Robert Burke's MSDN Weblog

May the road rise to meet you...

robburke — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:30:00 GMT

It's time for me to sign off from this blog. I'll be over on www.robburke.net and wish you all the best.

Keeping Connected to Microsoft in Ireland

robburke — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:17:00 GMT

The whole Developer and Platform group have joined forces to start an MSDN Ireland Group Blog, including new developers Martha Rotter and Ronan Geraghty (who I must say are off to an amazing start with the group). Inimitable community guru Clare Dillon, as well as Olive Cannon and Ciara Murphy, who you might know through our events and the Partner Program, will also be posting on that blog.

It's a great idea: you can subscribe to one feed and get all the news from the group. So if you're keen to keep up with all the latest Developer and Platform Group news, I'd recommend that you visit and subscribe to the new blog.

MSDN Flash Ireland Newsletter

Martha and Ronan are going to be carrying on the bi-weekly MSDN Flash Ireland newsletter, which contains local event information, as well as news from MSDN and now guest columns. You can sign up for the newsletter through the Ireland TechConnection site.

Local Usergroups

Someone asked me today if TechEd Europe in Barcelona is going to be worth attending. I learn a lot from the big Microsoft events, but did you also know that thanks to our local usergroups there are some very high-quality local events taking place all over the island, and these are often free? If you sign up to the Flash Newsletter and follow the MSDN Ireland blog, the team will keep you up to date about these.

Five-digit number

robburke — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 14:16:00 GMT

Here was my XBox Live Gamertag this morning:

According to Dave, that makes me a sad git, and he's probably right, but according to Guitar Hero, it also makes me:

Rock on.

After the Last Stand

robburke — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 12:04:00 GMT

When the XNA-fuelled fireworks were over at yesterday's Last Stand in Dublin (literally and figuratively) I was totally lost for words. When does that ever happen?!

What I really want to say most is thank you - especially to Clare Dillon, Philip McKeown, Fergal Breen and everyone else at Microsoft, MTUG, IrishDev and beyond who made my time with the Ireland developer communities so enjoyable. I love the communities because you guys WANT to be there and so it makes it worth my while to shower you with my honest (boundless?) enthusiasm.

And thank you so much for letting me keep the Lego Mindstorms NXT kit! (!!!) I promise you it will be well looked after and is staying in a loving home where it will get all the attention it deserves. And Siofra and I may have to share the table between mosaics and Lego from now on :)

You probably could tell, I really enjoyed the chance to pull out all the stops and show you what I've been up to.

Just like the guy who forgets that his glasses are on his forehead, I forgot that my speaker notes were in my pocket. There were about 4 other things about XNA and Robotics Studio I forgot to show you yesterday... but those all are for another story, except this one thing:

With the XNA 1.0 Refresh, it takes just one step to package up your games (code+content) to distribute as an install for Windows and XBox360! At present, you need to be a XNA Creators Club member to play the XBox versions, but the Windows ones are good to go for free.

So if I can have the permission of the inimitable Phil McDarby to distribute the beautiful background image behind the fireworks, I'll take my Guitar Hero XPlorer-controlled finale, pack it up, and you can all answer Ireland's Call with your Guitar Hero controllers any time you want, even when Ireland aren't playing rugby at Croker.

p.s. what are you doing here?! My new blog is here!

Microsoft Surface

robburke — Wed, 30 May 2007 11:51:00 GMT

Out of Steve Bathiche and Andy Wilson's work on Surface Computing comes an elegant 30-inch diagonal display table that reacts to touch -- and will hit the market in Winter 2007. It'll be on show at Siggraph in August.

Check out the demo (done in Flash (!) ).

Please, can I have one in my living room?

More on the Microsoft Research work into surface computing (and a cool video) from the MSR TechFest event this year.

P.S. Microsoft stuff gets cross-posted here for another week but my blog is actually here.

Nikon's RAW (NEF) Vista Codec Updated

robburke — Sat, 26 May 2007 22:30:00 GMT

Nikon has released an updated version of their RAW (NEF) Codec for Vista that resolves an issue that caused it to suddenly stop working last week. Apparently the problem had something to do with an expired certificate.

The new Codec is still labeled version 1.01. However, if you uninstall the old 1.00 or 1.01 codec, and install this new one, you'll be back in business.

I mentioned back in January that I have stopped shooting JPG images, in favour of only shooting RAW (NEF) images. I am still using the following photography pipeline:

View, sort, and triage the NEF images from Vista's File Explorer and Windows Photo Gallery.
Load into Nikon Capture NX for post-processing. This program has earned my respect with its ability to store my edit history in the RAW file, and also one ingenious feature (yes, I think ingenious is exactly the word for it) called Color Control Points. However, I have nothing positive to say about Capture NX's user interface: it desperately needs keyboard shortcuts, and lacks basic navigational functionality like mouse-wheel zoom. I found a great resource for Nikon Capture NX tips and tricks here at Nikonians.org.
Batch export to JPG using Nikon Capture NX's batch processing
Upload to Flickr.

There are two challenges with this pipeline:

First, the Vista codec still isn't particularly quick, even on a relatively beefy laptop (Vista Overall Experience Index: 3.0, Processor: 4.6, Memory: 4.7, Graphics: 3.6). You can flip through photos quickly enough, but if you want to delete a photo, Vista spins its wheels while the codec renders the high-res image. To work around this, I use the keyboard shortcuts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) to quickly "rate" all my photos, and then delete all the bad ones in one go.

Second, although you can associate metadata ("tags") with NEFs in Photo Gallery, using the above-mentioned codec, the tags don't show up anywhere I can find them in Capture NX. Therefore I am not tagging my images on Vista (defeating a lot of its organizational potential) and instead am just tagging the JPGs on Flickr, which, by that point, have become disassociated from the original NEF images. Some day, if I want to sync them, it may be an intractable task (or at least an image processing challenge).

So the Vista NEF experience is good but not great. I am still going to keep shooting RAW (NEF) only, as I am learning how to make subtle and powerful changes to my photos using Capture NX, which I find very valuable. After all, if it's worth shooting, it's worth trying to shoot it right :)

p.s. As it's Vista-related, I'm cross-posting this here on my old blog, but I've moved my blog over here to http://www.robburke.net now.

Rob's Last Stand: XNA, Microsoft Robotics Studio, 360s, Wiis, and Dancing Robots

robburke — Wed, 23 May 2007 00:32:00 GMT

Talk Abstract:

By day, he's helped mild-mannered developers build n-tiered architectures using .NET technologies.

But by night, the real Rob comes out. The one that works endlessly - nay, furiously - with XNA and the Microsoft Robotics Studio. And now, with backpack and camera over shoulders, he's going freelance, making the IMTC, in fact, Rob's Last Stand*. Witness applications written in C# that run on Windows and the Xbox 360! Gasp as the Nintendo Wii controller gets integrated into .NET to control a wee flock of boids! Learn how to do all this stuff yourself! And if none of that batters yer sausage (in the words of the esteemed Podge O’Leprosy), then come for the dancing robots.

Rob's going to give the talk he's been dying to give for 3 years, give away the Lego Mindstorms kit, and then boldly make like a moose, and vamoose.

Ah goodness, now you just have to be there.

When: June 7th, Irish Microsoft Technologies Conference
Where: Cineworld, Dublin
Level: All
Who should attend: Developers, IT Pros, Designers, Leprechauns, my Mammy.
What you’ll take away: XNA, Robotics Studio, possibilities for everything from commercial apps to weekend projects, a sense of awe and wonderment at the interconnectedness of all things, oh, and possibly some Lego.

* By "Rob’s Last Stand" please note that terms and conditions apply, including but not limited to Rob making another stand at the bar that night.

Helpful links: For those traveling from overseas, here are some resources that might come in handy, in no particular order --

Aer Lingus website

Ryanair website

Air Canada website

International Dog Sledding website

p.s. Cross-posting this here on my old blog, but I've moved my blog over here now.

All good things ...

robburke — Mon, 21 May 2007 15:45:00 GMT

It has now been almost three years since I joined Microsoft to work with developers in Ireland. During that time, Microsoft has unleashed one-and-a-half new Visual Studios, presented the world a new Vista, and most recently they've shed some SilverLight on things. Meanwhile, I've kept up the auld vices: dabbling in AI, shooting some photographs, and even introducing people to the occasional moose.

But all good things must come to an end. The silverlit vista pictured here was the view out my window last night on Georgian Bay, just north of Toronto. I've been back in Canada this week, and am returning on Friday for my Microsoft Ireland home stretch between now and the 18th of June.

Next month, I'll be saying farewell and returning to Toronto for an exciting summer that will culminate with my sister Elizabeth's wedding in September. (She and her fiancé Jason are the ones with the adorable husky dogs.) Then, with backpack and camera over shoulders, I'm off to see the world. And beyond that? Well, I have some ideas, but you'll have to keep in touch :)

Between now and the middle of June, there are some big things happening for developers in Ireland:

There's a Windows Server 2008 (née Longhorn Server) Jumpstart event coming up in Dublin with some great developer-focused content.
Then, at the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference on the 7th of June, I'm giving the talk I've always wanted to give, which will feature XNA, the XBox360, the Wiimote control, Microsoft Robotics Studio, and dancing robots. Rob's last stand.
And, great news for the team, we have three great new people joining the Developer and Platform group in Ireland!!

And now for a little housekeeping: Although I'll keep posting here for a few weeks, I'm going to move my weblog off of MSDN, and over to my shiny new blog over at www.robburke.net. I'll still be exploring and building and humming and hah-ing, and hope you'll join me there, where we'll carry on this motif: [.NET, AI, Photography, Moose]. For your convenience and my sanity, I'm going to split the blog into three main subscription feeds: Personal, Technical, and (Personal + Technical = ) Everything.

Thanks to everyone who has been a part of my past three years with Microsoft. With a month left, it's too early to get sappy, but I do want to take this chance to say thanks for all the craic, and I very much look forward to keeping in touch.

with very best wishes,
Rob

Dublin Event, May 28th: Windows Server 2008 Jumpstart

robburke — Mon, 21 May 2007 15:07:00 GMT

There are some exciting things coming for developers in Windows Server 2008, which recently reached Beta 3 under its codename Longhorn Server. If you're able to reach Dublin next Monday, you may be interested in the upcoming Longhorn Server Jumpstart Event taking place at the Microsoft Ireland buildings.

The developer- and IT-Professional-focused event takes place in Microsoft's Atrium B building in Sandyford, south of Dublin, on May 28th. Here is what's happening:

This one-day event is an excellent way to understand the specific technologies incorporated in Windows Server "Longhorn" and to build momentum within your company toward the ultimate goal of designing a successful application. You will receive in-depth insight into Windows Server "Longhorn" through presentations and demonstrations from subject matter experts.
Agenda

8:00 – 9:00   Registration and Welcome
9:00 – 9:15   Introductions
9:15 – 10:15   What's New in Windows Server "Longhorn" for Developers
10:30 – 12:00   Lap Around the Application Server
12:00 – 1:00   Lunch
1:00 – 2:00   Lap Around IIS7
2:00 - 3:00   Lap Around Management
3:15 – 4:30   Lap Around Fundamentals
4:30 - 5:00   Server Platform Roadmap

If you're interested in attending, please contact my colleague Ciara Murphy at this mail address or +353 1 706 3135. Although there's no online registration, we need to get a sense of numbers. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Dev.Live.com gets a Facelift

robburke — Wed, 16 May 2007 02:31:00 GMT

I was looking up some information about one of the Windows Live services (Custom Domains, specifically) and noticed they've completely re-vamped the Windows Live for Developers site. If you haven't visited, that's the "one link to rule them all" I have been giving after presentations to developers on the Windows Live Services.

The re-org is very nice: they've integrated Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming, added a News feed that provides updates and news, and summarized the Windows Live Services off on a new sub-page (select "Reach new users" to find it). I like the "What Other People are Building" evidence, and the increased focus on links to tools and resources.

If nothing else, you might be interested in subscribing to the news feed on the front page.

Three Technologies that will change photography

robburke — Mon, 14 May 2007 20:39:00 GMT

Quite an interesting article in the Microsoft PhotoBlog: Program Manager Jordan Schwartz describes 3 Technologies that will change Photography.

The three he cites are Mini Projectors, Liquid Lenses and GPS. And it's worth the link just for the mad-cool photo of the Mini Projector.

This would also be a great chance to link again to two amazing photographic technologies under development from Microsoft Research: Photosynth and HD View.

What do you think? Which innovations are really going to change the role photography plays in our lives?

Silverlight Developer Resource-a-rama

robburke — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:10:00 GMT

I've been absorbing Silverlight from the perspective of a developer who wants to use .NET code to build Silverlight applications.

Here are the most useful resources I've found this week:

0. The Documentation

Silverlight alpha documentation and samples - very thorough for "alpha" bits!

1. Silverlight Mind Map

This is a "mind map" of Silverlight online resources complete with hyperlinks.

2. Jamie Cool and Nick Kramer Presentation

These are videos of the two-part presentation by Jamie Cool and Nick Kramer at MIX07, called Building Silverlight Applications Using .NET (Part 1 of 2) and Building Silverlight Applications Using .NET (Part 2 of 2). The two comprise a really instructive discussion of building managed code apps in the Silverlight 1.1 alpha.

You might also be interested in the other MIX07 presentations available online.

3. Scott Guthrie Silverlight Summary and Videos

After his keynote demo at MIX07, Scott Guthrie published a summary of the Silverlight Keynote and announcements in his blog, complete with a 22-minute video of him building a Silverlight application from scratch.

The blog entry is a thorough summary of an amazing keynote, and it's great to have the video as well. Thanks to Scott for for taking the time after the keynote to put this resource together.

(aside: Just in case you missed it, here's Robert Scoble's interview with Scott Guthrie from shortly after the keynote. You can tell Scott was still buzzing :) )

Upcoming Silverlight Podcast with Brad Abrams:

Ireland's Tom Raftery is interviewing Silverlight Product Manager Brad Abrams on Monday for his Podcast series. If you have any questions for Brad, send them along to Tom before Monday!

Just for good measure, here's a photo of Tom Raftery and Sean Foley jammin' it Guitar Hero style at MIX07.

And now that this blog entry has gone completely off piste, it's time for me to stop.

Leaving Las Vegas

robburke — Fri, 04 May 2007 12:52:00 GMT

I've just touched down in Dublin after the long haul back from the MIX conference. I had an amazing week - days of MIX, nights of Vegas - but it's with some relief that I'm back here now.

On Wednesday morning I snapped this shot of a woman painting in the blue water of the Trevi Fountain at Ceasar's Palace. In some way, that perfectly sums up the atmosphere of Vegas for me.

High up above her, on a neon sign, Celine Dion promises that this will be her last year in Vegas. That got me thinking, wow, imagine spending more than a year in the atmosphere of Vegas. One week on The Strip was just about right.

On the plane ride home, I dove back into the new Hofstadter, "I Am A Strange Loop" (which is great, by the way - a perhaps less playful, more personal, succinct revisit of his core thesis from Godel, Escher, Bach about consciousness).

I also installed Orcas Beta 1, the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha extensions, and the Expression Blend May CTP, as per here. After the install, I had about 5 minutes before my battery died, and that was enough time to create a Silverlight project in Visual Studio, draw some XAML shapes in Blend, add some C# code in Visual Studio, and Control-F5 to run a Silverlight app. Amazing.

After I charge the battery of my mind's strange loop with a bit of sleep, I'm going spelunking into Silverlight.

Silverlight Airlines Keynote Demo Online

robburke — Wed, 02 May 2007 18:44:00 GMT

Last night, Delay announced the publishing of the Silverlight Airlines Demo from Monday's keynote.

He and a colleague, Ted Glaza, built the demo in three weeks, beginning with nothing and building on top of the Silverlight .NET platform as it was still being developed. Now you can play with it yourself in a browser.

You might also want to try the very clever Silverlight Chess demo that Scott Guthrie showed during the same keynote, which can pit the Silverlight Javascript AI against the Silverlight .NET AI. Check out the difference in the number of nodes processed in the screenshot below!

You can download the chess and several other demos from the gallery page on the Silverlight site.

Communities of Purpose: Social Networking Panel

robburke — Tue, 01 May 2007 23:36:00 GMT

From left to right on the Social Networking: Enabling the Two-Way Street panel at MIX07:

Dave Morin, Facebook;

Evan Williams, Twitter;

Aaron Emigh, Six Apart;

Joseph Kleinschmidt, Leverage Software;

Marc Canter, Broadband Mechanics

These guys have all created what Joseph referred to as "Communities of Purpose" (and I am a member of two of those communities myself).

Futures in Design with Kip Voytek

robburke — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:45:00 GMT

Kip Voytek's great design presentation today was, in my mind, underattended. I am sometimes concerned that there isn't the right developer/designer mix here at MIX.

Kip is from the R/Greenberg Associates design agency. Here are some of my notes from the talk:

Create Simplicity by being subtractive AND additive: it was refreshing to hear him echo the insightful John Maeda (who writes the Simplicity blog at MIT) and say that good design is not about being subtractive, it’s about managing, rather than avoiding, complexity.

Use Effective practices, not "best" practices. I love this. We talk so often about these mysterious "best practices" at Microsoft and disregard the importance of context and asking what's effective.

A Design Challenge: Can you can create an error message that is sufficiently fun that you inspire your users to re-create the error to see the message again?

Kip's Examples of Delight and Discovery in design:

Flickr: "Great" happens when unexpected or emergent behaviours can occur.
World of Warcraft: talk about emergent behaviour!
Nike iD: the concept, "what if we let people customize their shoes?" has turned into a dialogue and a playground
Oxo: the interesting handles on kitchenware that say "that's so much better!"
Uniqlo: a counter-conventional approach to a catalogue (as featured previously at Where Design Comes From)
... and there were more... watch this session!

Kip's Closing Note: Do more. Strive for delight.

(My Closing Note: I don't purport to be a designer, but I have immense respect for good design.)

Silverlight Developer Reference Diagram

robburke — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:27:00 GMT

Click to download. With props to Expression Product Manager Arturo Toledo for putting this together, and thanks for the cool poster version they're giving out here at MIX!

MIX Misc Monday

robburke — Tue, 01 May 2007 19:59:00 GMT

Myspace presentation: Serving up the long tail's mp3 and other rich content at scale is an awesome task. And by "awesome" I mean the original, "awe-inspiring" sense of the word. Myspace is using the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime from Microsoft Robotics Studio as part of their infrastructure.

Monday Announcement Round-up: Nick White has a summary of all of Monday's MIX07 announcements. More to come today!

Wiimote-Controlled Cars: Last week, I linked up the Wiimote control to XNA to make a few demos. Brian Peek took it to the next logical step and connected the Managed Wiimote Library to Microsoft Robotics Studio. In the MIX07 lounge area, you can tilt the Wiimote back and forth to control remote-controlled cars! Mona, at your science center in the arctic, are you reading this? :)

ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls: To dive deep into dev-land for a sec... To work with data, ASP.NET's GridView and DetailsView controls let you quickly get to work, but don't play nice when you make changes to your schema, or, without legwork, show relationships between tables. Dynamic Data Controls provide View/Edit/Delete pages for any Tables and Views you want... with 0 lines of code and about 4 lines of XML. Check out the ASP.NET Futures download - there's a video on the page.

Ireland night out in Vegas: The improbable stamina of the Irish surfaced when we all hit the town. Consider the jetlag well and truly licked... but I'll need to watch the Silverlight at the 2008 China Olympics presentation after the fact.

Right... off to another day of MIX!

MIX07 Keynote: Favourite Moments (and photos)

robburke — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:36:00 GMT

After this morning's MIX07 keynote, I am reinvigorated about the power and potential of Silverlight.

Here are my favourite moments:

Scott Guthrie debugging a Silverlight application's .NET code that was running on a Mac in the Safari browser, changing a property on a remote .NET object in the running app by using the Immediate Window in Visual Studio back on the PC. [Link to new Silverlight site.]

The Metaliq demo called Top Banana that showed awesome video editing in a browser window [Link to the Metaliq site.]

The demos our partners created with Silverlight (like Metaliq, CBS, Netflix and Major League Baseball). I was blown away. [Update Tuesday: Netflix video, Major League Baseball video.]

You can view the whole keynote here.

I'm pleased with my photos, which I posted to Flickr. (To the guy who accidentally took a bounce flash in the eye for the Ray Ozzie shot, I'm really, really sorry.)

Over lunch, Sean and I met and had some great chats with most of the folks from Ireland that we know are here: Tom Raftery (Tom Raftery IT), Walter Higgins (Pixenate), Fergus Burns (nooked/Web2.0Ireland), and Eamonn Fallon (daft.ie). Looking forward to catching up with Jazz Williams (Dialogue Marketing) soon too. [update: Found him! :) ] If you're here and we don't know it, please let me know!

MIX07 Welcome Swag

robburke — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:02:00 GMT

Swag found in my MIX07 Welcome Pack:

1 Silverlight / Mix07 T-Shirt (obligatory)
1 copy Vista Ultimate (cool)
1 copy Expression Studio (double cool!!)
3 coloured "discipline" armbands to identify the like-minded at MIX (Blue=Developer, Green=Business, Yellow=Design)
1 myspace.com thingamayoke
1 Silverlight sticker
1 Vista-branded USB key in black fuzzy box (containing Live Platform In-A-Box, Live Search Starter Applications, Live Search Widgets)
4 MIX07 DVDs (containing Visual Studio "Orcas" Team Suite Beta 1; ASP.NET AJAX Resource Kit; WPF Virtual Bootcamp; Windows Media Center Resource Kit)
1 pile of brochures and special offers

1 Obligatory photograph of slot machines in Las Vegas Airport:

1 Obligatory photograph of a statue in Ceasars Palace, where I'm staying:

OK, so those last two weren't in the welcome pack. But I'm here in Las Vegas and the MIX07 Conference kicks off in a matter of hours. Speaking of hours, I've been up for 23 of them myself, so it's time to get some sleep, and I'll join you in the morning for the keynote!

Microsoft Ireland's Imagine Cup winners announced this evening

robburke — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:23:00 GMT

I've just returned from the first Microsoft Ireland finals of the Imagine Cup, an annual international student competition hosted by Microsoft.

The theme of the Imagine Cup competition this year is "Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all."

Although the competition has been running since 2003, this is the first year that Microsoft Ireland has hosted the competition for students in Ireland and Northern Ireland. I was one of six people on the judging panel today and have to say I had an amazing time.

Why? I was very impressed by the quality of the entries from the ten finalists. Earlier this year, when we selected the finalists, I was struck by how ambitious their projects were. I had my concerns about their ability to execute on the proposed projects in the time available, but they did.

Here are the three winners of today's finals:

First place: From NUI Maynooth - Team InGest - A low-cost interactive system for teaching sign language, using standard web cameras as input, to provide feedback on a participant's signing gestures. The team offered a good, realistic problem definition, gave a great demo, and showed how they'd constrained the problem space sufficiently to a challenging pattern recognition problem which, when solved, would allow them to develop an application that would significantly increase the number of people who can communicate using Sign Language. (Dan Kelly, Cathal Coffey, Eric McClean; Mentor: Tom Lysaght.)

Second place: From University of Ulster Coleraine - Team UUC - A system for using gaming concepts on the PC and XBox360 to teach Linguistic Phonics, an approach which provides an understanding of how oral language is recorded in print. Again, the team demonstrated the relevance of their application to this year's competition, and in UUC's case also showed the results from user studies performed in collaboration with local schools. They offered great ideas for future development, including a content authoring environment, and ultimately provided an engaging way to teach and reinforce phonics concepts.

Third place: From NUI Maynooth (again!) - Team Sleepy Oranges - A training environment to provide students in the western world with feedback on the subtle but critically important aspects of learning tonal languages such as Chinese. They began by demonstrating that giving feedback to the student is essential for learning tonal languages. Using pitch tracking and dynamic time warping to analyse voice input, and handwriting analysis to analyse written input, they then showed how their solution provides the required feedback in a novel and effective manner. (Fergal Walsh, Cathal Browne, Shekman Tang, Lei Pan; Mentor: Joseph Timoney.)

If you'd like to see the other entries, here's an image of Karlin Lillington's Irish Times article on the Imagine Cup, which appeared last Friday (20th of April; click to enlarge):

As a judge, I can admit now that the judging panel had the happy quandary of having to choose three finalists from among more than three that could easily have made that cut. I'll write more later to give some insight into some of the projects that didn't make the top three - as there were some other great ideas and implementations in there.

Finally, I want to tip my cap to Liam Cronin, who led the organization of this year's Imagine Cup Ireland competition. Organisationally, and in terms of the results from the ten teams, the event exceeded every expectation I had.

Adventures in XNA 6: A Wii Flock of Boids

robburke — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:43:00 GMT

Here's a flock of butterflies, brought to you in XNA, which can soar around their environment with the help of the Wii controller.

By tilting and rolling the Wiimote, you can control the flight of the lead butterfly.

The rest of the flock sticks together, chasing you wherever your accellerometer-fuelled flights of fancy take you.

All the butterflies, including the one controlled by the Wiimote, avoid collisions with eachother, as well as with the features of the environment.

[Update: After showing this demo at my Last Stand in Dublin, I posted an updated version of this blog entry on my new blog.]

How it's done

WiiMote Control: I integrated the Wii controller using the Managed Library for Nintendo's Wiimote which I found through Coding4Fun. It took less than 20 minutes for me to integrate this library into XNA and map the accelerometers to the butterfly's motion, but it had previously taken me 4 days and 8 different attempts to find a Bluetooth adaptor that would work on Vista and speak with the Wiimote.

I am now using the EPoX BT-DG05A Bluetooth USB Dongle. Just so you know, the Vista bluetooth stack doesn't seem to talk to the WiiMote at all, so instead, I am using the Toshiba stack installed onto Vista. The Wiibrew Wiki offers a list of working Bluetooth devices - although Vista seems to complicate things tremendously. Many of the drivers for the Bluetooth dongles listed as Wiimote-compatible are simply incompatible with Vista, and when I forced two of them to install, they sent me from Bluetooth to Bluescreen. And the fantastic Toshiba stack will expire in 30 days. Sigh.

Once I got the Wiimote talking to my PC, having Wii input is very, very, very, very cool. Note that although this gives Wiimote input for PC games written with XNA, if I published my XNA game to the Xbox360, I wouldn't be able to use the Wiimote.

Flocking: The autonomous butterflies follow the rules of Craig Reynold's classic Boids flocking algorithm, which encourage separation, alignment and cohesion of members of the flock. They avoid obstacles, and tend towards a target. Here's the pseudocode that I worked from.

The butterfly's model and animation, as well as the environment, were created by Phil McDarby and originally appeared in Still Life and Mind Balance.

Animation: My butterflies are animated with the XNA Animation Components library, which you can download from Codeplex. Thanks to David Astle (who leads the project) for sorting out a little bug in the InterpolationController. Now I can significantly slow down the animation and the engine smoothly blends between frames of Phil's animations, giving the butterflies a really natural look, even when they're at rest.

Future Stuff

I have some ideas for my butterflies that require a particle system, and rather than doing a cheap 'n' cheerful one, I'd like to implement one using HLSL, the High-Level Shader Language, which will give me hardware acceleration. If anyone wants to give me a starting point for that, I'd be really grateful :)

Also, I have some really fun Wiimote ideas in mind, and it's, as always, a matter of hours in the evenings!

XNA Refresh Available

With the XNA Game Studio Refresh, which was announced yesterday, developers can now package up your XNA games as binaries and distribute them.

I'd love to publish this game so that you can check it out yourself. Before I publish the Boids butterfly demo, I need to understand more about how "dissectable" the deployed format is. I'll get back to you on that one, but for now, happy coding!

Tá ocras ar an Orcas: Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1 available

robburke — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:41:00 GMT

I'm working on two projects in the evenings: One is an XNA app (no surprises there), and the other is a Live Messenger bot that is going to integrate the DotMSN bot library, WCF, WF, SQL2005 and more. I've been building that second project with the March CTP of Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas".

Lots of cool things happening there.

Visual Studio Codename "Orcas" Beta 1 has hit the streets and I'm downloading it now. Download link is here. Check out Brad Abram's example of how the new language enhancements can streamline your code. I'm feeling these improvements myself, big time. I linked to commentary on the language features previously, and have since appreciated Scott Guthrie's discussion of Lambda Expressions.

On the Live Messenger Bot front, Jonas just published a Vista Gadget interface to a "Bus Oracle" Messenger Bot that can give you bus times for Trondheim, Norway (in Norwegian). Really cool example of how you can integrate the Live Messenger service, a bot and a Vista Gadget to build a useful application. That's two Norway stories in two days - must be something in the water up there!

Bringing it back home to Ireland, the title of this post (I'm told) means something like "I've got a hunger on me for Orcas" in Irish Gaelic: Tá ocras ar an Orcas. I'm happy to be corrected if I have it wrong, but one thing's for sure: in the middle of this monolithic download, I wish that the definition of "home broadband" was faster in this country... :)

More info and download for Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1 here. [Note: at time of publishing this blog entry, the download for MSDN Subscribers was available, with a public download promised shortly.]

Two Artificial Intelligence Legends Publish Sequels

robburke — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:28:00 GMT

I discovered through a New Scientist magazine article (thanks to Clare) that Marvin Minsky, a.k.a. "The Father of Artificial Intelligence," has published The Emotion Machine, the sequel to his 1988 masterpiece, The Society of Mind.

In Society of Mind, Minsky proposed that complex human intelligence arises from layered interactions between simple "agents," which themselves are mindless. There's enough potential buried in each page of Society of Mind to inspire a graduate-level thesis.

In The Emotion Machine, Minsky continues by proposing a "Critic-Selector model of mind" where emotions impact the resources used by the mind to address problems. Some draft chapters of The Emotion Machine are available on Dr Minsky's MIT website.

When I went to order The Emotion Machine online, Amazon disappointed me by not having a copy in stock in the UK. But then it helpfully informed me that one of my other cognitive science heros, Douglas Hofstadter, has also published a new book!

Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach is a Pulitzer Prize-winning "metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll." The book is a beautiful creation that tackles the phenomenon of consciousness. Read what Wikipedia has to say about it.

I Am A Strange Loop is Hofstadter's new book, and its title will resonate with GEB fans, as Hofstadter explains consciousness and self-awareness with a model that uses self-referential "loops." I can't wait for my copy to arrive.

The fact it has taken me this long to discover these books shows just how far out of the loop - the strange loop - I've become.

Microsoft Robotics Studio, and teaching robotics north of the arctic circle

robburke — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:12:00 GMT

I was excited to see a good friend, Mona, start blogging about her experience running a science center located north of the arctic circle.

It's fascinating reading. They're designing interactive exhibits and experiments: everything from visualizing DNA to creating 5-meter-high geisers of Coke and computer-controlled Lego greenhouses. Mona has a background in marine microbiology, she's an innovative teacher, and her science center is situated in the Northern Lights Planetarium in Tromsø, northern Norway, which is just cool.

They're doing some great work with programmable Lego - there's even an all-girls robot building team - and Mona's colleague Dag Atle recently expressed an interest in working with some other development tools for the Lego for implementing the greenhouses.

From the image (right), it looks like they're using Lego's programmable RCX brick, which I once coded against using a language called NQC, or Not Quite C. I used NQC to make a simple Braitenberg Vehicle and was really impressed by the horsepower of the Lego RCX!

Another option they should explore is the Microsoft Robotics Studio, which would give them an integrated platform for building simulations, controlling live robots, and teaching basic (and advanced) programming concepts. Robotics Studio includes a simulator environment, a visual programming language, and the ability to move code from the simulated enviornment onto a number of real-world devices, including programmable Lego bricks (RCX and NXT) and those Roomba vaccuum robots.

The simulation component of Robotics Studio is built on top of XNA, and the only reason I haven't written more about it here is I don't have any real-world robotics hardware here to play with, which is the whole point. Here are the instructions for setting up hardware with Robotics Studio - to give you a flavour for the devices it supports.

Anyway, Mona's blog makes for fascinating reading, and I look forward to seeing the direction the science center takes their programming and robotics content!

[p.s. I visited Mona and my other Tromsø friends back in January and had a great time helping out a little at the Science Center's launch event.]