Windows Live Quantum Mechanics : events

MIX07 UK Podcast with Craig Murphy

dthorpe — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:37:18 GMT

I sat down with Craig Murphy to chat about Windows Live and life in general at MIX07 UK. Craig has just posted a podcast of that conversation.

I've known Craig for many years through the Delphi community. I think we first met in person in 2001 at "The Delphi Conference" run by the Borland User Group UK. Aha! Found a photo. Craig got his start as one of the pillars of the Delphi developer community - particularly at the Scottish end of the isles. Today he provides much the same community organizing and informing service over a much broader swath of tech topics as a Microsoft MVP.

MIX07 UK Blogging

dthorpe — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 06:54:51 GMT

The title of honorary MIX07 UK stenographer goes to Sebastien Lambla (aka SerialSeb)for transcribing nearly word for word just about every session he attended this week, in realtime! Check out the detail in his notes on "Building Next Generation Web Applications using Windows Live Services", for example. He has half a dozen more posts on Mix07 UK just as detailed. Way to go SerialSeb!

PodCast Interview on LiveSide.Net

dthorpe — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 06:20:42 GMT

Angus and I had a chat with the guys from LiveSide.Net during the MIX07 UK conference this week. Check it out!

Blogging at ReMix07 London

dthorpe — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 12:00:50 GMT

I'm sitting next to Angus in the back row of the ReMix07 London keynote. Angus is blogging in Windows Live Writer, and the guy on the other side of him is blogging in Windows Live Writer. Everyone loves a parade, so here I am blogging in Windows Live Writer, too.

It's times like these when I wish I had remembered to pack my camera.

Where Have We Heard That Before?

dthorpe — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 00:55:27 GMT

Yesterday the Seattle Times ran an article about Penny Arcade and the overnight success of the Penny Arcade Expo. I had to laugh a little when the article used the words "imploded" and "E3" in the same sentence. I used pretty much the same pairing of words back in my January 2007 Events Calendar post.

The Seattle Times article has more timely data than that January post, naturally. PAX2007 is expecting some 30,000 people through its doors this weekend. Thirty Thousand! Jiminy Cricket! PAX2005 was only 1500 or so people (and 3x the expected turnout even then).

E3 Dies Again

In other news, FiringSquad reports that the new event that came out of nowhere, E for All Expo, is having trouble attracting major exhibitors. Sony is not interested, Microsoft is noncommittal. The only player signed up so far is Nintendo. E for All Expo is the brainchild of IDC, the very makers and destroyers of the late great E3 Expo. If this is IDC's attempt to rectify their choice to kill consumer access to E3, it sounds like the vendors are not playing ball. And why should they? IDC has a terrible track record with the consumer market.

Windows Live Web Controls Mix07 Video

dthorpe — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:40:23 GMT

In the better late than never department, a video interview with Koji and me from the week prior to MIX07 is now posted on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=317385

Yay! Thanks Catherine for pushing it on through.

Maker Faire

dthorpe — Tue, 22 May 2007 04:39:14 GMT

Photos from this weekend's Maker Faire Part carnival, part science fair, part flea market, part performance art. It was funky, kooky, often corny, occasionally silly, and universally fun.

The only thing I can think of that would be more fun than going to Maker Faire next year would be to be an exhibitor! Exhibiting something molten, something metal, and definitely something previously considered impossible. Sharpen your pencils, my hamster minions, there's work to be done!

See Popfly at MakerFaire: May 19-20 San Mateo Fairgrounds

dthorpe — Sat, 19 May 2007 00:43:09 GMT

Hey, whadayaknow: John and the Popfly team will be at the O'Reilly Maker Faire this weekend in San Mateo.

As a hard core tinkerer myself (don't ask what's in my garage, ask what's not!), I've been following Make: magazine since discovering it last summer. It seems likely that Maker Faire will take a seat of honor on my short list of must-go annual events.

Since I'll be there anyway (got my tickets in February!), I'll be sure to drop by the Coding4Fun booth to see what sort of heckling can be done. (I've been in several conf calls with John Montgomery and others on his team, but we've never met in person so I don't think they'll spot me in the crowd. heh, heh)

Hey, Bathsheeba Grossman will be at Maker Faire, too! Awesome! She does some amazing things with topological models and direct metal deposition rapid prototyping systems. I'm a bit of a nut for additive rapid prototyping fabrication (additive process = constructing solid shapes by building up raw material, as opposed to subtractive processes such as milling).

MIX07 Speaker Interviews on Channel 9

dthorpe — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:35:00 GMT

Video interviews of many of the MIX07 speakers are posted up on Channel 9. I think most of these were filmed before MIX and released during the event. Koji and I were interviewed by Catherine Heller here.

MIX07: POST/GET/PUT/DELETE Your Way To Windows Live Data

dthorpe — Thu, 03 May 2007 22:38:00 GMT

Martin Heller posted an article on Infoworld, "Data Wants To Be Free," about the Windows Live Data "secret session" at MIX07. The Windows Live Data service (probably not its final name) enables a deeper level of integration and data access than the devlive web controls, but still maintains user control over access to user data.

The Windows Live Contacts Control and Windows Live Spaces Control are designed to be super simple to drop into an HTML page and wire up with a minimal amount of JavaScript code. Easy easy easy. The controls provide prepackaged UI, take care of user login, and pass back to your page just the data that the user has chosen to use with your web app. The controls are stateless in that they don't remember any sort of relationship between your web page and the end user. Each time the user selects data to send to your web app, the controls will prompt the user to confirm the data transfer. The controls require nothing from you but an http file server - no server side execution required, so they can be used on even the most minimal, shoestring budget hosted domain.

Windows Live Data enables your web application to establish a lasting relationship with the end user. The user can choose to allow your application to access their Windows Live data without constant confirmation prompts. Your web app can make server-to-server calls to read or write the user's Windows Live data. To prove that you have the user's permission to do this, your app includes a token in the request that was issued to you by the Windows Live Data service when the user approved access for your app. The user can revoke that permission at any time by going to a Windows Live page and removing your app/domain name from their approved list.

Windows Live Data imposes no UI on your application other than the initial granting of access permission. (Your site directs the user to Windows Live to approve access for your app, then Windows Live redirects back to you) Your app is trusted by the end user, and has unhindered access to the data the user has granted your app permission to use.

More Control, More Work

The price for this deeper data integration is that you need to write more code than the super easy Windows Live web controls require, and you'll need more from your web server than just http file serving. It's pay for play. If you want full control of the UI and seamless integration of the user's data into your web app, you'll need to work a little harder to get it. Because you'll need to remember the user's id and the authorization token issued to you by Windows Live Data, you'll most likely need server side storage for your web app. You definitely don't want to leave that token lying around in persistent browser cookies. You'll probably use server-to-server calls to access the user's data via Windows Live Data service, so that means you'll need code execution capability on your web host. If you're running your own server farm, that's probably a no brainer, but if you're on a shoestring budget using a hosting service you'll probably pay a little more for your web hosting to include server side script execution. Windows Live Data does not require ASP.NET on the server - it's usable from anything that can drive http requests and responses.

There are multiple ways your app can present itself to the Windows Live Data service to prove that you are indeed the app that the user authorized for access to their data - authorization tokens are one path. Mutual SSL (server to server) is another option.

Knowing Your Costs At Scale Before You Get There

How much will direct access to the user's Windows Live Data cost you? Nada. Nothing. Under the new unified terms of use announced at MIX07 this week, you can use Windows Live Data service for the Contacts API in your application for noncommercial and commercial purposes for free up to a threshold of one million unique users per month, averaged over 3 months. That's not one million API calls, not ten thousand users visiting your site a thousand times each, not even a million unique users accessing your site - it's one million different user ids seen by the Windows Live services in API calls from your site. You may have 2 million users running around on your site, but if only 1/3 of them are using a feature that touches Windows Live Data services then you're not at the 1Muu threshold yet.

What happens as your app grows in popularity to beyond that 1Muu threshold? That's the point at which you'll need to have a chat with Microsoft about a suitable "exchange of value". One way for your app to provide an exchange of value with Windows Live is to serve Microsoft AdCenter ads in your app. If you aren't interested in putting ads on your pages, or you feel you can get better return from some other ad system, you could choose to just pay for your service usage outright: 25 cents per unique user per year, calculated quarterly. Other options are possible, but those are two baseline examples.

Worried that these terms may change in the future? Lock the terms in with a service contract. Microsoft also announced this week that service level agreements including multi-year service contracts will be available for Windows Live services in 2008. So you can bet your business on a set of Windows Live services, get a commitment in writing from Windows Live, and use that contract as an asset in growing your business. Venture capitalists, for example, like to see supply chain contracts in place in a startup to minimize the risk of costs spiraling out of control as the startup scales up in volume. A multiyear service level agreement is not going to be free, but it's cost effective way to hedge against future unknowns and establish a beachhead of stability in this chaotic industry. It's also what entrepreneurs have been asking for - a way to lock in service guarantees and pay down business risk.

The specific details mentioned here are for the Windows Live Contacts API, a service of Windows Live Data services. The thresholds for other Windows Live services such as Silverlight Streaming, Virtual Earth maps, or Windows Live Search queries will vary slightly due to the different nature of the services (Search doesn't involve logged in users, for example), but the concept across the board is the same: free usage for noncommercial and commercial purposes up to a well-defined threshold of "significant" activity beyond which an exchange of value is needed. Simple baseline terms for exchange of value (such as serving ads or paying for usage) are clearly defined well in advance so that you don't have to worry about shakedowns just as your business begins to take off.

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Watch the video of this session

MIX07: Extending the Browser Programming Model with Silverlight

dthorpe — Wed, 02 May 2007 20:34:00 GMT

Silverlight implements isolated local storage on the client. Currently in the Alpha, the storage is limited to 1MB per web application and is keyed to the full URL of the XAML/HTML page. That means for this alpha release, two pages that are part of the same application served from the same domain will have separate isolated storage. In later beta releases, support will be added to allow configuration of isostorage quotas by users or corporate configuration profiles.

Isolated storage is stored outside the browser cache. This suggests to me that the lifetime of the data in the isostorage is independent of the browser cache settings - isostorage won't be wiped out when the user clears the browser cache.

Silverlight running in different browsers on the same machine will use the same isostorage area on the machine. If the user fires up your Silverlight web app in Safari on a Mac and your app writes something to isostorage, then if the user later fires up your Silverlight web app in Firefox on the same Mac, your app will find the data it wrote into local storage earlier in the Safari session.

Isolated local storage is not strictly protected on the local machine. It's stored in the hidden App Data subdirectory in the user private directory. A determined user can drill down into this directory and possibly muck with your app data files. If you're wanting to write sensitive data to the isolated storage that you want to trust has not been mangled by the user, you should consider encrypting the data.

Silverlight provides scriptableobject wrappers for managed code to access JavaScript objects and DOM elements, properties, etc. When serializing JavaScript data into managed code, you can use CLR generics to instantiate the JavaScript data in strongly typed collections on the managed side. (strong types! generics! compiler-checked code! Yay!) For example, instead of implementing a GetProperty method that returns integer, and another one that returns double, and another one that returns strings, they've implemented only one GetProperty method as a generic method whose type parameter defines the return type you want back. foo.GetProperty<string>("name"), for example.

In the current 1.1 Alpha release, directly calling from managed code into JavaScript is not yet implemented. However, managed code can invoke events that will fire on the JavaScript side, so you can at least cobble together a way for the managed code to invoke code on the JavaScript side until the real method invoke marshalling is implemented. JavaScript can call directly into managed code that is tagged with the scriptable attribute.

Silverlight provides an OpenFileDialog functionality. It manages the UI of prompting the user to select file(s) on the local system and providing them to Silverlight code. The UI uses the open file dialog of the native OS, so that Mac users see Mac file open behaviors while Windows folks see Windows File Open dialogs.

The filenames returned by OpenFileDialog are stripped of all path information to minimize accidental disclosure of sensitive info that might be embedded in the file path, such as the user's login id.

Files selected by the user and returned by OpenFileDialog can only be opened by Silverlight code in read-only mode. This is also for safety reasons. Neither OpenFIleDIalog nor isolated storage ever allow web app code to write to arbitrary locations on the local machine.

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Watch the video of this session at MIX07

MIX07: Silverlight Supports Dynamic Languages (Iron Ruby, Iron Python, JavaScript)

dthorpe — Tue, 01 May 2007 21:17:35 GMT

Josh Holmes has a great summary of the Ray Ozzie / Scott Guthrie keynote yesterday. Towards the end of his post, Josh notes with shock & awe that Silverlight not only includes a .NET CLR execution environment, but also the Dynamic Language Runtime as well. Yes, it's true! You can write apps for Silverlight using dynamic languages such as Iron Ruby, Iron Python, and managed JavaScript!

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MIX07 and Silverlight in Technorati Top 10

dthorpe — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:48:01 GMT

Chris Woodill noticed that the MIX07 event and Silverlight announcements are creating ripples in the blogsphere. MIX07 and Silverlight are in the top 10 searches on Technorati!

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MIX07: Windows Live Platform Beta

dthorpe — Tue, 01 May 2007 19:39:00 GMT

Live & raw notes from Brian Arbogast's keynote: (watch the video)

"Today we are announcing the Windows Live Platform Beta"

Simple and consistent terms of use across the Windows Live service spectrum

Predictable costs at scale - so that you can plan your business growth with high degree of predictability

Windows Live Web Services evolving from "first party applications" such as Messenger, Hotmail, XBOX Live into reusable and recombinable service offerings to support 3rd party applications such as social networking, rich media, mashups, and enterprise applications.

What can you do with the Windows Live Platform today, at MIX07?

Combine video, photos, contacts, maps, and search into web applications. Broad spectrum of engagement: you can drop web controls into your web app with just a few lines of JavaScript and be up and running in a matter of minutes, and/or you can dive a little deeper to access service APIs directly and define your own UI and process flow. A little more work for a lot more options.

User Controlled Privacy Model. Users have control over what applications can access their private data, and can revoke that access at any time.

Easy to Understand Business Model

Apps can use Windows Live services for free up to a point of "high traffic". As app usage grows beyond that threshold, seek to find "exchange of value" for service usage - app use of Microsoft ads, or pay per unique user. Example: For Spaces Photos and Live Contacts: Unlimited use of Web Control. For direct service API use, free up to 1 million unique users per month (avgd over 3 months). Past 1Muu/month, apps can either provide exchange of value with Windows Live by serving Microsoft AdCenter ads, or by paying 25 cents per unique user per year. Similar terms with threshold variations for Silverlight, Virtual Earth, Search.

The intent of the threshold is to nurture adoption and help applications grow at scale. The clear and simple cost structure beyond the free threshold makes is easy / possible to build a solid business plan that extends from zero all the way out to wildly successful Internet killer app with tens or hundreds of millions of active users. Knowing your costs up front is critical to structuring your revenue streams so that your business can be as financially successful as your app grows in popularity.

PhotoBlugBlog - Koji showed the PhotoBugBlog travel journal that we "wrote" on stage in yesterday's 30 Minute Social App session. I'll blog more on that later today.

Match.com dating service - early pioneer in the social networking. As an industry, online matchmaking is responsible for nearly 10% of all marriages in the United States. Match.com alone responsible for 400,000 marriages per year. 60,000 new match.com customers per day worldwide. 55,000 anonymous emails sent between customers each month. Looking for new ways to communicate, anonymously. "winks" - one way anonymous message. Match.com partnered with MSN Dating & Personals

Match.com technology: Microsoft shop. Windows OS / IIS web platform. .NET development environment. SQL server databases. Significant platform size and scale. Top 50 site in the English speaking world. 1.5 billion page views per month globally. "a lot of people looking for love, globally"

Improve user engagement, development new communication tools, anonymous environment, use presence. Everything through "double blind" anonymity systems.

match.com online demo. customer A can communicate with and see presence of customer B via Messenger even though customer A is not logged into Messenger and customer B is not logged into Match.com. This is done using back-end Messenger service APIs used by Match.com. (No messenger API announcements today, but clearly something is cooking in the labs)

Q&A:

Q: Is Virtual Earth licensing still based on tiling? It's very hard for us to plan our business costs around this tiling model.

A: We've simplified the Virtual Earth terms a bit already, but there is still an element of tiles served. That's sort of representing our back-end cost structure for the images we license, but you're not the first to ask this question. We'll continue working on simplifying the Virtual Earth licensing even further.

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MIX07: Social Mixing

dthorpe — Tue, 01 May 2007 09:12:00 GMT

I bumped into Anders Hejlsberg in the speaker's lounge this afternoon just before my 4:30 presentation. He was at Mix to talk about LINQ, and probably on hand to provide Silverlight air cover. He asked how things were going now that I had a full year under my belt at Microsoft. My reply was to show him the WL Contacts control and Spaces control in the 30 second elevator pitch. He was curious about the cross-domain communication trick we've developed. We both had to head off to our respective sessions, so I'll have to follow up with him on that.

Speaking of which - keep an eye out for the June issue of the The Architecture Journal 12 #6. I've written up some notes on secure client-side cross-domain communication using the iframe URL technique, it's weaknesses, and how we've addressed them in our Windows Live Contacts and Spaces controls.

After our dev live session (The 30 Minute Social Application, with Lynn Ayers and Koji Kato), I bumped into Chuck Jazdzewski in the hallway. Chuck wasn't presenting a session at MIX, but was on deck to field questions about XAML designer work that he's been working on in the Visual Studio group (applicable to Silverlight, I believe). I was trying to keep up with my team to get in on the dinner plans, and he was trying to do the same with his team, so we hardly had time for a score of words before we lost our respective dinner groups. S'ok, I have lunch with him in Redmond every month or two.

Hardly 20 seconds after seeing Chuck, I bumped into Miguel de Icaza outside the speaker lounge. Man, this place is crawling with power hitters. I met Miguel at the first non-Microsoft .NET development conference (.NET ONE) in November 2001 in Frankfurt. It was a somewhat smallish event, so we speakers ended up spending most of the time talking to each other between sessions, over dinner, etc. Miguel was there for Mono, of course, and I was there to make the first public presentation of Delphi for the .NET platform. (a very early alpha compiler, but it was enough to show IL codegen and compile a writeln app)

Miguel was of course orbited by all manner of fans and friends, so we said hello and made a mental note to try to hook up again later to catch up.

In the speaker lounge, I mentioned to my devlive coworker Galo Corvera how cool it was to see Miguel at MIX. Galo's response: "Miguel de Icaza? THE Miguel de Icaza? WOW!" So naturally, I dragged Galo out into the hallway and introduced him to Miguel. Though Miguel protests loudly, there is no escaping the fact that he is an icon within the open source community in general, and nothing short of a cult hero in the software development community of his homeland, Mexico. Galo was gobsmacked. Ah, such fun. :P

John Lam of Ruby on Rails fame was spotted at dinner just outside the Venetian conference center. Said hello to Julia Lerman on the escalator between floors. (She's already checking out ink support in Silverlight!) Donovan West caught in passing.

Last but not least, I was pleased to see Yousef El Dardiry in the audience at our session this afternoon. Yousef recently made MVP recently, finally. He's won or placed in just about every coding contest Microsoft has come up with for the past two years, but he's been excluded from MVP recognition due to age minimums required by the MVP non-disclosure agreement. Well, his birthday was a month or so ago, so he now has his long-deserved MVP badge. Congrats Yousef!

Tomorrow morning, Brian Arbogast (Windows Live Developer Platform VP) will kick off day 2 with a mini-keynote rolling out new unified terms of use and cost-at-scale across all the Windows Live service offerings. I call it a mini-keynote because it's actually a breakout session alongside other sessions, but it's in the keynote room and is expected to draw a capacity crowd. Anyone wanting to build a business on Windows Live services will want to be there.

After that, the buzz is building about the "secret session" that isn't listed on any of the printed schedules, nor on the billboard at the room entrance. We unequivocally cannot confirm or deny that it may or may not be scheduled at 11:45 in room Lando 4204, entitled "Windows Live Data services" and presented by the devlive team's king of privacy paranoia, Yaron Goland. We deny any involvement in annotating the room signage with a sharpie of unknown origin.

The session is real, but it was withheld from the printed matter to avoid showing our hand too early. It is actually listed in the online schedule. I can't tell you about it (yet), but it should be a knockout session. Maybe not quite as sexy as spinning video cube Silverlight eye candy, but I'm sure it'll get a rise out of the true data diehards who manage to actually find this session.

What am I going to do after MIX? Take a little break, build a few thousand feet of steel pipe fencing at the homestead, and then perhaps get cozy with Silverlight to see how it can be used to assist and accelerate our JavaScript web controls under the hood. I doubt we'll take the hit to rewrite the Contacts or Spaces control in Silverlight, but it seems very likely that one of our next web controls might be built first in Silverlight.

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