Scott Barnes

Bio

Scott Barnes, former Rich Platforms Product Manager (Silverlight/WPF) and first RIA Evangelist for Microsoft, has been in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) industry since it was first known as DHTML. Prior to Microsoft, Scott also was also part of the first Adobe Flex's birth, by being one of the first handful of community leaders to be receive a sneak peek at its creation (back in the Lego/Royale days). Prior to this, Scott was also an avid DHTML programmer who at the time used to fight with folks in the community that using JavaScript on a public facing website was ok - long before AJAX was coined by Adaptive Path.

He first got involved in interactive design when he was granted a Scholarship by Silicon Studios to study and make use of VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) and from there the passion was light.

Scott was born in Toowoomba, Australia and grew up in a small Outback town called Cunnamulla. It wasn't until the late 80's, his parents moved away from the Outback back to Toowoomba, where his mother studied computer programming (Amiga) and it was there that Scott first got hold of a computer and decided design + computers were fun. His first ever digital creation was the Australian Flag on the commodore 64 where his mother showed him how to use ASCII to produce art.

Scott has since left Microsoft and has taken at present a role with Readify as their new Principle UX Specialist, it's here that he plans on combining traditional engineering excellence with today's UX platforms from both Microsoft and Adobe, not to mention HTML5 and AJAX as well. Inside Microsoft, Scott was part of a team whose job was to help architect the future of where Microsoft was looking to invest in RIA as well as provide counter intelligence on movements of the companies RIA based competition.

".. Silverlight, Flash, Flex, AJAX, WPF etc it doesn't matter which you choose, its more about being open to all of them and finding the right solution that fits your team, your problem and your budget. That's where the real friction lives, the rest is just academic debates that lead to no real outcome.." - Scott Barnes.

Scott currently lives on http://www.riagenic.com and works at http://www.readify.net as their Principle UX Specialist.