TURING FAQ
Q: What Is Project Turing?
Project Turing is an annotated walk-through, from design to testing of a real-world application. This development will be documented as it happens, and will touch on and teach important topics in Silverlight development
The output of the project will be
1. A series of blog posts, numbered as pages in the project series; some of which will be long enough and stand on their own enough to also serve as mini-tutorials
2. A number of videos demonstrating specific skills or technologies discussed along the way
3. Source code for the demonstrations in the Mini-tutorials and videos, and a repository of the on-going project software open for your use.
4. An application that may or may not be developed to sufficient functionality to be put into service.
The application is a prototype of an aggregator for Microsoft employee blog entries about Silverlight. It consists of four parts:
- Friction-free notification that a blog entry has been created
- A SQL Database of entries
- A WCF application that serves up the entries
- A Silverlight application that displays the entries.
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Q: Who Is It This Project For?
Project Turing is aimed at two audiences simultaneously: Novice Silverlight Programmers (programmers with less than 6 months experience with Silverlight) and Intermediate-Advanced Silverlight Programmers (programmers looking to go beyond the basics).
Each entry will be numbered sequentially for the two audiences. By clicking on [Novice] Next you will go to the next page in the Novice thread. By clicking on [Advanced] Next you skip over the novice-oriented pages and go to the next advanced page. You can decide which path to take and you can of course move back and forth among them.
Finally, all the pages are listed in the Table of Contents so you can move to any page you want rather than reading sequentially.
A more complete description of this experiment in parallel documentation is available on Page 2 of the project.
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Q: Where Do I start?
The project begins here.
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Q: What If I want To Find A Particular Topic?
The Table Of Contents is designed to allow you to jump to any page or topic of interest
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Q: How Long Will It Take
Because I will be documenting the project from both the advanced and novice view point, and because I’ll be building it as I go (using successive approximation) it is not possible to predict with precision how long the project will last (much will depend on feedback and what issues and functionality we decide to cover). That said, I would be surprised if it were done before October 1 or after Dec. 31.
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Q: What is AgOpenSource and Why is Turing Part of It?
AgOpenSource is an umbrella project for all the applications I’ll be building using this model. It is my hope that some/ many/ all of these projects will be licensed for OpenSouce and that we’ll be able to accept and integrate community-created code and modules.
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Q: Where Do I Get The Source Code?
Every blog entry, mini-tutorial and video that demonstrates code will have the code available for download. I will also provide a repository with the canonical version of the project.
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Q: What are the numbers at the tops and bottoms of the pages?
Project Turing is documented as two threads: one targeted at Novices and one more advanced. Each page is numbered for its thread. Thus, the seventh novice page may be the fourth Advanced page and the top of the page would look like this:
Turing Entry: [Novice: 7] [Advanced: 3] FAQ Contents First Page
This tells you that you are on the 7th novice page, the third advanced page and provides links to this FAQ, the Table of Contents and to the first page in the project.
The goal is to allow novice users to read background information they may find useful while following the discussion of the project, while Advanced users can skip over this material and stay with the more challenging material.
You can read your thread sequentially by using the links at the bottom of each page:
Novice: Previous Next
Advanced: Previous Next
You might picture the two threads as something like this illustation:
I’m very interested in whether this threading is helpful or in the way. If it is the consensus that this was a nice idea but is a distraction, I’ll get rid of the numbers and we’ll use the Table Of Contents to let folks pick which entries they want to read.
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Q: What is With the Name and the Logo?
The name was designed only to honor Alan Turing and the logo to make reference to his famous “Turing Test.” If I had it to do over, I’d call it Project Blog Aggregator, but such is life.
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Q: How and When Can I Contribute?
Unfortunately, at this time, I do not have an Open Source license from Microsoft that would allow me to take community contributions. We are working the issue.
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