Twitter: @katriendg
Microsoft Web Camps are free events that allow you to learn and build on the Microsoft Web Platform. Good news: Web Camps are coming to Belgium!
The Belgian Web Camp event on 24th of January 2011 is a full-day event where will hear from Microsoft experts on the latest components of the platform, including ASP.NET MVC 3, jQuery, HTML5, OData and WebMatrix. Scott Hanselman is doing a two-hour keynote together with James Senior, which is then followed by three sessions delivered by Gill Cleeren and Katrien De Graeve.
Two options to registering for the event:
Location: Business Faculty St. Lendriksborre 6 / Font Saint Landry 6 Brussel - Neder over Heembeek 1120 Belgium Timing: Monday 24 January 2011 – 8:30 to 17:00
8:30
9:00
Welcome and registration
11:00
Opening Keynote by Scott Hanselman and James Senior on ASP.NET MVC 3 and WebMatrix
11:30
Coffee Break
12:30
HTML5: How about today? (Katrien De Graeve)
What is HTML5? With more and more browsers supporting HTML5, ECMAScript 5 and other web standards, developers now have a strong web platform they can use to create a new class of web application that is more powerful and interactive than ever before. What's in HTML5 that lets us take our sites to the next level? Expect demos and code!
13:30
Lunch
14:45
Come in as jQuery zero, go out as jQuery hero (Gill Cleeren)
jQuery is the web developers’ new favorite. This lightweight JavaScript library has developers writing JavaScript code again, and loving it! What previously needed 20 lines of code can now be done in just 3 lines. Who wouldn’t be enthusiastic? Microsoft showed its love for the library by fully integrating it in Visual Studio. I dare to ask: should you stay behind? In this session, we’ll take a look at jQuery and we’ll teach you what you need to know to get you on your way. More specifically, we’ll look at selectors, attributes, working with WCF, jQuery UI, and much more. You could easily walk out of this session wearing a sticker: “I love jQuery”!
15:15
16:30
Oh, look at that data: using oData to expose your data over the web (Gill Cleeren)
While applications, sites, tools all generate tons of useful data, it is sometimes hard to access that data from your own application. To increase the shared value of data, Microsoft has introduced the Open Data protocol. Using Open Data, we can expose any data source as a web-friendly data feed. In this session, we'll start by looking at oData, to make sure that everyone is on board with all the concepts. We'll see how it adds value for the developer and the end user for many of Microsoft's products and services. We'll then look at how we can build our own oData services using WCF Data Services, from working with the basic concepts to more advanced features such as query interceptors and service operations. Come and learn about information and entity services that are stunning in their simplicity!
17:30
Closing drink
Scott Hanselman Scott works out of his home office for Microsoft as a Principal Program Manager, aiming to spread good information about developing software, usually on the Microsoft stack. Before this he was the Chief Architect at Corillian Corporation, now a part of Checkfree, for 6+ years. He was also involved in a few Microsoft Developer things for many years like the MVP and RD programs and he'll speak about computers (and other passions) whenever someone will listen. Before Corillian and Microsoft, Scott worked as a Principal Consultant at a local Microsoft Solution Provider called STEP Technology, speaking, writing, consulting, and very much not getting rich during Web 1.0. Blog: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/
James Senior James works for Microsoft in Redmond as the Web Evangelist on WebMatrix, ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. He helps run Microsoft's top developer conferences like PDC, Mix and TechEd as well as being the mastermind behind Web Camps - free training events, the Web Camps Training Kit and TV show on Channel 9. Blog: http://www.jamessenior.com/
Gill Cleeren Gill Cleeren is Microsoft Regional Director (www.theregion.com), MVP ASP.NET, INETA speaker bureau member and Silverlight Insider. He lives in Belgium where he works as .NET architect at Ordina. Passionate about .NET, he’s always playing with the newest bits. In his role as Regional Director, Gill has given many sessions, webcasts and trainings on new as well as existing technologies, such as Silverlight, ASP.NET and WPF. He also leads Visug (www.visug.be), the largest .NET user group in Belgium. He’s also the author of “Silverlight 4 Data and Serivices Cookbook, published by Packt Publishing. Blog: www.snowball.be.
Katrien De Graeve Katrien is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Belgium and Luxembourg, focusing on Microsoft Web and UX stack. In this role she works with the community and is responsible for developer events. Before joining Microsoft in 2007, Katrien was active as a trainer, a web developer and later a team lead at a Belgian web agency. Very passionate about technology Katrien De Graeve has been active with the Internet technologies for over 14 years. Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/katriend/.
Prepare for the event: check out Web Camps TV on Channel9 and use these resources:
Building out an infrastructure that supports your web service or application can be expensive, complicated and time consuming. Whether you need to forecast the highest possible demand, build out the network to support your peak times, getting the right servers in place at the right time or managing and maintaining the systems, these actions require time and money to do.
The Windows Azure platform is a flexible cloud computing platform that lets you focus on solving business problems and addressing customer needs instead of building that infrastructure to have your business running on. Furthermore with the platform, there is no need to invest upfront on expensive infrastructure all together. Pay only for what you use, scale up when you need capacity and pull it back when you don’t, all this power is provided by the Windows Azure Platform at your fingertips.
During PDC 2010 we announced much new functionality to become available at the end of this calendar year. Some of these new functionalities are available as of today:
Reading about cloud computing is one thing, experimenting and trying it out is a completely different thing. As such Microsoft provides you different ways allowing you exploring these new functionalities while making cloud computing and Windows Azure in particular more accessible to you and your business. All this and much more can be done in three easy steps.
You will need an account and subscription to access the Windows Azure Portal allowing you to deploy your applications. Microsoft offers two choices for having a free subscription:
Note: You can have both offers active at the same time providing even more free access to the Windows Azure Platform and related new functionalities.
Following tools are required to access the news features on the Windows Azure Platform:
As part of the release of the new features, new detailed walkthroughs are being made available in learning how to use these new features:
Last week the Patterns & Practices team announced the availability of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide. The guide describes a scenario around a fictitious company named Tailspin that has decided to include Windows Phone 7 as a client device for their existing cloud-based application.
The book consists of seven chapters:
Tailspin sample application is provided in two versions: just the Windows Phone 7 client or the combined Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure application. The simplified version allows you to test the version locally with simulated services without the need to install Azure development environment on your machine.
‘Quick tip’ posts are short, useful posts pointing to content and tricks that might otherwise go lost in a typical 140 chars tweet on Twitterverse.
Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta has been announced by Jason Zander and S. Somasegar.
SP1 becomes available to the public in two phases:
Improvements include IntelliTrace support for 64bit and SharePoint, Performance Wizard for Silverlight, Unit Testing on .NET 3.5 and more.
Link for download and more information: Jason Zander’s blog post “Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta”.
Note: If you have ASP.NET MVC3 RC installed, Razor syntax intellisense will break. Please read Jason Zander’s note about current compatibility and wait for an update to the RC.
Last week folks from all around the world attended the online or in-person keynote during the Silverlight Firestarter event in Redmond. Scott Guthrie did the opening keynote in which Silverlight 5 was shown to the public for the first time. The rest of the Firestarter event were in-depth sessions about the current version of Silverlight.
> You can read the overview of announced Silverlight 5 features in Scott Guthrie’s blog post: Announcing Silverlight 5
In this post we’ll go through the main topics of the keynote and sessions, and highlight some of the shared information with resources that you can use today. Silverlight 5 Beta has been announced for H1 2011. As mentioned by Scott, there were more than 20.000 votes up on Silverlight feature request site (Uservoice). About 70% of those votes are addressed in the new features in Silverlight 5 beta.
> Watch the full keynote on demand: Silverlight Firestarter Keynote with Scott Guthrie
Media
Something that is probably not shown enough is the support by IIS Media Services 4.0 released in November, to deliver high quality video to a series of clients and devices. During the keynote, Chris Knowlton showed how to use Microsoft Expression Encoder Pro and IIS Media Services to setup a live HD Smooth Streaming site serving up on Silverlight desktop, Windows Phone 7 and iPhone/iPad. Please note this is not Silverlight running on iOS but rather automated transmuxing of the video on the IIS server to be compatible with iOS. Chris Knowlton’s demo is fully on today’s technology of Silverlight 4, IIS Media Services and Microsoft Expression Encoder Pro. Chris showed only one unreleased version which is Expression Encoder Pro SP1. Scott Guthrie mentioned IIS Smooth Streaming capabilities are coming to Windows Azure in the future as well.
Note: Scott Hanselman has a great post up on his blog that runs through all the steps: Streaming Live or On-Demand Video from IIS7 to iOS Devices (iPhone/iPad) and Silverlight Start using today: IIS Media Services 4.0 and Microsoft Expression Encoder Pro. > Download IIS Media Services 4.0
Note: Scott Hanselman has a great post up on his blog that runs through all the steps: Streaming Live or On-Demand Video from IIS7 to iOS Devices (iPhone/iPad) and Silverlight Start using today: IIS Media Services 4.0 and Microsoft Expression Encoder Pro.
> Download IIS Media Services 4.0
Announced Silverlight 5 media features include:
Business applications
John Papa showed a few of his top features for Silverlight 5 business applications and also how to use coded UI testing, now available with Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 (available for Ultimate and Premium editions of Visual Studio). Tim Heuer has a video up on his blog on how to use the Test Manager and coded UI tests.
> Download Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 > Download WCF RIA Services Toolkit December 2010 (by the way, did you know the new Windows Azure Management Portal is built using Silverlight and WCF RIA Services?)
Announced Silverlight 5 business app features include:
3D and Graphics
To present some of the new low level 3D features announced for Silverlight 5, Luigi Rosso, Chief Technical Officer and and Guido Rosso, Chief Creative Officer from Archetype were invited on stage. You’ll have to watch the video to watch Scott Guthrie in 3D. The red polo shirt plays a role, not saying more than that…
Announced Silverlight 5 graphics features include:
The keynote was closed by a very interesting demo of how the SQL Server team is building new products on top of Silverlight.
In-depth sessions are about what you can use today (Silverlight 4), although some of the speakers throw in a few notes when something new in the future will easy a certain task. All sessions are available on Channel9 for on-demand viewing or download in different formats including MP3.
Did not yet have the chance to watch this session but according to Twitterserve it was pretty good to say the least.
Download the announced update: WCF RIA Services Toolkit December 2010
John uses the Book Club example to go through the session material. He explain the most important aspects of implementing MVVM pattern and how to integrate with WCF RIA Services and others. Shout outs to some of the open source MVVM libraries available out there: MVVM Light Toolkit by Laurent Bugnion Caliburn and Caliburn Micro by Rob Eisenberg
John uses the Book Club example to go through the session material. He explain the most important aspects of implementing MVVM pattern and how to integrate with WCF RIA Services and others.
Shout outs to some of the open source MVVM libraries available out there:
Tim Heuer has written about the Silverlight installation subject earlier on his blog.
You can find Jaime’s source code, presentation and a performance cheat-sheet (very useful!) in his blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jaimer/archive/2010/12/02/windows-phone-application-performance-at-silverlight-firestarter.aspx
A new set of labs was also released during the event. You can follow online or download the content for viewing offline. These labs are focused on Silverlight Line of Business (LOB) applications with practical, real-world samples.
View Firestarter labs
At PDC10 last month, we announced a host of enhancements for Windows Azure designed to make it easier for customers to run existing Windows applications on Windows Azure, enable more affordable platform access and improve the Windows Azure developer and IT Professional experience. Today, we're happy to announce that several of these enhancements are either generally available or ready for you to try as a Beta or Community Technology Preview (CTP). Below is a list of what's now available, along with links to more information.
The following functionality is now generally available through the Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio release 1.3 and the new Windows Azure Management Portal:
The following functionality is now available as beta:
Developers and IT Professionals can sign up for either of the betas above via the Windows Azure Management Portal.
We are also making the following available as a CTP:
But there is more:
Microsoft provides you different ways to assist you in making cloud computing and Windows Azure in particular more accessible to you and your business.
Building your first application on the Windows Azure Platform is easy and can be done using these simple steps:
If you would like to see an overview of all the new features that we're making available, please watch an overview webcast . You can also watch on-demand sessions from PDC10 that dive deeper into many of these Windows Azure features; check here for a full list of sessions. A full recap of all that was announced for the Windows Azure platform at PDC10 can be found here. For all other questions, please refer to the latest FAQ.