Tonight I'm in San Francisco at f8. Since I was two seats over from Dan and didn't take photos myself, you should check out Dan's blog for photos of the keynote. :-)

Exciting news from f8! Microsoft and Facebook are partnering to provide VS support with the Facebook Developer Toolkit, native support for Silverlight on FB and a Popfly Facebook Block. During tonight's hackathon (still going), I downloaded the Facebook Developer Toolkit and started playing with it. The toolkit enables developers to build applications for Windows, the web, or Microsoft Office. It did take me just a little too long to figure out that the source (downloaded to "Program Files") doesn't have permissions to create a new directory … I'd like to say it's because I'm tired, but, despite being tired, I'm not sure that's true…. Anyway, just changed the folder permissions and it worked.

Along with about half of the Popfly team, a few Imagine Cup participants are here. Ben Rinaca has uploaded a bunch of photos of the event on Facebook. I'll also upload some of his photos here. :-)

I'm very happy to be home after a couple weeks away. Things seem to have survived in Connecticut without me, and we had gorgeous weather today!

Tonight I'm playing with the Popfly Alpha. Microsoft Popfly launched on Friday as a private alpha, allowing users to build and share mash-ups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly has two parts: Popfly Creator has visual tools for building web pages and mash-ups and Popfly Space is a community where you can share your creations. You can see the demo on Channel 9 and an overview video here.

So far I've only shared one project and haven't written a block. My favorite block right now is the Ransom Note. (and I like Whackamole too :-P) It was hard to think of something to use Ransom Note for since all of my ideas used either no text or a lot of text. Eventually, I decided to mash the Love Factor with Ransom Note. What I couldn't figure out how to do was to hardcode it so that Erin + Diane would be 100…. I feel like that should be easy, but I wanted to do everything with the designer. Any ideas?

Anyway, it's extremely easy to create something with what's there, but I NEED MORE BLOCKS! :-) There are lots of things I'd like to mash up!! The good news: users can add more blocks. Looks like my next step is figuring out how to do that.

MS blogs I'm reading that talk about Popfly (in order of how long I've been reading them):

• Dan's Blog Dan is the Lead Product Manager
• Andy's Blog Andy is a Program Manager on the team
• JohnMont's Blog Andy works for John, the Group Program Manager

Technorati tag: popfly

On the UK Academic Team blog today, I read that Mark is returning to the Academic Team. Mark previously worked in the same role as I do, but in the UK. He'll be returning to the team as their new Marketing Manager. Mark posted a nice intro of WPF resources relevant to faculty and interesting for students on his blog. See how much he likes academia? Welcome back Mark. :-)

Apparently I have a short attention span. Training is long. So I downloaded Scratch today from the MIT Media Lab. I read the article in the Boston Globe earlier this week and have heard about it from Alfred, but had never played with it until…. well, until about 20 minutes ago. My initial thoughts…

• I made a cute kitty cat walk around in a pretty red skirt in <10 minutes including download!
• I made the kitty talk!
• I didn't write any code! Or did I? While the commands weren't exactly intuitive at first, the control structures were easy to understand and weren't scary adult code. ;-) I imagine the "forever" loop would make sense to someone regardless of programming experience. (It goes forever? Got it.) Repeat "10" also seems to make sense. (Repeat this ten times? Ok.)

I need to get back to work. Either doing a lab for training or trying to make a cooler app than Nancy. (see below from the Boston Globe) My kitty is no flying hippo.

Christine Leung and Nancy Chomitz , both 12, began by making simple animations in which characters talk onscreen, but have begun to try interactive projects. Nancy's "flying moon hippo," for instance, blurts out funny phrases when people press different letters. In their current project, a snowman floats across the screen; when he gets into certain spots, a cartoon bubble appears saying, "OMG!! I'M MELTING!!"

I'm still in the training with my friend Jen, a Developer Evangelist in Ohio and Michigan, and some coworkers from the Academic team. Training is much less painful today. On to the good news…

Dan and Jen are staying at the same hotel as I am, so I've been seeing them a lot during our carpool and in class. I'd like to note that they didn't share my extreme joy over this news. In fact, they seemed a little annoyed that I am/was so excited about it. They may have even thought I wasn't being mature! Anyway, my good news… Starbucks has a new DELICIOUS frappuccino!!! The orange crème frappuccino is out and delicious! It reminds me of an orange creamsicle, but with whipped cream. (In the future, I will skip the orange topping stuff that goes on the whipped cream. That was weird and too sweet.) I love summer.

I'll upload a picture of my new favorite frappuccino soon. :-D

Student scholarships are available for the 2007 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing! Grace Hopper is "the seventh in a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront." The conference will take place in Orlando, Florida this October. I can't say enough good things about last year's event. The largest Grace Hopper ever, all of the major tech companies were in attendance bringing many techie women from industry to network with students from around the globe. Students interested in scholarships to attend the conference should apply here. These scholarships fully cover the conference, a stipend for airfare, meals and lodging! Apply ASAP … the deadline is June 11.

I'm taking a training course in Charlotte this week. It's one of the more boring trainings I've taken, but it's been nice to connect with other people who do somewhat similar jobs to what I do. For instance, I had lunch with Peter Laudati today. Peter worked with the BarCamp organizers in NYC to host the event at the Microsoft office in NY. (Btw, you really should follow this link, because the pic with him wearing a target really amused me.) Working remotely makes it very hard to meet coworkers, so events like this are useful for both the content and the connection to coworkers.