Say what? Microsoft Malaysia One ISV Technology Blog : TechEd SEA 2008

Outlook To Go, anyone?

hoongfai — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:58:17 GMT

The final session I delivered at TechEd SEA 2008 was one titled "Outlook Application To Go! Building an Occasionally-connected outlook add-in using Outlook+Services Blueprint". I tag-teamed with Patrick Yong, for this instructor-led lab (ILL). Patrick developed a workflow hosted as a WCF service, and it serves as an Issues Tracker. With oil price only increasing, and the cost of living skyrocketing, people need a solution to keep track of their issues. :)

Essentially this lab introduces a manifestation of Software + Services, in the form of an Outlook application to go! Outlook + Services is one of the blueprints published under Software + Services Blueprints. You need to install the Software-plus-Services Blueprints, and the Software-plus-Services Blueprints Manager which is a Visual Studio 2008 extension that gives you all the nifty features of developing an Outlook add-in at blazing pace.

This lab was developed by both Patrick and myself, hence it was exclusive at TechEd SEA 2008. I've developed the lab manual in simple steps, which do not require you to type in code. I've also prepared a bunch of code snippets (all C#), which you could use the keyword shortcut to insert into your code. I've also setup all the bookmarks all over the classes so that all you need is to follow the sequence of the bookmarks. Bookmarks in Visual Studio 2008 is an excellent feature to guide both the presenter as well as the lab participants on where to insert code. The shortcut is as follows:

Go to the bookmark item.
Say this is the first todo item, type "todo1", and press the Tab button twice, and VOILA!

The lab content is explained well in the manual. Enjoy reading the manual.

Extract the code snippets into My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets

I played Rock Band drums on stage at TechEd!!!

hoongfai — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:06:00 GMT

This is truly a wonderful experience, to play drums on Rock Band in front of a crowd. So far I was far from being contented playing in front of a virtual crowd in the world tour. Check out the video which my ex-colleague, KC, took, and he uploaded the video onto YouTube. Check it out here. A bunch of us "Microsofties" just couldn't wait to get our hands on the Rock Band instruments, but we were to give priority to the attendees. But when the attendees failed miserably, we had to step up to the challenge. I jumped up onto the stage on no time to grab hold of the drum sticks, to the chagrin of my team mate, Yu Tsing. ha ha :) The verdict, 98% on drums, and 400+ notes streak.. woo hoo!

These are some of the photos which were taken at my first breakout session at TechEd SEA, which happened right after the keynote. Pretty cool to be presenting in a large hall.

The presenters' appreciation night

Where have I been during my MIA days?

hoongfai — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:56:24 GMT

You may have realized by now that my recent blog posts are not in chronological order. But I think that this is better than not blogging at all. Life's revolved around TechEd SEA 2008 since the past one month. Check out my profile on the TechEd SEA 2008 website here. My session synopsis are all on this site, just search for my name.

It was also the first month in Microsoft's new fiscal year of FY09, which starts in July every year. That means plenty of business meetings with my ISV partners, especially with managed partners to ensure we start the new fiscal year fresh with good plans, and means to bring in the results.

While preparing for my session that was titled SharePoint To Go!, I holed up in my study room for 4 days straight in sharpening that rusty coding-Swiss army-knife of mine. It was enjoyable and very satisfying to say the least. In doing that I learnt a great deal about the Microsoft Sync Framework, which has since RTM, and also played with one of the app blocks in the Smart Client Software Factory.

The week before TechEd SEA 2008, I was in Seattle to attend an internal technical conference called TechReady. It was also a satisfying and unforgettable experience as I won the Top Performing Partner Evangelist award. The award comes with a Flip video camera, which sadly I haven't had the time to start using it yet. I should have used it at TechEd to do some video recording of the crowd. It wasn't all party and drinks in Seattle, I had to go back to my hotel room every evening to continue working on my demo!

In a later blog post, I will surely explain what were my key learning, steps, and resources I came across while developing the demo for my TechEd session. While I was thinking about how best to retain and share the knowledge, an idea was born. This will be my pet project for this FY, and I hope to have more details of that at a later time, perhaps around Oct timeframe. Meanwhile keep reading my blog. Cheers!

Creating Dynamic UI using WPF

hoongfai — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:33:00 GMT

As promised, here are the content from my other session at TechEd SEA 2008. This session was titled WUX338 - Creating Dynamic UI with Windows Presentation Foundation. This session was not solely mine to present, I did a tag-team with the Lead Architect from Entellium Technologies. We invited Entellium to do a quick demo of their sexy-looking Rave client at TechEd SEA keynote, and this session was meant to divulge more details about some of the things they did under the hood to provide animation when stack panels are resized or reordered. This is great considering they are really sharing their engineering excellence.

I took this opportunity to also share the Composite Application Guidance for WPF - June 2008 release. As I have emphasized this during my breakout session, I will say it again in my blog, the application block and patterns used in this example was a modification of the Stock Trader RI application, and it was really meant to exaggerate how modules could be dynamically loaded onto a shell application to make up the look-and-feel of the application. In the modified Stock Trader RI, all I did was to create the following to demonstrate the points across to my audience:

Create a new region on the shell, AdsRegion
Create an AdsModule
Created the interfaces for View and Presenter, and a concrete class to represent the Model, which is Advertisement
Implemented derived classes for the View and Presenter interfaces.
Created the AdsModule, and updated the shell bootstrapper to load up the AdsModule statically. However this may well be a dynamic loading of the modules by means of a configuration file or a directory lookup. If you want to find out how to achieve that, there are QuickStart samples that show exactly that.

When I checked out the Composite WPF app block, I fell in love with it. In many ways, those were exactly the requirements of most of the ISVs I've been working with. Essentially the question is how do they cater to very dynamic, or fluid UI that may be capture in some form of metadata, and the application UI framework should be intelligent enough to render this during runtime. In other cases, my ISVs are looking at designing their UI (which may consists of hundreds of screens or forms, and store that as metadata in a local storage, and the shell application should be able to load it up on the fly).

William has also promised to share the code for the PanelAnimator class as well as the Visual Studio project he had demonstrated during the session. However he's on vacation until Aug 22, and once he's back, I'll get the bits from him, to upload here or to link to what he has posted.

Meanwhile, he's the project and the slides I presented at this session.

SharePoint To Go!

hoongfai — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:15:00 GMT

I'm back. My apologies to those who have been waiting for me to upload the bits after my breakout sessions and ILL session from TechEd SEA 2008. I'll start off with my session that is titled OFC311 SharePoint Applications To Go! - Building Occasionally-Connected SharePoint Applications Using the Microsoft Sync Framework.

You can go ahead and create a list on your SharePoint site. Update the part of the code that points to the SharePoint List Web Service, which I have bookmarked. You need to open this solution using Visual Studio 2008, go to the Bookmarks windows, and navigate through all the bookmarks in sequence.

At a later point, I will provide more meat to this, but in the meantime, check this out.

I'll also talk about what I've been doing since I went MIA.