US ISV Developer Community

Take a Tour of Data Center in a Container

2009-12-22T11:13:00Z

Frank Arrigo takes you on a tour of what the cloud physically looks like by walking you through a container that was shown at Professional Developers Conference (PDC09). The container is similar to one that is placed in data centers that host your Windows Azure applications.

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation

New: NYC Microsoft Architecture Meetup

2009-12-18T15:21:25Z

Come and join us for the inaugural meetup of the NYC Microsoft Solution Architects :-) in January at the Microsoft office in NYC http://bit.ly/73M7j9 .

Click here to check out
The NYC Microsoft Solution Architects!

Hope to see you there….

Happy holidays!

Gunther :-)

Share Real-time Premium Data with Codename "Dallas"

2009-12-18T13:49:00Z

Microsoft® Codename "Dallas" is a new service allowing developers and information workers to easily discover, purchase and manage premium data subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform.

Dallas was announced at Professional Developers Conference (PDC09).

Dallas is an information marketplace that brings data, imagery, and real-time web services from leading commercial data providers and authoritative public data sources together into a single location, under a unified provisioning and billing framework. Additionally, Dallas APIs allow developers and information workers to consume this premium content with virtually any platform, application or business workflow.

Getting Started with Codename “Dallas”

Become a Dallas Content Provider Learn More.
To get started now, visit the Dallas Developer Portal to get an account key and quick start tutorials.
To see the list of content available on Dallas, please visit us on the Microsoft Pinpoint Marketplace

Resources

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation

Windows 7 Boot Camp Videos Now Live

2009-12-18T01:08:00Z

Windows 7 Boot Camp pre-con event videos to Professional Developers Conference (PDC09) are now live.

Yochay Kiriaty has posted links to the videos on the Windows 7 blog posting, The Windows 7 PDC Boot Camp Recordings Are Online.

The videos include:

Multi-core processing. Arun Kishan described his work around the thread and process allocation that frees the kernel from its thread dispatcher locks and gives Windows 7 the ability to scale seamlessly to many (256) cores. Arun also talked about the new User Mode Scheduling.
Memory management. Landy Wang of Kernel team describes the changes to Windows 7 Memory Management.
Taskbar. Jaime Rodriguez has a great talk about the Windows 7 Taskbar, showing multiple ways (native and managed, using Window API Code Pack and WPF 4) to add great Taskbar functionality to your application.
Libraries, Sensor and Location Platform. Yochay has a couple talks on what you need to remember as developers since libraries may sometimes break your application.
Graphics. Michael Oneppo explained the changes in the Windows 7 graphics stack. Michael's presentation is very interesting, as it describes some of the DirectX API that was down-ported to Windows 7 as a part of the Platform Update for Windows Vista and the Platform Update for Windows Server 2008.
Multitouch. Jaime was the last speaker of the day, covering Windows 7 Multitouch. Jaime explained the concept of multitouch using the native API, but switched to WPF 4.0 support for multitouch.

For time codes and links so you can go to the exact place of interest, see The Windows 7 PDC Boot Camp Recordings Are Online.

For information about getting started in your own application with Windows 7 features, see the Windows 7 Training kit that is available from the Channel 9 Learning Center.

See the Windows 7 Development Center on MSDN. Additional how-to videos are available on MSDEV: Windows 7 New Features for Managed Code Developers.

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation

Windows 7 Multitouch Videos

2009-12-17T20:11:00Z

One of our managed ISV partners Iconics created a channel on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/iconews) to showcase some of their videos. They've got some spectacular videos of how they use multitouch on Windows 7 in their products. Let us know if you have a channel where you share videos like this as well.

Free Silverlight 4 Training Now on Channel 9

2009-12-17T13:20:00Z

Take advantage of the new Silverlight 4 training course on Channel 9 Learning Center where you will learn about the latest features of the Silverlight 4 Beta, announced at the Professional Developers Conference 2009.

Some of the new and highly anticipated features include Printing, Webcam and Microphone support, custom right-click, rich text, HTML support and access to local files with trusted applications.

The course contains a video and a technical feature overview that allows you to drill down into lessons that address three topics: Enabling Business Application Development, Empowering Richer Experiences and Moving Beyond the Browser. Each lesson includes detailed guidance and code samples.

Enjoy.

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation

12 Days of RIA – Day 7 – Search

2009-12-16T22:18:00Z

I got a bit ahead of myself with my desire to move on to styling the app, and decided instead to focus on a few more pieces of business app functionality first. And so, I’d like to show an approach for doing searching on more than one attribute. I want to disclaim this a bit, as I haven’t completely thought through the depths of what should or shouldn’t be done here, but I do want to offer this as a utilitarian approach. In taking a look at the data, I saw that Artist and Album were very simple – it’s the Track table that I found to be a little more interesting:

I already had a way to search for Artist by name – I wanted to add a means to search for Artists by album name, track name, or even track composer. Fortunately, LINQ made this a lot easier than I initially expected. I started by adding an additional query to the domain service which took artist name, album name, track name, and track composer as arguments:

LINQ enabled me pass an IQueryable<Artist> through a pipeline of conditions – that enabled me to query by any combination of criteria . I’m not confident that this is the best LINQ code (in fact, I’m quite confident that it isn’t.) However, it hopefully illustrates the point:

I then went back to Artists.xaml and checked the data source to be sure that the FindArtistsQuery was now visible under the Artist entity

This enabled me to replace the artistsDataGrid based on the GetArtistsByNameQuery with the FindArtistsQuery. After a little XAML adjustment similar to the one I did when I first built the page with the GetArtistsByNameQuery, I ended up with the following:

This implementation could of course use some work, but I think it illustrated how to do something a little more complex than query by a single value.

Code for this is here.

Summary: ISV Software Architecture Workshop in NYC!

2009-12-16T13:39:00Z

ISV Software Architecture Workshop

Dec 10^th 2009, Microsoft NYC

Context:

The second ISV Software Architecture Workshop organized in NYC this year took place on December 10^th. The turnout was great and it is great to see that almost half of the participants were repeat offenders who already attended the first event in March 2009. The intended impact of the event is NSAT on the one hand and Microsoft technology adoption on the other and I think we this event we had a big impact on both of them in the NYC Software Architecture community!

The help and support of Bill Zack (the local AE) and Ashish Jaiman (ISV AE from Washington DC) were essential for the success of this exclusive, and by invitation only, ISV Software Architecture Workshop (SAW) in New York City on December 10^th 2009 The event was in direct response to the feedback we received at the CTO Roundtable of our managed partners to facilitate more learning of new and emerging Microsoft technologies, experience exchange, and networking amongst the ISV community.

We had 32 attendees focused around our managed ISVs but included also Microsoft Solution Architect MVPs, and members of the IASA (International Association of Software Architecture). The attendees consisted of mainly Software Architects, some CTOs, Technical Managers, and a few senior developers.

The feedback we received was fantastic!

The Event:

Based on the feedback from the last event we changed the format of the event to first have very short but structured presentations reviewing the Microsoft PDC announcements. The second part of the event (which was about 2/3^rd of the time) was very intense and interactive sessions specifically targeted to address problems and opportunities of our managed ISVs. We used the OpenSpace format for that part (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/OpenSpace.html ), with 3 parallel tracks that allowed for discussion of a wide range of relevant topics to the attendees. The format was very well received and the discussions were mostly partner lead.

Session Highlights:

Cloud Computing (3 Sessions moderated by Bill) conclusions:

· Overview of Windows Azure

· Windows Azure deep dive: SQL Azure, AppFabric, and Windows Azure Platform

· Best practices and patterns for cloud computing

Silverlight 4 (Ashish moderated):

· What is new in Silverlight 4

· Opportunities for ISVs and differentiation of WPF and SL

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 (Gunther and Ashish moderated)

· New features in Visual Studio and .NET.

· Extensibility of Visual Studio for ISVs

· Modeling with Oslo and Visual Studio compared to DSL toolkit

· Impact of MVC 2 and RIA Services

Summary:

We got outstanding feedback from the attendees such as:

“Thank you for putting this together. I learned a great deal about the possibilities of MS Azure and look forward to the next workshop.”

“Awesome event, Gunther! Thanks for inviting me!”

“I want to credit all of you for the valuable experience ... Let me know who to forward my appreciation to.”

“Thanks for reviewing the upcoming technologies with us at yesterday’s ISV Architecture session.

I think there’s some interesting things coming in 2010 and we’re looking forward to leveraging many of them.”

I believe this is a very impactful event and I am looking forward to organize the next ISV Software Architecture Workshop in 6 months to continue on the great feedback, the value that participants see, and the impact Microsoft can make with such events on technology adoption as well as NSAT.

If you have any question about the event please let me know.

Thanks to Bill and Ashish, without their help the event would not have been possible and certainly would not have been that successful.

Gunther Lenz

The Architecture Journal – Taking BI Beyond the Business Analyst

2009-12-15T23:00:27Z

The Architecture Journal is an independent platform for free thinkers and practitioners of IT architecture. New editions are issued quarterly with articles designed to offer perspective, share knowledge, and help you learn the discipline and pursue the art of IT architecture. The Architecture Journal reaches over 50,000 subscribers worldwide.

Software Escrow as a Service with EPS, Silverlight and Azure

2009-12-15T22:01:42Z

I recently had a chance to sit down with Markus Egger of EPS Software and Code Magazine. We talked about how they created a unique software escrow service (Tower48.com) using Silverlight and how they architected their solution to run on Windows Azure. We recorded this interview and it’s available to view on Channel 9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/jbienz/Software-Escrow-as-a-Service/

12 Days of RIA – Day 6 – Pagination

2009-12-14T21:57:00Z

Even though we parameterized the query for Artists in the last step, it could still return a large number of entities depending on the data in question. RIA provides a means to handle this via the DataPager control and what Brad Abrahms calls “connect-the-dots” data binding. I wanted to do the same for the artists query, but I wanted to also keep the view neat, so I began with a slight layout tweak to the layout. In the Grid that contains the artistDataGrid, I added an additional auto-sized row for a DataPager as shown:

When I looked, the DataPager wasn’t there in my toolbox, so I added it via right-clicking, selecting “Choose Items…” from the context menu, and then checking it in the list of Silverlight Components.

With the DataPager now in the toolbox, I dropped it on the design surface in the neighborhood of where I wanted it to appear. This can get a little tricky with auto-sized rows, so I adjusted the XAML to get it in Grid.Row=”2” with nothing else set as shown:

The DataPager needs to know what size pages we’d like, so I set the PageSize property to something I thought was reasonable (i.e., 10.) Then, to “connect the dots”, I dragged the GetArtistsByName query on to the DataPager, which added the following binding to the DataPager’s XAML:

The artistDomainDataSource’s Data is the “dot” that needed to be “connected” in order to make the artistDataGrid work with dataPager1 as expected. I ran the app and got what I was hoping to see – a master-details-details UI with a place to input query parameters and with pagination at the master level.

The column sorting at the master level even worked as I think most people would expect. Sorting by name sorted the entire (3 page) set and not just the local batch of 10 in the current page.

Since I had a reasonably functional app running, I wanted to do some simple styling to improve its UX a bit. That will be the topic of the next post. In the meantime, code for post is here.

Microsoft buys Opalis to strengthen cloud management capabilities

2009-12-14T21:50:06Z

Moving to strengthen its management tools related to virtual environments, Microsoft Friday said that it has purchased IT process automation vendor Opalis for an undisclosed sum.

Microsoft said the acquisition, which had been rumored for nearly two months, adds to its System Center portfolio needed tools that can manage highly automated and scalable virtual environments. The tools complement Microsoft's strategy to stretch its management tools across on-premises environments and the cloud

Read the article here.

Windows Azure – Great Resources

2009-12-14T21:44:25Z

PDC was a major milestone for the Windows Azure Platform, with Ray Ozzy announcing “production” and Bob painting a future vision in the keynote – there is a lot of new content, information and messaging to digest. New services were announced including “Dallas” as we as some old favorites being re-branded into the AppFabric.

If you want to get started, or need some more information on any of the technologies, then the links below will provide3 you with a wealth of resources to jump start your development:

Getting Started

Windows Azure

Codename “Dallas”

Enrich your Applications with Data from Microsoft Project Code Name “Dallas”

SQL Azure

Identity

Customer & Partner Showcases

Channel 9 Learning Centers

To tie in with the launch, we have released the first wave of learning content on channel 9. The new channel 9 learning centers features content for both the Windows Azure Platform, as well as a course specifically designed for the Identity Developer. The content on both these sites will be continued to be developed by the team over the coming weeks and months. Watch out for updates and additions.

Downloadable Training Kits

To complement the learning centers on channel 9, we still continue to maintain the training kits on the Microsoft download center, which allows you to download and consume the content offline. You can download the Windows Azure Platform training kit here, and the Identity training kit here. The next update is planned for mid-deccember.

12 Days of RIA – Day 5 – Read Only Data

2009-12-11T21:20:00Z

Opening Artists.xaml, I’d like to make it so I can search for an artist, and then see all their associated albums and tracks. This is a simple 3-level hierarchy as evident in the data model and the object model created from it. Accordingly, I’d like to start with this by adding 3 data grids to view before doing any styling work. I first did a little refactoring of the layout on this page, wrapping the StackPanel that holds the 2 TextBlocks into a Grid. VS2010 now has a nice interface for editing the Grid’s RowDefinitions collection, so I used it to add 4 rows (one for the StackPanel, three for the data grids) as shown:

Connecting it to the Artists was pretty easy. I just navigated to the Data Sources tab (choose Data | Show Data Sources from the menu if you don’t see it.) I simply dragged Artist from the TwelveDaysOfRiaContext and dropped it on the Grid, and then Reset Layout|All and set Grid.Row=1 and reset Grid.RowSpan until I had this:

When I ran the app and navigated to the Artists view, I got the following:

which is the full list of Artists in Artist ID order and probably not the desired effect (remember the advice of the comment blocks above the GetXxx methods in the TwelveDaysOfRiaService class.) The designer in VS2010 is quite smart though, and it enables the addition of parameterized methods that return IQueryable<Xxx> which are discoverable by the client side. Even better, if the parameters are simple enough, the designer can generate the UI Elements to input them and invoke the method.

To demonstrate, I started by adding a method to get Artists by name as shown:

I then connected the client to this query by first rebuilding (rebuilding between steps often is a good idea when developing an app on RIA Services.) I knew that the front end could see my query because it was now available from the Data Source tab under the Artist entity.

I removed the DataGrid and its associated DomainDataSource from the XAML (these were added when I dropped the Artist entity on the design surface previously.)

I then selected the GetArtistsByNameQuery and dropped Artist on the Grid again. I needed to do a little editing of the XAML to get the layout to look nice, but came up with this.

The XAML in this file warrants a closer look. The DomainDataSource is where the GetArtistsByNameQuery is bound to the view.

<riaControls:DomainDataSource

AutoLoad="False"

Height="0"

LoadedData="artistDomainDataSource_LoadedData_2"

Name="artistDomainDataSource"

QueryName="GetArtistsByNameQuery" Width="0">

<riaControls:DomainDataSource.DomainContext>

<my:TwelveDaysOfRiaContext />

</riaControls:DomainDataSource.DomainContext>

<riaControls:DomainDataSource.QueryParameters>

<riaControls:ControlParameter

ControlName="nameStartsWithTextBox"

ParameterName="nameStartsWith"

PropertyName="Text" />

</riaControls:DomainDataSource.QueryParameters>

</riaControls:DomainDataSource>

It found the parameters for the query, and bound them to corresponding UIElements. Notice that its AutoLoad property is set to False – the prevents the query from executing when the frame navigates to Artists.xaml. The StackPanel contains the UIElements into which the query parameters are entered.

<dataInput:Label Content="Name Starts With:"

Margin="3" VerticalAlignment="Center" />

<Button Click="artistDomainDataSourceLoadButton_Click"

Content="Load" Margin="3" Name="artistDomainDataSourceLoadButton" />

</StackPanel>

And finally, the DataGrid is bound to the artistDomainDataSource as shown.

<data:DataGrid Grid.Row="1" AutoGenerateColumns="False"

ItemsSource="{Binding ElementName=artistDomainDataSource,

Path=Data}"

Name="artistDataGrid"

RowDetailsVisibilityMode="VisibleWhenSelected">

</data:DataGrid>

All this yields an app which provides a lookup of artists by name:

This is great, but Artists also have Albums – it would be nice see those once an Artists has been selected. I dragged the Albums from under the Artist onto the design surface and reset the layout properties, which yielded the following:

The designer picked up that I wanted a DataGrid bound to Artist entities, but it didn’t make the expected connection at run time. To fix that, I bound the second DataGrid to the SelectedItem of the first via element binding.

I manually changed the path to SelectedItem.Albums, but the Albums didn’t show up as expected. The solution to this is to set the Include() attribute on the Albums property of the Artist entity on the server side as shown:

and to add an Include to the LINQ query in the domain service

This yielded the desired effect.

Repeating the process for Tracks with the tweak shown below to the Include in the LINQ query…

…got me to a full master-details-details view…

…and there was much rejoicing! Code for the 5th day is here.

Code Project Offers Free Windows Azure Tokens

2009-12-11T20:20:15Z

Code Project is offering a limited number of free Windows Azure tokens.

The Code Project has exclusive access to a limited supply of Azure Services Platform Tokens. Best of all, they are free! Grab your token before they run out, then enter our competition for your chance to win an Amazon Kindle.

There are two ways to enter:

Follow the simple directions on the site to create a trial Windows Azure account, then upload the CodeProject Sample App. Every day your app runs in December you'll get an entry in the contest. Or,
Upload your own app and/or web pages to your new Azure account and email the URL to azure09@codeproject.com. We'll choose our favorite on January 1, 2010.

For more information, see Try Windows® Azure in December and Win!

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation