Recommended listening: .NET Rocks with Brad Abrams
If you haven't heard .NET Rocks before, now is a good time to do it. In their last show, they interviewed Brad Abrams during Remix Boston where he did a keynote. So who is Brad Abrams.
Quote from his own blog:
Brad Abrams was a founding member of both the Common Language Runtime, and .NET Framework teams at Microsoft Corporation where he is currently the Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services team which is responsible for delivering the developer platform that spans both clients and web based applications as well as the common services that are available to all applications. Specific technologies owned by this team include ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, parts of Silverlight, and Windows Forms.
In the interview, they talk a lot about Silverlight, what they are trying to do and how open the technology actually is. And they talk a lot about that openness Microsoft has recently approached, and how the Silverlight technology could be adapted by a developer of any of the three major platforms. (Windows, Mac & Linux). I really like that approach, and the result is clear. Already – even though Silverlight just hit the 1.0 RTM recently, there's a huge amount of applications running live from notable companies.
They also talk a lot about Brad Abrams' keynote at Remix Boston, where he did a demo on debugging a Silverlight 1.1 app.
And he didn't do it the easy way! He had a Linux box with a small PHP page, hosting the Silverlight 1.1 app. That worked great. The he fired up a Mac, and hit that page from Safari. And to achieve the debugging experience of Visual Studio, he attached the VS debugger to the Safari process on the Mac, set a breakpoint in the code, and refreshed the page on the Mac, to hit the breakpoint. And there you go. A Mac hitting a breakpoint on a Vista box, and the website being hosted on a Linux box – how cool is that?
During the show Richard Campbell said that he didn't believe it would work. I don't know – but I want to try the same thing, and se if it really works.