Whilst drinking my first cup of coffee this morning and browsing my , it occurred to me that Prism as a moniker is far more extensible and composite in nature than the official title of the product: Composite WPF. The reason being that once you introduce Silverlight into the mix it's no longer Composite WPF.

• Composite Silverlight?
• Composite XAML?
• Composite .NET?

I find it amusing that the "marketing" title for the product does not live up to the product that it allegedly describes. Apparently for legal beagle reasons we cannot keep the lovely handle Prism as a product name.

I have recently managed to get myself invited on to the Microsoft patterns & practices advisory board for Composite WPF, formerly known as Prism. I consider my self very lucky to have been invited to serve on the board so expect to start seeing more from me on this really great topic in the coming months.

My intention had been to wait until I'd at least managed to attend my first meeting of the board before announcing that I'd been invited to attend but the boys at p&p only went and shipped the first drop of Prism V2, forcing my hand by about a week!

If you're working with WPF today or just have a keen interest in designing composite applications please go and take a look at the Composite WPF bits on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF. I'm also posting all my links for anything related to Composite WPF under the Prism tag on delicious, which you can find here: http://delicious.com/compilewith.net/Prism. Enjoy!

The second day started with a session by ScottGu on ASP.NET MVC; the session itself was great and the technology shows some real promise. I actually skipped the next session I was going to go to, on IE8, to play with the MVC bits. Next up was the Developer Speaker Panel with Scott, Sara Ford, Mike Flasko, who gave the Astoria talk the day before, and another member of the Data team at Microsoft. Most questions ended up in Scott's lap and while he gave some great answers it was a pretty average session for me.

Next we went to lunch with Arturo Toledo, and then afterwards we went to his session Design with Microsoft Expression, which was really great; easily on a par with Scott's session that same morning. Then that was it, we were all done and left Brighton for home.

In conclusion I don't think there was a single winner with regards to the sessions; but if I had to choose it would have to be Bill's session Designing for the Wild on the designer track, and Scott's MVC session on the developer track. All in all it was great conference and I'd love to do it again next year.

Now I'm just waiting for my swag to arrive......

The keynote was awesome, the surprise for me was Bill Buxton; I'd not really heard of him much before today and he was a real pleasure to watch. ScottGu was as awesome as ever, and it was really fantastic to meet him in person.

I went to four sessions today:

• Introduction to Silverlight 2 - Part 1. I wanted to go to this one to see ScottGu speak, and surprisingly I learnt a couple of things (iframe presence to fix a bug in older Safari browsers and their expected control release plans) that actually made the whole session worthwhile.
• Designing in the Wild: Sketching Experiences. This session was the highlight of the day for me. Bill is an inspirational speaker; I learnt loads about design and designers and how to think about design... and that I'm not a designer, and unlikely to ever be one.
• ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria). This was the best technical presentation of the day! This technology is amazing and is live and available for use today by using .NET 3.5. JP you really need to look at this.
• Design Panel. I had a choice of this session or the VS IDE Tips and Tricks by Sara Ford, which was the session that I intended to go to - but Bill so impressed me that I wanted to hear more from him.

All in all it was a great day, I really enjoyed the whole thing, looking forward to more sessions tomorrow.

...the new look is now live. I'm still not completely done hacking on it yet, but it's baked enough that I just wanted to get it out there. I'd love to get your feedback, be it good, bad or indifferent.

18-19 September 2008 | Brighton

See you there?

I've been using Evernote for a couple of months now and I think it's an absolutely brilliant tool for keeping notes. introduced me to it and I'm glad he did; he talks about how much .

Like Matt, previously I used Microsoft OneNote (which I introduced him to a while back, heh); At first I saw no reason to change, I just thought I'd give it a go for a while, take it out for a spin. I don't really know why I did, I was really happy with OneNote.

But Evernote has one killer feature that has made me a convert (even if it does have a much smaller feature set):

Evernote is everywhere!

And that's it hold over me, that's why I probably won't be going back to OneNote. Evernote is simply and truly everywhere - in the cloud, on my desktop, on my phone, on my laptop. Like the Mesh, Delicious, , and Box.NET before it Evernote has found it's way on to my list of indispensable tools for living and working in the cloud.

Find my public Evernote notebook here:

http://www.evernote.com/pub/pjackson/compilewith.net