Some of you may have missed Scott Guthrie's First Look at Silverlight 2 - so I thought I would add it in here.
We are all very excited with the news around this major new release of Silverlight which will get its public beta release very shortly. Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser. Developers will now be able to write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby).
I was speaking last night to Vicki and Michael from the Python Ireland - so I know there will be one group of people who looking at the IronPython support with interest. It will also be very interesting to hear what the ever-growing Ruby Ireland community thinks of the IronRuby support...
Scott's post has all the details about the upcoming release and also contains links to a set of really excellent tutorials for Silverlight 2 - check them out:
Quick note of congratulations to two of my Microsoft Ireland colleagues who have been short-listed for this year's Best Technology Blog in the Irish Blog Awards. The winner will be announced this Saturday - so best of luck to Dave Northey (just back from an exhausting few weeks travelling around for the community launches and straight back in to preparation for the March 11th Launch 2008 event) and Alexia Golez (who is a very familiar to anyone involved in the Irish micro-blogging scene already).
Our group is also one of the sponsors again this year - so best of luck to all the folks short-listed for the Best Personal Blog too!! Looking forward to seeing you all on Saturday night! :)
Over the past few weeks, we've had hundreds of folks attend the community launches for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 in Belfast, Cork, Galway and Dublin. We've been using the opportunity to learn more about which of the hundreds of new features we should highlight in the showcase Launch 2008 event in Dublin on March 11th.
So, if you didn't get a chance to attend the community events at a city near you, this is your final chance to sign up to the official Microsoft Dublin Launch 2008 Experience event on March 11th in The Tripod in Dublin. Click here to register for the 3pm slot. You wouldn't want to miss the chance to pick up your free copy of the products! (Though it will only be a voucher for SQL Server which you can redeem as soon as it ships!)
We'll be looking forward to seeing you there!
Wow is all I can say. I was honestly expecting around 20 people to this event and was quite pleased with the idea that I might get that many women turning up.
It's two days away and we've more than doubled that, so much so that I actually had to close registration today! I am absolutely thrilled with the response from the tech community and the support we've been given - this is fantastic. Thank you!
If you haven't registered yet and wanted to go, fear not. First of all - send me an e-mail and let me know. I will do two things: 1) Put you on the Waiting List, so that if anyone drops out, I can let you know, and 2) Put you at the top of the list for the next dinner.
Speaking of the next dinner - I will announce the location of the next dinner on Wednesday at Odessa, and the dinner will be in April. You can see the current runnings and vote for your choice (courtesy of Ireland's own PollDaddy.com) on our website at http://www.irelandgirlgeekdinners.com/
With all the buzz around the event, a few fantastic sources have picked up on it as well, and Ireland Girl Geek Dinners has received coverage in Silicon Republic and The Right Hook. We'll also be on RTÉ Radio 1 Tuesday morning as well as RTÉ TV's Six One News Tuesday evening! So look for some lovely ladies tech talking tomorrow on the tele!
In just a few short hours, the Irish Web Technology Conference kicks off! I am really thrilled about this because there are lots of really amazing speakers that Ireland is quite lucky to have come pay us a visit!!
The Opening Address and Keynote with Minister Tony Killeen and Nooked CEO Fergus Burns should be excellent Tuesday night at 7pm. If you're interested in popping along, please send me an e-mail...I have a few extra passes to the evening's events!!
Some of the sessions I'm most looking forward to attending include:
and...basically everything else! Day four is especially interesting to me with the legal track, as those are increasingly important issues which you don't often find at web conferences.
I wish all the talks were being recorded, but they're not - so you have to get there to see these amazing speakers!
During the conference, I'll be walking around with my Handycam doing quick interviews and chatting with attendees for our webcasts, so keep an eye out! I'll also be updating the iwtc twitter channel, so if you're a Twitter user, follow iwtc to get the latest and greatest updates to the conference!
On a bummed note, I was really looking forward to the iPhone development talk by Kevin Hoffman, Editor-in-Chief of the iPhone Developers Journal, but alas - we are scheduled at the same time!
I'll be talking about how to build cool and fun mashups quickly with Popfly, as well as Silverlight development. With the impending landing of the Silverlight 2 beta, this is an especially exciting arena lately! More on that later!
See you this week at Cineworld!
Dr. Joaquin Quiñonero-Candela is an Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He works with the Applied Games Group. He and his team are doing quite a lot of interesting work as you will see in his talk, titled "Learning to Race." He talks about all of this, as well as a showcase of an internship there. Enjoy!
Way better than a poster, this is a handy application that helps developers to drill down to each product and technology and learn about new features, objects, Web services, namespaces, and schemas required to extend Microsoft Office and build custom Office Business Applications (OBAs). This application also includes links and pointers to online resources available on Office Online, MSDN, TechNet, Channel 9, Channel 10, and OBA Central.
What’s in the Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map Version 2?
1. Update to more than 200 links to MSDN portal pages, MSDN articles, MSDN reference documentation, blog posts, RSS feeds, and community resources.
2. New products and technologies such as:
· Office Development in Visual Studio 2008
· PerformancePoint Server 2007
· Unified Communications
3. User interface improvements:
· Top 2007 Office system Web sites toolbar
· Scaling and scrolling to varying resolutions
· Crisp graphics
You can install via ClickOnce from http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/devmap
Dave Mitchell came all the way from Seattle during his Thanksgiving holiday to talk with students at the XNA tour. He is a director at Microsoft for XNA, and he certainly knows his stuff. Dave gave the opening keynote of the XNA European Tour, where he talked about the "Ongoing Democratization of Game Development." It's an excellent overview of how the games industry is changing and opening up. It's not a country club anymore - XNA allows anyone to play in this space, just like sites such as YouTube opened up the media industry to everyone.
We were really lucky to have Dave here! I am thrilled with the video as I had also just returned to Dublin from my Thanksgiving holiday, and had arrived too late to hear him. Enjoy Dave's talk!
If you were at the Dublin community launch event on Feb 13th you saw an ASP.NET / VE / SQL Server 2008 demo that I put together during Dave's talk on Windows Server 2008. (Philip from MTUG was sitting beside me, not doubt a little concerned that I should have had my demos done by then :-))
When I highlighted the code involved if you were paying attention :-) you may have seen that I was using regular ADO.NET code rather than LINQ to select / insert details of the pushpins on my VE map. I side-stepped the VS 2008 / SQL 2008 interop issue, but basically at the moment if you try to open a DB conn to SQL 2008 from VS 2008 you may get the following error:
“This server version is not supported. Only servers up to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 are supported.” There is, however, runtime connectivity. Obviously, since my demo worked.
This CTP addresses this issue, and enables the following Visual Studio functionality for SQL Server 2008:
By the way, I've had a couple of requests for the code of that Demo - I need to tidy it up first, but I will post it to my blog when it's done.
Rob Miles is a Microsoft MVP, and as he says in his highly entertaining talk below - it's what all Microsoft Student Partners should aspire to be. Watch as Rob tells bad jokes and demos XNA Game Studio on his MacBook Pro. I laughed out loud at his descriptions of *alternative* games like "Hide the Controller" and "Controller Racing."
Enjoy!
Last week I posted that the first ever Ireland Girl Geek Dinner was coming to Dublin during the Irish Web Technology Conference. If you haven't registered yet, there's still time!
Go to http://www.irelandgirlgeekdinners.com & click on "Register" to add your details and save your spot next Wednesday, February 27th for 7pm at Odessa on Dame Court!!
Now's your chance to meet other women interested in technology, enjoy a great dinner at Odessa, and help launch Ireland Girl Geek Dinners into a great organization for women all over Ireland!
If you're outside of Dublin, don't worry - the next dinner in April will rotate so that more women can attend! Make sure to vote for where you'd like the next dinner to be on the website.
If you have any questions about the event, please feel free to contact me. Looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday!
Back in November, Dublin was host to an event called the XNA Game Studio Tour. It was a full day jam-packed with superb XNA experts talking about the upcoming XNA Game Studio 2.0 release, showing off features and real-life examples of XNA applications and games.
Liam (pictured below in the video) was kind enough to pass along videos of the event so that we could share it with more people, as the presenters were all quite good! I took some time this week and turned them into Silverlight applications, and I'll be uploading them over the next few days.
The first presenter is Charles Cox. Charles is one of the most enthusiastic and dedicated speakers I have ever seen, and he does a great job showing off some of the brand-new networking features in GS 2.0. Enjoy!!
I know you've all been waiting for it, so hurry up and register at http://www.irelandgirlgeekdinners.com/!
The dinner is taking place in conjunction with the Irish Web Technology Conference. It is on Wednesday, February 27th. We have two venues, but we're waiting until later this week to see how much interest there is - then I will update you with location. Special thanks to Microsoft Ireland for sponsoring the dinner.
What this is is basically an evening for women in technology to get together, enjoy some dinner and meet some new faces. It's a way to encourage your fellow women colleagues to join the community, offer their expertise and help grow the network of role models and leaders here in Ireland.
The one rule is that men are allowed to attend, but they must be the guest of a woman who was already planning to attend. Get that? ;-) So ladies when RSVP-ing, please add in the comments or e-mail me if you'd like to bring a guest so we can manage numbers.
If you have questions about the e vent, would like to get involved at a higher level, or would like to sponsor a future dinner, please contact me at martharo [at] microsoft.com.
Thanks - looking forward to seeing you all at our first GGD!
Last year I started working on a side project to keep track of my family. I stopped at some point because I didn't want to put too much information on the public site. Now that v6 of the Virtual Earth control is out, I have picked the project back up again. I wanted to make the data easier to maintain and be able to protect certain pieces of data.
After moving it to its own site, I got rid of the array so I could replace it with maps.live.com collections. To create a collection, simply open maps.live.com. In the top-right corner is a "Collections" option. Clicking this allows you to create or view your collections. I created a new collection for my family. Adding individuals is even easier. You can add data to the collection by from the map by right-clicking & selecting "Add a pushpin." When the form pops up to edit data on your pushpin, you can add the pin to the relevant collection.
Once you have a collection (and you can always edit, delete, add to the collection in the future), you can bring that data onto a map. The following code actually imports the layer:
function AddMyLayer(type)
{
var l = new VEShapeLayer();
var veLayerSpec = new VEShapeSourceSpecification(type, collectionID, l);
map.ImportShapeLayerData(veLayerSpec, onFeedLoad, false);
}
Type is which type of shape you're bringing in - in this case you want VEDataType.VECollection.
onFeedLoad is just a callback that executes after the layer is added.
So now we just need the collectionID. I'm sure there is an easier way to do this, but I didn't find it and this was pretty fast anyway. What I did was click on my collection and under "Actions" select "Send in e-mail." The e-mail will pop up with a hyperlink to send. Pull out the string between "cid=" and "&encType" and that's your collectionID. Embed that in the script file and you're good to go!
Next on the agenda is adding Windows Live ID Authentication to the site! You can follow the site's progress here.