By now you’ve probably heard the big news that Microsoft’s PDC (Professional Developer Conference) will be unveiling Windows 7. This is big news, especially since they’re not just showing it off, but actually building a lot on top of it, as demonstrated by the 20+ sessions around Windows 7 content. Not only that, but they also recently announced that PDC attendees will get to walk away with a Windows 7 pre-beta build.
Surely PDC isn’t just about Windows 7, though. Check out all the sessions and topics which will be covered at PDC in great detail:
The other huge area of focus for PDC is Live Mesh. I’ve blogged a bit about Mesh and how much I like it, but what’s there now is not the full story.
The sessions shown give an idea about the types of scenarios developers will be able to create with Live Mesh. Ray Ozzie’s keynote should also be a great introduction to the current and future capabilities of Mesh.
Speaking of keynotes, Ray Ozzie is joined by a super list of impressive speakers including Scott Guthrie, Bob Muglia, Rick Rashid, Steven Sinofsky and David Treadwell, all of whom will be making exciting announcements for their respective groups and products.
Another new announcement which came out this week is that of the two symposia. There is one symposium on parallel computing, described as “A detailed look at how multi-core architecture will unleash computing power and enable innovation.” The second symposium is around cloud computing and software plus services. The title is “Head in the cloud, feet on the ground – a practical look at architectural challenges and opportunities with identity, management, data and interoperability in the cloud.”
Lastly because everyone loves swag, they also just announced that attendees at the 2008 PDC will receive a 160GB USB2 hard drive with all the bits. That is a very sweet takeaway.
For those who like bling as well (come on, you know you do), you can find badges and wallpapers here: http://microsoftpdc.com/Social/Bling.aspx
I received excellent news late Friday of last week. Josh Holmes, RIA (Rich Internet/Interactive Application) Architect Extraordinaire, is coming to visit us in Dublin in early October. He will be speaking on the topic of “Developing RIAs with Silverlight 2.”
This is an excellent opportunity, as Josh is a great speaker and a true leader in the RIA space. I am really looking forward to meeting him and hearing him talk about Silverlight. I already have a lot of time for Josh, as he e-mailed me and let me know that in his very short time here, he’s interested in meeting with lots of different developers and architects in Dublin, everyone from Silverlight to ASP to Ruby to PHP to Python and everything in between. We’ll be doing some fun podcasts while he’s here as well, so it should be a great event.
Come along to the Morrison Hotel on Thursday, October 9th to meet Josh and kick off another year of Microsoft Technology User Group Talks. If you’re not a member, membership is free and gives you access to great events like this one as well as kick-off events where we give away attendance prizes, software and more.
For more information and to register for the free event, click here.
I created a ton of Photosynths yesterday and I forgot to mention a neat tip I discovered. I previously haven’t been that familiar with Windows Live Photo Gallery. I fired up the new Photo Gallery Beta to navigate through my pictures of the Artbots and noticed a new menu in the gallery called “Extras.”
The first option in “Extras” (provided you have installed Photosynth) is “Create a Photosynth.” So you can simply navigate through your photo collections, select groups of photos inside Photo Gallery & create your Synth from there. Nifty trick.
It’s been a couple of months since I’ve gotten the chance to write any new programs for my Lego Mindstorms robot. The Artbots were in town this weekend, and I thought that would be the perfect place to get some excellent inspiration.
Artbots is an international art exhibition for robotic art & art-making robots. It was held at the Science Gallery in Trinity College, and if you’ve never been to the Science Gallery you should make it over for their next exhibition. It’s a great space on Pearse Street (with a nice cafe, too) where they hold cool events like this and TechnoThreads, a wearable technology show they had earlier this year.
I was glad I brought my camera along. There were a lot of cool robots to check out. I held this device, called Momo, which sits in your hands to help you find a location. It leans toward your destination, vibrates and helps move you to where you want to go. I shook hands with an eerily attentive alien-looking baby. I played improv drums via computer.
There were lots of art-creating robots as well. This one, called Gossamer-1, picks up sound via a microphone, analyzes it with a digital sound processor, and generates an abstract painting.
Another artistic robot makes a statement by creating a physical manifestation of kills during the play of a video game (Counterstrike). It detects when players kill each other and communicates with various valves containing fake blood, instructing them to discharge a portion of it. That one was a bit freaky, especially since the fake blood containers really did look a bit like real blood donor bags.
One of the really fun robots was the Rubot II, a scary-faced robot which turned out to just want to solve your Rubiks Cube. Rubot has a built-in efficient algorithm for solving Rubiks Cubes. He uses cameras in his eyes to scan the Cube first to determine its initial state, and then solves it in an average of 35 seconds.
But my favorite robot has to be IC Hexapod, a spidery-looking hexapod which can detect people’s faces and study them. You know how when you look at a dog, and the dog sometimes follows your face as you move around a room? IC Hexapod does that perfectly. It will lock onto a face and appear to study it. What it’s really doing is tracking the face and taking a picture of it, which it uploads to its website. IC Hexapod is really a beautiful-looking robot, and it’s the movements that really got me, as it does seem to move like a real insect or spider.
I created a few Photosynths of some of the exhibits. You can click on the images below to go to the 3D versions. You can also search for the “artbots” tag in Photosynth to find them.
Hope you enjoy – they were fun to photograph. The rest of my photos from the event are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martharotter/sets/72157607418493068/
Earlier today Chris Jones posted a new entry on the Windows Live Wire blog (http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com) informing everyone that the latest version of Windows Live Beta, Wave 3, was now available. Included in this release are new beta versions of Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Office Outlook Connector, Toolbar and Family Safety.
You can go to http://download.live.com to download any or all of the new beta applications.
I installed everything right away, and I’m happy to let you know that I am currently writing this using the new version of Windows Live Writer. Writer now includes cool features for editing photos, images and videos, and it also got a slick upgrade in terms of look and feel. And one of the nicest surprises came when I carelessly uninstalled Writer without backing up my Drafts folder. I was happy to discover that all my weblogs, account settings and (thankfully) my drafts were intact and unaffected by the upgrade.
Office Outlook Connector is nice. It lets you use your Outlook client to sync and manage your Windows Live or other accounts. It’s handy to have them in one client, but to be honest I like keeping mine separate. And with the nice, updated Windows Live Mail client, I will probably not use the Connector much. Having offline access to my Windows Live mail is great, but the best new part of the client is the smooth integration with Windows Live Calendar, a feature several people have asked me about. I’ve kept my mouth shut until now, but now you can try it out for yourself. It’s great for sharing calendars with friends and family, for managing calendars or organizing events with other people, and for importing publicly shared calendars like public holidays or your events feed from http://last.fm.
The Toolbar has a couple of nice features like instant translation of pages and jump to your Windows Live sites such as Photos and Mail. It also has a built-in signin for Windows Live. To me, the search box is a bit redundant since I already have it in my browser, but I suppose it would be nice if you used a different default search in your browser and wanted this to have some search options. The new Toolbar does let you narrow down your search results more easily, though, by selecting image, RSS feeds, news, or whatever you’re looking for in the dropdown. Lastly, there is another button for adding additional Toolbar buttons like Wikipedia, Office Live, and more.
The last product I tried out today is Messenger. Lots of people still think of Messenger as just a chat client, but with games, photo sharing, phone calls and contact updates, it’s quite a bit more than that these days. Messenger got a great facelift, allowing users to do a lot of customization of the application. It has a new feature for sharing pictures while inside a chat which looks cool, as well as a “What’s new” section at the bottom to update you on changes in your contacts including new blog posts, photos, their current status, and more. The last thing in Messenger that I’m hoping to try out soon is the video calling, so I’ll give that a shot with my family over the weekend.
I haven’t had time to mess around with anything else, but I am looking forward to seeing the updates in both Photo Gallery and Movie Maker. I am hoping to get into those and try them out tomorrow.
To get the latest and greatest from Windows Live, go to http://download.live.com
Have you heard of Zignals yet?
If you have, I’m not surprised given the great visibility and publicity they’ve received for their unique, innovative application and beautiful set of controls, all done in Silverlight. They also do a great job informing customers through their actively updated blog and recently started sending updates via Twitter as well.
If you haven’t heard about Zignals, you need to check out their site here: http://zignals.com Their tagline is “Transforming Investing” and that’s a very accurate description of what their application does. Zignals provides tools and customized services for investors to democratize online trading. Users can log on to create their own easy-to-use alerts, build custom charts using the intuitive charting application, and do deep technical analysis on their stocks and portfolios.
In short, Zignals levels the playing field for investors, giving them the tools and knowledge they need.
Recently Zignals upgraded their application to Silverlight 2 Beta 2, and yesterday it was added to the prestigious Silverlight.net Showcase – the platform for showing off brand new, shiny Silverlight applications.
When you go to http://zignals.com, you can create an account to test out the charting and alert functionality. In the screenshot below, I selected Microsoft, and then adjusted the time range to show me a particular few months. Then I used the Magnifier control to zoom to get a closer look at the rise and fall.
Cooler still, however, are the Indicators, Trend Lines and other functions you can overlay on your stock to help you with your analysis, research and predictions.
There’s a lot more functionality there than I can show here, so I urge you to check it out for yourself.
With alerts, you have a lot of options around alert conditions, advanced alerts, historical tests and more:
You can also customize how you want alerts delivered:
There are also step-by-step instructions for the various functions, so it’s pretty easy to follow along if you’re not yet an expert investor.
Zignals blog: http://zignals.com/main/stockalertsblog.aspx
Follow Zignals on Twitter: http://twitter.com/zignals
Every couple of weeks I send out a newsletter to developers in Ireland and Northern Ireland about upcoming events, new announcements, news and various tips and tricks.
I’m really interested in hearing what folks are interested in seeing in the upcoming newsletters. So I created a poll (thanks PollDaddy.com!) to find out what you would like to read about. Please indicate your interest below or feel free to e-mail me with additional thoughts at martharo <at> microsoft.com.
If you’re not receiving it and you’d like to, you can click here to get connected: http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/techconnection/default.mspx
UPDATE: Almost forgot to mention – our next newsletter will contain a new surprise from MS Press Books. Make sure you’re registered so you can take advantage of huge book discounts in the upcoming newsletters!
Just wanted to give you a heads-up on an upcoming, free event in Cork. Sidar Ok, who is a senior .NET developer in DeCare Systems, will be speaking in Cork on Monday, 22 September at 19:00 on the topic of LINQ to SQL.
The presentation will discuss the ORM concepts in the favour of LINQ to SQL, and it aims to give a deep insight of the various benefits one can get in daily development. There will be core coding demos throughout the event.
About Sidar: Along with his work at DeCare, Sidar is also a regular blogger and contributor to many Open Source projects and MSDN forums. He holds an MCPD.NET, ASP.NET 3.5 Certified Specialist, and lately developed two live enterprise applications which are live now with LINQ to SQL. He will be sharing his thoughts and experiences on this.
You can find Sidar’s blog on: http://www.sidarok.com, and specifically his posts about LINQ to SQL are here: http://sidarok.com/web/blog/content/category/linq.
The event will be at the Imperial Hotel in Cork. For more information or to register, please click here. For further information on the Cork Microsoft User Group, visit http://www.cork.mtug.ie/.
(Cross-posted from Clare’s blog)
(Note: If in Ireland/Northern Ireland and you are are interested in learning more about WPF, would like to attend a WPF Bootcamp or are interested in “pimping that GUI” by adding a little WPF to your existing application via forms-interop then contact me for more details).
If you’re weighing up your options for a front-end for your next LOB application then check out this amazing Smart Office application from Lawson. Smart Office is a front-end to Lawson’s suite of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and as you might have guessed, it’s written in WPF. It’s a great example of providing a fantastic user experience in an enterprise application, providing each user with a personalised experience via their own “information workspace”, as shown below:
But don’t take my word for it - to see a walkthrough of the application, watch this Channel 9 video. If you want to add a little of the same to one of your applications then be sure to check out the recent release of.NET 3.5 SP1 and the Client Profile and of course the improvements for WPF projects and the WPF designer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1, including
If you’re in Ireland / Northern Ireland are are interested in learning more about WPF, would like to attend a WPF Bootcamp or are interested in “pimping that GUI” by adding a little WPF to your existing application via forms-interop then contact me for more details.
It’s no secret here in Ireland that Virtual Earth has been getting a lot of exciting new developments and investment lately. With all the new Birds Eye View maps, 3D enhancements and models and sophisticated APIs for developers, there’s little wonder lots of companies are building their web applications on top of Virtual Earth.
On October 16th from 9:00 - 17:00, Virtual Earth experts show you just how easy it is to track your company’s assets, find customers, manage mobile sales forces and make sure that customers find you before they find your competitor!
The Virtual Earth event is free and located in the Microsoft Building 2 Auditorium in the South County Business Park in Leopardstown.
Click here for registration and to find out more about the event.
Agenda: 08:30 - 09:30 Registration open
09:30 – 09.35 Welcome - Jennifer Forsythe 09.35 – 10.30 Microsoft Mapping Platforms overview – Jennifer Forsythe
10:30 - 10.50 Tea/ Coffee Break
10:50 - 11:20 Partner presentation - BizMaps 11.20 - 11.50 Customer presentation - TBC 11:50 - 12:50 Lunch
12:50 - 13:20 TBC 13.20 – 14.05 Virtual Earth Deep Dive – Johannes Kebeck
14.05 – 14.25 Tea/ Coffee Break
14.25 – 14.55 VE Pricing – Jennifer Forsythe 14.55 – 15.40 Virtual Earth Deep Dive – Johannes Kebeck 15.40 – 16.00 Q&A Session
See you there!
Click here to be invited to Virtual Earth events and webcasts!
Click here to find out about forthcoming Virtual Earth events!
Here's your personalised result courtesy of smallestdotnet by Scott Hanselman:
Quite clever!
There are still some seats available for this event in Sandyford, being run by the SQL Server Ireland User Group... registration is via http://sql.mtug.ie/Events/EventInfo.aspx?ID=2a6f555f-c4f9-40c6-8971-097f46cba063
The topic is SQL Server - Index Internals & Fragmentation.
For this episode I sit down with Ciara Murphy to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about partnering with Microsoft. The full podcast is nearly 11 minutes long, but I have included markers in the audio so you can use the skip buttons (either side of the stop button) to skip directly to the topics as per the table below:
You can find more information at https://partner.microsoft.com/, in particular the Partner Program and Points Guide is an invaluable source of information.
To achieve certified partner level you need to have 50 partner points. As mentioned in the podcast, for an ISV typically this is done by getting a product certified. You can find more information about testing at http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-US/services/outsourced-testing/product-certification-programs/microsoft/Platform-Test-for-ISV-Solutions.htm , while the Platform Test for Hosted Solutions at http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-US/services/outsourced-testing/product-certification-programs/microsoft/Platform-Test-for-Hosted-Solutions.htm addresses certification of a managed service.
Details of what the test for hosted services involves are available http://www.lionbridge.com/NR/rdonlyres/3E6C7DFA-8215-4308-946D-3C77AC475A12/0/MicrosoftPlatformHostedTestFramework10320080110.pdf and should give an idea of the effort involved in passing the tests.
Also available: mp3
Cross posted from ronan's blog
So my last few posts outlined how easy it was to create a webslice and an accelerator and also to ensure your site renders correctly in IE 8...
So now that you're equipped with a couple of working examples, I've got an IE 8 branded wireless mouse to give away to the author of a cool example of a local site (i.e. Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland only I'm afraid) which has either an IE 8 webslice or an IE 8 accelerator - if you don't already have one, 15 minutes should do it!
If you've written one, let me know, and the best example will win the mouse...I've only got one, and it needs to be a local site which I can access (obviously!)
You may know that one of the goals of IE 8 is to be the most standards-compliant version of the browser ever...clearly this has implications for all those sites out there which have content which is not strictly compliant to e.g. CSS standards for example.
Thankfully, IE 8 has a few modes to allow it to be compatible with such content :
By default, IE 8 attempts to display content by using its most standards compliant mode: the Internet Explorer 8 Standards mode. But what if you're not ready to go through your site page by page to make it standards compliant? The easiest and quickest thing you can do is to use a compatability meta tag/header. For example, the below meta tag will cause IE 8 to use IE 7 compatibility mode:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7">
This can be added e.g. to a single page that doesn't render properly in IE 8 at the moment, or you can use it for you complete site by adding it as a custom HTTP response header in IIS - that's it and you're done. Here's a snapshot of what/how I added it to my default webs site on my local IIS 7:
Easy!
MSDN is one of the sites I use most frequently, so I thought it would be a good candidate for my first IE 8 Accelerator. And it turns out it's even easier to do than writing a webslice. All you need to do is write a simple XML file, the specification for which can be found here on MSDN.
The below is the content of my MSDNAccelerator.xml file and as you can see it's pretty simple. I'm reusing MSDN's favicon.ico as for my accelerator (note that the domain name used for the icon must match that of os:homepageUrl). The os:activityAction and os:execute elements define the interaction with your sevice provider - in this case I just pass the selected text to the MSDN search engine via the os:execute block.
1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
2: <os:openServiceDescription
3: xmlns:os="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
4: <os:homepageUrl>http://msdn.microsoft.com</os:homepageUrl>
5: <os:display>
6: <os:name>Find on MSDN</os:name>
7: <os:description>Find more information on MSDN</os:description>
8: <os:icon>http://msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico</os:icon>
9: </os:display>
10: <os:activity category="Technical">
11: <os:activityAction context="selection">
12: <os:execute action="http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/Default.aspx" method="get">
13: <os:parameter name="Query" value="{selection}" type="text" />
14: </os:execute>
15: </os:activityAction>
16: </os:activity>
17: </os:openServiceDescription>
Here's what it looks like from the user's point of view from within IE 8 (available via right-click):
The accelerator opens a new tab in IE 8 with the results of your MSDN search. Pretty neat! If I had control over the MSDN site I could add a lightweight preview page to popup a quick view of the results (this is e.g. what some of the mapping accelerators do).
To make this available on a website I would just publish the XML file and provide a button to allow the user to install my accelerator. Here's the code for my sample page:
<%@ Page Language="IronPython" CodeFile="Default.aspx.py" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head runat="server"> <title>Add Accelerator Test Page</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <button id="myButton" onclick="window.external.AddService('MSDNAccelerator.xml')"> Add the MSDN Accelerator to Internet Explorer 8</button> </div> </form> </body> </html>
For your convenience I've attached the sample project including the test ASP.NET page plus my accelerator to this post (see link at the bottom).
And here's what it looks like when you click:
Common IE 8 accelerators such as those for Facebook and ebay can be installed from http://www.ieaddons.com/en/accelerators/. You can manage (e.g. remove) your accelerators via the Tools->Manage Add-ons window as shown below:
So all in all, pretty easy - you can add a useful accelerator to any site in less than 15 minutes I would guess. A little more work (e.g. on a preview) would make it even more valuable.
I recently had the opportunity to meet with Microsoft Ireland’s new team of Student Partners. They were incredibly enthusiastic, and I’m looking forward to the great things they’re planning on doing over the next school year.
I talked to the students about as much as I could cram into a little over an hour. So we did a brief overview of Silverlight (they even got a sneak preview of the Silverlight NBC Olympics application!), talked about XNA and game development and lastly walked through a bit about Popfly.
I promised everyone I would post links and slides, and so here they are.
If there is any other information anyone needs about topics we covered, please let me know. See you all soon, and don’t hesitate to drop me an e-mail if there’s anything I can do to help you this year.