Silverlight 2.0 is a freaking phenomenal RIA development environment and I would actually, at this point, put the development experience in Silverlight 2.0 above and beyond Flex. I can do more faster and have it look better and run more efficiently in Silverlight 2.0 than I can in Flex. BUT, when you're looking for case studies, look for ones where the person or organization who adopted Silverlight did so of their own volition, without being approached by Microsoft. I'm interested in hardcore, unbiased opinions from people who have been in the trenches doing their own coding, not watching Microsoft consultants do the coding for them. There are plenty of case studies like that out there, you just have to look past the shiny bouncing balls that are the Olympics and the Oscars and all the other crap that probably cost Microsoft a hojillion dollars in marketing funds and incentives.

Told ya Adobe was gonna reorganize and put its mobile/devices operation in with its platform operation in the name of moving to a single technology platform and runtime for PCs, handsets and consumer devices. Adobe's new CTO Kevin Lynch, the creator of AIR, is basically in charge of the whole magilla now. Gary Kovacs, VP of product management and marketing for the mobile and devices business, will be general manager of the unit, reporting to Lynch, replacing Al Ramadan, who is leaving.

If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.

I want to thank everyone who showed up to share my enthusiasm for the iPhone as it is, what I believe, the mobile development platform to target. I also want to thank those people who tolerated my evasiveness and lack of detail during the SDK session. As I've said before, just because everybody else on the internet has no problem violating NDAs, when I click 'Agree', I know what I am agreeing to and I intend to stick to that agreement.

The F2F meeting of OpenAjax Alliance at NYC on March 21st worked out really well in my oppinion. As a result of the last F2F meeting in October 2007, we formed a new task force called 'Runtime Advocacy Task Force' at OpenAjax. The goal of Runtime Task Force is to collect a 'wish list' from the Ajax community, get the communities involved, have active dialogs and engage browser vendors, with the goal of fixing the issues that have bugged down Ajax developers and help build a better web. So far we've collected a list of 29 issues, of which we hope to open up to the general public for review/comments/voting.

During the Q&A period after one of my sessions at the iPhone Developer Summit last Thursday, there was someone there from Microsoft Competetive Intelligence. She asked myself and some other folks who were lingering nearby to describe, in our unbiased opinions, what we thought was wrong with Windows Mobile.

Sybase iAnywhere announced availability of support for Apple iPhone during the first international iPhone Developer Summit, colocated with AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East. Information Anywhere now enables IT organizations to provide secure delivery of Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange enterprise email to iPhone users, in addition to a broad range of other mobile devices. Sybase iAnywhere?s unique approach to providing enterprise email support for the iPhone reduces potential security concerns while still providing a rich user experience utilizing native iPhone applications.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

So is O'Reilly actually condoning the hacking of the phones? O'Reilly has had a long and prestigious history as being the ultimate source for *nix manuals, including many books that became so dogeared I actually bought multiple copies, including dozens of 'in a nutshell' books. Back in those good old days, 'hacks' which appeared in O'Reilly titles were actually just low-level down-and-dirty nuggets of pure gold that geeks and admins loved but were all perfectly legal.

Think about this: If I wait a couple weeks until I can lay hands on one in a store before ordering, a shiny new Macbook Air might arrive just in time for the iPhone SDK, giving me the perfect iPhone development machine since the iPhone GUI doesn't require the same amount of screen real estate that Interface Builder 3 requires. My usual rule of thumb is to wait 2 weeks after a Steve Jobs keynote before purchasing anything. That way I can be sure that any residual RDF effects have worn off. We'll see how well I'm holding up two weeks from now :)

This session will focus on our experience of developing open source-based mobile messaging and sync applications for both of these platforms. It will compare and contrast the platforms in terms of the development methods and tools required, and their strengths and weaknesses from a developer's perspective. The presentation will share lessons learned as well as tips and techniques for developing for both platforms.

Come to this talk and find out how ICEfaces delivers the goods today for development of web-based social computing applications. The open source ICEfaces project pioneered web-based real time collaboration, an essential capability for truly interactive Social Computing, and its server-centric architecture is well-suited to resource-constrained devices such as the iPhone. During this session you will see several live demos of collaborative applications running on the iPhone. You will gain an understanding of ICEfaces' server-centric architecture and understand how it is a natural way to deliver high-powered, but light-weight AJAX capabilities to your mobile applications. You will also learn how to leverage AJAX Push to make your applications truly collaborative, and prepare yourself to deliver on the promises of social computing.

Since the iPhone was first released, early adopters haven't stopped talking about what they think of the device. While the free promotion can be a great marketing tool for wireless carriers, it can be crippling if users have issues with session and network quality. Verizon's Voyager and Nokia's N810 must isolate and prioritize network problems to ensure that customer issues are addressed as quickly as possible. Ensuring that these early adopters have a positive experience is essential for having any chance at the viral adoption the iPhone experienced, along with a low customer churn rate.

This session will provide ADC member developers with the information they need to get started building native iPhone applications. This session covers the basics from how to set up your development environment to building a basic application (not just a simple hello world, but a real, functioning, practical application), to covering debugging and deployment.

Since I purchased my ADC subscription in January, it's coming up on renewal time and I thought I would take a few moments to reflect on the past year from the perspective of a newbie Cocoa programmer. When I showed up to the Leopard Tech Talk in 2007, I felt a little nervous... after all, I showed up and took notes on a Windows Vista machine ;) Everyone there, especially all of Apple's evangelists were very welcoming... they didn't even throw me out when I started asking them for comparisons between Cocoa and WCF and Core Animation and WPF. They even remained gracious when I started talking about Remoting and PNRP ;) Trust me, it takes a lot of patience to be in the same room with me when I'm in 'learning mode'.

As interest in mobile AJAX gathers in the wake of the Apple iPhone release, the ICEfaces open source project is poised to deliver mobile AJAX solutions. This presentation talks about why the server-centric nature of the ICEfaces technology provides inherent advantages in the mobile space. You will get a brief overview of the ICEfaces technology and see how it is applicable to resource-constrained mobile devices. There is also a demonstration of a mobile ICEfaces application running on both the Safari and Opera mobile browsers. Finally, you will learn about some of the emerging best practices for mobile AJAX application design, and get a glimpse of the ICEfaces roadmap for mobile AJAX.

Is it easy yet to make AJAX applications that easily go offline? Are developers better off using an AJAX framework, a toolkit or just coding their own AJAX/JavaScript? Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud? How can AJAX apps be made secure? Sessions on these and dozens of other topics have already begun streaming in to AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City on March 18-20, 2008.

Since the iPhone was first released, early adopters haven't stopped talking about what they think of the device. While the free promotion can be a great marketing tool for wireless carriers, it can be crippling if users have issues with session and network quality. This is the background to the iPhone Developer Summit session 'Early Adopters: The Key to Free Publicity or the Fall of a Technology,' to be given in March by Mark McIlvane, President & COO of Velocent Systems.

The iPhone and Google Android platform are undisputedly transforming the mobile industry by bringing smartphone capabilities to the masses. They are also making for enticing new mobile platforms for developing and deploying new types of mobile apps and services for mass market users. Yet, developing for them is not that easy.

The iPhone is transforming the Web as we know it and compelling every Web designer to consider handheld portable devices. This will cover various aspects of iPhone and iPod Touch development. It will include tips and tricks as well as best practices to follow. Williams will also cover how to use an integrated development environment (IDE) for building iPhone and iPod Touch applications and how to use the iUI library to easily build iPhone applications.

Could Apple iPhone become a viable portable gaming solution (like PSP or NDS) one day? If the iPhone does as expected and takes a decent chunk of the growing smartphone market then will malware writers start to give OS X some serious attention as the overall penetration of OS X skyrockets? These are among the dozens of questions to be asked and answered at the iPhone Developer Summit being held in New York City in March - an intensive and content-rich two-day program designed to satisfy the growing hunger among software developers and IT professionals for a broad spectrum of sessions informing developers what kinds of development options and opportunities the iPhone provides.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

iPhone Developer Summit (www.iphonedevsummit.com) announced today Kevin Hoffman as the Tech Chair of the Conference. The letter from the Tech Chair at the conference Website contained the following message: What's the impact of the iPhone going to be on the delivery of rich content to mobile users? How does Google's new Android differ from the iPhone SDK and iPhone Safari development? When should you use the iPhone SDK versus developing web applications?

A highly experienced executive from ACCESS, the company whose browser will be used in the forthcoming Amazon Kindle ebook, is the latest to join the line-up of industry experts to speak at the iPhone Developer Summit being held in New York City in March next year - an intensive and content-rich two-day program designed to satisfy the growing hunger among software developers and IT professionals for a broad spectrum of sessions on the widest possible range of iPhone development topics.

Google, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about proving it. It also needs the buzz - and a killer mobile app - for Android to hit a homerun. The first $5 million will be paid out in $25,000 prizes for the continued development of the 50 most promising entries submitted between January 2 and March 3 2008 to the Android Developer Challenge I.