Silverlight 3

Last Friday Silverlight 3 was released, though it has been available in beta for a while now. As it is version 3, it has all the things we wanted in version 1.

At nsquared we have been doing some work with Silverlight 3 and the advantages over Silverlight 2 seem small but tidy. The tooling however has mostly gotten a lot better. Blend 3 is really looking good, it hardly even crashes any more. Strangely Visual Studio seems to have taken a step back with no visual preview of the Silverlight rendered from the XAML.

The Silverlight 3 out of the browser experience on OSX would be nice if we had not already implemented our own version for Silverlight 2 last year. It is great that Microsoft can maintain that experience for us in a way that reduces our costs.It seems like more and more teams at Microsoft are now fixing their websites to drop Flash and move over to Silverlight. Our favorite is, of course, the new Surface website.

As always, nsquared is staying ahead of the curve by implementing the very latest technology products. We are here to help you bring your innovative software ideas to life!

Why Software Sucks

Dr. Neil is whinging again (Australian for whining) about poor software development. He says the wrong people are developing software because the common tools have become so easy (see his blog post, "democratization of software") and that developers aren't avidly considering UX. His favorite book on the subject, David Platt's Why Software Sucks supports his theory.

"I could think of a way to get a higher percentage of software developers thinking of UX" says Dr. Neil. "Remove the others." Wow, imagine working for THIS guy! He sure doesn't mince words! :)

Here at nsquared, UX is our priority. We start with UX considerations for every project and then use the right tools for the right jobs. The problem with the majority of developers out there is that they don't know enough tools. "It's the hammer and nail analogy," says Dr. Neil. "If all you have is a hammer, you try to use it for everything." Of course we use Visual Studio, Expression Blend, and other Microsoft tools, but we are also adept at a number of other programs such as Paint.NET and Xcode, Dashcode, NUnit, and many others.

If you have projects where wowing the end user is your priority, contact us!

Expression Blender Bender

nsquared's very own Pierce has been Blending like a mad man! He tells me (in his Expressive way) that he uses it because "it makes some things easier".


Hmmm, I guess that means that although he has been immersed for 30 hours, he's pretty ambivalent, but then, maybe that's just Pierce. So I dug a bit deeper....


Pierce likes that Blend has a GUI for editing xaml properties, but dislikes it because Visual Studio still renders better than Blend. He's excited about the Expression Blend 3 intellisense and looks forward to enhancing more of our top secret projects with his rapidly increasing skillset. While you know we can't talk about the applications for which Pierce is Blending, we thank him for all his extra hard work this week!