.
>> So, we didn't have necessarily a plan.
We did amazing things,
like Silverlight team put HD video online.
I always tell people, If
you're watching HD right now,
this Twitch stream,
you can thank the Silverlight team
because that kick-started.
We had first move advantage in that space
that kick-started the race.
We put out Blu-Ray codecs,
VC1 codecs online for the first time
at NAB in Las Vegas, and
then Adobe a year and a half
later wakes up and says, oh, shit.
We better capitalize
this video thing and put
HD out as well.
So, yeah.
It was at a time when no
one said it was possible
and these guys did the possible.
So, I was really, really
looking back on it now,
I was really, really proud
of what was accomplished.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> And with all the video
and stuff that you're talking
about, again I was in the
Children's Hospital kind
of space, and I got to go out,
and I got to visit some
other hospitals, their tech companies,
to see how they were using,
and in regards to the
media, the video playback,
Arkansas Children's Hospital
actually implemented
that for their kids that
were in the hospital.
So, they kind of had a like
a rolling cart with a screen
and they were using
an Xbox type of controller, I believe.
And with that they could
actually change the so-called
channel, and they could go
from one stream to the next,
and they only had three,
four so-called channels to pick from,
but they wanted to be very
careful and curate the content
themselves versus rely on some sort of,
at least in the U.S., a
public television service
for the security.
>> It was prime for that.
The first version of
Silverlight, we went to market
and we said, we got HD video
with the latest capabilities.
We've got XAML.
But you're gonna have
to write in JavaScript.
And then it was like, What?
Sorry, that last part.
What did you say?
They said, yeah, you
gotta write in JavaScript.
So, you 're doing XAML
in JavaScript, that's it?
No C#?
We're like, Yeah, well C#'s coming next,
but yeah, JavaScript.
And we're looking at our feet, like,
we're so gonna get crucified.
This is not gonna be acceptable.
The world lost their mind.
They completely lost their mind,
like it completely went
a different direction.
We went into there thinking
JavaScript was gonna be
a really awkward conversation,
people are gonna hate us,
blah blah, and then went to
NAB, did the launch thing,
came back, and it was just
exploding and exploding
and exploding, and it was
just getting so much positive
sentiment that we went, oh, shit.
And then, we did we did
the one thing that products
should never do,
is we put out 1.1,
we did these massive breaking changes.
So, we said to the poor
schmucks out there, adopt us,
but use JavaScript.
They're like, all right, this sucks,
but I'll get on with it 'cause
I'm sure you're gonna plan
to get out of this, right?
We went, yeah, the plan is
don't touch that code base
again and try a new code base.
They were like, okay.
(laughing)
So, it went forward, and
some people angry, I think,
but that's what the kind of
energy that we're getting
from it, and I remember the
program managers weren't
starving for features.
We were having to spend
a lot of our time saying,
this feature will work with this feature,
but not right now.
They were so excited about the features
they were working on.
They were frustrated in some
cases, but, I don't know,
it was just this groundswell
of we can do anything
attitude and I think that's
what made it successful
in the company at that time
because it's the fastest
growing product of that time.
And what made it really
successful that time was
the energy levels and the
way that people approached
it, it was like it was
trying to keep lightning
in a bottle in a nutshell,
as cliche as that is,
but it was.
It legitimately was.
>> Go ahead.
>> I was just saying, it
guy gave birth to Netflix.
Look at this is juggernaut today.
>> Oh, yes.
>> So, look what it's achieved.
>> And Netflix, when it rolled out,
it was Silverlight, and
then they eventually.
So, what are they using now, even?
Do you know?
What did they switch to?
>> Those guys at Netflix
are always switched on.
They had their own sort kind of thing.
The development team at Netflix
is top tier since day one.
So, they've always had
their shit together.
So, they took Silverlight
but mutated it a little bit.
I'm not saying they would
got to a generic version
and ran with it.
They knew what they're doing,
they knew whatever they wanted to achieve
and Silverlight was a vehicle.
But I think that using,
I think they may be still
using part of the smooth
streaming, like that
smooth streaming technology
is still remnants.
Below the surface, I think,
there's a lot of that still happening.
Client side, I'm not
sure what they're using
at this point.
It could be just simple
browser-based videos.
'Cause Silverlight's other role,
we had this joke inside the team,
when you hit ubiquity of
90% break the medicine glass
and read the note, and the note says,
delete Silverlight, 'cause
Silverlight also realistically
its main job was to wake the web up.
Like, we could do better.
At that time,
we'll flounder around with
some mediocrity and 360p video
or whatever it was,
the Flash was just making a lot of really,
Adobe was making some really,
really bad decisions
at that point in time.
They were kinda lazy in
many ways with their tech.
They weren't growing it,
and the web was just kind of floundering
in this HTML conversation
over at Java, whereas plugins
like Silverlight are
supposed to be an influencer.
They're supposed to be
disruptive and they're supposed
to say, the web can go further
and faster, farther, sorry.
So, if you hit ubiquity
90% with Silverlight, then
it's achieved its mission
because we're now having
these rich,
vibrant experiences online
that are desktop quality.
It's essentially what you want.
>> Yeah, and it was a big
gigantic game changer,
at least when I was a dev
in Children's Hospital
because for us in the medical
field, even at that time,
Windows wasn't necessarily
everywhere, so our physicians,
they were Mac.
We knew when they came in they were used
to Mac, and they weren't
going to be changing.
Our team was just strictly
.NET and .NET Framework,
and we were very much invested
in WinForms at that time,
and we had just been playing,
we really had gotten into XAML and WPF,
and then when Silverlight hit,
and I will say we didn't adopt it,
I think, until Silverlight 3.
Wasn't Silverlight 3 the
first version that worked
with the C#?
Is that it?
>> One point.
>> It was one point?
>> Yeah, like 1.0 I was
JavaScript then 1.1 started
bringing in C#, and
then it grew from there.
>> Interesting.
Okay, so I think we started
around Silverlight 3
'cause I think like in
Silverlight 4 you could do
things like elevated permissions and some
of that other stuff.
>> Yeah.
That was actually the
potential death of Silverlight.
That was the nail in the coffin.
This is the political stuff.
So, I remember one of the
program managers came back
from Vegas, whatever, and he goes,
Come have a look at this.
It's one of those meetings,
and he shows me out of browser, right?
And I go, wow, this is amazing.
Because yes, the idea is
you can watch offline video.
That was the intent.
That was honestly, his heart
was in the right place.
He was like, we can now do offline video,
so you can watch Netflix on the plane.
I said, this is, like,
in those days, this is a game changer.
This is massive.
Yes, let's do this.
And then, so I went back
to my other team members and I showed him.
I said, Look, we've got
offline video, and he goes,
"You can't talk about that."
And I go, "What do you mean?"
He goes, "Do not shop that around.
"Just leave that with me."
Park that at the door.
"Do not shop that around."
And I'm like, "Why?"
This is amazing.
Look at this guy.
This guy's invented something really cool.
He's built it, he's prototyped
it, this is really good.
He says, "You can't talk about it."
I'm sitting there going, why?
What's the problem?
He goes, "'Cause now you got
Silverlight on the desktop.
"'Cause to build a video
application means I have
"to build a desktop application."
And I went, "Yeah."
He goes, "So, you're telling
me that Silverlight is going
"to make desktop applications for not
"just Windows, Mac and Linux, as well?"
I'm like, "Yeah, I see
what you're saying."
He goes, "Right now,
"I got the Windows division
up my arse about a whole range
"of things about Silverlight.
"This is not gonna help
that case, so park it."
So, that kicked off a
different style of discussion.
(laughing)
It eventually made its
way out the front door.
I ignored that nonsense,
and we eventually were
persistent and we badgered it,
and we got out the door
in this offline out-of-browser capability.
But, yeah.
That was definitely a turn
of the road for Silverlight.
Put it that way.
>> Oh, yeah.
So, I just pulled up a few dates
so I could remember these.
Silverlight 3 was announced at Mix '09.
Do you remember that in Las Vegas?
>> I have very, very foggy
memory of Vegas, but yes.
(laughing)
>> So, what typically happened with us,
and this is before I was at Telerik,
which was a third party control company,
which is now Progress, we
would get to go out to some
of these things.
And so I remembered some of the really
cool things was that, with
Silverlight, and this was me,
just again, one of the questions,
was that there was always
a beta that was available
when you announced it.
And that was always something that,
it made us super excited as
developers because the first
thing we did was we downloaded
the beta, and we would play
with it while we're at the
event, and then when we come
back, we would show that to everybody.
Did you always,
or was there always planning
of the if you're going
to talk about Silverlight
or release a new version
of Silverlight, you were
going to give the public beta
that they could play with?
Or was that more along
the lines of, again,
maybe going back into press,
or just the hype part of it?
>> No.
Once Silverlight crossed
over its video hype.
So, we've got a lot of unexpected hype
at the V one stages.
So, you got a lot of
positive gains out of that.
We had to think of prime score
and our positive/negative
PR scores were all pretty
much through the roof.
So we got nothing but
positive feedback from press.
The only time we got
negative feedback from press
for Silverlight was around ubiquity.
Flash is 98%.
What are you guys?
And we'd never give them
a percentage number.
We'd always give them download numbers,
because the percentage
numbers for Adobe are always
flawed, so we didn't wanna play that game.
So, we wanted to change the channel.
So, the same time we ever
gone into the negative waters
with press was around how
many people have Silverlight?
But we knew that, honestly,
it took us a while to catch on,
but towards the end of
Silverlight's life we knew
that it wasn't what we used to call BDMs,
businesses decision makers.
It wasn't CIOs, it wasn't
some manager doing something
or someone with business
mindset,mor business acumen
making decisions around Silverlight.
It was pretty much guys
like you in a cubicle.
You would take the tech,
you'd go back home,
you'd unpack it,
and you'd naturally
evangelize the product for us.
So, we started saying,
We've now gotta arm you with a backpack.
We call it a lot of materials,
but we've gotta give
you a backpack of stuff
that you can talk about.
It's all well and good for
you to sit at the conference
and get the the hive mind,
going and be influenced,
and we'll put on a great party
and really get you excited
and you had a great time in Vegas.
Great.
But get back on the plane the next day,
you arrive back at your cubicle,
they're not interested in
how much drinking you did
in Vegas, they're interested
in how much you've learned
and garnished from the next version
of Silverlight, and how
it can propel you forward.
So, we spent a lot of our
time putting a lot of demos
together and we spent a monster
of amount of money trying
to get those demos.
Every one of those presentations
you saw on stage costs
Microsoft to some point some money.
>> Oh, yes.
>> Because it wasn't just by saying,
hey, come and actually do something
interesting in Silverlight.
They're like, yeah, but it's
not gonna be out until such
and such, and we're like,
okay, how much would it
cost for us to accelerate
that, so we can get it
to our presentation?
Because that's a good demo.
That's a good demonstration
of what's capable out there.
And it worked.
And I think it really excited
a lot of teams and a lot
of people like yourself who
would see the presentation,
they'd see the beta, and they'd go, wow.
This isn't lies.
This is here.
Some things we'd leave out.
I remember the Silverlight on mobile,
I think it was just a GIF
animation on a mobile phone.
It actually wasn't Silverlight.
(laughing)
But there were certain things that were.
>> Smoke and mirrors.
>> It's not saying we couldn't do it,
it's just saying the demo
wasn't ready at the time.
So, we really, really,
really, really did push.
And a lot of the people on the team were
ex-developers, so they
themselves would say,
I can't sit there with
a straight face and say
to someone, adopt my tech
with smoke and mirrors all
the time, 'cause I have to back it up,
and if I can't back it up,
then why am I talking about it?
So, you kind of have to
demonstrate to yourselves first
that you could do it,
therefore you demonstrate to your peers.
>> Yeah, and again, this
is real interesting to me,
hearing your side and then
as we're kind of talking
through this, what we were thinking
at Children's Hospital, what
really made this real to us
and again, this is going
back into Silverlight 3,
was when you started giving away controls,
when there was the DataGrid TreeView,
and when there was a set
of controls that came
out with Silverlight 3,
and they were free and then
we were like, okay.
Well, if Microsoft's
investing in these controls,
like DataGrid,
then now we know for our
line of business applications
needed to run in the
browser and all these random
operating systems, we
can now invest in that.
>> Well, the DataGrid was
interesting because DataGrid
tree control with two controls,
I deliberately sabotaged funding for.
(laughing)
>> Oh, yeah.
>> And the reason was I
wanted to see what the world,
'cause you've got this brilliant
new canvas and the first
thing you do is you try
and build Excel again,
and it frustrated me in the
industry, still frustrates me
to this day.
I look at data.
Anytime you use a data control
or tree control you might
as well say to the audience,
I have no idea what it what you need.
Good luck.
Right?
You're not really tailoring
any user experience
at this point.
You're simply saying,
I gave you a half-arsed
version of Excel online.
I hope it works.
See you later.
And you lose control of your
features, and so on, anyway.
So, I personally wanted
to withhold the DataGrid
and tree control to see
what teams would come up
with as a solution to solve that.
Now, some would turn around and look
at Telerik, and Infragistics,
and all those other guys
and say, where's yours?
Then, they'll say, we're working on it.
We're working on it.
So, they'll eventually
come up with their own,
but they always do the deep down,
unless it's made by
Microsoft, maybe it'll work,
maybe it won't.
I was gonna say,
and then what happened was people created
these experiences, but they
looked at data differently.
They got deeper into the
data set and they got deeper
into the user experience,
and they tried things differently,
And that's exactly what I was
personally hoping for anyway.
>> Yeah.
And so, from our our
healthcare, so obviously,
we're regulated by a
bunch of different types
of organizations, government,
but we could not use a Telerik DataGrid,
we could not use Infragistics
or any of those other types
of company simply because
those were third parties.
Now, if it came out of
Microsoft, we could roll
that out everywhere, and we
would not get in trouble,
at least any of the the people
that was watching over us
at that time.
>> Absolutely, yeah.
As I say,
I was aware of that and I knew that,
there's one thing I learnt
really late or early,
I can't remember when,
but I really started to notice one thing.
Unless something shows up in
the File, New Project menu
in Visual Studio, .NET
doesn't want to adopt it.
It just wouldn't.
And I even laugh now,
Xamarin's pretty much had a
shitty adoption experience,
but then it became File,
New Projects inside
Visual Studio, it's now being used.
Nothing changed.
It just got added to the menu. (laughing)
Microsoft devs do put a
lot of faith and trust
in what goes in their products,
and they do assume that
a lot of security will
go with that.
>> They do,
and even a project that
I had started working
on with Clint Rutkas back in the days
of Windows templates.
>> Ah, New Zealand.
I know Clint, yes, New Zealand.
>> Windows Template Studio?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, go ahead.
>> Sorry.
Oh, sorry.
I keep talking over you.
I was gonna say,
with Clint, I have a
funny story about Clint.
He was in Vegas with
us and he woke up naked
in the hallway.
Anyway that's a different conversation.
(laughing)
>> Are you sure that was Clint Rutkas?
R-U-T-K-A-S.
>> Yes, the New Zealand guy?
>> Oh, actually no.
He's here.
He's in Redmond.
Let's see.
>> He's originally from New
Zealand though, isn't he?
>> No, I think he was from Chicago.
Let's see.
>> Different Clint.
Sorry, different Clint then.
Never mind.
(laughing)
As you were.
As you were.
Never mind!
>> This Clint right over here,
and then I will switch back over.
Just so you know.
Let's go here.
So, sorry about this, and then watch.
That's the Clint.
So, hopefully that was not the one
that was running around--
>> No, no, no, no, no, no.
>> All right, very, very, very good.
>> Sorry.
We deviated off course there.
(laughing)
>> Yeah.
So, let's see.
We were talking, what
were we talking about?
(laughing)
I think I've already forgotten.
>> Video.
>> Video?
>> The controls, and
security around controls.
>> Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess, with us,
it was if it came from
Microsoft and from our end,
me and Clint, we started putting together
like a Windows template studio,
which was a wizard that lets
you scaffold UWP applications
and 100% towards your
comment about if it's inside
of Visual Studio, and they
don't have to kind of go
outside of that, and you
just pop up wizards, people,
or at least a lot of the
developers that's in this space,
they're 100% going to use
that if it's built in.
And there's no real reason
that they shouldn't,
but if you have to, at least
from a health perspective,
if I had to go and download
Windows Template Studio or
any of these other types
of projects, then we couldn't use it.
We couldn't use it at all.
And even with the open source projects,
even like MIT, if it was
anything that was open source,
it could not be in our
published application.
>> And that's more evident today.
We've all learnt from
that famous Leafpad thing.
We know at that time where
one person yanked the chain
and all of a sudden just
dominoes effect occurred
because someone forgot
to check MIT license
on that check in.
So these days,
if you take a dependency
on another third party
and they didn't have MIT,
you're basically a loaded weapon
with your tech.
And even then, you'd still verify
that that person who stems MIT is actually
author of that MIT, as well.
Sometimes you get a lot of people,
especially Unity 3D space,
they'll make their game unit open source,
but they bought some
modules within their game
that it wasn't open source,
and it just becomes this nightmare
of cascading legal nightmares.
And with Microsoft, you
always get the assurity
that what's in there is in there.
That's it's.
It's out of box and it gets supported.
So, when Microsoft makes tech,
has 20 year minimum lifecycle,
just due to government contracts and stuff
with the U.S.
That's why Windows has taken more than 20
years to kill because they
cannot technically kill
it for 20 years.
>> Yeah, didn't Silverlight 5
just end of life or something?
No, it must have been like.
>> It's still legally right now,
you probably get another 10 years on it.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There was something.
>> It's coming to its halfway mark.
>> Oh, it may have been that
all of the browsers are now,
I don't think you can
actually download it and add
it to any current browser with the install
of the Silverlight on the desktop.
I think that was it.
>> Yeah, it was funny
because Silverlight 4ish,
maybe Silverlight 4 or 5,
I forget which one it was, finally solved
the ubiquity problem.
For years we were plagued
with how many people
are using Silverlight?
So, one of our directors
had a press meeting with one
of the journalists and he goes,
How many people have Silverlight?
He said, 400 million, and he goes,
Yeah, but that's not much,
and it was just astounding.
400 million people have
downloaded this product.
There's 400 million unique
downloads of this product.
It's probably more than
that if we wanna talk
about the amount of
repeat offenders do it,
but we can absolutely say
with great accuracy 400 million.
And the journalist was like,
It's not really a lot.
So then, he was telling us a story,
so then I just used a
comparison and I said,
well, how many people are on
Twitter and how many people
are on Facebook right now?
And at that time,
more people were downloading
Silverlight than Facebook,
Twitter, and Myspace combined,
and so we were siting back going,
that's a good narrative right there.
So, we started publishing
that as our PR and so forth.
So, it was always this
psychology problem around
solicitations, almost like
this problem of convincing
devs that lots of people had it,
so they would go and make it.
But it didn't solve the
problems 'cause a lot of times
you make a Silverlight
solution and you lose numbers
because you've front loaded
30 meg of shit before you get
to the actual heart and
soul of your application.
They're like, ugh, Silverlight's
ubiquity's the problem.
It's like, no, you just made
a really shitty creation,
to be honest.
So, there was always
this psychology around
what the installation experience
was and what the phase
of that installation experience meant.
Flash at the time had they
were saying 98% ubiquity,
and then they say,
Well, eight million people
per day download the plugin,
and I went, hang on.
There's 1.24 billion people online.
And I start doing the math.
That doesn't add up to 98%.
Someone's lying at this point,
and then they change the numbers around.
And what we learned quickly
was that people didn't
care about tech.
They would normally install
a virus if it got them across
the finish line on whatever
they wanted to achieve.
We actually did a survey with IT pros.
If you could access it then,
would you knowingly install a virus?
And IT pros go, yeah.
And they're the most expert in the room.
So human condition says
that we would install stuff
if the value was high enough.
So, that was never really a concern.
The concern was always
around browsers and their way
of shaping the narrative.
And around that time
Silverlight was getting pumped
out through Windows Update.
So, we finally solved, the consent decree,
it was over, I guess.
Microsoft sat in its
purgatory for a little
while about monopoly and things like that,
and so now you can start slipping stuff
into the Windows Update pipeline.
And so, overnight you've
potentially hit 98%
of the world's,
you can probably potentially
hit more people using
Silverlight than Flash
in terms of installation.
Because the other thing we
have to remember is Flash got
its ubiquity because it was pushed
out through Windows Update.
So, that was an interesting
moment there for Windows.
So, ubiquity was this battle,
we finally got ubiquity going,
it still wasn't good enough, what changed,
and it started seeing this
emergence of browsers wanting
back control, because they feel like,
and this is where Steve
Jobs did these posts around,
Flash sucks, basically, and
ActiveX basically sucks.
Sure, it sucks,
because at that time Flash
had the most indie game
development going on
in the world, and most
of these puzzle games
and things like you find
on the iPhone right now were all done
in Flash, so it makes sense that,
if you were to make a game in
Flash, Apple has no control
over their phone development story.
So, it's easy to sabotage the
ActiveX than it is to deal
with what it comes out of that.
So, once people started to populate
Google started coming
out with Google Chrome, there
was always a big threat.
If you ever wanted to kill
Google tomorrow as a company
the easiest way to kill it is starve
it from HTML and JavaScript.
That's it.
Just shut down HTML and JavaScript,
the company collapses.
That's it, because everything
around them revolves around
those two tech.
That's it.
It's its lifeline.
So, Flash is doing SWF
files, we're don't ZAP files.
Who do you think Google's gonna back?
It's not going to be
either Flash or Microsoft in this case.
They're going to try and push
back on the browser thing.
So, they've cannibalized half the IE team,
half the IE team's is now at
Google making Chrome, and all
of a sudden ActiveX became less
important to the world.
Fast forward to today,
we're three steps behind parity
on Silverlight and Flash on its worst day,
and that's the part that
honestly does my head in.
It just does my head in.
I don't know what success
criteria looks like any more.
>> Yeah, so going back
to what you were saying
about the install of
30, 40 megs or whatever,
and people willing to do
that, I've also noticed,
for example, my wife,
if she is installing an application,
no matter what that
application is on her phone,
it is allow, allow,
allow, allow, allow all.
And I don't know if it's
just me or whatever,
but whenever I install something,
I'm very much on the
cautious side of allowing all
contacts, and especially
with things that access
Twitter, but I believe I'm
also on that very small
percentage versus the rest
of the world, especially,
I guess, maybe people that
maybe they're not into tech
or they're maybe not maybe
not into development,
where they're always
gonna click yes, yes, yes,
and just get through
it just in order to get
the app installed.
I think that's--
>> It's a trust economy.
I trust Twitter.
Why would they screw me over?
And you go, it's not Twitter
that's gonna screw you over.
It's gonna be the kid that hacks Twitter.
That's the point.
Microsoft just recently
last week admitted out loud
that for a little bit of a moment,
we did expose username and passwords,
but we feel like we contained it.
They still have to put the
announcement out there.
It's not like they were breached,
but every company makes
a mistake at some point.
It's not a question of
if, it's question of when.
Every company, no matter
how sophisticated they are
and how great they are at this job,
they will eventually trip
up and let something slip.
And we put a lot of faith
and trust in these companies
to hold their data.
They don't always do it.
Installation-wise with
Silverlight, we are always
cautious of that trust,
things like we will access
the GPU through a plugin, for example.
We could technically
blue screen your computer
if we screw it up.
The moment that happens,
it's game over for
Silverlight, straightaway.
That's it, end of life.
You're playing with fire
every time you did that.
So, probably Silverlight
7 today we'll keep going.
We'll probably will eventually
blue screen your computer
because we would have
accidentally didn't carry
the one when we should
have carried the two.
>> So, one question that I
had, that I believe others,
especially from my time,
would like to hear it
straight from the source,
and that was just the name Silverlight.
So, when we started hearing
that name, at least me,
I'm in the deep south,
we were super pumped about the name.
And so from your perspective,
did you build the product
first, or did you give it the name?
And how did you come up, or the teams,
everybody involved, come up
with the name Silverlight?
>> Well, the name was
put together by, I think,
from memory, a company called Zazz.
I think Zazz was the agency
that we went to for branding.
And they came up the logo and the name.
They had a bunch of pictures, Zazz.
>> They came up with both?
>> And the name was.
Yeah, yeah.
>> Cool.
>> We're not that smart internally.
Yeah you test it and say,
One in five housewives like
this name Silverlight 'cause
it doesn't offend them, or whatever.
They have is sort of market
Mad Men sort of analysis
on naming and branding, and so forth.
But when I first heard it,
I giggled because I said,
Isn't that just another
way of saying a flash?
And the room goes quiet
and then we move on.
(laughing)
I feel like I pulled on
a thread there (laughing)
I shouldn't have pulled on.
And the logo, I remember,
the logo was an animation.
>> Yes.
>> And it was a frame for
one of the animations.
It became the logo.
So, that swirl thing,
I think one of the Adobe
vendors called it the smoke
from a crack pipe 'cause
he was obviously against
Silverlight at the time.
And it's always stuck with me
because now I can't unsee that,
he had this whole animation.
But essentially the crack pipe smoke ball,
as we jokingly called it later on,
became the brain of it.
And it was supposed to
be youthful and focused
and targeted, and I
think it did a good job.
I think it was unique.
It was a fun logo to work with.
It was very, very, I guess, prominent.
I don't know.
I thought it was really well
done brand to be honest.
I thought it was the one time I saw
Microsoft approach branding differently,
and I thought the people behind it,
the guys that were running
this, with the agency,
I think they honestly
nailed it, to be honest.
Then, I found that we use the
.NET logo after that became
an extension to this,
and it sort of steamrolled from there.
>> Yeah, and so this is the
Silverlight logo that I've got
on the screen here,
and we use this in so many
different ways, even when we were like
communicating out amongst our tech teams.
Like, hey, here's what we're using.
And people would see like
this logo and their minds were
blown, and then they were
all into just this name.
Do you remember the guy
named David Silverlight?
Do you remember that person?
>> Yes.
MVP David.
>> And he was an MVP.
For some reason,
I was always like that
is such a cool last name,
and then he's an MVP.
>> What are the odds he lands that?
I actually reached out and said,
You've got to specialize in Silverlight.
This is this is in your wheelhouse.
I don't care what you're doing right now.
You need to stop a double down on this.
Yes, I thought it was a
very freaky coincidence.
>> Yeah, and for me, for example, again,
I wasn't really doing conferences.
I was just a person in a
cubicle, and when I saw
Silverlight, when I knew
I could start reusing
that skill set, which was C# and XAML,
and be able to write
these applications that worked everywhere,
I immediately said to myself, okay.
So I'm gonna really get
in this, and I'm gonna
really start learning this.
And I invested in it a lot,
and the evangelism part of it,
it seemed to be extremely natural.
You and the teams did a very
good job at making advocates
out of everyday people.
And also, you and others
were very much helpful
on Twitter at a time when
maybe developers weren't
necessarily all migrating to Twitter.
I might even remember
when I created an account,
the other developers on my
team actually laughed and made
fun of me.
They were like, "Why did you
create a Twitter account?"
That's not for us.
That's for young people, or whatever.
>> I created the Silverlight
Twitter account, and I created
the WPF Twitter account when
a time everyone was like,
why would you do that?
So now, look fast forward to today,
I think we were one of the
first product teams to create
a Twitter accounts, too.
So, ask the team anything.
So, we created Team WPF
and Team Silverlight.
I think it was the Silverlight Team.
>> I totally gotta bring it up right now.
Ooh, somebody already got the Silverlight.
>> I think it was Team Silverlight.
>> Team?
All right.
>> Team Silverlight, yes.
>> You created it?
Yeah?
>> 'Cause I wanted a way to
amp a lot of the products.
We had one iteration of
Silverlight where we didn't
even have a website up at
that point, and I said,
We gotta market this.
We've gotta figure this way.
So, I created some Twitter
accounts and I created
a note from the UserVoice.com
back in those days
when you used to vote for things.
'Cause I went back to my
grassroots of social evangelism
and said, look we've gotta
go back to evangelizing
this ourselves, because at one stage,
the subsidiaries of Microsoft
weren't getting metrics.
So, one thing I learnt
being a product manager
that I didn't realize
being an evangelist inside
the company is, as an
evangelist, you get hired,
like I was hired by Microsoft Australia.
You pick out your metrics from the inside.
These are the top 10 things
I'm gonna do this year
to make the company better.
And you've got a buffet.
Every product team wants you
to evangelize their product,
no matter who you are.
It's always a high priority.
So, you as an evangelist,
and your manager,
have a lot of power and you
figure out which is gonna
be easy, and which one's gonna be hard.
And what we found was we
couldn't make evangelism teams
do the evangelizing of
Silverlight, so we had to come up
with a way to evangelize ourselves
and make ourselves scale.
So that's when we made a
decision to join the team,
start ignoring evangelist
inside the company,
which is those days, DPE
was lifeline to everything,
and we made a decision
to just ignore them.
Let's do it ourselves.
And so, we went after MVPs
and loads of other people,
and demoed kits and stuff like that,
and how do you get the guy
in the cubicle to evangelize?
So, we started looking at
ways to give them the weapon
and armory they need to do
the job they need to do.
So, it was a grassroots campaign.
That came from a guy called David Pugmire.
David Pugmire had a product team, as well,
and he was very,
very much pro-how do I help
the little guy in the cubicle
all the time?
He was annoyingly good at it,
so he pushed quite aggressively.
And these are really passive guys.
So when he pushes
aggressively, it's funny,
but he was pushed quite
aggressively to get
that evangelism at the
grassroots going even when all
of management at that time
said it's not really a thing.
But look at the success he got from it
I guess is where I'd say he
was right, they were wrong.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And even with that,
also there was specific
user groups before there was
just like a .NET user group,
and in that .NET user group
that's kind of where everybody
got together and chatted,
but with Silverlight it
was always thought of,
okay, this is kind of like
its own thing so we're gonna
create another brand new group
for Silverlight, and in this
we're only going to just be
focused on Silverlight.
And it's funny enough,
I believe I was part of
one of those user groups.
It's funny now, I'm thinking,
I think it was called All About XAML.
I think there may have
been a Twitter account.
But what I'm saying is that
the team did such a good job
at the evangelism piece
that for us that were
the so-called like little guys,
we had all of the ammo that
we needed to create and form
our own groups,
and then Microsoft was
working really closely
with Aneta, and there was even things,
such as funding that would
maybe give us 100 bucks
or something for pizza.
And like those little tiny things,
you look at like a major company like
Microsoft, Google, whatever,
and you're thinking, okay.
Well 100 bucks
for these people to all get together
and talk about just our products, to me,
that's a pretty amazing feat.
>> I remember Silverlight 3 timeline,
we had a bit of a riot
in Australia on this kind of topic.
Microsoft Australia turned
around and pulled funding
on pizzas for all the
user groups in Australia.
One stage they had their facilities,
but for some reason they
turned around and said,
No more funding for pizzas.
And I'm sitting back going,
this is the stupidest
decision that was ever made
in the history of the company
because you will spend 10
times that trying to reach
an audience of that quality
through marketing and so forth.
And all it costs us 20 to 100
bucks once a month for pizza.
I would buy them boxes
of cocaine at this point
if it got me across the finish line.
It kind of got the point
where they were dropping
the ball and, like I said,
we were getting frustrated.
When I went back to Australia on holidays,
I went back to Australia
for one month just to sort
of catch up with my family, and so forth,
and I said to them, look,
hey, I'm in Australia.
What are you guys doing for
the Silverlight 3 launch?
And there was just crickets.
And so, I single handedly went around
Australia on a plane, out
of my own credit card,
with the company's credit card, obviously,
but I funded my own launch on evangelism.
It was just completely
different to when I was
at the company,
when I was in the
subsidiary side of things.
And I went back to Redmond and said, look.
If this is happening in places
like Australia, we could
do this ourselves 'cause
they're not gonna help us.
We have to figure out another
way to reach these people.
How do we reach guys like
you at the cubicle level?
And so we had funding.
We always had funding.
And I'd reach out to these
user group members and say,
Send me the invoice for your pizza.
We'll pay it.
No problem.
If you talk about our
product, we'll pay it.
That's what it costs.
It's a 10th,
it's like pennies on the
dollar compared to what I have
to pay to get to you via
a conference or something.
>> It was, and when the Aneta
program eventually closed up,
at that point we still
were able to keep it going,
but I believe I may have been using like
Eventbrite or one of those,
or MeetUp.com where I actually
needed a paid account,
and I think it was
because I needed the email
distribution list to be able to export,
to do some other stuff with it.
Well, I was paying for that,
and when more of the funding
went away, obviously,
we weren't able to do things like pizza.
And I remember,
at the user group I would
start to invite people to maybe
a place for us, a restaurant or something.
And when people were like, oh, okay.
Well, you're not paying,
believe it or not people
are pretty weird about this.
They're like, oh, you're not paying.
Eventually, I was hearing
more people being like, okay,
well, how come you're not
funding this meal or whatever?
And then be like,
Well, Aneta, which in term
of Microsoft, canceled
the the funding of this program.
So now, it's just me.
People at that point, they
were kind of starting to feel,
maybe is this information
of what's to come
with the Silverlight product or what?
>> That's what we used to
call breaking into jail.
So, you've broken into jail
the moment you came late.
If something benign is
canceling pizza funding,
breaks into jail with not
just Silverlight, but any
product you're talking
about 'cause now people are
starting to wonder, are they
dialing back on investment?
And it could have been a
flipping email where someone did
some math one day and said,
oh, we spent eight million
dollars on pizzas worldwide.
Let's just cut that down to three million,
and not even thinking
about the consequences
of that decision.
But at that user grade level,
the grassroots, the coalface level,
that's an important thing.
Because what we've learnt
in history with computers,
even right dating back to
when Bill Gates was mucking
around with Paul Allen, that user group,
that sort of environment,
that incubator where they're
the outliers in tinkering
things, they go on advanced,
they got deep into a
technology that no one cares
about this point in time or understands,
they come together, they
figure some stuff out,
and they foster relationships.
And they build a network out of it.
I can think back right
now on my entire career,
the amount of solid
relationships I've developed,
going right back to the user group level,
back from 1997
to 2006 mainly.
Those people right now
are C-level executives
at large companies.
There's one person right
now that I remember was
this pimply, sort of squeaky,
"Ah, what do you doing?"
Type guy at a user group who's now
a C-level for a Fortune 500 company.
And I still have contacts with him now.
So, you have a lot of influence late,
as well as early in these discussions.
For Microsoft, any other
company to cut pizza funding is
by far the stupidest
decision I've ever seen
a large company do.
To this day, it still doesn't happen,
and I kind of look back and go,
you're gonna spend probably
10 times that to try
and reach that audience,
and it costs you 100 bucks.
It makes no sense to me.
>> Yeah.
And that's really kind of a point to hear,
is that even I see
people using Google Ads,
paying crazy amounts of
money to get impressions
on Twitter, and just ad searching
from other just press,
when at the end of the
day, if the company creates
a product that people feel is good,
and that company gives some love
to the people that are
evangelizing it, that goes a long way.
That that dollar bill stretches
very far compared to--
>> It's like saying it's
the most authentic fan base
you can have.
You're basically keeping
that fire alive in them.
You're saying, this month,
come learn how to use
Silverlight with X, or this month
come use how to make .NET
through X. Whatever that is.
It's these advanced topics,
and it keeps people's energy levels up,
it keeps people's focus up,
it's a great way to advocate
a new change, it's a
great way to get feedback.
If I'm a program manager
and I come to a subsidiary
in Chicago, for example,
it's great way for me to get hands-on,
get rid of all MVPs out
of the room, no offense,
but you guys are a little
too much on the fanboy
side of things.
Let's get back to the people
who haven't made decisions
and I wanna hear the
person who's angry with me,
as well as person loves me.
This used to be, I forget what it was,
it was a saying that I once got, was,
never listen to your fans,
they never want you to change.
Never listen to your critics,
they always want change.
Listen to the undecided
because they haven't figured
out what change is.
And that's always held true to me.
As much as I like the MVP summits,
these are generally people
that are pretty much
on the positive side of the spectrum,
not so much on the middle to the negative.
I used to go to, as a
Microsoft evangelist,
I'd go into the PHP user groups
and the Java user groups,
and so forth,
and I'd try and get my
head around what they see
the world through, what
we see the world through,
and get some sort of sense
of connection out of that.
You gotta listen to these people.
You can't just be in
your own insulated bubble
all the time.
They give you a really healthy perspective
on just how badly you're doing,
as well as how good you doing.
And to keep that energy alive.
And so I went to a lot of user groups
for Silverlight and WPF,
and I'd be in the back row.
This is after Microsoft,
and I'm in the back row,
and most people in the room know my role.
And they would always be
these tongue in cheek moments
of Silverlight WPF 'cause
once I figured out it was
dying, it was constant,
look at the guy the back of the room.
Even then in that capacity,
I still managed to keep the energy alive.
It was interesting.
>> Oh yeah, absolutely.
So, I wanna at least show this screen,
so let me hit this button.
So, this was the actual
user group that I created,
and look, it's actually following me.
So, this was the Twitter account
for the Birmingham, Alabama
user group all about XAML.
What's kind of funny or
interesting about this is
that it was all about
Silverlight, but the second
that we started to hear more about that,
which I think will be our next topic,
I quickly changed it
over to all about XAML.
What's also kind of fun here
is that you can see I was
auto-tweeting for a while
on this account, (laughing)
and I don't recall even doing this,
but apparently sometime
around July the 30th,
it cut off the feed.
So, I just think it's
kind of hilarious that now
that feed that was auto-tweeting
is now actually turned
off and it had nothing to do with me.
But we did have this site,
and I don't want to bring
it up and unless I can see
where it goes to, but it's this URL.
Let me switch over here in case
some weird person bought it,
and let me just double check
it really quick and see
what it goes to.
Oh, it actually goes to nothing.
(laughing)
>> It reminds me of a company
that specializes in keeping
your your domain alive after you die,
and you pay them money,
and then you fast forward
three years later, they went bankrupt.
(laughing)
>> Awesome, awesome, awesome.
So I wanted to bring up,
I guess, some of the so-called
elephant in the room.
You totally don't care if
I show one of your tweets
from back in the day, do you?
(laughing)
>> I've always been one
of those guys, like,
I say something stupid,
I'll admit it out loud.
I say something stupid,
and I'll never delete it.
>> No. (laughing)
No, it's totally not that.
Let me switch to the screen.
I think this would be interesting or fun.
So, what happened here,
and let me just give you a little bit,
let me just add a little bit.
>> This is under the stupid category.
>> No, no.
So, this was 2010, and so
the reason I have this one,
I think I had this one bookmarked,
and I was looking through
a lot of my old bookmarks
from back in that day,
you tweeted this out, and from our end,
where I was working, when we saw this,
and I don't believe these
numbers are correct,
by the way,
I think something has happened
with Twitter, and this isn't
correct because when we.
It's correct?
>> No, it's definitely not correct.
>> Oh yeah, yeah, I was gonna say,
there's no way it's correct
'cause there was so much.
When we saw this tweet, it
'caused a gigantic firestorm
(laughing) within our organization.
So, we saw it,
there was only a few of us that was really
on Twitter and heavily using
Twitter, and so we saw it,
we talked about it amongst
ourselves, and obviously,
eventually it got moved
up to some of our leads,
and they saw this, and
then they started saying,
okay, well, we need to
talk to Microsoft and see
what what does this actually mean?
Because they were planning on
investing in obviously more,
and more, and more into Silverlight.
>> It was a polarizing tweet.
It was a very, very polarizing tweet.
All right, so the backstory behind this.
So, it's a year or two later
after I've left Microsoft.
I've come back to Seattle for holidays
and my wife and I were doing this massive
U.S. holiday with the kids,
Disneyland, all that stuff.
We thought, we'll start in
Seattle and say hello to some
friends we had back then.
So, we stopped in Seattle
for about three or four days
to say hello to some friends.
I knew a lot of people inside the campus
so I said, I'll catch up with you guys,
if you guys wanna have a
talk and just catch up.
And I caught up with your friends,
and then halfway through
one of my catch-ups,
we're just in the cafeteria,
one of the guys goes,
"Oh, you're back?"
I'm like, "Nah, I'm not back.
"I'm just here on holidays."
He says, "No, you're back."
I'm said, "No, I'm on holiday."
"Come to this me.
"I wanna show you something."
So, go into one of the
meeting rooms, lights down,
PowerPoint presentation opens up,
and it starts literally the entire,
I guess, Windows launch.
And halfway through
this meeting, I'm like,
I'm gonna stop you right now.
You're showing me a lot of shit.
You do not have an NDA with me,
you do not have a formal agreement.
If I see this, I can talk about this.
And his response to me
at the time was, mmm hmm.
Funny that.
He goes back to the presentation.
This person was an executive at Microsoft.
It was not a low-ranking member.
So, my head fills with this
information that I didn't
want, didn't ask for, didn't
want to know more about,
and I'm looking to the other
guys in the room, like,
why are you guys briefing me on this?
What do you want from me?
Okay, it's cool, fantastic.
I'm pissed off with a lot of those.
Information that you could use.
So, I went, "Okay, well
so Silverlight's dead?"
He said, "If gets his way, sure."
So, I then went, left that
meeting, then went out,
had lunch, I think the next
day I had lunch with another,
it was a program manager
on one of the teams.
And I started asking him
some questions, said,
Look, is this true?
'Cause I wanted to verify.
I've got a lot of information
now and now I wanna
validate it, and he gave me
this kind of wild-eyed look,
like, how did you know?
And then he said, well he must know stuff,
so it's okay to talk about it.
So then he starts talking
about how pissed off he is.
And then I met with
another program manager,
and they're all pissed off
with how some of the stuff
he's worked on are now getting collapsed,
and it just got to the point
where I felt like the dev
organization at that point
in time somehow lost a fight.
Remember I talked about
how the energy levels
and the vibe, you couldn't
contain these guys?
It was depressing.
And so, I left Microsoft campus
and then I called up some
friends at Google, and Google
was completely different,
like it was a really night and day moment.
So, Microsoft was like just
jaded toxicity and people
angry at this point, they weren't happy.
And I'd go to Google and then
these people were just smiling
as they're riding bikes down nice
sunny Mountain View, California.
It was like night and day,
literally night and day.
And some of these guys were
working on the HTML5 sort
of things, one was working
on Google Glass at the time.
And I could see the energy
levels are now shifted
over here, but they went over there.
So it was frustrating.
So, then we're flying back
to Australia, and I'm in the LAX airport,
I'm two beers in, and I'm just seething.
At this point, it's still
percolating in my mind.
I'm sitting there going,
I don't know owe this company anything.
My allegiances died the day
that I went to the workforce
and you know what?
These decisions they're about
to make are actually gonna
affect my livelihood.
This is actually gonna
financially impact me,
'cause like everybody else,
I've got skin in the game now,
I'm a consumer of Silverlight,
I'm a consumer of WPF.
I've built a business around this.
I've got a niche business that,
my role at that time in
Australia was every time a large
company over-commit and owns,
Silverlight or WPF, they
would call me and I'd come
and fix it.
That was literally my niche business.
This is now gonna affect me.
So, I put that tweet out,
I pumped the tweet out.
I was pissed off and I sent.
Now unfolds, anyway,
so I jump on the plane,
land back in Brisbane 20 hours later,
'cause to fly anywhere
from Australia is 20 hours.
>> I would guess, I've been there.
>> Flick my phone on and
alarms go off, tweets,
like I know those numbers are wrong 'cause
there's so many retweets,
there was so many direct messages,
there was missed phone calls,
there was text messages,
there was emails, it was like,
I've never ever experienced
that in my entire life
before, but it just blew up
and I had journalists asking
me for quotes, I had
people, I had PR people,
I had threats from Microsoft's
legal teams, saying,
you breached the NDA, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, no, I didn't.
So I had like this kind of nonsense.
So, it was big, and I realized
that those little 140 characters
or less, kicked off something.
Now, was I wrong?
No.
I still look back on that
tweet today and it nailed it.
Honestly, just nailed it.
Look where we are today.
It just nailed it.
The Windows took a destructive path.
I think they had a success
with Windows 7, I think
bought into their own PR,
and they got
to this point of assuming that
they were right all the time.
And what kind of it did was they made
so much potential.
When UWP was the solution that they had,
it destroyed that too.
>> Yeah.
And so here, I brought in, (laughing)
this was one of those.
I'm sure you read this probably at exactly
when it came out.
This is one of them from NeoWin.
Do you remember this post?
>> Yep.
(laughing)
That was that, that was the weirdest mix.
That was like, post
this, and I had this mix.
And year on year, Guthrie's always been
on stage talking about Silverlight.
He was the biggest
advocate of Silverlight.
And this year, not a word.
>> Well, and so, there was a video post.
So going back to RDMs,
back when this was actually happening,
I mentioned to you, I was like,
hey, that was a great video.
I don't know where that video was hosted.
I didn't know if it was on,
I couldn't find it on
your YouTube channel,
and back in the day,
I just don't remember,
but what were you saying?
>> I paid a lot to remove it. (laughing)
>> Oh, okay.
Well, I was gonna say that video,
I was gonna watch it again,
but I remember this right here,
or maybe not Neowin, maybe
it was an there was another,
because it got picked up by
a lot of different press.
That was also when we
really started re-evaluating
Silverlight is when we started seeing,
when we started seeing this sort of post.
>> Yeah, I know what the video was.
I was watching
the Windows 8 Build
Conference, I think it was,
I know I was watching a conference.
And they had a picture on the
screen of the entire stack,
and right in the bottom
corner was Silverlight,
this little box was Silverlight.
And I remember thinking, well, that's it.
This is it.
This is the moment.
We've been building up to this point.
This is the moment.
I remember getting
pissed off again saying,
well, you just destroyed everything.
You destroyed so much work for no gain.
There's no gain here.
I don't understand why you're doing this.
You will not get the
adaption you think you get.
It goes without saying,
the briefing I got was
the story of the day was,
We're gonna move.
There's two types of developers now.
There's going to be the desktop developers
who just write desktop stuff in C++.
C# are first class citizens.
And if you want to write these web apps,
then use HTML JavaScript,
but C# is not a first class citizen.
That was literally the strategy,
and then they had one where they said,
and we'll make some extensions for IE
so it gives people deeper reach.
And I laughed and said,
all you just did then was moved
the boundary to the browser.
You didn't solve the problem.
So, what you're saying
is you're gonna make
Silverlight the browser.
I don't understand.
What's the game plan here?
And that was the kind
of Windows 8 mentality
at the time that I was briefed in on.
Now, whether that was true or not,
I don't know particularly,
but that was a brief I was given,
that was given to me
by some serious people.
So, I looked at that and said,
Well, that's not gonna fly.
Like everybody, I have work on it.
I've got bills to pay as well,
and this is gonna affect my livelihood.
Because I couldn't just sit and,
oh, well Microsoft, I
hope you got it right.
I'll have complete faith in you.
Let's go again.
It was pissing me off
because now you're actually
affecting my livelihood.
You're actually affecting
my career in a negative way,
and plus, I've just told
millions of people, "Trust me."
And you've just come along
and said, "Don't trust me."
So I had to make a stand here,
I have to say, no, you're full of shit.
You can't do this.
Try again.
This is not gonna work.
Don't double down on a bad strategy.
This is a bad strategy, and
that's why I kept pushing.
>> And people trusted you,
or at least I can only
confirm myself, and at least
the tech team that I was on.
We trusted you because you
appeared in a very authentic way
at conferences, with online,
and it was almost as if you were maybe one
of our co-workers, so we had
just, throwing out a number,
we had like 10 cubicles, it
was almost as if, oh, okay.
Well, Scott is also in one of these 10,
which made it so much better
for us to trust you during that point,
because it was you're one
of the the people, I guess,
the terminology or the analogy of like,
boots on the ground type of people.
And at that time, and I'm not saying
that's this way today, but at that time,
Microsoft clearly lacked people like that,
that were authentic, down to earth,
and was truly trying to help
their fellow developers out.
And that's something I do
believe that they're doing
a lot better job of today,
or at least in my opinion,
at least throwing out for myself.
I try my best to be somebody
that the community can trust
and that somebody that,
I'm not gonna steer anybody
in the wrong path if I can.
And anyway that's how at
least you came off to us.
>> Well, and it was by design
because up until I joined
Microsoft, I was a Java developer,
so when I got the phone call that said,
"You're joining Microsoft," I
actually looked at my resume,
I said, I feel like you got the wrong guy.
I don't have any .NET at all,
and I've never used
your shit, to be honest.
I don't know what the
hell you guys even do
half the time.
And the hiring manager at the time said,
I can teach a monkey our stuff,
but I can't teach him what you have,
which is outside perspective.
So, when I first came to the company,
I was not star struck by the geek stuff,
I was not overwhelmed
by the brand's power.
When I met Scott Guthrie
the first time, I was like,
"Who's that dude?"
"That guy's the company."
Oh, cool.
The one person I did admire
the most when at Microsoft was
a guy named J.J. Allaire
who made ColdFusion.
That's the only time I ever
really freaked out the whole
time I was at Microsoft.
So for me, coming into
the company, I said,
Look, we're just gonna get a job done.
We just gotta make decisions
that make sense and talk
to people in ways that I
would want to be talked
to myself in the cubicle.
I don't wanna see the polished version,
I don't wanna see that
it depends conversation,
the Teflon coating of bad decision making.
If we screw up, we say we screwed up.
If we're successful, own it.
So for me,
a lot of the times my Adobe
sort of competitive stuff
as well was me pushing back on Adobe,
saying, You're just lying.
Stop lying.
Be authentic.
You feel like we're a threat to you?
Fine.
That's fine.
You can be threatened by us,
but don't lie while
being threatening to us.
And at the same time with our guys,
I would pull in some of our guys and say,
You've got to be authentic
because you only get one
shot at it.
Like, who evangelize the
product to an audience,
and the moment they spot
you being disingenuous
or you're not authentic, that's it.
Your integrity is blown.
You'll never recover that again.
It will just be a one shot
hit, so you can never do that.
So to me, my reputation,
the things I put personally
into the brands were personal.
So, for me to evangelize
Silverlight and WPF, and advocate
its change, its progress is
still to this day I'm still
proud of it.
To this day, I still defend it,
even though I don't work for the company.
I still evangelize its successes.
>> Yeah, and that's really important,
especially talking about
even your personal brand.
I feel that for myself,
I am 100% in the same boat.
And I'm not going to tell
a developer, regardless
if I'm getting paid
by Microsoft, or regardless
of I'm getting paid
by Telrik, I'm not going
to tell the developer,
You should use this unless
I actually use it myself.
And going back to the days
of Telerik, the reason
that was such an easy deal
for me to come on board,
and I worked there for almost five years,
was because I had used their
controls and I believed deep
down in my heart that it
was the best at the time
and same way with when I
came here and I was working
on the Windows bridge for iOS,
don't know if you remember that or not,
but basically it allowed
our iOS developers to use
Xcode and Objective C to write UWP apps.
And even now with Azure,
I very specifically select
and apply for a job that I
believe deep down in my heart
I love the tech,
I love the product, because
I don't wanna join a job
that I feel like I will be miserable at.
I just couldn't do it.
I could never go out there and say,
Use this tool or use this service,
if I didn't believe down in my heart
that it was actually good.
>> Well, it just makes it easy, right?
When I was given Windows
Sidebar Gadgets one time
as a metric, Windows Vista's
just about to come out,
they've got this side bar
gadgets, and my boss goes,
you need to go there and pump that.
I'm like, I'm not fucking
going there to the pump that.
And he goes, why?
I go, 'cause no one's gonna use it.
It's such a stupid thing.
He goes, we've got metrics for it.
I'm like, I'm not doing it.
Give me something else.
'Cause I can't legitimately sit
there with straight face and do this.
So, I did how to use Blend,
the Blend design tool,
how to make illustrators,
Adobe Illustrator switch to Blend Design.
So, I put all my energy
into some design audiences
and hide there for a couple of months.
Because I just couldn't get
behind the stupidity of it.
It was just a stupid, stupid thing.
It was just something,
I don't think developers even
go near the bloody thing.
So for me, it's always about passion.
So, when I see Silverlight WPF
being put on the back burner
and there's no replacement,
and there's no authentic good
reasons to why it's been there,
other than DevDiv and the
Windows org couldn't get
their shit together politically,
and I just shook my head and said,
we're fighting the wrong fight.
We're just fighting the wrong fight.
We really are.
And yes, it hurt the Windows 8 launch,
and yes, it hurt folks like yourself
with Silverlight and WPF adoption,
but I'd rather be upfront and
not drag it out every year
and a half.
I wanted to accelerate that conversation.
That's the whole reason why
I did it was you're doing it,
they know you're doing it,
we can play this game where
we hide in plain sight
for a year and a half and
eventually you come clean,
or we can get this Band-Aid ripped off,
and we can start talking
about what the next steps are.
And that for me was important.
So, how do I get your
management to realize
Silverlight is now dead?
No more discussion on that point.
Now, what do we do now?
What's the next step?
That's what it's gonna be.
Cubicles around the world
is literally gonna have
this conversation,
and Microsoft's response is, "It depends."
That's not the response we need.
We need some concrete decision making
because there's a room full of developers
who just invested so much
of their own personal time
and energy into learning
the product, this language,
like XAML and C#, and your best answer is,
you can potentially reuse
your C# and XAML skills.
Okay, so I can take my WPF
and pull it over to UWP?
No.
Why?
Well, turns out we changed the namespaces.
Why?
Because it's our own processor.
Okay, so that's just narrative.
That's what you told the world?
Yep.
Then, I look straight
at the program manager
and he's like, "Not really."
I said, "What happened to the namespaces?"
"We have to go change the namespaces
"to stop backwards compatibility."
Right.
Well, that's not an answer.
That's stupid.
If I go WPF application tomorrow,
why can't I use a new UWP?
Because Windows team didn't
want you bring your old
to the new.
Right, okay.
Well, that's not gonna
work with me 'cause then
you just stalled your Windows 8 adoption
because everyone's gonna stay
with Windows 7 because XY's
apps can't migrate forward.
Again, I don't think this is
a well thought out strategy.
>> Yeah, and for us, at
least back at that time,
so we saw all the HTML5
stuff, and it was coming
in pretty hard, and so what
our team did was we still
needed to be able to deploy,
we still need to be able
to have a site there,
runs on Mac,
and there was some Linux, not very much,
there was actually quite
a bit more Mac, and then
obviously, we had deployed
on Windows out to the whole
hospital, and then and then
some of our other branches.
We were definitely going to invest more
into the HTML5 stuff and so
everybody was like showing
HTML5, and they were talking,
oh, it's got a new doc type,
the standard demo of the doc
type that doesn't have all
of the additional crap.
And so, we started seeing
that, and we had some
JavaScript, but our team, really,
what happened was we all
just started learning
JavaScript. (laughing)
>> It kinda comes full circle.
Do you remember I said Silverlight 1 was
XAML and JavaScript?
>> Yep.
>> And people were like,
What are you doing?
Are you high right now?
And then the best strategy
of the day was take
that beautiful protocol
Silverlight that you're
potentially going to make a lot
of easy success on, and come over here
this JavaScript route
and we'll start over.
But the good news is you get less.
So you don't have to learn as much,
but you still get less.
And the promise is that in
five years later you look back
on this and just laugh
because it'll be a good time,
you'll be so advanced, and
you'll be so further ahead,
and so forth.
Fast forward 10 years later,
the best idea of the day
is React, Vue, and Angular.
My only question is
what was the worst idea?
Because I'm still not
convinced these are the best.
If this is the best idea
the human race and come up
with I'm at a loss.
I really am at a loss,
because we haven't moved all.
>> And that's obviously
where we're at today is
Silverlight and WPF 10 years later.
So, we kinda know the fate
of Silverlight. (laughing)
Well, I guess we knew that a while back
from our tweets in 2011.
By the way, Jeremiah said, "Fix WPF."
He said, do you remember this?
>> Yes.
>> Is this yours?
>> Yeah, it's still there.
Yeah.
>> This is your account?
>> I think I still got the password.
>> That's awesome.
>> Yeah, I've still got it.
It's still lingering.
>> Does that link actually work?
Let me switch over.
>> No, I don't think it does.
>> The reason that I'm switching
over is I clicked on a link
before and anyways,
some other people had acquired the link,
and so it was not appropriate.
So, I'm trying to prevent
that from happening again.
So it does not go anywhere.
So, if you--
>> No.
>> Want to take Scott's domain. (laughing)
>> If you wanna fix WPF?
It's interesting.
Fast forward today, WPF
is still being used.
I literally worked for the
company not just three months
ago, where the guy is
making a lot of money
off WPF today.
So, WPF still exists.
A lot of enterprises
still use WPF right now,
so WPF is never done.
I'll walk back my statement WPF is dead.
WPF is dead in the eyes of
Microsoft, but in the eyes
of the community it lives.
It's a very, very, like a
still a well-used solution.
A while back, someone, sol
when Microsoft bough Xamarin,
they had to come with,
they had one problem.
How do we solve this mutated
version of XAML over here
in the Xamarin space?
And UWP.
So, these two worlds need to
come together at some point.
You have to kind of find a middle ground
because these two cannot
continue side by side
to co-exist without some uniformity.
So then, Microsoft announced,
I think Kevin Gallo or somebody announced,
that they're going to create
an open source project
called XAML Standards.
I was like, this would be
interesting where it goes.
And then a while back,
someone created an issue saying, hire me.
Bring back me, because
apparently there's a bullshit
happening in the XAML thing,
and I didn't even pay attention,
and someone mentioned it.
So that night, I went and
actually looked at this actual
GitHub account, looked what
was going on with this thing,
and I read their manifesto, and I went,
ah ha, don't wanna make XAML a standard.
You wanna solve UWP and Xamarin.
That's not a standard.
That's just a specification.
So if you actually want
to make an actual standard
for XAML, then let's talk about that.
If you're if you're serious about it,
then I will personally
dedicate as much time and money
as I can to have this conversation.
And then yet another issue
arises where you don't hire me.
I'm like, fuck, I can't.
>> I was gonna say,
are you okay with me sharing this screen?
You can see it.
>> Yeah, no, no.
I found it a little
funny because honestly,
I tuned out and it was
kinda like Godfather, like,
just when I thought I was
out, they brought me back in.
>> Don't hire me Scott Barnes number 134.
This person right here would
be really awesome to see
what did they hope to
accomplish with this?
Somebody, I guess it was just
closed by, who closed it?
>> Yeah.
The standards.
It ended up shutting down
the project, I think,
'cause it was one of those
situations where I started
asking questions about,
well, is this a standard,
or are you trying to solve
Xamarin and UWP's problems?
Because we have a specification called
WPE and and it's gone
through a lot of rigor.
Like, the WPF XAML spec is
part of the OpenOffice spec,
which went to ISO blah blah blah.
So, that was accepted as a standard.
So, to roll back XAML as
today as a standard is
an interesting question
as to why you want to do
that, because I feel like there already is
a standard out there.
What are you doing differently?
So, this is one of these
times where again, authentic,
being authentic with the
community, and disingenuous.
It came across as you're trying to sell
your product positioning problems.
That's not what we're here for,
and there's a lot of WTF,
Silverlight, XAML guys
out there that don't
understand the language,
and you want to reduce it again further.
This is the one time
again, not gonna happen.
So, they've since walked
back that standard pledge
and we haven't heard since.
Still waiting for that.
>> Well...
Making decisions.
>> Well, I will say I have
thoroughly enjoyed talking
to you today.
This is been great.
I just looked at the time and I was like,
Wow, we've been talking
for almost two hours.
I feel like we could probably keep going
for a very long time.
So, thanks very much, Scott.
I really do appreciate this
time that you spent with me
today, and with others,
and this is a great kind of insight.
I feel like maybe we
should even do a part two.
(laughing)
>> Well, let's see if you
keep your job after this one.
But, yeah.
(laughing)
>> No, it's okay.
This is a personal channel. (laughing)
>> There's no such thing.
There's no such thing.
>> I know.
I know, I know, I know.
>> This is all public.
>> I don't any of that,
like you were talking about
before of like where people
put on and they put all
opinions are expressed as mine.
I never like do that thing
'cause just going back
to your point, it's not really yours.
It's other people's.
>> Yeah.
Well, I look at it from differently.
When people do that just
quickly, when people do that,
you have to understand
that Microsoft does invest
in you as a person and
your personal brand.
Like, take Scott Hanselman.
Scott's a very authentic person.
I think that's always got a huge following
because he's very genuine
and is like the easiest geek
guy in the cubicle, right?
>> Yep.
>> He's got in his brand
invested and they also invest
in his brand, so no matter what,
Scott's always going to
be Microsoft's brand.
And he finds a nice way to
balance between personal
opinions and himself,
so he's able to balance that really well.
Not a lot of people tackle
that as well as he can.
So, there's a way to manage
that, I said Microsoft,
you are Microsoft brand first,
and then yours is second.
Try and keep your brand
as authentic as possible
and you'll be as successful
as guys like Scott Hanselman.
>> Yeah.
I almost feel as if just the
whole personal brand type
of stuff is really like a whole episode
just in and of itself,
because when I was originally
trying to put my brand
out there for developers
in the developer space,
I wasn't doing it for
followers or whatever,
I was doing it because I
wanted some additional job
security, and also to have
at least some industry
recognition, and then,
I see a lot today where I
think where it's probably
even a bit sad,
but sometimes the whole
motive is by gaining
the followers, or that the
value of some people is
completely in that sort
of a thing or views.
And by the way, I mean I love both,
but I try not to ever let
that be the main thing.
>> The one thing I'd say
is that your followers will
disappear when you leave the company.
There's an element of that if I still,
how many followers have I got now?
I think about 5,000.
I've always bordered
around 5,000 followers.
I don't even know why
5,000 people follow me,
to be honest.
I'm still baffled.
So, I don't understand why,
but they find enjoyment from
me, that's always there.
But I've never paid too much
attention to who follows me.
Clearly, I have no care
factor of what people
think of me.
I've got a pretty thick skin,
I'm used to people saying
positive and negative
things at me.
I know who my friends are and
I invest in my friendships,
and invest in people who
I feel are authentic,
and I will always back them
100% in that authenticity.
And that's all you can
really do in this industry
because trying to be a company
bully or a company person
and telling a lie and
things like that, yeah,
it'll work for your first year metrics,
in the second year it starts to, and then
you've lost so much of
your integrity as a result.
So, you get paid because
of your integrity,
paid because of your passion, just own it.
People say, people good work.
That's it.
I look back at the Silverlight team.
There's good people, good work.
That's why it was a success.
These people believed
and they went after it.
I don't want stories right now.
That's the problem I
can't get behind right now
with Microsoft is this your team.
Okay, I can see them.
They've got a vision and execute it,
and they get a momentum.
Right, that I can back.
UWP team, what are you doing?
Xamarin team, what are you doing?
HTML5, IE team, stop.
Just stop.
Think.
Why keep doing the things you're doing?
Chrome and all those
other guys have already
won this battle.
It's just a losing fight.
So just regroup and come
up with better decision.
But you gotta have
something that you can back.
Right now, I can't see.
I can see Azure's vision.
I can say the DevOps vision.
I can totally get behind
that and I do this daily,
but I just can't stand what
our rich platform story looks
like any more, 'cause right now I'm doing
React, and I hate it, so hate it.
Honestly, this is the
lowest point for you.
>> Yeah.
>> 'Cause it's shit.
>> Yeah, and you see that all the time.
It's like, okay, what's
the framework of the week?
(laughing)
There's always something new out there,
and if your job's JavaScript,
it is, it's what do I pick
this time and how many like
Angular versus React,
versus whatever do we see
all the time?
It's always some sort of
comparison, and they say,
okay, this one's the best.
Next week, okay, well,
they made another update.
It broke these changes, so
now the other one's the best.
>> Well, and the thing
is the JavaScript stuff
is low hanging fruit.
You got a subset of developers
out there now who don't
even understand how
garbage collection works,
doesn't understand what
a compiler even does.
And they're the ones
advocating for development.
These aren't developers.
These are just people assembling code.
And look at React and go,
like when you go through
that redux and reducers,
actions and reducers conversation,
you kind of snap out of
one point and you go,
let me get this right.
You just took the pub
sub-patent and mutated the shit
out of it.
They're like, well, kind of.
Right, well, it's not innovative.
So, tell me what you learned from MXML.
When I look at React, I
feel like saying to people,
Did you use Adobe Flex?
Because what you're doing right now is
what Adobe Flex did.
There's nothing really that different,
and what did you learn from
Adobe Flex that you thought
was worse or better?
And how did you improve on it?
And I would guarantee these people went,
"What's Adobe Flex?"
So, not even taking stock
take of what we've done
in the past where we go the future.
So, it's not evolving.
It's repeating the patterns over and over,
and that's why these
frameworks never take.
Every five years,
I call it JavaScript herpes
of the web because every five
years there's a new outbreak.
So, five years from now we're gonna learn,
we're gonna come up some
little hipster name called
Coca Cola is the new JavaScript
framework or whatever.
(laughing)
>> That is true.
It's funny, I remember
during those Silverlight days
and this is the last thing I've got,
do you remember knockout.js?
>> Oh, my god.
That was literally my Vietnam War.
(laughing)
It was MBDMish
and JavaScript basically.
>> Yes.
>> And I went, ah this
is not gonna end well.
And everyone was like, why?
I'm like, 'cause you didn't
solve the memory issue
that we had with MDBM. (laughing)
Trust me when I say this, guys,
memory is gonna be a problem,
and then years later,
Yeah, knockout sucks with memory.
>> Yeah, and with us in the
Silverlight world that was
where we started looking at
migrating to 'cause we were
forced to do it in JavaScript.
>> That's it.
Natural setup.
And we've now learnt,
and then now look at React
and Vue, and I'm going,
You didn't learn a lesson, did you?
You didn't learn a goddamn thing.
We're doing this again.
There be dragons ahead,
but there's no alternative.
I know I can't legitimately say out loud.
The only one product on the landscape,
I'll tell you this now,
there's one single
product on their landscape
that achieved something
that we wanted to achieve
with Silverlight and Blend pipeline,
but we weren't successful,
and these guys did it much
better, and they nailed it.
They have nailed it.
And that product is Unity 3D.
>> Unity 3D.
>> If you wanna on a phone
or a desktop application,
ignore the fact it's a game engine,
realize that games need menus.
So, when you play a game in the Unity 3D,
you have a menu system.
That menu system is
more than what you need
for an application for either
a mobile phone or desktop.
And you look at Unity's
entire production pipeline,
they have absolutely nailed it.
The editor could obviously be better off,
but essentially, technically,
is one of the most brilliant platforms
on the market right now.
For a C# developer, 100% get behind it.
>> Yeah.
So, I've watched quite a
bit of the people that were
using Unity, and actually
I just was watching
Layna Lux today on Twitch.
Yeah, and she was she was doing that,
and she was integrating
with PlayFab, and I was
just watching her.
I was kind of blown away.
I was like, hey, this
is this is pretty cool.
It's pretty awesome.
>> I've been watching her
for ages and she's literally
the divider on one.
She's a designer, developer, strategist.
She's absolutely brilliant.
When she makes that game.
I won't even play,
I'll just buy it just to say, that's it.
You nailed it. (laughing)
>> You've got it.
So Scott, besides your @mossyblog,
where else can folks find you?
You're on Twitch, right?
>> Yep, I think I'm
MossyBlogz with a Z on Twitch.
So, right now I went with a GTA mod,
as weird as it sounds.
On Twitch GTA's, RP storylines are huge,
so I've been watching, I think,
there's a better way to solve
Grand Theft Auto's problem.
So, I've reprogrammed Grand
Theft Auto from the ground up,
and I'm making another Grand Theft Auto V.
So, I usually put on my
Twitch stream, plug that,
and show people what I'm doing on that,
but other than that,
I'm pretty much low key.
I'm just a quiet geek now.
I don't have much presence any more.
I kind of keep things to
myself and just take small gigs
here and there, and enjoy life.
>> I'm going to make sure
that I bring this up.
So, over here, this is yours, correct?
>> Or you can always take components, yes.
You can always find us in there.
It turns out.
>> In the--
>> Both do the same
live coder teams.
So, you can always find us in live coders
teams on Twitch.
>> Why the heck am I not
following you on this?
Boom.
>> I've been busy.
I'm not even following you.
That's embarrassing! (laughing)
>> Hey, you know what?
That is okay.
And then also,
if you're interested in Unity, Dr. Argus,
let me go to his channel,
just while he's here, Doctor A-R-G-U-S.
>> Dr. Argus, you and I are
gonna get along just fine.
>> Yeah.
>> He says, I'm showing Unity over JS.
>> Yeah.
>> That is a smart person, yeah.
>> And so yeah, that is
also his channel, as well.
Well, thank you so very much,
Scott, again for the time today.
Yeah, almost I'm thinking
we should do this again.
Well, I think people have
your your information.
I'll probably make a cut here
for like YouTube and a few
other places, and I'll let
you take a look at that.
But with that said,
I think we are going to raid another
live coder's team member.
Let me go to our...
Actually, it's--
>> I think a lot of us.
>> Who's that?
I think Lana just got offline.
>> Live coders.
Live Coders Twitch.
Yeah, and so we kind of
help grow the community
by raiding other people.
If you're wondering what
raiding is, obviously,
we're going to select a person,
and all of our folks will
jump over into their stream.
>> I will say this,
our community manager
in the Live Coders team,
she's doing an amazing job, by the way.
>> She is.
>> She's doing a phenomenal job.
>> She's totally doing a phenomenal job.
So, I am going to quickly
type in here raid,
and hopefully you'll stick around and go
into this next person's stream.
I think they are doing.
Oh, it's actually showing.
I think they are doing some Unity.
But, thank you so very much.
If you haven't already,
hit the follow button.
And keep up with me, and
also with those other two,
Scott and Dr. Argus.
>> I'm gonna hit the--
>> Appreciate your time.
>> Yeah, I'm gonna hit
the rate button here.
So, at least check out their
channel for a few few minutes.
Thanks, everyone.
