I had some free time during the holidays and saw at the MIX09 website that they have a contest entitled MIX09 10K Challenge where they ask participant to create a web application that is either using Microsoft® Silverlight™ or Windows Presentation Foundation, as a XAML Browser Application running in Partial Trust or as a ClickOnce application in 10 kilobytes or less. I decided to take a stab at it and this is what I've comed up with

SilverCalendar: A Silverlight Pregancy Calendar

You can see the app live here http://2009.visitmix.com/MIXtify/TenKDisplay.aspx?SubmissionID=0051

Dont forget to vote when you're there :P LOL

My primary motivation when I built the app is the idea of having something that is going to be useful and at the same time fun to build. My wife is currently 34 weeks pregnant and it made me think that a pregnancy calendar would be q great application to do since it relates to me and my current day to day life. I love pregnancy calendars because it gives you a good daily insight on the progress of your baby and what you might expected as you go along in your daily life as a soon to be parent. 

The application that i built is using Microsoft Silverlight 2 with a backend WCF web service. You can find the pregnancy calendar web service here. I wasn't able to add any animations to the application because I decided to concentrate in adding functionality to app rather than the eye candy' With that said, I'll be posting the non-10K application this week.

Be sure to comeback on this blog in the coming weeks because I'll be publishing the source code to both project soon together with a 11 part tutorial and screencast walkthrough that i have prepared to show how to to build an application using .NET 3.5, WCF, WPF and Silverlight.

I've been keeping this for months now because I wanted to announce it at this years Thanksgiving... :) 

On June 7, 2008 we learned about this wonderful news:

Yup, I'm going to be a father soon! :) My wife and I are very excited about this blessing to our family. We can't wait to see our baby on February 2009.

Below is the first picture of our baby taken at 6 weeks:

Next is our babys picture at 20 weeks:

I don't have her new picture scanned yet but I'll post it a soon as I have them.4 weeks ago we learned that we are having a baby girl. Sweet! 

As with all first time dads, there's a lot of things to learn. I'm learning a bunch of new stuff everyday and I highly recommend going BabyCenter.com. BabyCenter.com is a site dedicated to babies and parenting in general. They have a ton on articles about babies, pregnancy and parenting which i really love. I go there everyday to check out articles and information that will help me become a great dad. Also, JustMommies.com is a great site too. They have this calendar thingy where you can check out the progress of your baby day-by-day which is pretty cool!

This is what me and my wife are thankful for this Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! God Bless!