Dan Fernandez's Blog

Bug Killer - A Channel 9 Halloween Special!

2009-10-30T17:12:42Z

Check out Laura Foy’s “Bug Killer”, a Channel 9 Halloween special.

Visual Studio Documentary Part 1 & Part 2

2009-10-28T03:26:00Z

I'm the last person to blog about this, but we've launched the Visual Studio documentary on Channel 9. I've embedded the videos below,

Part 1
Part 2
We're also doing the full length interviews with all of the participants that will be posted over the next few weeks

We're also going to be doing a screening at PDC on Monday from 6:30 - 7:30 PM so mark your calendars.

Download Visual Studio 2010 Express Editions

2009-10-21T18:00:49Z

Hey folks,

Visual Studio Express Editions are now live and available for download!

Express Versions

The Visual Studio Express family is unchanged from 2008 as it comes in four flavors

You can also download an ISO image that contains all of the Express products

Installation

When you install, you can expect the need to restart your PC during installation for the .NET Framework 4.

Beta Expiration

The betas expire June 30, 2010.

Download and start playing now!

My Picks for PDC 2009

2009-10-14T05:20:00Z

With a little over a month to go before Microsoft’s biggest and best developer event, I wanted to pick out which PDC sessions look super interesting (to me) this year:

Dan’s picks

Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp (Mark Russinovich, Arun Kishan)– I’ll be setting up some projects during this time, but it would be great to go to this workshop. Note that this is FREE and you don’t have to be registered for PDC to go to it.
Building Live Media Viewing Experiences using IIS Smooth Streaming (Vishal Sood) – We’re looking to add Smooth Streaming to Channel 9 so any details on the programmability would be appreciated, plus seeing how they did the NFL player will be interesting
Code Contracts and Pex Go to a NerdDinner with ASP.NET MVC (Manuel Fahndrich, Peli de Halleux) – How to take an existing application and apply Pex for parameterized unit testing and code contracts for improved static checking
Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks (DJ Park) – As I used to give this talk back in the day, it’ll be interesting to see how it’s evolved for Visual Studio 2010
Microsoft AJAX Library, jQuery and Visual Studio 2010 (Stephen Walther) – How VS 2010 will make building AJAX apps better
ASP.NET MVC 2: The New Stuff (Stephen Walther) – ‘Nuff said
How Visual Studio 2010 was built with WPF 4 (none listed) – This should be a great talk for anyone who wants high performance WPF and that has a legacy Win32 code base
Dynamic binding in C# 4 (Mads Torgersen) – Everything that I’ve seen about C# 4.0’s dynamic features makes me fall in love all over again
Networking and Web Services in Silverlight (none listed)– Interested in the “server push” pattern mentioned for scenarios like real-time chat
Introduction to SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight (Torsten Grabs) – I know nothing about StreamInsight, but it’s a “platform” for processing data over real-time events (with LINQ) so I’m thinking a Twitter or Facebook scanner Coding4Fun project would be great for this
Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic (Luca Bolognese) – Luca is always an amusing speaker and I’m sure this will be a fun session
Advanced Diagnostics, Historical Debugging and Test Automation (Habib Heydarian) – Speaking of entertaining speakers, Habib’s session on cool new testing/debugging features for VS 2010 is another can’t-miss session.
Silverlight Roadmap and Futures (Karen Corby) – Your first look at Silverlight 4
Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure (Steve Marx) – Steve always builds cool demos (like faking how to be a CIA agent) and I’m sure this talk won’t disappoint
Windows Azure Present and Future (Manuvir Das) – As I haven’t played with Azure yet, this should be a great place to start and to see their roadmap for the future

What PDC sessions are you most excited about?

Popfly Game Downloader Available

2009-07-22T22:22:32Z

While it’s sad that Popfly is going away, it’s cool that the Popfly team put out (an unsupported) tool, Popfly Game Downloader, that enables you to download and run Popfly games offline.

- Step-by-Step instructions on Coding4Fun

- Project on MSDN Code Gallery

You can download any shared games, whether they’re your games or community built games.

Kudos to Ben Anderson and Adam Nathan for building the tool :)

TweetCraft – A World of Warcraft Twitter client

2009-07-02T23:21:00Z

After much ado, we finally launched TweetCraft, one of our new Coding4Fun applications. Shout-outs to the other members of the TweetCraft team - Gabor Ratky, Mike Sampson and Lincoln Anderson for building a kick-ass v1.

TweetCraft Overview

TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft. TweetCraft has two major components:

Windows client - A Windows client utility that sends/receives messages from Twitter & TwitPic
Warcraft Addon - A Warcraft AddOn that sends/receives messages from Twitter

Key Features

Send/receive Tweets in-game
Upload in-game screenshots using TwitPic
AutoTweet Warcraft achievements
AutoTweet when you log in, enter an instance or change zones
TweetCraft is also extensible so that AddOn authors can build custom AutoTweet messages

More Information

Blog/Twitter friendly URLs: http://ch9.ms/TC or http://ch9.ms/TweetCraft
Frequently Asked Questions
Getting Started Guide
Coding4Fun article on how TweetCraft works
Extending TweetCraft

Screenshots

WPF Client

TweetCraft In-Game

TweetCraft Client Close-up

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Cheat Sheet

2009-05-20T16:57:00Z

Hey folks, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for the world to download and here's your cheat sheet of links you'll want to know about

Download: Visual Studio Team System Beta 1, Web installer, VSTS Beta 1 ISO, .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1
Readme: VSTS Readme
Installation Tips & Tricks: Be sure to watch Brian Keller's 10-4 episode on how to download & install VSTS Beta 1
Key Features: If you want to see what features are available in Beta 1, check out Jason Zander's VS Beta 1 blog post for tons of screenshots or watch previous episodes of the 10-4 Show on Channel 9 for everything you ever wanted to know about VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.
Support Forums: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1
Bug Reporting and Suggestions: Visual Studio 2010 on Connect
Training Materials: Drew and team have posted the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit that works with VSTS Beta 1. This includes coverage of:

New language features including VB, C#, F#,
.NET Framework features like: Parallel extensions, MEF, WPF, WCF
Data features: Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services
Web development with ASP.NET 4.0

Top Two Installation Questions

Q. Will it work side-by-side with VS 2008?
A: Yes, Visual Studio 2010 will work side-by-side with VS 2008

Q: Will it work on Windows 7?
A: While installing on Windows 7 Beta is not a recommended scenario, installing on Windows 7 RC is a tested scenario.

One thing to remember is that VS 2010 is not feature complete and hasn't been optimized for performance. While the move to a WPF-based editor is pretty sweet, there are some scenarios where you may feel a little bit of latency with your commands. You'll see perf improvements on this over time.

TwitterDrive - Tweets are the next evolution in message protocols

2009-04-01T17:53:00Z

Today we announced TwitterDrive, a free, open source application that will revolutionize cloud storage and cloud applications as we know it. Here is an interview with the TweetDrive creator, Brian Peek with the full details.

What is it?
TweetDrive is a .NET application that enables you to use Twitter as a cloud storage backend to share files, musics, photos, anything

How does it work?
TweetDrive serializes your file into BASE64, splits the file 140 characters at a time and uploads each file chunk to Twitter.

Does it really work?
Yes! Here's an example Tweet from my TweetDrive account, DanielfeDrive

v6Ld6nEc7w/kXepotrAlOWo984Ob3M6+tJNaNpzpZtQ5Rp5zV99RsnL7NroXvLeNKbdQVWIdizYpqPdJqJR9JFBeIVoO5rwoNITw2J/oKW/FlWjf0aaDJLENCGgYNW5Tpvfu

about 18 hours ago from web

Why use TwitterDrive?

Infinite Storage - There are no limits to how many Tweets you can have on Twitter
Leverages Network Effect - Before TwitterDrive, sending files across the network was just from user A to user B. Now communication is open and linked in a social graph. Social file sharing is the future
Open Protocols - Since Twitter has an open API, all data is accessible via XML which means developers will be able to build applications on top of this communication stack.

Evolution of networking
I think what you'll see is that Twitter is the next evolution of message protocols. Traditional communication protocols are point-to-point (TCP/IP request between you and a Web site) and totally closed (the exchange is designed to be private between users, outside of packet sniffers).

It's not just TCP/IP that is closed, other communication protocols or applications like email, FTP, HTTP, file streaming are closed systems. Twitter is the future of a communication protocol, it's not only completely open, it's a protocol that is social by design.

I suspect that academics will be re-writing networking books to include Twitter as the fifth and perhaps final layer on top of the TCP/IP protocol.

The Future
This is absolutely just the beginning. Imagine how many applications can be built on top of a totally free, distributed, and social computing cloud. It won't be long before we see the next BitTorrent client or a full blown Web site running using Twitter Cloud Storage. I won't be surprised if the next cloud operating system is distributed and run directly from Twitter.

Coding4Fun Book: The people and the projects

2008-12-11T02:21:37Z

Available now on Amazon.com for $26 (34% off!)

Our Coding4Fun book, Coding4Fun 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, World of Warcraft, YouTube, and More officially released to the world last week. Unlike your typical .NET development book, Coding4Fun is about learning how to use your developer skills to do fun, cool projects (see below for the full list). All of the .NET projects are in VB and C#, with the exception of the XNA chapter as XNA only supports C# at this time.

I wanted to send a big thank you to everyone who helped write, edit, and review our book's content, especially Laurel Ruma from O'Reilly publishing for all of her work and for being a great advocate for our book!

Coding4Fun: The People

Brian Peek - Brian authored several of the chapters in the book and he's been a regular Coding4Fun contributor, he's a C# MVP, he built the Finalizer, the .NET Battlebot, and he's the developer of the ever-so-popular Wiimote and Wiifit .NET Library. Brian wrote the Alien Attack XNA game, Windows Home Server Mail, Wiimote-Controlled Car, Holiday Lights chapter, and contributed to the Twitter and Wiimote Whiteboard chapter.

Johnny Chung Lee - Johnny was a PhD student from Carnegie Mellon University that became Internet famous by showing how you can use the Wii Remote's IR tracking capabilities in innovative ways. His YouTube videos have been seen by millions and were ranked amongst the top rated YouTube videos of all time. Johnny was also named one of the 2008 Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review and is joining Microsoft as a full-time hire. Johnny co-authored the Wiimote Whiteboard chapter (watch video).

Gabor Ratky - Gabor is the Lead Developer on AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft, a tool that brings a Visual Studio-like experience to building World of Warcraft addons including a visual designer, rich editor, and fully-featured project system (100K+ downloads). Gabor co-authored the World of Warcraft RSS Reader chapter.

Clint Rutkas - Clint is the Content Strategist for Coding4Fun and he's built some pretty impressive projects including the Disco Dance Floor and the Segway Skateboard. Clint co-authored the TwitterVote chapter.

Dan Fernandez - And of course me. I worked on the InnerTube, PeerCast, Lego Soldier, Warcraft RSS Reader, and TwitterVote chapters.

Coding4Fun: The Projects

Alien Attack

Create a 2D clone of Space Invaders with XNA, including how to build for the PC, Xbox 360, and Zune.

LEGO Soldier

Create a 2D side-scroller game with Popfly Game Creator and custom LEGO characters built with LEGO Digital Designer.

World of Warcraft RSS Feed Reader

Building an in-game RSS Reader that synchronizes feeds from your PC to World of Warcraft.

InnerTube

Download, convert and sync hundreds of YouTube videos to iTunes and Zune.

PeerCast

Stream videos on your home PC from anywhere in the world without special hardware using Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PnRP).

TwitterVote

Create custom online (Silverlight) polls for Twitter.

Windows Home Server Mail

Read your email remotely from Windows Home Server without needing Exchange Server.

Wiimote-Controlled Car

Hack a remote-controlled car so that you can control it using a Nintendo Wii Remote.

Wiimote Whiteboard

Create an interactive virtual whiteboard using a Nintendo Wii Remote's IR tracking.

Holiday Lights

Synchronize your holiday light display with music to create your own light show.

For more information on our book and/or for links to the code for each of the projects listed above, visit www.c4fbook.com.

PDC Recap

2008-11-11T04:54:25Z

With PDC just about a week over, it's about time I finally got around to blogging about it. Here's the random list

Windows Azure: Ray Ozzie launched Windows Azure and Microsoft's Cloud Strategy (video here). Charles on Channel 9 did a bunch of videos on our Cloud services. If you want a no nonsense explanation of Windows Azure, check out the interview with Manuvir.

Manuvir Das: Introducing Windows Azure

For a great recap on the Windows Azure, check out Dare Obasanjo's blog.

Windows Azure

Azure is that for developers building public-facing Web sites, this is a no-brainer, assuming they get the monetization story right.

Cloud-in-a-Box?

That being said, a number of enterprise customers that I spoke with at the conference said that the primary workloads they're doing are within the firewall and hosting data/computation outside of that is a non-starter. This is especially true with customers with sensitive data (government, financial vertical, biotech,etc). While I have zero knowledge of what the teams are actually working on (read: I know nothing), if Microsoft can either release software or partner with HP/Dell/etc, having a Microsoft Cloud appliance or Cloud software license would definitely be a big hit for that segment of customers. This isn't too far fetched as you're seeing teams discuss providing mutliple tiers of service where you can either pay for software as a service (Exchange Online, SQL Server Data Services) or host them yourself (buy a product license and run it yourself).

Language Parity

The other interesting aspect in looking at the PDC announcements is the difference in strategy amoungst VB and C#. Instead of having each language be good at certain scenarios (VB for Office interop for example), since the language teams have merged and the goal is to have feature parity. This is interesting in that many of the new features for VB were features that already existed in C# (collection initializers, auto-properties, etc) and the reverse is also true (C# gets VB features like optional parameters, named parameters, etc).

Service Bus

While Dare jokingly referred to this as "boring enterprise stuff", the killer feature for me is that Service Bus enables Point A to talk to Point B easily even if both clients are behind firewalls (NAT firewall traversal). One of the chapters in our upcoming Coding4Fun book is PeerCast which lets you stream video from one PC to another PC using PNRP. The problem with PNRP is that in many cases it won't work because you can't see the global seed cloud or your router doesn't support it amongst other troubleshooting issues. If Service Bus "just works" and it has both low-level and high-level APIs to exchange data between peers, then it's definitely going to be of use to Windows developer.

BI in the Cloud is coming

While not currently available, SSDS is going to add business intelligence (analysis services, reporting, data mining) to the cloud and that is going to be a killer feature. If you like Google Analytics, imagine having Google Analytics on steroids for every piece of data your company captures. I'm definitely looking forward to this given that it's very difficult to find a hoster that provides BI solutions from *any* vendor today. It will be interesting to see how Sun (MySQL), IBM (DB2) and Oracle respond to this.

"Pure Evil" = Win

Brian Keller and I got called out as "pure evil" by Scott Hanselman in his excellent .NET Framework 4.0 Overview session at PDC for our now infamous prank on This Week on Channel 9 where we asked our viewers to vote up adding MMO features to BabySmash! (who doesn't want baby vs baby).

Massive video backlog

The great thing about PDC is that all of the videos are available online (streaming + download) from. This of course means that I have a massive backlog of video content to watch.

Our C4F Session: Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo's Wiimote

You can watch our Coding4Fun session online with with Clint Rutkas, Brian Peek, and Scott Hanselman here. I have the C# version of InnerTube up and I'll have the VB version up soon too.

The People

One of the best parts about going to PDC is getting to see old friends or people I've only met through email/forums/twitter in person. Shout-outs to everyone who stopped by the Channel 9 & Coding4Fun Lounge.

Codeplex Meetup @ PDC

Speaking of people, Sara Ford hosted a Codeplex meetup at PDC that I think we'll be posting the video

PDC 2009

Mark your calendars, PDC 2009 is coming back to Los Angeles Nov 17-20th!

CodePlex Community Meetup at PDC

2008-10-21T03:22:00Z

As Sara mentioned in the CodePlex blog, we're having a CodePlex meetup at PDC on Wednesday from 1:30 - 2:30pm where volunteers will be able to show off their Codeplex projects and you'll be able to check out demos of new CodePlex features and give the CodePlex team feedback on what they're delivering.

Full details on the CodePlex blog:

Want to showcase your CodePlex project or your favorite CodePlex project at PDC? Channel 9 and CodePlex are sponsoring a CodePlex Community Meetup in the Channel 9 lounge area. We’re looking for volunteers to give 5 minute demos of their projects or how they are using their favorite projects.

After the demos, the CodePlex team will be demo’ing new features and collecting feedback, in a town hall / open space format.

We’ll have prizes to give out, and thank you gifts for those who demo projects.

If you can’t make it to the get together, we’ll be at the CodePlex booth towards the back of the Microsoft Pavilion hall on the left-hand side as you enter the Partners and Sponsors section all week. Come by and say hi. We ::heart:: our users.

Announcing Visual Studio 2010

2008-09-29T19:10:14Z

Since I'm a Visual Studio fanboy, I love hearing about the future of Visual Studio, now officially named Visual Studio 2010. While the team is taking a measured approach to disclosure, something they haven't done in VS 2005/2008, I did get the scoop on the future of Visual Studio Team System with Norman Guadagno, the Director of Product Management on what the key themes are for this release.

Norman Guadagno: Announcing Visual Studio Team System 2010

There's a lot more coming and Brian Keller from Channel 9 has a ton more videos coming this week with demos all week long on the Channel 9 Visual Studio site.

Video Schedule

Architecture Day (Tuesday, September 30th):
- Overview from Cameron Skinner
- UML designers
- "Top-down design"
- "Bottom-up design"

Business Alignment (Wednesday, October 1st):
- Overview from Lori Lamkin and Stephanie Saad
- Agile project planning and reporting
- Enterprise project management

Software Quality (Thursday, October 2nd):
- Overview from James Whittaker
- Test Case Management
- Manual Test Runner
- Historical Debugger
- Impact Analysis

Team Foundation Server (Friday, October 3rd):
- Overview from Brian Harry
- Branching and merging visualization
- Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management
- Team Foundation Server Setup
- Migration & Synchronization
- Team Build

While the team is primarily discussing Visual Studio Team System now, as Norman alludes to, you can expect to hear about a whole slew of new features at the Professional Developer's Conference in October, and some more at TechEd Europe 2008 in November.

What about bits?
Unfortunately the team hasn't released any public bits that you can play with to try these features hands on.

Opening the kimono on Windows 7

2008-09-24T20:45:20Z

Today we officially announced that PDC is the first time Microsoft will be discussing Windows 7 in-depth.

The big announcements are that:

Steve Sinofsky will keynote on Tuesday at PDC
There are 21 sessions on Windows 7 at PDC on everything from kernel, audio, graphics, networking, and more.
All PDC attendees get a pre-beta build of Windows 7 on a custom 160GB external USB drive

Nice!

Popfly Game Creator Goes Beta

2008-09-02T07:14:14Z

Congrats to the Popfly team for moving Popfly Game Creator from alpha to Beta and adding a bunch of handy features. For the full rundown, check out the Popfly Team Blog.

Here's a few of my favorite features

Inserting images into a game

Alpha (before): You had to manually build XAML and manually upload images for an actor and make sure the URL is
Beta (after): Native support for adding images to an actor

Playing Audio

Alpha (before): Popfly let you play built-in sounds with no code, but if you wanted to play a custom sound clip required custom JavaScript code
Beta (after): No code to play custom sounds

Testing Different Scenes

Alpha (before): You had to manually play the game to get a scene or add a custom keyboard shortcut to load a scene
Beta (after): Built-in support for previewing any scene

Customizable actor collisions

Alpha (before): Your actor "hit box" (the area for actor collisions) was either a square or a circle and you could *not* make it smaller
Beta (after): You can drag and drop the hit box and make it larger or smaller

All-in-all, lots of good, meaty features for Game Creators.

The Unofficial Microsoft Overworked Advisory System

2008-08-08T09:36:19Z

Scott Hanselman recently blogged about "Ninjas on fire" as a way to describe being overwhelmed at work, here's a snippet from his post on the origin:

Jesse asked me how I was doing yesterday and I replied "Ninjas on fire, man." Four years ago when Halo 2 was coming out it was described like this.

"Halo 2 is alot like Halo 1, except it's Halo 1 on fire going 120 miles per hour through a hospital zone chased by helicopters and ninjas. And the ninjas are all on fire too." -Jason Jones

For me and some of my compatriots, it also become a phrase that referred to our current workload, like:

"How's work?"

"I'm being chased by ninjas."

"Are they on fire?"

"Not yet."

"Oh, so it's Tuesday. You wait."

The short-hand just became "ninjas on fire, man" as a response to when you're totally overwhelmed with deadlines and work.

Scott and I taped This Week on Channel 9 earlier to day and I was telling him how our old team came up with a similar version of "Ninjas on Fire" as we just had *so* many projects to be working on and so little time that we continually had too many things to handle. To illustrate the overworked advisory system, I've added this helpful graphic which is of course ripped off from the US Government's Homeland Security System.

My current level is:

And no, you don't get to know how the criteria is set :)