Darryl Burling @ Work : Gadgets

MSDN Flash - Silverlight, Rugby and Visual Studio 2008

dburling — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:52:00 GMT

I know - the last one only just came out yesterday. I'll blame the spam legislation :-) Here is this weeks - should be in your mail box Friday or early next week.

Silverlight, Rugby and Visual Studio 2008

Silverlight 1.0 is out! The final release of Silverlight was announced a couple of weeks ago, and means that if you’ve been waiting for the production release of Silverlight, it’s here and you can get into it.

You might have heard about a small Rugby tournament that is going on somewhere else in the world at the moment too. Obviously the New Zealand Rugby union is pretty focused at the moment, keeping AllBlacks.com up to date with interviews, match highlights, table standings and scoreboards. To help you keep up to date, AllBlacks.com launched its new Rugby World Cup Windows Vista sidebar gadget a couple of days ago – built entirely in Silverlight 1.0. The cool thing about this gadget is that if you don’t have Vista installed yet, you can access the web version of the gadget with your web browser and because it’s Silverlight, it will run on Windows Vista, XP and on Macs. Get the gadget here.

One common question we get around Silverlight is what are we doing to get designers interested in this technology? If you are fortunate enough to live in Wellington Nas Khan has set up a user group for designers called ZamDes. We are also kicking off a global design event in Auckland on the 4^th of October called “Expression around the clock”. Places are limited, but please tell any designers in your organization to register for the free half day event. If you can’t make it, you can always follow along on the global website at http://expressionevent.com.

I’ve also kicked off my User Group tour of New Zealand with presentations to more than 70 people at the new .Net User group in Ellerslie (read Jacqui’s summary) and the .Net User Group in the Auckland CBD. My presentation covers a bunch of the new features in Visual Studio 2008 across Windows Client, Web, Office, Mobile, Services and some of the new language features.

Feedback about Visual Studio has been very positive so far. Here’s what Chris Jacques, who runs his own consulting firm - B2B 24-7 in Auckland said:

“B2B 24-7 will be using the Web and Mobility features in Visual Studio 2008 in the development of all future customer solutions. We believe Visual Studio 2008 will allow us to deliver a richer customer experience within an affordable timeframe in an exciting market place”.

If you are interested in learning more about how Visual Studio 2008 will reduce the time you spend configuring and increase the time you spend coding and allow you to build richer applications, come along a user group meeting on my tour. We also announced our community leader of the year award recently – so support your local community leaders by getting along to a user group. We’ll have copies of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 for you and I have a few other prizes to give away.

We’ve also updated the mscommunities.net.nz site with a couple of new user groups – so make sure you check it out and stay up to date with community news.

To sign up for Microsoft New Zealand newsletters (including this one) - visit http://microsoft.co.nz/subscribe.

Ask the experts

dburling — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:46:21 GMT

The ask the experts evening went off. I have been going to Tech Ed for a few years now and I don't think I've seen delegates as engaged with experts as I did last night.

Those of you who stuck around to talk to the speakers - they enjoyed it. As I previously mentioned, many of them are looking to talk to you - not just present to you.

Ron Jacobs was great, and spoke to many of you with Nigel following along. I happened to be speaking with Graeme from http://gofetch.net.nz when Ron approached Graeme. He wasn't expecting it so the first words from his mouth were expletives :-). He then went on to talk about the Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget that he's put out for customers to use. His and more New Zealand gadgets are listed on the Microsoft NZ Gadgets page.

I caught up with some people from Canterbury Uni who wanted some advice as to how to find which printer driver on a server with 150 printers was leaking. Thanks to Eric Deily from the IIS team for knowing that a tool on http://iis.net could help!

I also got to meet a few of the speakers who were not around on Sunday and catch up with quite a few of you.

TechNet Gadget - with New Zealand (and Australian) content

dburling — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 02:36:39 GMT

In my email this morning I got a message that Jay "No Blog" Templeton and the team from Mabode have just launched the Microsoft Australia and New Zealand TechNet Gadget.

The gadget allows you to select a bunch of feeds to have rotated through the gadget at intervals. It also includes a ticker of alerts and a TechNet Search box to make it easy to search TechNet from the sidebar.

The New Zealand content looks cool - the link in the screen shot above linked off to Nathan Mercers (IT Pro Evangelist) blog.

You can get the gadget here. Great work Jay!

Wanted - a Video Player sidebar gadget

dburling — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 00:40:00 GMT

I was just considering watching a videocast that I'd downloaded but I've got other things to do and don't want to devote myself to just watching the video.

On my computer I've got the sidebar set to always on top (I've got a 20" wide screen monitor, so no great loss of space). What I'd love to be able to do is put the video into the sidebar where it can just play away and I can tune in and out of it as I work.

Ideally something where I can load a video from a location on my computer and then play/pause the video as required. When the video isn't playing it can show a logo or something. It would be great if you could set the logo yourself. Other nice to have's would be if you can queue up some videos (perhaps via a Windows Media play list).

Would anyone else use something like this? Has anyone got one? Has anyone got time to build one? :-)

Background Motion - now live!

dburling — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:35:00 GMT

Over the last few months the guys at Mindscape have been dotting i's and crossing t's in order to get BackgroundMotion up and running. This has meant getting a solid hosting solution up (thanks to ZeroOne for pitching in!) as well as ensuring things like the terms of use and such things are in place.

The great news is that this is all now done and http://BackgroundMotion.com is now up (Mauricio got the scoop on this yesterday).

What is it?

Backgroundmotion.com is two things.

Firstly it is a community website to allow you to share backgrounds and background video for the DreamScene features of Windows Vista Ultimate.

Secondly it is a great example of a modern web application built on .Net 2.0. When I say example, I also mean sample - the source code for the site is available on codeplex for you to download and pull it apart.

There is also a "Code" tab on the site to help you get up and running with the source code. The developer section of the site includes sample code, short introduction videos and resources to lower the bar to use these technologies.

Technologies used

One of the things that the guys did was to build in all the latest technologies and making the code available means that you can go and see how they did it. Specifically, the technologies and tools they used include:

.Net Framework 2.0
.Net Framework 3.0
ASP.Net 2.0
ASP.Net AJAX 1.0
Silverlight
NUnit
LINQ (May CTP)
Web Client Software Factory (Composite Web Block)
Lucene.Net
RSS Toolkit (which was extended for the solution)
Virtual Earth
Sidebar Gadgets

The guys also made sure that it is XHTML 1.0 compliant.

If you went along to the Technical Briefings we did back in March you'll remember that JB and JD presented at those sessions on BackgroundMotion. The code tab on BackgroundMotion also has links to the videos of their sessions from the events, all nicely polished with demos and decks integrated into the video (dont forget you can get the decks here).

Nigel tells me he's planning to do a screen cast on getting started with BackgroundMotion, so watch his blog for that too.

Go check out the site, click the code tab and take a hunt around. We are keen to know what you think - so click the feedback link on the site or post a comment on one of the blog posts that you'll see today.

Trade Me Launches Vista Gadget

dburling — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:31:46 GMT

Good news from Rowans Blog.

The TradeMe gadget is one of several New Zealand gadgets that have been incubated.

This gadget is for people selling stuff on TradeMe - if you sell stuff on TradeMe, this is a great way to keep up to date with what your goods are up to and what value has been placed on them.

I'm using it to track one of my auctions right now, and I've used it for previous auctions.

You'll see a few more gadgets come online this week, so stay tuned. In the meantime, go get the TradeMe Gadget :-)

Powershell gadget and using WCS in the sidebar

dburling — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 08:33:23 GMT

Last night the guys from Mindscape unleashed their powershell gadget onto the world. This very cool gadget allows you to enter powershell commands into a gadget rather than having a powershell window running full time in the background. The guys have actually hooked up their sound system to a system that plays MP3's and using powershell they "bump" and play tracks. So the gadget was inspired in many ways by this scenario. The gadget also has a nice flyout which serves as a powershell window that tucks away when not in use - very nice.

The other interesting thing about the powershell gadget is that it uses .Net but without requiring a UAC prompt or MSI installer to make it all work - thus, you get full .Net power in a sidebar gadget that any user can install and use - very cool.

You can download the gadget here, and read about how you can automatically register any objects you need here. If you get it - make sure you install powershell before you tell them it doesn't work... :-)

You've seen JB using .Net from inside a gadget and you've now seen the Powershell Gadget that uses .Net, Vitorrio has taken to the next level by using Windows Card Space in a sidebar gadget. He's also written a pretty comprehensive blog post that tells you how he did it and he's attached the source from his project to his blog post.

Very cool! Hopefully these help you expand the possibilities you can acheive with gadgets :-)

Technorati tags: WCS, Powershell, Sidebar, Gadgets, Windows, Vista

More NZ Sidebar Gadgets

dburling — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:41:43 GMT

There is lots of activity in the Windows Vista Sidebar gadget space here in New Zealand. There are a heap of significant organizations here that are working on gadgets right now that will be revealed in the next few weeks.

For the moment though I want to highlight the astonishing gadget development effort of Chris Crowe. Chris is an IIS MVP from Christchurch and he's been busy making gadgets for a while. I had no idea he was working on these until the Christchurch Technical Briefing when I caught up with him briefly.

He currently has six gadgets that he's built. Five of them are Radio gadgets (one for each of More FM, Radio Pacific, News Talk ZB, RDU Radio in Christchurch and ZM Online)- so you can put your radio station on your sidebar and listen while you work.

The other one is a very cool NZ Weather gadget. This gadget tells you the current wind speed and direction, rainfall, humidity, barometric pressure and temperature. In addition you can see graphs of the data over the last 24 hours or 7 days depending on the type of data.

This is a very cool gadget. He's only uploaded it a few days ago (last thursday IIRC) and its already had nearly 3500 downloads!

You can get any of Chris's gadgets from his live gallery profile page here.

There is lots of news around gadgets coming up - there are some cool gadgets and gadget usage starting to happen.

If you've got a gadget you'd like showcased, please let me know.

Technorati tags: Gadgets, Sidebar, Vista, New Zealand

Sidebar Gadgets - getting started made easy

dburling — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:57:00 GMT

We've got some great New Zealand gadgets up on the Microsoft NZ website now including ones from DigiRama, TrafficWatch, NZ Herald, ASB, and TVNZ (my personal favorite). These are all listed on here.

If you've been thinking about writing a side bar gadget (and you are not the only one) there are a few places you might like to start.

The first place to start is the Gadget Development overview which gives you an introduction to building a sidebar gadget. This will give you an understanding of the basic architecture and minimum requirements for a gadget.

There is also the Sidebar Reference (ignore the mostly blank landing page - look in the table of contents...) that will provide details about events and API calls available to use from inside the sidebar.

Daniel from the UK DPE team has also put together a 10 minute video that walks you through developing a gadget, this is a good way to get an overview of the process and simple gadget development.

In case you are a little daunted about burying your head in javascript and HTML or if you just dont have the time to do all this reading, JB has got something that should help. He's published a gadget shim which is essentially the basics of a gadget already to go. All you've got to do is download it, add your content and publish the gadget.

Go and download the shim (a small zip file) and build a gadget. And when you do, make sure you add it to the gallery - and let me know so we can add it to the NZ gadget page.

Technorati tags: Sidebar, gadgets, Vista, Windows