Zag Studio’s web site

Zag Studio’s web site is now online! I plan to keep expanding the site with information that my clients and prospective clients find useful, so if there’s anything you would like to see there, let me know.

The Silverlight banner in the main page was a fun side project I did during the refreshingly inspiring Siggraph conference earlier this year in New Orleans. You can replay the animation by clicking on the banner again.

The idea was to create a Silverlight animation that included fractal geometry. A fractal is an object that is similar to itself at all scales, like the branches in my animated trees. Each tree is a user control with properties to specify the thickness of the tree trunk, the length of each branch, the number of branching levels, and the number of levels bearing fruit. From those parameters, the user control creates a branching pattern with random variations. There’s also a property that specifies a seed for the random number generation, so that the trees look consistent every time the application runs.

For inspiration on generating pictures using grammars, I found this book a good read: Grammatical Picture Generation: A Tree-Based Approach.

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Oredev and Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards

I got back from the Oredev conference in Malmo (Sweden) a few days ago, where I spoke on advanced line-of-business features of WPF and Silverlight. I presented at Oredev last year and became a big fan of this conference – I had to go back! Just like last year, I was highly impressed by:

The meticulous organization of the conference. Only in Sweden could there be so much attention to detail in such a big conference. I could go on about this…

High technical level and interest of the attendees. All attendees I interacted with were smart, experienced, and highly engaged. It was a pleasure to speak to such an audience.

Interactions I had with other speakers. Other than seeing old Microsoft friends, I had a chance to interact with people from others parts of the industry and get a broader understanding of software trends. I also had the chance to meet some very inspiring women, as you can see in this interview with Amanda, Kerry and me.

In other news, I was excited to find out recently that I was nominated for the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards 2009, in the Individual IT Professional Female category. It would have been even better if Computer Weekly had contacted me and voting weren’t closed already. Still I am very honored to have been listed as one of the 10 nominees for this award – so thanks everyone for reading my blog and making this possible!

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Announcing… Zag Studio!

After more than five years working for the WPF and Silverlight teams at Microsoft, I’ve decided to move on and start my own business.

Participating in the creation of WPF and Silverlight was a fantastic experience. I’m proud of the work we’ve done and I’m grateful for all the friends I made in these and related teams. The time is right for me to advance my career to the next level by creating my own company: Zag Studio LLC.

Zag Studio focuses on consulting, development and training for the Silverlight and WPF technologies. I’ve been having a blast helping customers take full advantage of the power of WPF and Silverlight. It’s been especially fun to utilize features that I helped shape to solve complex real-world problems in effective, well-designed, and performant ways. I am looking forward to helping many of you create compelling user interfaces using these technologies. Zag Studio doesn’t yet have a website, but I will announce it here when the time comes.

My career change will not affect the content of my blog in any way. I will continue addressing WPF and Silverlight topics relevant to business applications, since that will continue to be the focus of my work.

Wish me good luck!

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New look

My blog has a fresh new look! If you use a blog reader, make sure you go to the site to check it out! I’d love to hear your feedback about it, especially if it doesn’t work correctly in your favorite browser (unless your favorite browser is IE6…).

Also, some of you may have noticed that I changed domain name a while ago, from www.beacosta.com to bea.stollnitz.com, to reflect my name change. I will keep the old domain name working for a while, but eventually I plan to let it go, so make sure you update any links to my blog with the new domain.

I also included my email address in this site (on the top right corner).

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My blog just got a face lift!

As you may have noticed, I just moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress. Sorry if you got duplicate copies of old blog posts in your blog reader. If you have trouble with my web site, please let me know – I’ll do my best to fix it right away!

Here are some features of the new blog:

• You can search my site.
• Posts are tagged with categories and subcategories.
• Comments are threaded.
• You can now subscribe to the comments.
• To avoid spamming those who subscribe to comments, a new comment will appear only after I approve it. So don’t panic if your comment doesn’t show up right after you submit it.

And to make your life easier:

• Old links still work, but they will be redirected to the new pages. Please update any links to my blog.
• The RSS feed is the same http://feeds.feedburner.com/BeatrizCosta.

Any feedback about the new blog is appreciated!

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Hello World!

About me

Nationality: Portuguese

Interests: Travelling, Snowboarding, Hiking, Snowshoeing.

Job Description: I work for the Data Binding team in Windows Presentation Foundation. It’s pretty cool how this works. I would actually pay to get to play with the coolest features of WPF in their early stages, but instead I get paid to do it! (Just don’t tell my boss I said that.) Data Binding is where everything comes together: it ties the UI to the data model. It’s where all the magic happens. And I’m pretty lucky to be given a chance to understand that magic.

This blog is a product of my laziness. There are some questions I get asked over and over again. I will feel like I accomplished something when next time someone asks me a question I can just email them a link to a previous post in my blog.

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