OK, so it’s hardly Monty Python but…

This was a bit of work that myself, Mark Quirk, Michael McClary, George and Will worked on as a simple explanation of Azure (RedDog at the time…)

Yes, that’s me on the treadmill with the bandage on my head. The things we do.

Eileen is going to be putting together some more serious info – cool. I’ll be talking about Azure tomorrow at OreDev too!

Talking of great examples, MikeT had a crack at the Twistori thing that MikeO looked at but took a slightly different tack and employed WPF. He’s written the whole thing up as a 7-part (count ‘em) series. You can start here.

Much as I love Silverlight, I’m a sucker for those WPF shader effects…

I’m hoping that Katrien was inspired by the PDC BBC iPlayer demo that we worked on here, as she created this great step-by-step guide to building a Silverlight Mesh-Enabled Application.

I’d like to tell you that it was a smooth for us when we were building against the pre-release versions but you know we didn’t have those tools available to us… That’s the bleeding edge for you I guess. We wrote our first WPF prototype (back in Avalon days) using Notepad…

Anyway, great stuff as usual from Katrien.

Spotted on Jon Fanders’ blog, a look at the very first model driven architectures through to the present day. More at Models Remixed.osl

Talk about a teaser…

The Gu says:

“Silverlight 3 will include major media enhancements (including H.264 video support), major graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration), as well as major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls).  Note these are just a small sampling of the improvements - we have plenty of additional cool features we are going to keep up our sleeves a little longer. ;-)”

Awesome.

This particular post brought to you by the “Things You Think Up Whilst Bored At An Airport” department.

Blooders was talking about the supermarket price war and, for instance, the very cheap price of chicken, which lead him to suggest that the notion of ad-supported chicken might be viable.

It is an interesting thought as it seems that chicken, much like most stuff on the internet, is being commoditised to zero as described by the principles of “Free” – more on that here and on The Long Tail blog here.

Would you eat a free chicken emblazoned with a Nike swoosh (for instance as I don’t want to be responsible for any rumours…)? I probably would. As an aside, why is that the Nike swoosh always seems to be the most applicable icon for any product..? Well done, timeless icon creators.

The makers of Danish bacon (apt, seeing as I’m writing this some 30,000ft above Denmark) almost had it right, their only mistake being that they should have used other logos rather than their own.

Extending this a little more, would you pay extra for a “Pro” Chicken that supported everyone else to have Free Chicken in a Flickr-esque “Freemium” model. So, much like Jamie Oliver is out there teaching the people of Rotherham that there is more to life than Turkey Twizzlers (or whatever he is currently up to), you can pay a little extra for your own chicken, knowing that others can benefit too.

Put like that, Freemium pros/payers sound a little like micro-philanthropists. That’s interesting because I’d never really thought that I was helping other people to share photos – I just needed the additional storage space. I can think of some pretend scenarios that make me go all misty-eyed as to the good I may be doing…

Not a lot different to charity subscriptions I guess. The other similarity may be that my subscriptions to Freemium “Pro” services may well suffer in the same way as my charitable contributions suffer as the economic conditions begin to bite….

There was another idea for Soft Porcelain, but I’ll leave that for some other time.

I’m loving GOW2 and am hoping to add this to the very small list of “games I actually finished” which (in recent years) amounts to er, GOW and Fable2 (there must be others… surely).

Anyway, for the Zune and GOW afficionado, there’s this:

A couple of interesting articles on Silverlight and Flash that are worth a peek:

• Adobe's CEO Underestimating Microsoft's Ability To Compete With Flash
• Microsoft’s Silverlight heats up fight for online video

Note to self that some people will take your estimates quite literally sometimes. Anyway, a bit of Silverlight Twittter-searching fun from MikeO (in a pseudo-Twistori style, or at least it will be when I can find a designer for another “20 minutes of effort”…)

TechCrunch are reporting on the changes to Live.com.

There’s a nice Common Craft video to accompany the news.