The Blog formerly known as "Ed's TechEd Blog"

I love DeepZoomPix!

2009-04-17T07:25:09Z

How ridiculously easy have the Bods in Redmond made it to upload and create your own DeepZoom experiences? This took me literally seconds to implement:

http://deepzoompix.com/Album.aspx?alias=edquek&album=2

Playboy via Silverlight and Deep Zoom

2009-03-23T09:13:39Z

For the benefit of the whole of mankind, Playboy has made around 50 of its classic issues of the magazine *free* to view online – made possible using Microsoft Silverlight and Deep Zoom technology.

http://playboy.covertocover.com/

WPF Reactor In Action

2009-03-16T10:34:00Z

A video showing the main features of WPF Reactor.

XNA? Meh - check out this totally awesome graphics engine built and running in Microsoft Excel. You read that right...

2008-03-07T05:59:08Z

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php?page=3

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php?page=4

MUST SEE: Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia collection using Silverlight 2 Deep Zoom technology

2008-03-07T02:57:48Z

Here's and example of technology facilitating experiences that would otherwise be impossible. The Hard Rock Cafe, as you may know, own thousands and thousands of pieces of Rock 'n' Roll memorabilia from famous stars through the past few decades. From outfits worn by Elvis, guitars signed and donated by Eric Clapton, the range of objects of interest (particularly to me as a musician myself) is staggering.

They recently worked with Vertigo - one of the top Microsoft early technology adoption partners to build this application: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

The application uses Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and takes advantage of the Deep Zoom technology (formerly known as SeaDragon) that enables the user to zoom in with incredible depth and clarity on images taken specially to show cloes-up fine detail of their item collection.

I found this totally totally gripping and have spent ages playing with it.

Defying the tradition of 3 hour event opening pitches being tiresome, the MIX 08 Keynote totally captivated me

2008-03-07T02:39:30Z

I'll be honest with you, I normally find event keynotes extremely dull. Some senior guy comes up on stage and rambles on with some spiel that panders to the company-in-question's current or upcoming product offerings that often have little to do with the theme or content coming over the subsequent days - they're just taking a chance to do a marketing pitch to a captive audience. My boredom threshold is low and sometimes I pack up and go out looking for coffee.

Not so with MIX. All I can say is that I was excited, stimulated, amused and overall WOWED by the sheer number and the quality of new offerings that are coming from the company for developers, designers, agencies, custom development shops etc. The demos of real applications that have been built by early adopters were simply amazing.

You can watch the keynote streamed from the MIX site here: http://www.visitmix.com/blogs/Joshua/Day-1-Keynote/

Cool things to watch out for:

Ray Ozzie providing a holistic Connected vision that puts everything that the company is trying to do around the Web (and its relevance to the MIX audience) in context.
Extremely cool, totally awesome demo of Silverlight Deep Zoom (Seadragon) showing the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia collection. Absolutely must see.
NBC Olympics streaming site. Mind boggling in what it provides in terms of viewing options for the upcoming 2008 Olympic games programming.
Cirque Du Soleil show off a LOB HR application with a twist and Microsoft Dev Div Corporate VP Scott Guthrie considering joining as a backup juggler.
Nokia Symbian OS phones running Microsoft Silverlight.

Some of the key announcements:

Internet Explorer Version 8 Beta 1 available. I'm using it right now. Standards compliant and with a whole bunch of other cool new features. Speed performance en par with Safari and Firefox now. Cool Developer Tools integration for script debugging. Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx
Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 SDK available. Contains .NET runtime integration (the really BIG news), a whole bunch of new controls (Calendars, DataGrids, multi-line textboxes etc.) Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4E03409A-77F3-413F-B108-1243C243C4FE&displaylang=en
A whole bunch of cool Visual Studio-integrated tools for Silverlight available: Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E0BAE58E-9C0B-4090-A1DB-F134D9F095FD&displaylang=en
Silverlight for mobile devices will be coming along
Microsoft and Nokia partnering to deliver Silverlight on Nokia's S60 and S40 operating systems.
WPF 3.5 is getting a new Effects API that includes cool things such as a programmable shader pipeline to give graphics accelerated lower level control so that developers can build truly outstanding desktop UIs and visual effects.
Microsoft Dev Div Corporate VP Scott Guthrie considering joining Cirque Du Soleil as a backup juggler.

Microsoft Releases New Version of Its Windows Live Mobile Developer Program

2008-02-20T10:26:00Z

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=PR&date=20080211&id=8171373

BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Today at Mobile World Congress 2008, Microsoft Corp. announced that it is releasing a new version of its Windows Live Mobile Developer Program, enabling developers to create mobile versions of its popular Windows Live services that can be built for virtually any mobile phone independent of phone operating system. Microsoft also announced Windows Live @mobile, a new program that allows operators to adopt and deploy Windows Live services. These two initiatives will enable Microsoft's developer community to deliver compelling Windows Live services and provide flexibility to access the Windows Live platform to innovate on top of those services. In addition, mobile operators can connect their customers to Windows Live, one of the largest communications and sharing networks in the world, create additional revenue opportunities and enhance the customer experience.

Classic Games

2007-11-13T05:35:00Z

Someone recently asked me what my favourite games from older (not current gen platforms) were that I considered 'classic'. Here they are, probably with some glaring oversights, chronologically inaccurate and in all likelihood giving away how old I am....

Star Wars (Arcade)
Afterburner (Arcade)
Marble Madness (Arcade)
Karate Champ (Arcade)
Yee-Ar Kung Fu (Arcade)
Asteroids (Atari 2600)
Space Invaders (Atari 2600)
Mazogs (ZX81)
3D Monster Maze (ZX81)
Manic Miner (ZX Spectrum)
Jet Pac (ZX Spectrum)
Freefall (BBC Micro)
Twin Kingdom Valley (BBC Micro)
Starship Command (BBC Micro)
Elite (BBC Micro)
Tetris (GameBoy)
Zelda, Link to the Past (GameBoy)
Flashback (SNES)
Super Mariokart (SNES, GameBoy Advance)
Doom, Doom 2 (PC)
Quake 2 (PC)
Half Life (PC)
Age Of Empires (PC)
Resident Evil 1, 2, Nemesis, Zero (PS1)
Super Mario 64 (N64)
Zelda, Ocarina of Time (N64)
Shadow of The Colossus (PS2)

How I made that thing that proves I can't draw or design for toffee (pt 1)

2007-11-06T07:56:37Z

I basically learned how to do this from Laurence Moroney's excellent book "Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0". You should buy it. I'm deliberately leaving out some key info from this walkthrough so it doesn't hurt his book royalties. Also, I can't remember some of them.

First up I drew this little man holding the video screen using Expression Design. You can tell I spent years at Art College right? Also, this guy has high blood pressure and needs to reduce his salt intake.

Next, I exported the image as a XAML file.

After that, I opened up the Expression Blend 2.0 Preview and created a new Silverlight Application (JavaScript). After a bit of resizing of my canvas, I copied and pasted in the XAML from the image into the XAML of the Page.xaml file that I'd been given by Expression Blend.

I then grouped (Object -> Group Into -> Canvas) the various controls (the triangle, square and two rectangles) into individual canvases which then became my buttons. These can be assigned handlers that detect stuff like mouse clicks.

I then added a Media Element which fit nicely into the screen being held by the little guy's hand and inclined them both slightly.

I then did a little bit of hand coding on the XAML of this page to wire up the event handlers for each of the three buttons along the lines of:

I then edited the Default_html.js file in Visual Studio adding in the actual handling code, so 3 functions that look like:

function handlePlay(sender, eventArgs)
{
sender.findName("vid").play();
}

Gratuitous unhelpful screenshot of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Pro:

Incidentally "vid" is the name I'd assigned to my Media Element in Blend. This allows me to use the Silverlight DOM API to reference it and call methods on it such as play(), stop(), pause().

At this point, the little app works. My next challenge was to figure out how to embed it in this page - coming in the next part.

My Silverlight Custom Media Player

2007-11-02T11:02:54Z

Try pressing his nose and ears... I'll write about how I did this next week.

Highbrow work-unrelated humour

2007-11-02T05:48:56Z

Cartoon deleted 'cos I was probably infringing somebody's copyright.

Instead here's a link to the Perry Bible Fellowship which I'd never heard of (thanks kettch) but which I think is fabulously hilarious.

http://pbfcomics.com/

Learn Silverlight odyssey soon becomes 'futz around with Expression Encoder' for a day...

2007-10-31T09:23:48Z

After rooting around the Silverlight tutorials and documentation for a while I quickly became sidetracked by the attractions of being able to easily embed video into the a web page using Silverlight. A Microsoft colleague of mine from Redmond, Jim Thill, was recently down here in Singapore visiting and had shown us a very cool demo where he used Expression Encoder to do very fancy video editing and encoding followed by automatically having it uploaded to a ridiculously cool online service called Silverlight Streaming (anyone can try it out here and get 4Gb of space for free).

So here's what I did:

Installed Expression Encoder and the Silverlight Streaming Publishing plug-in.
Created a Silverlight Streaming account noting the account ID and key.
Selected a very cool video of me playing this stunning original composition* on my guitar which might attract the attention of the major labels who would then shower me with record deal advances and promises of groupie-laden tours as the new Bob Dylan.
Crossed my fingers and hoped in vain that record company execs and A&R men read MSDN blogs.
Imported it into Expression Encoder.
Used Encoder's features to:

Crop the video as easily as I might crop a .jpg in Windows Picture Manager or any other similar application just by dragging some little knobbers. This had the added advantage of removing my flabby drooling lower lip from most of the video as well as allowing me to raise the bottom so you can't see my knobbly knees too much.
Set the output size and aspect ratio with a simple check box selection. This video started out in regular 4:3 but I changed it easily to 16:9 so I could pretend I was in the movies.
Create an overlay so that if anybody of you wanted to pirate my video and upload it onto Youtube I'd soon scupper you because it has that tell-tale little cartoon Thumbs-Up Monkey in the upper left corner. This is easy to do - basically select a .jpg file and drag it where I want it positioned, set the opacity if preferred and Encoder does the rest.
Automatically publish it to Silverlight Streaming Services (using aforementioned ID and key).

Next, I installed the Lighterfuel plug-in for Windows Live Writer (the client I use to write this blog because it's so flipping fabulous (you can get it here) and started typing this. It's very to insert a Silverlight video now from the task pane - there's an 'insert Silverlight Streaming' thingy that just makes it absolutely idiotproof (ok - I admit I messed around with that for an infinitesimally short while) to do this.

So here's the end result. It works best with your sound on (Leon).

Isn't that just totally bitchin'?

*Ok. It's not original. If you know the name of the track and who originally played it, post your comment here. First one to get it right wins some naked pictures from the Internet. I won't say of what though so that anyone claiming I outraged their modesty will have a hard time making a case. The prize isn't what really matters anyway - it's more about the kudos of having your comment on my blog which will no doubt be a digital media sensation within the next few weeks.

P.S. Da Bomb Mothership for all the info on this stuff is here.

Silverlight stack installation

2007-10-30T11:27:12Z

I've actually got some real work to do, but ended up doing this instead which turned out to be way more fun. First off I decided to install the prerequisite stack required to start messing around with Silverlight 1.1.

You need:

Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.

Actually, it tells you what you need to install here with some provisos (see below). I started by installing the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha bits only to be told that I already had it? Did I? I don't remember installing it - better check. Umm, how do I check? A quick Live Search revealed some useful forums that showed that I needed to poke around in my registry to figure out what version of the plug-in I already had, so Start -> Run -> regedit and then drill down to the following Registry key to see the value:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Silverlight\Version

The 1.0 Beta will show up as 0.90.20416.10 and the 1.1 Alpha will be 0.95.20416.10

Okay, so it turned out that I had the 1.1 version installed. All good.

I then went and installed Visual Studio C# Express. So the first caveat is that the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for VS2008 B2 requires at least VS2008 Standard (I ended up using Pro) edition in order to work. Don't waste time as I did installing Express and only find out when you try to install the Silverlight add-ins on top (it fails obviously). This info is buried elsewhere in the online docs.

Finally, once I'd figured this bit out, the installation of the Silverlight Tools plug-in was smooth and quick.

Midlife technical skills atrophy crisis

2007-10-29T09:12:16Z

Rather like a sad-case-mid-thirties father-of-two-with-an-expanding-girth who still goes to Heavy Metal concerts in order to cling to the last vestiges of his youth by trying to appear hip (as if Heavy Metal was ever hip), I recently decided that I wanted to dust off my technical bones and try to program something again - perhaps some misguided salvation from the Marketing that I have effectively been doing for the last 5 years instead of writing code.

After all, I used to be quite a hardcore techie once, having had several cool C++ and Java gigs* in the past (I was never officially a jobbing .NET developer - just a charlatan cooked up by Marketing/Evangelism group) and the slow decay of my technical abilities has been remarked upon more than once by my smarmy colleagues of late especially those gits with way more time on their hands than me who spend their weekends playing with things like XNA. Still, there's more than a fragment of truth in those snipes and my ability to code up a storm has been receding faster than my Caucasian colleagues' hairlines.

So what did I pick? Microsoft Silverlight 1.1. Why?

1.1. isn't out yet and isn't widely understood (bonus - maybe I can get a head start over the other gits).
It will help me understand a key technology that I'm supposed to know about, albeit at a high level, as part of this new Next Web initiative that I'm supposedly working on.
The Silverlight site has some very cool tutorial videos that may make my life a whole lot easier.
It's a hot, cool (sic) property right now and Silverlight in general is on the up when we look at the proverbial Hype Cycle.

So off I go. Expect more inane minutiae documented here as I wrestle with it and try to create something more than just 'Hello World from Silverlight'.

P.S. you can read my sad-case-mid-thirties father-of-two-with-an-expanding-girth review of a recent Heavy Metal concert here.

*I actually wrote this single-handedly. (Oh alright, there were about 6 other programmers too...)

New job, new blog, new E-mail sig...

2007-10-29T06:09:00Z

Well, seeing as for the last 4 weeks I've been doing this new role of 'Regional Manager, Next Web' I thought it about time to get with the programme. While I will spend some time explaining more about what this role is later, suffice to say for now that it has something do with the Internet.

So, here's my getting-with-the-programme action plan:

Create a new blog. Blogs are all the rage these days - all new-fangled and Web 2.0. Of course nobody knows what that means yet except Timothy Leary - an acid casualty from the 60s. Alternatively - it might have been this guy. So, looks like I've gone all Web 2.0 on your collective derrieres and resurrected the idea of digitally documenting the inane minutiae in my working life along with a vain hope that this time, it might just garner a readership that will surpass the combined 3000 hits in 6 months of my previous (now defunct) other two blogs.
Craft* a new E-mail signature. Nothing says 'reinvention' like a new E-mail signature. In fact, now I have it, I feel like I've just spent 2 weeks at a detoxification retreat in Thailand, shedding 10 kg of flab in the process followed by an extreme makeover (yes, botox was involved) and a total wardrobe reset. Of course this also qualifies as a subject trivial enough to pander to the unwritten traditions of the blogging fraternity and makes up the meat of the perfect first post. I'm thinking of getting a Twitter account too so I can give up-to-the minute accounts when I feel like changing the colour or font size.

Old:

New:

The signatures are telling actually and go some way to explaining what it is I did then and what it is I should do now. If they were human, the first would be a single, overweight, software developer who lives with his ma despite being in his mid-30's. He'd wear a soiled T-shirt that might say 'Pink Floyd' and he'd play D&D (pen and paper style) with some people he's known since he was 15. If blogs could smell (the technology doesn't allow this yet) and you put your nose near the screen, you might detect the odour of unwashed armpits and possibly, Mozzarella.

Conversely, the second one is sleek and ergonomic and you can imagine that if personified, he'd look like one of those Creative Design Director types, possibly wearing all black Armani or Hugo Boss duds and those shoes that you see in those boutique shop windows that you secretly covet, yet if you saw them on a friend you'd whisper to your partner that they must have been a royal waste of money. Again, if blogs could smell, you'd detect the faint sophisticated whiff of something by Issey Miyake or Davidoff. This guy loves sushi and those impossibly small 'nouveau cuisine' dishes you get at restaurants like the one owned by those two bald brothers who are always on the Discovery & Living channel making stuff to order.

You may also notice, however, that neither of them give any clear clue via my role titles what it is that I in fact do on a day-to-day basis.

*by 'craft' I actually mean 'stole' from another Microsoftie. If it looks familiar and you think it was you, please mail me and I'll see to it that you receive more spam than you do already.