If you are a developer and have been working wit WPF and/or Silverlight, you may have wished you had a better sense of design to really take advantage of XAML and create a visually compelling app.  A new Design for Developer series has been started and you can watch the first installment here.

With some recent announcements from a big Internet company whose name cannot be mentioned, I went off on my own expedition into the dark corners of the .NET and Windows platform to see what cool technology treasures may be lurking there.  If you are like me, you may have heard something about P2P technologies being delivered for Windows.  And if you were like me, you didn’t really pay much attention to it at the time since only file sharing, music stealing people cared about peer to peer technologies.

Well, let me tell you, my friend, that was a very wrong assumption!  There is a ton of amazing P2P technologies in Windows and .NET, and they make the creation of amazing new applications possible.  Ever had an idea where your app would need to dynamically find another computer and communicate with it but both computers might be around the world, not registered with DNS, and hiding behind a NAT device? PNRP in Windows makes that easy! Every thought of having a global hashtable to store all kinds of data that could be retrieved by your app’s users – DRT to the rescue!

What are PNRP and DRT you ask?  That, dear reader, will be what I will cover in a series of blog posts and screencasts in the coming weeks to show you how to leverage and exploit this cool technology.  Want to get a head start?  Check out the P2P team’s blog and the Microsoft Peer-to-Peer Reference page.

In this installment, we take a look at using PRISM events to publish and subscribe to events. Previous versions of the application have used .NET events and event handlers to communicate UI events between presenters. We know use PRISM events in conjunction with WPF Commands (introduced earlier) to notify various parts of the application that something important has happened.

Download video here

Download source code here

Hanging at the .NET UG and Scott Davis pointed me to this Silverlight app by some French Microsofties - http://www.microsoft.com/france/entreprises/centre-des-usages/  WOW!!!!!!

Totally off normal topic (if there every really is such a thing on this blog), but I’ve signed up to take motorcycle riding lessons in a couple weeks.  I am still on the fence about getting a bike, but this seems like a logical first step.  I’m looking forward to it.  No idea what to do for a first bike should I decide to pursue it.  All the bikes I really like are much more than likely to be way to much bike for a first time rider.  Admittedly, that takes away some of the allure – not getting to ride a cool bike. ;-)  I get the feeling I need to stick to 600cc or less and that does not leave a lot of cool factor in the choices that remain!  ;-)  I’ve even heard some say to not get anything over 500cc but that is just not an option – I can afford a bike now so I kinda need to get something that I can grow into ‘cause I am not sure an upgrade option will exist in a year or two. Anyone with recommendations/experiences as a first time rider, please leave a comment.  And no, I am refuting the notion that this is some kind of mid-life act out!!! ;-)