March 2007 - Posts

• Robby Ingebretsen at VSLive (San Francisco)

  “Kurt and I attended Robby’s session at VSLive and Robby did a great job showing the crowd how to Love your software™ with WPF” said Ashvil D’ Costa, “It was amazing to see the Seattle PI application on a 25 foot screen!” Kurt Brockett our Director of Product Management took this shot of Robby: It was a busy day for IdentityMine. Jonathan Russ had the opportunity to present at Microsoft's WPF Boot Camp on the Redmond Campus. It was great to see so many leading companies taking advantage of the WPF training. Karsten Januszewski did a terrific job organizing the event. Thanks Karsten! If you missed Robby at VSLive come see him and several other members of the IdentityMine team at MIX07! - http://visitmix.com/Blogs/News/cool-session-alert-quotzap-wham-kapowquot-wpf-and-the-next-generation-of-online-comic-book-reading/ Posted Mar 29 2007, 01:08 AM by Chad Brown, IdentityMine - Recognizing our team. Filed under: Kurt Brockett, Robby Ingebretsen, Ashvil D' Costa, MIX07, Expression, VSLive

• CHATBlender – The CEO is coding again! ;-)

  When you are deep in the creative process, any tool that can speed things up is extremely valuable. Mark Brown the CEO of IdentityMine came up with this cool tool in his spare time. (Between 1:00Am and Coffee Time) At IdentityMine we're always coming up with tools that help our developers and designers work more efficiently and effectively together. CHATBlender allows us to communicate our XAML assets with ease. Designers are constantly creating XAML assets that need to be sent to a dev to be included in a project, and visual assets that need to be sent to management for approval. CHATBlender allows us to work together on assets so we can "blend" multiple people's expertise into one asset all via instant messenger. http://www.chatblender.com/ With a simple copy and paste you can be sharing your XAML assets too! Nathan Dunlap, a key CHATBlender contributor has a few things to say about this app as well. http://designerslove.net/?p=26 and http://designerslove.net/?p=34 Posted Mar 29 2007, 12:39 AM by Chad Brown, IdentityMine - Recognizing our team. Filed under: Mark Brown, WPF/E, Nathan Dunlap, CHATBlender, XAML

• Love your software.™

  The Forbes news reader presented an opportunity to develop several IdentityMine ads to show off the potential of advertising in a WPF news reader experience. Since IdentityMine has never advertised before, we started from scratch. In the end, what resonated with the entire team was a single phrase…”Love your software”. We LOVED it so much it’s now Trade Marked. We believe this statement summarizes how we feel about software, our jobs and the potential impact of WPF on the end user. www.loveyoursoftware.com Posted Mar 29 2007, 12:34 AM by Chad Brown, IdentityMine - Recognizing our team. Filed under: Love your software, Forbes

• First ever production quality WPF application…Maybe?

  How do you present the Microsoft Dynamics customer model which consists of a complex set of departments, roles and responsibilities? WPF of course! IdentityMine had the privilege of working on several Proof of Concept (POC) applications for Microsoft including CaseBuilder (Codename for PDC 2003 demo), Patient Monitoring, Accruent, DinnerNow and the list goes on. This experience gave us the opportunity to work with the Dynamics team to build a WPF production application that was screaming for rich visualizations and powerful relationship views. Is this the first production quality WPF application every created? I’m not sure but it might be. Regardless, it’s likely the first with rich editing and keyboard navigation features used in production by data entry personnel. Hmm…A static shot doesn’t do it justice: Sure Step Business Modeler (aka DVA) was built initially for Microsoft internal development team so they could better understand the customer model and therefore create even better software. Next steps are to help Microsoft partners in a similar way. Numerous individuals had their fingers in this application. Our Kochi India team really stepped up to help provide some of the editing functionality. Thanks Franklin Jose and Vijay Narayan for your help on editing. Jobi Joy performed some much needed research around keyboard navigation and Liby Simanthy followed with a top notch QA effort. Job well done! The team agrees that Jonathan Russ should take some serious credit for the end result. The entire team consisted of: Developer and Team Lead: Jonathan Russ – Developers: Franklin Jose, Vijay Narayan, Jobi Joy – Interactive Designer: Nathan Dunlap – Designers: Dale Jones, Jimmy Jones – DB Architect: David Kelley – QA: Liby Simanthy Posted Mar 29 2007, 12:21 AM by Chad Brown, IdentityMine - Recognizing our team. Filed under: WPF, Nathan Dunlap, Franklin Jose, Jobi Joy, Jonathan Russ, Vijay Narayan, Production, Liby Simanthy, Dale Jones, David Kelley, Jimmy Jones

• WPF Training – Key to customer co-development efforts

  I think our project methodology is unique. (Strategy – Training – Envisioning – Design – Development – Deploy) Notice the training element. It seams waterfall-ish but in reality it’s an iterative approach simply broken up into manageable phases. Our team realized early on that building production WPF applications was going to require some customer training. Although we don’t sell ourselves as a training company we typically engage the customer in a strategy phase where we learn about the project at a high level and understand specific challenges. In addition, we also analyze the team. Do they have developers, Designers or Both? What capabilities does the collective team have? We then distill the multiple weeks of content into a week of focused developer and/or designer training + workflow concepts. For more information see: http://www.identitymine.com/services/CustomizedTraining.aspx Posted Mar 29 2007, 12:10 AM by Chad Brown, IdentityMine - Recognizing our team. Filed under: Workflow, Training, Expression, Blend

• Seattle PI and Forbes – Extra! Extra! - WPF Readers for Sale!

  Let’s face it; the web isn’t cutting it today. How much content are you really willing to read on the web? It’s not the reading experience or feature set that’s going to keep people coming back. Publishers need something better and that’s what our reading experience offering is about. Nathan Dunlap says it best, “WPF is the foundation that can finally provide a reading experience that gets technology to step out of the way and lets the user focus on reading instead of interacting with the medium”. http://designerslove.net/?p=23 Several members of our team including Nathan worked on the Seattle PI and Forbes readers. Team Lead and Developer: Ashvil D’ Costa – Designers: Nathan Dunlap, Jared Potter and Fil Fortes – Installer Development: Karim Hernandez – PM: Suzanne Anderson For a complete list of the WPF Reader feature set please visit: http://www.identitymine.com/readers/Default.aspx To view our Press Release please visit: http://www.identitymine.com/press/02_22_2007.aspx or http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/2/prweb506903.htm ((((( Podcast ))))) Posted Mar 28 2007, 11:08 PM by Chad Brown, IdentityMine - Recognizing our team. Filed under: WPF, Nathan Dunlap, Jared Potter, Ashvil D' Costa, News Readers, Fil Fortes, Karim Hernandez, Suzanne Anderson

• A StandOut Team!

  IdentityMine was invited down to the Electric Rain headquarters in Boulder CO to take a sneak peak at the latest build of StandOut. http://www.erain.com/products/standout/ Very impressive! You might ask…This blog is dedicated to our team. What does Electric Rain or their product StandOut have to do with our team? Well, Electric Rain valued our team’s talent enough to ask for our opinion as it relates to the current implementation and future design decisions of StandOut. This was in itself enough to write about. However… What really impressed me was the response of the seven IdentityMine team members who became stranded during the December 21st snow storm which closed down the Denver airport. You might imagine spirits would be low as we contemplated entering 2007 without our families. As the weekend came and snow continued to fall this thought became a possible reality. Regardless of the situation, everyone remained positive and enjoyed the time together. This was a test and our team passed with flying colors. In the process, we had a few extra days to spend with Electric Rain. A bonding experience both with the team and Electric Rain. Take a look at some PR we released with Electric Rain. http://www.identitymine.com/press/01_30_2007.aspx Posted Mar 28 2007, 10:30 PM by Chad Brown, IdentityMine - Recognizing our team. Filed under: Partners

• WPF Beginnings - PDC 2003

  Although IdentityMine has been around since 2001, I’m only going to go back to 2003. That was when we were introduced to XAML, Avalon (WinFX then WPF), WinFS (Gone), Indigo (WCF) and a few interesting people that would one day join our company. Microsoft was preparing for PDC 2003 and we were asked to deliver several keynote demonstrations on a very short timeline. In addition, we were asked to learn a completely new set of technologies as well as integrate with a Microsoft team we’d never worked with before. Thankfully, the Microsoft team consisted of Nathan Dunlap (Designer) and Jonathan Russ (Developer). Yes, they now work with us. You’re going to be hearing a lot about these two guys. Nathan Dunlap is a rather large voice in the WPF community. You can follow him at: http://designerslove.net Posted Mar 27 2007, 01:48 AM by Chad Brown, IdentityMine - Recognizing our team. Filed under: WPF, Nathan Dunlap, XAML, WCF, Jonathan Russ

• IdentityMine Intro

  IdentityMine is an Interactive Design and Development firm. We’re roughly 50 people today with offices in the Seattle area, Cochin India and now starting to build a presence in the bay area. What’s unique about IdentityMine is our blend of Designer and Development talent. You see…There are plenty of good Design Agencies as well as Development firms but very few that bring them together. IdentityMine has managed to create a culture to successfully do just that. This combination is what allows us to create some truly amazing applications and experiences. We’re very excited about where we’re at as a company right now. A few years back we made a big bet on a suite of beta technologies called WinFX, today known as .NET 3.0. Now with the recent release of Vista and the 3.0 available on XP we’re getting the opportunity to apply our technical expertise and creative talents on production software. http://www.identitymine.com Enough about the company. Let's talk about the people and what they're doing! BTW - You can contact me at: http://2idi.com/contact/=chad.brown (Simply provide your e-mail and message) Posted Mar 27 2007, 12:53 AM by Chad Brown, IdentityMine - Recognizing our team. Filed under: WPF, .NET 3.0, Developers, Designers