Gold Coast : Windows 7

Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch

marcsc — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:25:39 GMT

Robert Levy from the Surface team and Anson Tsao from the WPF team gave a great session on:

Multi-Touch on Microsoft Surface and Windows 7 for .NET Developers

The session is definitely worth watching if you are interested in building multi-touch apps on Windows 7. In the session, they announced the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch which is a set of “Controls, samples, templates, and docs Coming shortly after the WPF4 launch.” Don’t let the Surface name fool you, the toolkit will work on any Windows 7 touch PC with the .NET Framework 4.0 installed.

This is exciting news that I have been keeping under wraps for quite some time. The toolkit will take Windows 7 multi-touch developer productivity for WPF4 developers to the next level. During the session, they shared that the toolkit will include:

Common controls optimized for Multi-Touch

Controls design primarily for Multi-Touch

Essential Multi-Touch UX Functionality

Hearing all of this is, of course, a bit of a tease since the controls won’t be available for a while, but exciting news nonetheless. The good news is that the Surface team also announced that the Surface SDK is no longer “by invitation only.” You can download it from http://surface.com/developer. Since the toolkit is a subset of existing Surface 1.0 SDK assets ported to WPF4, you can get a head start by evaluating the Surface 1.0 SDK. If your development cycle is far enough out, you might even want to consider building your app on the Surface 1.0 SDK and porting it to WPF4 / Windows 7 when the toolkit is available. Of course, you will have to stick to the subset that is being ported to WPF4, but your code will only need minimal changes (if any) to run on a Windows 7 PC once the toolkit is released.

Silverlight touch just got easier

marcsc — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:51:39 GMT

I’ve been waiting for this to happen! The Surface team ported their Manipulation and Inertia APIs to Silverlight 3+. They’ve made them available for download at:

http://tinyurl.com/SurfaceManipSilverlight

This is a must have set of APIs if you are interested in building multi-touch solutions on Windows 7 with Silverlight 3+.

Tallahassee follow up

marcsc — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:04:15 GMT

Thanks for taking the time to attend our developer day!

For resources from my Windows 7 for .NET Developers session, see this post:

http://tinyurl.com/Win7DevDinner

The two decks and the GuestBook demo I used for the Windows/SQL Azure session are from the Windows Azure Training Kit:

http://tinyurl.com/WindowsAzureTrainingKit

The two helpful tools I demonstrated for SQL azure are:

http://sqlazureexplorer.codeplex.com/

http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/

These are MUST HAVE tools for anyone working with SQL Azure right now.

FOLLOW UP: DevDinner - Developing for Windows 7 using the .NET Framework

marcsc — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:48:08 GMT

As always, thanks to those of you who attended. You can find the deck here:

The Surface 1.0 videos are there as well.

Some of my code demos came from other sources:

http://tinyurl.com/Windows7TrainingKit

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SensorsAndLocation

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsTouch

Don’t forget that these resources have tons of samples, slides, hands on labs, etc.

The demos I wrote (mostly the .NET 4.0 and touch demos) need a little clean up, organization, etc. before I make them public. I’ll blog about them soon.

Joe Healy has some additional .NET samples here. Some of my stuff was inspired by Joe. Also, a shout out to Jared Bienz. The Sensor and Location demo I showed was a modified version of the Hands On Lab he wrote that’s in the latest release of the Windows 7 Training Kit.

Also, there is a new set of videos collectively titled Windows 7 New Features for Managed Code Developers:

http://www.msdev.com/Directory/SeriesDescription.aspx?CourseId=130

I haven’t had a chance to review them, but I don’t believe these videos cover .NET 4.0. I think it is all 3.5 SP1.

As I mentioned, keep an eye out for next month’s dinner. We will be announcing it soon. The topic will be SharePoint 2010 from a developer’s perspective. As I mentioned last night, I never really warmed up to SharePoint development until now. To me, SharePoint 2010 is the first version that feels familiar and approachable for the typical ASP.NET developer. I hope to convey that at the next dinner.

As always, if you or your company do work for the US Government, are looking to adopt any of the new Windows 7 features in your applications, and want to some help from our team of evangelists, then feel free to contact us through our team blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/contact.aspx

Hello, anyone out there? (aka I’m back)

marcsc — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:36:08 GMT

My blog has been dead for quite some time. My last post was over a month ago. I haven’t given up on blogging. I took the last month off to bring my new son into the world. I’m back. It will take me some time to get caught up from being away from work for a month. I will be blogging again in the coming weeks.

Over the last few months, I have been spending most of my time on Windows 7 related work (mostly multi-touch) and learning what’s new SharePoint 2010 for developers. I’ll be sharing some of the things I have learned about Windows 7 development at our next Developer Dinner. Here’s the link to the announcement on my team blog:

Microsoft Developer Dinner Series for Partners: Developing for Windows 7 using the .NET Framework

As for SharePoint 2010, well there isn’t much I can share just yet. We’ll definitely have a developer dinner on SharePoint 2010 for devs. My team is also planning a full day SharePoint event in November. The event will be delivered in DC and Reston. The DC event will also be available online. More details are available here:

Maximize Your SharePoint Investment: Leverage It as a Development Platform!

Windows 7 RTM: Get your apps ready!

marcsc — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:44:47 GMT

I’m sure you’ve heard that Windows 7 has Released to Manufacturing (RTM):

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/22/windows-7-has-been-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/21/when-will-you-get-windows-7-rtm.aspx

(MSDN subscribers get it on Aug 6th)

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/07/22/our-next-engineering-milestone-rtm.aspx

The next step is to make sure your apps are ready for and take advantage of Windows 7.

Yochay has a great post on guiding you through ensuring you are ready:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/archive/2009/07/23/is-your-application-ready-for-windows-7-rtm.aspx

Windows 7 tips and tricks

marcsc — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:46:09 GMT

One of my new years resolutions was to minimize the amount of linking (“Hey, so and so just blogged this”) that I do on my blog. Why? Well, I personally find it annoying when I am going through my RSS reader and find myself spending an extended period of time going through a bunch of posts that just link to someone else’s blog that I am already subscribe to. Since I find it annoying, I want to minimize the chance of annoying anyone who reads my blog.

However, sometimes something comes along that is just worth linking to. Tim Sneath recently published the following:

The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

I’ve been using Windows 7 as my primary OS since build 6801 was released at the PDC. After reading this post, I was surprised at how much I didn’t know. If you are using (or plan on using) the Windows 7 beta, then this is a MUST READ.