Connecting the Dots

I've had a number of people ask me for the deck I presented last week, at the TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers conference in Barcelona.

The session was titled: Distributed Embedded Systems - The Next Big Developer Opportunity!

I've uploaded it to Windows Live SkyDrive.

With less than a week to go before this year's TechEd EMEA Developers conference, you may have started thinking about your schedule. So many sessions to see, so little time!

Last week, I posted a complete list of the Windows Embedded track sessions (TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers - Introducing the Windows Embedded track), but sometimes a raw list can be a bit daunting. So here's some additional information to help you navigate your way through that list. (Note that sessions may appear under multiple headings.)

If you want to see really cool/unusual demos... here are some that really stand out: 

If you're interested in feature-level introductory sessions... (and there's nothing like a solid feature-level overview to help you get a better understanding of a specific product), here are some sessions to consider:

If you're looking for hard-core embedded development topics... here are some sessions you can really sink your teeth into:

If you want to understand web services on devices... now that more and more devices are becoming connected -consuming end exposing web services on devices is the next natural step. The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) is an industry specification that defines a minimal set of implementation constraints to enable secure Web service messaging, discovery, description and eventing on resource-constrained devices.

These sessions will explain what's available, and show you what's involved: 

If you're not sure why you should care about embedded development, or how to approach it...

If you are a managed code developer...there are plenty of sessions for you. Did you know that the .NET Micro Framework is an embedded managed code bootable runtime? It even has a managed code device driver model! And POS for .NET - well, the name says it all.

You'll find lots of managed code in the following sessions:

• EMB203 "Running on the Metal" with the .NET Micro Framework
• EMB207 Put your Big Ideas onto Tiny Devices using .NET
• EMB307 Creating a Gesture-Based UI for Embedded Devices
• EMB303 Talking Web Services to Microcontrollers
• EMB209 Developing Point of Service (POS) Applications with POS for .NET

If you're looking for sessions that focus on a specific embedded product offering...the session search tool doesn't distinguish between the different Windows Embedded products. So here's a list for you:

If you're looking for interactive sessions...we've got some of those too:

• EMB01-IS Stabilizing the Window Embedded CE Platform
• EMB03-IS Windows Embedded: Forget the OS
• EMB05-IS Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Windows Embedded But Were Afraid to Ask
• EMB06-IS Protect a Windows Embedded Standard Image Using Write Filters

And if you're looking to get specific questions answered about embedded development or a Windows Embedded product, be sure to attend the expert panel session:

• EMB05-IS Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Windows Embedded But Were Afraid to Ask.

If you still haven't been able to find what you're looking for in the Windows Embedded track, please let me know! :-)

Back in September, I visited the European Microsoft Innovation Center (EMIC) in Aachen, Germany. It's quite an interesting place - the EMIC targets the creation of advanced technologies which could be in the market within three to six years. While I was there, I sat down with Matthias Neugebauer to discuss the work they're doing around sensor networks. You can watch the interview here, on Channel9.

The same facilities in Aachen also host the recently created Microsoft Embedded Systems Development Center (MESDC), which supports global product development and drives smart, connected, service-oriented device development. Given the work that both the EMIC and the MESDC are doing around distributed embedded systems, I'll be looking for an opportunity to return to Aachen in the near future.

This year, we're introducing a new track for embedded development technologies at TechEd EMEA. As owner of this track, I want to share some details about the track content, along with the thinking behind it.

Windows Embedded Track Overview

Finding the right balance between introductory and more advanced content can be a challenge. Given that it's a new track, and with no feedback from prior years to guide us, we're optimizing much of the content to attract new developers to embedded technologies. You'll find no other track at the conference with as many Level 200 sessions. We believe there's a huge opportunity for developers in this space, especially as solutions begin to span devices, the PC, and the Web. This is a great chance to get started!

We also want to provide opportunities for developers with expertise in embedded technologies to connect with product team members and well-known industry experts. We are providing a good number of Level 300 sessions (and even a Level 400 session), as well. 

Windows Embedded Track Product/Technology Coverage

The Windows Embedded track provides coverage of products within the Windows Embedded family, with plenty of sessions on Windows Embedded Standard, Windows Embedded CE, Windows Embedded NavReady, and Windows Embedded for Point of Services. It also covers other embedded development technologies, like the .NET Micro Framework, Microsoft implementations of the Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) industry spec, along with some tangential coverage of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (you'll find a couple more sessions related to MS Robotics Developer Studio in other tracks).

Windows Embedded Track Sessions

Below are the sessions we're providing in the Windows Embedded track. I'll be kicking off the track, aiming to set some context around the opportunities we see in this space (shameless plug for my session :-)

(Note: Please be sure to confirm scheduling on the TechEd EMEA 2008 Developer site, in case there are any last-minute changes).

Day 1 - Monday, November 10

Day 2 - Tuesday, November 11

Day 3 - Wednesday, November 12

Day 4 - Thursday, November 13

Day 5 - Friday, November 14

On my last trip to Redmond a couple of months ago, I sat down with the some folks from the .NET Micro Framework. We discussed some of the what, where, why and how's, saw some development kits, and got a peak at what's coming in the 3.0 release. And it's all recorded on Channel 9, here: A Look at the .NET Micro Framework.

A couple of recent news items, related to the .NET Micro Framework:

• .NET Micro Framework 3.0 Release Candidate 0 was made available on Microsoft Connect.
• The Dare to Dream Different Challenge contest was kicked off. Lots of opportunities to win dev kits and cash prizes!

A lot of big changes have taken place in my "world" over the past 6 months, and I'm using this post to formally kick-off a new chapter in my life (and in this blog).

From Live to Embedded.

Once again, I've taken on a new focus. I'm working on an initiative around "distributed embedded systems". More about this in future posts. :-)

From Redmond to Madrid.

When I moved from Madrid to Redmond in 2003, it was my intention to stay for 3-5 years and then return to Madrid. I'm thrilled to have found an opportunity to work as a Technical Evangelist (still my dream job) from Madrid, while continuing to work closely with product teams and continuing to form part of our corporate Developer & Platform Evangelism organization in Redmond.

Big challenges ahead.

So what's the big deal? This isn't the first time I've made a change in my technology focus. Over the past 5 years, I've worked on a number of evangelism efforts, including: Visual Studio Tools for Office and Visual Studio 2005, Windows Vista, and more recently Windows Live platform.

This is the first time I'll be working on a geo-dispersed team. I now work from home in Madrid; my manager (Arvindra Sehmi) and other team members (like Yuriy Zaytsev) are dispersed around the planet. Working from home does have a number of benefits, but it also introduces some interesting challenges - especially combined with frequent travel and working with people across a wide range of time zones. The impact on my life, how I work ,and how I schedule my time is definitely proving to be "interesting". :-)

A new title for this blog: Connecting the dots.

I've always had a tendency to prefer depth over breadth - I've been known to pore over WS-* specs, analyze difference between managed and native binaries, and monitor network communications looking for DCOM MEOW packets, all just for fun. There's a certain sense of confidence that comes from knowing the gory details, and I believe that's what's always drawn me to this approach.  But somewhere along the line, I've found myself increasingly attracted to the idea of bridging silos of expertise and looking for new scenarios and opportunities for next-generation products/technologies. So here's to the joy of "connecting the dots"!

Right before the holidays, I saw down with Marc Mercuri to discuss the recently released Tafiti Windows Live Quick Application and how it evolved from one of Marc’s recent incubation projects. The interview just went live this morning on Channel9; you can find it here.

In the interview, Marc describes the journey from Tafiti, the incubation project, to the Tafiti Quick App. In case you're not familiar with Tafiti or the Quick Apps:

• Tafiti is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft that uses Silverlight and Live Search to provide a rich specialized search experience on the Web. 
• The Windows Live Quick Applications are a set of samples that illustrate how to combine multiple Windows Live platform offerings to implement specific Web scenarios. Each Quick App is offered as a source code download, and you can use the code as-is, you can re-purpose it, copy code snippets from it, or use it as a learning tool.

Big thanks to Angus Logan who drove this effort, working with Marc and others to convert the incubation project into a Quick App.  Angus announced the release of the Quick App in this blog entry. (In case you didn't already know, Angus's blog is one of the best sources of information for what's happening in the Windows Live space for developers).

If you're inspired by Tafiti, and have interesting ideas for other specialized search experiences, be sure to listen to the part of the interview where Marc announces a contest (00:26:44). (Or just read the last paragraph of the video description on Channel9 :-)

I'm really excited about participating in the upcoming ReMIX event in Boston. I'm especially fond of Boston, as I lived there during most of the '80s. (I first moved there to attend New England Conservatory as a violin major. I ended up quitting violin, but I moved next door - literally! - to Northeastern University, where I graduated with a double major in Computer Science and Math. Lots of great memories!)

Anyway, I'll be presenting two sessions on the Windows Live Platform. In the first session, Exploring User Experiences Built on the Windows Live Platform, I'll run through examples of sites that are built on Windows Live Platform offerings. In the second session, Lap Around the Windows Live Platform, I'll walk through the specific APIs and controls.

Hope to see you there!

Windows Live ID Web Authentication

By now, I hope you've heard about the recent release of Windows Live ID Web Authentication.

If you haven't, here are some links you should check out:

• dev.live.com, the place for all things developer-related to Windows Live :-)  (click on Authentication in the list on the left)
• Angus Logan's post: SERVICE RELEASE ANNOUNCEMENT: Windows Live ID Web Authentication Released!
• Windows Live ID blog post: Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK for Developers Is Released
• Channel9 interview: Lynn Ayres - What is Live ID?
• To see Windows Live ID Web Authentication in action, check out LiveSide - they've added it to their site

Test driving the ASP.NET sample

I finally got around to giving it a test drive myself, using the ASP.NET sample included in the Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK, and wanted to share my experience with you.

Let me first share with you one of my pet peeves regarding web development: I DO NOT want to install a web server on my client machine. I don't have anything against web servers, it's just that I don't want the hassle of installing, running and managing a web server on my laptop when all I want to do is some straight-forward web app development. That's why I love the built-in ASP.NET Development Server that was introduced in VS 2005, and I actively advocate the need for our development scenarios to work in this environment.

The ASP.NET sample assumes you have IIS installed, so there were a couple of things I needed to do before I could run it from the ASP.NET Development Server.

Some background on Windows Live ID Web Authentication that is relevant to the steps I'll outline below:

• Users will sign in/out of Windows Live ID on your site via a link you provide to the Windows Live ID Authentication service; you need to provide an AppID in the query string (see Displaying the Sign-In Link for details)
• An AppID is obtained by registering your application and providing (among other things) a "Return URL" to which the service redirects users after they have successfully signed in/out (see Getting Your Application ID for Web Authentication). 
• The Return URL points to a page on your web site that handles login/logout actions (see Handling the Response from the Service). I'll refer to this page as the "web-auth handler".
• To change the URL of your web-auth handler, you need to update the registration values associated with the AppID (or create a new AppID, if you don't own the existing AppID - as is the case with the sample)

Creating a file system-based Web Site for the ASP.NET sample

Since I don't have IIS installed, the steps for setting up the sample differ than the ones described in the SDK docs.

Here's what I did to set up a file system-based web site for the sample:

1. Ran the ASP.NET sample installation file (webauth.msi), which you'll find here. 
2. Using Visual Studio, I created an Empty Web Site and named it WebAuth.
3. Copied the contents of the C:\Program Files\Windows Live ID\WebAuth\Sample folder to the WebAuth folder created for the web site
4. Copied the C:\Program Files\Windows Live ID\WebAuth\App_Code folder to the WebAuth folder
5. Refreshed the web site project in VS (right click on the site in the Solution Explorer and select Refresh Folder)

Running the ASP.NET sample using the ASP.NET Development Server

The AppID used by the sample is configured to redirect the user to the following path: http://localhost/webauth/sample/webauth-handler.aspx. This path won't work if you're app is running under the ASP.NET Development Server, because it's not listening on port 80 - it uses a randomly selected port. So I created a new AppID and modified the sample to work with this new ID. I did this in three steps.

Step #1: Determined the port being used by the ASP.NET Development Server

I ran the web app from VS and noted the port number displayed by the ASP.NET Development Server icon in the system tray. [If you hover over the icon - the one pointed to by the arrow in the image below - you'll see the port number at the end of the description text]. 

(There's a doc that describes how to configure it to use a specific port - How to: Specify a Port for the ASP.NET Development Server - but I found that the server seems to use the same port for a given app).

Step #2: Created a new AppID

I followed the steps outlined in Getting Your Application ID for Web Authentication to create a new AppID. 

• Application Name - you can use any value here; I used WebAuthSampleApp
• Return URL - I included the port on which the ASP.NET Development Server was listening (as determined in Step #1). Since I created a file system-based Web Site called WebAuth, and the server was listening on port 61343, it looked like this: http://localhost:61343/WebAuth/webauth-handler.aspx. 
• Secret Key - to minimize changes to the sample app, I specified the value used by the sample: ApplicationKey123

Step #3: Modified Web.config

The sample is reading the AppID and Secret Key values from the web.config file. I found the following line, and replaced the wll_appid key's value with my newly created AppID.

<add key="wll_appid" value="0016BFFD80002719"/>

That did it - from there, I just pressed F5 and ran the sample application under the ASP.NET Development Server.

I was out of the office last week on vacation (check out our awesome seaplane ride to Victoria!), and a number of things were released that I want to be sure and call out.

New release of the Windows Live Contacts control. You can read about the new incremental search and filtering features on Danny Thorpe's blog here.

Referencing Spaces Photos. Joe Healy posted a blog entry on how to reference Windows Live Spaces photos from HTML img tags, and John Bruno added some additional information in this post.

Note that there's yet another way to get the URL of a Spaces photo (although the URL is much uglier than the one returned by the RSS feeds): right click on a photo in the Photo Gadget, select Properties and copy the URL. But I must admit that I've recently switched over to Joe's approach of using the URL in the album RSS feed. 

Windows Live video segments On10. Before leaving for vacation, I worked with the On10 team on a series of end-user targeted videos on Windows Live. The first three were released last week:

• What is Windows Live
• Live Search Maps
• Live Search Maps Integration 

And more were released this week:

• Windows Live Messenger
• Windows Live SkyDrive 
• Windows Live Spaces 
• Live Search

Windows Live SkyDrive updates: new name (used to be Windows Live Folders), new features, and availability in new regions! You can read about it here, on the SkyDrive's team blog. 

With a recent update to the Silverlight Streaming service, it's now even easier to instantiate a hosted app on a web page: all you need is a single iframe element whose source attribute refers to a server-side invocation URL. You can now write something like this:

<html>
<body>
   <iframe src=http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/AccountID/AppName/iframe.html
     scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="500" height="400"></iframe>
</body>
</html>

(Note that AccountID and AppName need to be replaced with values specific to the hosted application)

Background

Silverlight Streaming is a new Windows Live Platform offering (currently in alpha) that provides scalability-on-demand for media-rich Silverlight applications. (You can find more information here)

Once you upload a Silverlight application to the Silverlight Streaming service, it's fairly trivial to instantiate the hosted app on a web page. You could previously do it in four easy steps that look something like this: 

<html>
<head>
<!-- (1) add a script reference -->
   <script src="http://agappdom.net/g/silverlight.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

[Details on the individual steps can be found here, on the Windows Live Dev site. Note that the URL used in step (1) is for the Silverlight 1.0 Beta. For more information on how to reference Silverlight 1.0 RC, see the July 27th entry on the Silverlight Streaming News page]

11.5 terabytes of new data! Including...

• Lots of new 3D imagery for many cities in the U.S. and Canada
• New Bird's eye coverage for many European cities (including the following cities in Spain: Ávila, Burgos, Gijón, Lugo, Ourense, Salamanca, Segovia, Vigo, Ponferrada, Zamora, Palencia, Ciudad Real, Pontevedra, Santander, Girona, Torrelavega, Valladolid, Castellón de la Plana, Elda, Fuengirola, Granada, Mijas, Murcia, Vélez-Málaga - but still no imagery for Madrid or Barcelona :-( 

You can read the details on the VE team blog: Virtual Earth updated with new Birds Eye and Aerial Imagery.

Yesterday we released this Channel9 interview with Koji Kato and Danny Thorpe from the Windows Live platform team. Koji and Danny share their views on Internet software development and evolving Windows Live into a platform.

This was my first time behind the camera - I'm a video newbie, so it's a bit shaky at the beginning (I think I actually kicked the tripod at one point) and the microphone was a bit too close to me. Oh well, lessons learned for future interviews. :-)

I'm planning a whole series of interviews focusing on Windows Live technologies, so stay tuned!

Apologies for "going dark". I had to put everything on hold for about a month to deal with the aftermath of the big windstorm we had back on Dec. 14th (you can read about it here on my personal blog, if you're interested), and it's taken me another month to catch up at work.  

And now that Windows Vista has shipped, I've moved on to Windows Live services evangelism.

You can still expect more posts on Windows Vista; over time, the focus will be more on Windows Live services. Just so you know, I'm starting off with a "blank slate" and there's a lot I need to learn to get up to speed. I'll be describing my journey as I go along - so I hope you'll want to come along for the ride :-) 

ISearchQueryHelper is a COM interface that can be used to convert from Advanced Query Syntax (AQS) to a SQL query that can be passed to the OLE DB Provider for Windows Search. (For background, see my previous post: Advanced Query Syntax: What, Where, Why, and How)

Good news for managed code developers - there's a type library from which you can create an interop assembly (using the tlbimp.exe tool). You'll find the type library (it's called SearchAPI.tlb) in the Lib folder of the Windows SDK. 

Once you've generated an interop assembly and have added a reference to it from your managed code project, here are the necessary steps to convert from AQS to SQL syntax:

1. Instantiate the Search Manager
2. Get the catalog manager for the system index
3. Query the catalog manager for its corresponding query helper
4. Convert an AQS string to a SQL query string

Here's some C# code that shows how to convert an AQS string to a SQL query string (the code fragment assumes that aqsQuery is a string variable that contains an AQS query):

using SearchAPILib;

...

CSearchManager manager = new CSearchManagerClass();
CSearchCatalogManager catalogManager = manager.GetCatalog("SystemIndex");
CSearchQueryHelper queryHelper = catalogManager.GetQueryHelper();

string sqlQuery = queryHelper.GenerateSQLFromUserQuery(aqsQuery);