I spoke for a little while at #uktechdays. The official recordings and decks will go up on the TechDays website, but in the meantime, you can see my effort at Slideshare:

What did I talk about? Well, essentially:

• …the iPhone possibly being responsible for “apps” being understood by the mass-market although it was hardly the birth of the application!
• …the phenomenon of single use/single mission apps such as Twitter clients, and how they bring together web services as hubs.
• …the journey the web took to get us to the point of services, rather than end-to-end experiences.
• …the differing requirements for clients (richness) and content (reach).
• …discussion on the various client technologies one could choose, and how Microsoft supports them all: HTML, Silverlight, WPF via similar tools.
• …a bit of a reality check on HTML5 and it’s significance to application development.
• …and then some thinking on differentiated experience to delight the end user.

If you were there, I hope it provoked some thought. Let me know.

One of the most common questions I heard was “When should I use WPF versus Silverlight?”. This question hasn’t changed in the past couple of years but as Silverlight has gained in capability then the lines become blurrier.

I would say this: all things being equal, I’d look at Silverlight to deliver your client experience. However, if you find you’re reconstructing things that are normally available in .NET (offline database access), or writing reams of Interop code, then maybe you should consider that to be a WPF (or other Windows client) app. If you want to take advantage of the desktop to the full – acceleration, parallel and so on, then start with WPF.

Ultimately, you’re using the same tools and gaining skills that can be purposed across browser, PC and phone – so it’s all good!

New Media Age picks up on a Silverlight Ad out in the wild from EA Games to promote Mass Effect 2. (What a great game by the way… unfortunately it turned up before I finished Borderlands so there’s two vying for attention).

NMA describe it in terms ad folk will understand:

The three-week campaign for flagship Xbox and Windows action game Mass Effect 2 comprises an expandable MPU which contains around 500Mb of rich content including high-resolution images that can be zoomed into by up to 30 times and buffer-free HD video trailers.

The ad is delivered dynamically depending on the speed of visitors’ broadband connection.

That means DeepZoom was involved to you and I. You can check it out here. MikeT has a couple of useful links on the ad details here.

You can view the ad here to see the smart DeepZooming stuff. Will only be alive for a while of course.

• Big list of example triggers, actions and behaviours for Blend 3 from Peter Blois
• An 'explode' behaviour (also from Peter)
• Loads of great Blend and Sketchflow stuff at Silverlight Buzz
• Bill Reiss commenting on the impact that behaviours have for Silverlight game programming.
• Awesome, awesome, awesome physics behaviours from Andy Beaulieu
• And then Andy follows up with some "how to" on behaviours.
• A 40-minute video from Jose on the power of states in Blend 3.
• A game "star field" implementation.
• Don Burnett talking about prototyping in Sketchflow.
• Katrien's 3mins on Blend 3 series - great Sketchflow examples.
• A tutorial on using Sketchflow Map.

• Silverlight 3 Multi-touch: The Basics (from Tim - who still hasn't renamed his blog "Heueristics"...)
• Animating when Data Changes - parts one and two from Josh Twist.
• An out-of-browser install pattern (also from Tim).