You probably know Internet Explorer Test Drive, where you can find several developer demos on the different features in HTML5. It’s also the site where you can find the Platform Preview for Internet Explorer 10.
Now, with Internet Explorer 9 coming to Windows Phone ‘Mango’, the IE team has created a special version of the site and samples for optimized testing on IE9 mobile: Internet Explorer Mobile Test Drive. There are demos on HTML5, performance, graphics and browser theming. By downloading the free Mango tools you get an emulator that you an use today to access the samples.
> Check out the demos using your phone browser > Read the official blog post by the team: Get Ready for a More Beautiful Mobile Web > Download Mango tools with IE9 available in the Phone Emulator
On June 28 we’re organizing an event around Next Generation User Experiences in Brussels Business Faculty. It’s entirely free and every attendee gets a unique T-shirt! Register today and join many other UX enthusiasts.
During this event, you’ll get inspired by Microsoft’s vision and strategy for natural user interfaces – see what today’s and tomorrow’s technologies can bring! In addition, you’ll learn from the UX experts what it takes to build applications that feel effortless in their use and that are optimized for emerging technologies. Finally, we have invited a number of companies that will showcase their next-generation user experiences and will demonstrate what is possible already today!
There will be a very nice prize draw: it’s your chance to win one of the Microsoft Arc Touch mouse. Your presence is your chance to win!
Date: Tuesday June 28th 2011
Agenda:
Address: Brussels Business Faculty St. Lendriksborre 6 Font Saint Landry 1120 Brussels (Neder-Over-Heembeek)
>> Register and join us!
And there is more… do not miss the event of the year:
BUILD is a new event that shows modern hardware and software developers how to take advantage of the future of Windows. Learn how to work with the all new touch-centric user experience to create fast, fluid, and dynamic applications that leverage the power and flexibility of the core of Windows, used by more than a billion people around the world.
With TechEd Europe being held in summer 2012 and no local REMIX event foreseen in September: BUILD is the key event to attend this fall.
How not to miss the event of the year?
//BUILD windows / September 13 to 16 2011 / Anaheim, California / And all around the world
Learn during BUILD:
BUILD is the first place to dive deep into the future of Windows.
If you are a contemporary developer, who thrives on the newest and coolest, who loves the freedom of the web and the power of all devices from mobile to desktop, you need to join us to help BUILD the future. Our approach means no compromises—you get to use whatever kind of device you prefer to run the apps you love.
Do not miss the event of the year:
With TechEd Europe being held in summer 2012 and no local Belgian REMIX event foreseen in September, BUILD is the key event to attend this fall hence:
Stay tuned for more to come. In the meantime, make sure you don’t miss the biggest event of the year.
In 1995, Windows changed the PC. BUILD will show you that Windows 8 changes everything.
Some folks at Microsoft are just great. Take Mads Kristensen and some folks in his team: last week they released a free update to Visual Studio 2010 SP1 that delivers better support for writing standards web pages. In essence, the extension adds Intellisense support for HTML5 and CSS3, following the newest W3C specs as good as possible. This includes schema support for Video, Audio, Input Type, Drag & Drop, WAI-ARIA, Microdata, Schema.org; intellisense for DOM API for Geolocation and Local storage; CSS3 support for 2D transforms, 3D transforms, flexbox model, media queries and loads more . CSS3 vendor prefixes -ms, -webkit and -moz are also included.
What about the free Visual Web Developer Express 2010 version? No problem, you can also take advantage of this extension with Web Developer Express 2010 SP1.
Next steps:
Note: because it’s created by these guys in their spare time, do note this is not an officially supported update.
Yesterday, Microsoft released the Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows academics and enthusiasts alike to be part of the movement. No doubt that this will help turning creative ideas into apps.
The Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) allows developers to plug the Kinect sensor—and the in-depth stream of 3-D imagery it gets from its camera—directly into a Windows-based PC. This gives developers access to the "raw sensor streams" in Kinect, including its high-performance skeletal-tracking capabilities, a sophisticated microphone array, and sample code to demonstrate how to use the sensor.
The release of the Kinect for Windows SDK shows Microsoft's deep support for developers and innovation, particularly in the area of natural user interfaces (NUI). Kinect for Windows SDK Beta is just a "starter" for non-commercial purposes—Microsoft is developing a more detailed kit that will let third parties develop use Kinect commercially. This will allow folks to create any number of uses for Kinect hardware and software and, with Microsoft's license, repackage and sell those packages. This release of the Kinect for Windows SDK is about "unlocking the ecosystem, inspiring innovation, and creating a new Kinect-based enterprise market for Microsoft down the road.”
Resources: Download the SDK, check out the Kinect Quick Starts, What’s possible in 24 hours with the Kinect SDK?, and view the Kinect Project Gallery on Coding 4 Fun.
How are you going to move? Let us know!
Microsoft NEXT (http://microsoft.com/next/) is one of my favorite blogs to discover amazing inspiration about technology today and in the future. Steve Clayton (@stevecla) delivers content that should not be missed in your RSS reader. This time, again he has done it: in the article “Connecting the dots: Microsoft E3 announcements”, Steve analyses how Microsoft is converging user interfaces based on the “Metro” design language first used in the Windows Phone 7 user interface. In the near future, we will see this design language evolving and unifying Windows 8, Xbox Live and Windows Phone 7.
Very much worth a read!
Link: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2011/06/07/connecting-the-dots-microsoft-e3-announcements.aspx (check out the section A world of Metro - user interface unification)
‘Quick tip’ posts are short, useful posts pointing to content and tricks that might otherwise go lost in a typical 140 chars message on Twitterverse.
In this post I would like to share the main resources and links of my Demo Day session on June 1st. Demo day is a customer event at Microsoft Belgium where no slides are allowed. Several of the teams show off technology ranging from Office use to Windows Azure, Lync, SharePoint, Office 365, Windows Phone and much more. My objective for demo day was talk about HTML5 and what it really means, show off Internet Explorer 9 and a glimpse of IE10.
As promised to those present, all resources are here for you.
And just off the press: Disney’s Tron Legacy site offers a beautiful comic reading experience coming to life. http://disneydigitalbooks.go.com/tron/. Be sure to learn more about how the site was built in this post “Behind the Scenes of Disney TRON: Legacy Digital Book Site”.
One of the questions was around tooling. Here’s a quick update on tooling available today.
Note: If you want to read more about Demo Day experiences, Karine has a nice blog post: Demo Day @ Microsoft Belgium.
Let’s build the future of the web together!
On June 1st, during All Things Digital D9 conference, Steven Sinofsky showed a first look at the next version of Windows, code-named “Windows 8”. According to Sinofsky this is big, in fact he calls it one of “biggest change since at least Windows 95”.
I’m pretty excited (ok, that’s an understatement) about what has been shown. My suggestion is to go discover what has been unveiled until now and prepare yourself for more later. Below you can find a number of videos and links with more information.
//build/windows conference
If you are looking for more then join us for BUILD, the developer conference in Anaheim California running September 13 to 16th 2011. BUILD is the first place to dive deep into the future of Windows.
In the official press release following Steven Sinofsky’s preview you can read some important aspects about “Windows 8”:
Building "Windows 8" - Video #1 Jensen Harris, Director of PM, Windows User Experience walks you through some parts of the new user interface.
Steven Sinofsky and Julie Larson-Green, Corporate Vice President, Windows Experience at D9:
Recording of Computex 2011 Taipei Microsoft Unveils 'Windows 8' to World: recording from COMPUTEX 2011, June 2, 2011 with Microsoft Corporate Vice President Mike Angiulo.
You can also watch extracts of parts of the video (instead of the 30+ minute total video) here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windows7/videoGallery.aspx?contentID=win8_preview1&WT.z_convert=Share
Community Day is back: on June 23rd 2011 at the Utopolis in Mechelen 14 different Belgian User Groups are joining forces to provide you a full day of sessions and networking. Register for free, while there are still some seats left. This is the Belgian community at its best: getting together and putting up a great event, for the benefit of the rest of the community. And for the first time at Community Day: two user groups from the Netherlands are also joining in for sessions (SiXin and DotNed.nl).
What can you expect?
Checkout the agenda and choose your favorite sessions. There are five different tracks with speakers from the different user groups covering developer as well as IT-professional topics. A few topics of the developer sessions: MVVM and RIA Services, Windows Azure scalability, ASP.NET MVC and NuGet blended with some MEF, Blend for developers, Windows Phone ‘Mango’ update, Microsoft Surface and lots more.
Practical details
Registration and site: http://www.communityday.be Location: Utopolis Mechelen (Map) Address: Spuibeekstraat 5 2800 Mechelen Event date: Thursday June 23th Start & end time: 8.30 - 19.00 Add Community Day 2011 to your agenda: Outlook *.ics file
Here’s an interesting event my colleagues are setting up at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Mons. A full day of Innovation, technology and entrepreneurship: registration is now open.
Save the date – June 23 2011.
The Microsoft Innovation Center organizes the Innov@MIC Day, 1 full day of 14-minutes conferences dedicated to technology, innovation & entrepreneurship. Join us on June 23 @ the Microsoft Innovation center for this free event! We promise you, you ll get inspired by more than 20 speakers, all trendsetters, futurist or expert illustrated by Demos or Case study.
Exceptional keynote speakers will kick off and wrap up the program,
Youth trends
Tom Palmaerts
Trendswatcher, Trendswolves
http://tompalmaerts.com/
Finding your Innovation catapult
Braden Kelley
Innovation expert
http://blogginginnovation.com
Subject : surprise!
Robot Nao
Robot, Aldebaran Robotics
http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com/
All attendees can enjoy the evening awards program celebrating the Boostcamp#3 and fostering the region’s most significant economic cluster. It’s a free event.
Program: http://bit.ly/micprg Registration: http://bit.ly/MicRegistration
Address: Microsoft Innovation center (MAP) 1 bvd Initialis B-7000 Mons
Add Innov@MIC to your agenda: Outlook *.ics file
Do not hesitate to contact Aurelie@mic-belgique.be for any further question.
I wanted to do a shout out to two of the Belgian developers in the community: Maarten Balliauw and Xavier Decoster have just launched a very interesting site and service for .NET developers: www.MyGet.org. What a great idea! At the same time they even came up with their own new abbreviation: NaaS for NuGet-as-a-Service
What is it?
First you need to learn more about NuGet itself. If you haven’t used NuGet and are doing .NET development you should check it out. NuGet comes in the format of a Visual Studio extension that allows you do install and update libraries for your projects. It’s in essence a package manager for .NET. NuGet itself is free and open source. Learn more at http://nuget.org (NuGet Gallery) and http://nuget.codeplex.com.
MyGet is a service Maarten and Xavier have built, hosted on the cloud (Windows Azure) that allows you to create your own private feeds to be used by the Visual Studio Package Manager. Once you sign in you’re ready to go. Create your own feed by searching packages from the gallery or even upload your own.
How to get started?
Install the components by using the links below and start using NuGet and MyGet. Watch Scott Hanselman’s TechDays session: “NuGet In Depth: Empowering Open Source on the .NET Platform” and then start using it for your projects and inside the enterprise.
More info:
Kudos Maarten & Xavier!
You’re designing or building applications and want to fast forward to get ready for the next generation of user experiences? Join us on June 28 in Brussels Business Faculty for a free event!
Technology is becoming more natural and intuitive. Touch, face- and voice-recognition, movement sensors – all are part of an emerging field of computing often called natural user interface, or NUI. Interacting with technology in these humanistic ways is no longer limited to high-tech secret agents and Star Trek.
And what’s more, you can get some hands-on touch experience with a series of Windows 7 Slate devices or enjoy our exciting Xbox Kinect experiences!
Special: prize draw of Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse
Cease this opportunity to take your applications to the next level, and make them more natural! Register today for this event and meet-up with other UX professionals. It’s free and you’ll get an exclusive T-shirt!
UX Design Patterns for Multi-touch applications
What is that makes your applications intuitive and make them feel effortless in their use? Come and learn a few tips and tricks from the UX experts.
Presented by: Sigrid Vandenweghe (Human Interface Group)
Experience some compelling examples of next-generation user experiences, built on the Microsoft platform. Presented by: Microsoft Partners
Last week I had the pleasure to do a session at the biggest Belgian design and web development event: Multi-mania. My session covered an overview of Internet Explorer 9 developer tools (F12 devtools). With the release of Internet Explorer 9 and support for standards with many of HTML5’s umbrella of technologies, it’s important to take advantage of the latest features while making sure older sites stay compatible.
Developer tools are not new in IE9, but this updated version does bring some very welcome new features:
Below you can find the slides for the session as well as recommended resources to learn how to use the tools.
Happy HTML5 coding and debugging!
On May 24th Microsoft held a press conference announcing many of the new features coming to the next version Windows Phone 7. Codename for this version is “Mango” so we’ll refer to it by that name in the rest of this post. Note that the official name in the documentation is Windows Phone 7.1 beta.
Mango was first unveiled at WMC event in Barcelona in February, more features including the full developer SDK functionalities were also shown during MIX conference in April. Take a look at the video below where Joe Belfiore walks you through the new consumer features.
Read about the consumer features in Mango on these sites:
Developers can tap into more than 1500 new APIs in Mango and start taking advantage of the new features today. But what are the main new features? Too many to call out in this post but focusing on the top we get:
Download and install the updated SDK containing Visual Studio 2010, phone emulator and Expression Blend for Windows phone, including some tools like the .XAP deployment tool. Note: for current application development: the new updated tools allow you for multi-targeting. This means v1 projects can be worked on with the updated tools, as well as creating new applications targeting the Windows Phone 7.1 version. Running the two tools versions side by side is not possible, and in this way not required really.
Today as a developer you can only submit applications for Windows Phone 7 (not Mango). In the near future the application marketplace for Mango will become available and from that point on you will be able to submit your “Mango” targeted application. Register for the marketplace on http://create.msdn.com. For tips on Belgium & Luxembourg specifics of Marketplace registration, watch this live meeting recording: “Windows Phone 7: Tips and Tricks about Developer Registration and Application Certification”.
Happy coding!
If you missed TechDays 2011, there is no way to bring you back the whole experience. That’s the bad news, the good news however is that we go a long way and bring you a recorded video of each of the sessions so you can learn from the best. From now on, you can browse all the sessions, view them online or download to your favorite media player and download the slides. With top speakers like Scott Hanselman, Jeff Prosise, Ingo Rammer, Vittorio Bertocci, Glenn Block, Christian Weyer, Hadi Hariri, …. and so many more. The event welcomed over 40 different speakers!
Check out our photos of the event and a short video compilation below. You can also view the testimonials video from attendees here.
On the TechDays website you can find the video recordings split up by Developer/IT-Professional and then further by track.
Next to the tracks you can also browse scenarios:
(note: Channel 9 contains all developer sessions, for IT-Professional content you can find it on TechNet Edge)
All session videos lead you to a Channel 9 TechDays 2011 Event page. Channel 9 also has a landing page for the whole event, which allows you to browse and do free-text search. You can also take advantage of commenting on the video and in this way have a conversation with other viewers or even get feedback from some of the speakers.
Happy learning!