These are mistakes that typically encounter from people that started web development in ASP.NET rather than one of the more classic approaches (e.g, static HTML, ASP, PHP, etc.). I still strongly advocate learning basic HTML skills before touching ASP.NET. Hopefully ASP.NET MVC can help bring back the roots.

I was expecting this to be an IE8 rendering of the Acid 3 test or something!

Cool. Can I order them in a larger size from anywhere?

I didn't watch the video, but I've found this feature to be extremely useful for using a shared key across all projects in a solution. What I always do is put a key in the root folder of my solution and then add a link to the file in each project.

Seriously, I don't give a damn if it's open source or not, but to pull it over something so stupid is just ridiculous.

Dang typos! We need a way to edit our comments!

I've had years of procedural programming experience and perhaps that explains why I was a little late to adopt OOP concepts. Without further research on my own, I would have left college believing that OOP was all about inheritance. In our courses, we built ideal scenarios with requirements that were well defined. Our classes often had 8 or more layers of inheritance. In short, the projects we built were "perfect scenarios" unlike the projects we get in the real world. Little emphasis was put on design patterns and instead energy was spent on abstracting classes in a million different directions. Although a great demonstration of the capabilities of inheritance, the projects were far from being easily maintainable in a real world environment. Also without further research, for example, I was left without an understanding of why interfaces were so important, which pretty much left my clueless on the possibilities and power of design patterns.

All college did (for me) was create a VERY baseline understanding of OOP concepts. It wasn't until after college that my primary focus switched from building the most crazy abstraction imaginable to actually building maintainable and readable code.

"it has been measured that it is more efficient to send your engineers home at a reasonable hour when a project is late than it is to have them work long hours. Efficiency doesn't scale with time spent, but exhaustion sure does."

Do you have any references for this? I worked for a company that was notorious for underbidding on contracts, which in turn caused an extremely stressful work environment where developers often put in longer hours, hoping to make up for "lost time". I personally witnessed people who were once brilliant developers write some of the most horrific code I ever laid my eyes upon (myself included). Although I know what you've said is true, I'd love to find a professional case study on the subject.

I realize this wasn't specifically the intent of your article, but I can really relate to that one particular part. ;)

It's a little slow, but I like it.

I haven't used StyleCop ( yet), but I rarely use "this" unless I need to because it looks ugly. Also, I've never found it easier to read code without it being used. But that's just me. ;)

Cool stuff. This is how I've always pictured Silverlight being used, so it's awesome to finally see an application like this.

Maybe I'm just being anal, but I feel like the properties should be in a separate class than the methods. To me, SessionWrapper is the implementation while the properties really have no part of it, which would mean that the properties have no business being there.

Just my humble opinion. Overall, I have no major gripes about the implementation.

I love the product, but it's ridiculously overpriced, in my opinion. Then again, it is competitively priced with Adobe, but I always thought Adobe over charged. If Microsoft reduced the price to $100-200, I think more people would show an interest.

There is one other important difference that wasn't mentioned. If you reverse the order in which the two methods are called, the code will not compile. This is because the out keyword allows you to pass a variable that have not already been assigned to. A ref argument, on the other hand, requires that the variable be initialized ahead of time.

Am I the only one that just doesn't understand this new twitter trend?

He posted part 2: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/silverlight/Create_a_video_player_in_Silverlight_2_Part_2#comments