Carter Maslan : Demos

Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista

jcmaslan — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:16:00 GMT

Karsten had a great time working with the Yahoo team on their Windows Vista Messenger client. They've posted a video preview of the app with some fun features like the group skinning in the fantasy football league example.

Karsten - at the risk of exacerbating the speculation that my office is at the beach, hook me up with a rippling ocean water skin to rendezvous with surf buddies. What will the voice visualization do with the background surf noise? :)

Chipping away at the "Tyranny of the OR"

jcmaslan — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 02:35:00 GMT

It's pretty natural to think through engineering problems in terms of choices between this OR that (e.g. web app OR windows app, online OR offline, centralized OR distributed, record-oriented OR document-oriented, synchronous OR asynchronous, http OR tcp, etc.). I've been calling this the "tyranny of the OR" - when our customers want us to think in terms of "AND".

That's why I like Soma's VSLive Keynote demo on Smart Clients (demo itself starts at 40:17 in the video). It's an example of "AND" thinking - a spectrum of end user experiences enabled by a pragmatic blend of ASP.NET, WinForms, Compact Framework, SQL Server, and Office.

Bay Area Traffic for your Smartphone (or Duct-Taping the Web)

jcmaslan — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 19:09:00 GMT

At Inktomi, we used to joke that cookies were the “duct tape” of the Internet.

That was before XML Web Services; but even now, this Smartphone 2003 bay area traffic application uses .NET Compact Framework and XML Web Services as a kind of “super duct tape” to make it easy for me to get drive times from my Audiovox 5600 (BTW, the best consumer purchase I’ve made in years). My job hasn’t enabled me to code in years, so the fact that I can create personal glue-ware for my phone - so easily that I view it as a minor customization to a consumer purchase - is truly a testament to platform advances.

Unfortunately, www.511.org does not yet provide a WSDL interface, so please do as I did and contact 511.org requesting that they do. Until then, this ASP.NET Web Service screen scrapes www.511.org to get drive times. Since there’s no easy way to know 511’s origin intersection codes, the argument to the web service is simply the URL you see when you lookup a route on their web site (this URL for example).

Use Visual Studio 2005 (codename “Whidbey”) beta 1 refresh to customize the source code for this project. It uses this OpenNETCF.org implementation of BackgroundWorker. Here’s the ASP.NET source code for the web service, here’s .NET Compact Framework source code for Form1.cs and Form2.cs. Sample screen shots:

(thanks to Ben Riga for pointing me to ActiveSync Remote Display to take Smartphone screenshots)

Also, based on comments in Scoble’s prior posting on the WeatherByZip application, know that you can point your phone’s web browser to the CAB file to install it over the air.

New Concept Video: Longhorn for Telecom

jcmaslan — Fri, 23 Jul 2004 21:55:00 GMT

The new Longhorn for Telecom demo video takes a look at a couple big opportunities for both telecom companies and software developers.

Cassini is Everywhere

jcmaslan — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 02:09:00 GMT

Under my hotel room door today was a front page photo of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft. Given that the ongoing stream of spectacular pictures from Cassini has been greeted with such anticipation, and has generated such excitement, I wish I’d included Cassini in the Longhorn Higher Education Concept Video. It’s completely fortuitous that the demo centers on calculating the flight trajectory of a space probe to Saturn. Let’s hope JPL publishes the flight path data to help someone build a great Longhorn photo-journal application that correlates these photos with Cassini’s actual position at the time of the photo.

The Man Behind the Curtain

jcmaslan — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 08:26:00 GMT

First I laughed, then I got scared, then I started thinking when I saw David's office as he's preparing for a keynote demo. Look at that picture.

He's got to ship all those machines to the event just because we can't guarantee 100% that we'll have a great broadband internet connection at the venue. We don't worry about having electricity; when will we stop worrying about broadband? Without that worry, we could leave all those servers and backup servers in the data center.

It's ironic, since the demo itself is all about Connected Systems and real-time Business Intelligence amidst the intermittent connectivity of people working in the field. We're showcasing autonomous smart clients that operate offline and synchronize seamlessly as soon as network connections are restored. And just because we can't count on the network 100% for the exact 12 minutes we're on stage, we're shipping all this equipment.

New Concept Video: Longhorn for Higher Education

jcmaslan — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 21:27:00 GMT

This new Longhorn for Higher Education Demo Video includes scenarios in community interaction, shared annotations, interactive documents, and visualizations. I'm hoping my son's college experience is filled with materials like the ones we prototyped with McGraw-Hill for this demo.

I had a fantastic time building this demo with Charles Hacskaylo last summer, before he started his new venture. Charles is just a super-talented designer.

Jonathan's Squarified Treemaps with XAML and C#

jcmaslan — Tue, 25 May 2004 02:58:00 GMT

I'm digging out from a 10-day-vacation-without-connectivity inbox, and just saw great work by Jonathan Hodgson that Chris Sells mentioned last week. Data visualization is going to be huge!

New Concept Video: Longhorn for Manufacturing

jcmaslan — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 23:02:00 GMT

The Longhorn in Manufacturing demo highlights Avalon, Indigo and Fundamentals in plant floor operations, business intelligence, and system integration. The scenarios in the demo are based on early work with our partner Invensys Wonderware. Their innovative work in real-time visualizations of plant operations will surely push Avalon and Indigo hard.

New Concept Video: Longhorn for Financial Services

jcmaslan — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 19:20:00 GMT

This Longhorn demo focuses on ways that Indigo and WinFS help you build collaborative applications that blend peer-to-peer workflow with back-end system integration.

It shows how deploying a simple client app can make a complex datacenter project easier. It used to be that every project that had to integrate lots of companies began with questions like: whose datacenter will host? which database will we use? how do we setup userids? how do we administer authentication? authorization? …

We picked Loan Syndication in Banking only because it’s easy to understand and is analogous to other Financial Services scenarios like New Equity Issuance, Bond Research, and Reinsurance. The demo depicts the kind of software I wrote about earlier.

Fly the earth in 3D - even before Longhorn! :)

jcmaslan — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 00:20:00 GMT

Everyone loves the satellite / aerial fly-over shown in the Commercial Real Estate Longhorn demo. You too can fly right now by downloading the app from Keyhole.

Deploying applications with email?!

jcmaslan — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 23:29:00 GMT

Regarding the Commercial Real Estate Longhorn demo, Joseph asked in email,

How can the one-click install feature possibly be secure when a one click install application is e-mail? You are allowing someone else’s code to run on your machine. What is preventing malicious code from being executed, your demo did not touch on this at all.

This demo was ambiguous about what exactly got installed when; I hedged on whether A) the base application was already installed and we were simply retrieving the updates needed to support the attached document, or B) whether the whole application was being installed from that attached document.

Option A requires that attached document use ClickOnce APIs to retrieve the required updates upon being opened. That’s definitely possible.

Option B, at least at this point, requires that the email instead point to your application’s ClickOnce Deployment Manifest that in turn points to a Application Manifest that installs your application. It’s still unclear whether Avalon will provide a generic document container that can deploy code based on a remote URI embedded in that document.

In either case, I’m relying on Code Access Security (CAS) to make things safe. There’s a good overview in Steve Hiskey’s Building Secure Client Applications in Windows "Longhorn". Jamie Cool also explains ClickOnce in Introducing ClickOnce: The New Web Based Application Deployment for Windows Forms and “Avalon”. Though in recent conversations, the scope of the SEE (Secure Execution Environment) is still a bit unclear, you might be interested in a good discussion on the definition of the SEE.

New Longhorn Concept Video for Healthcare Posted

jcmaslan — Fri, 06 Feb 2004 20:07:00 GMT

The second in a series of vertical industry Longhorn demos has been posted here on MSDN. The Longhorn Healthcare demo precipitated our collaboration with Merck and Datalabs on the construction of the Longhorn clinical trial demo you saw in Jim Allchin's PDC 03 Keynote.

Indigo, Biztalk, and Longhorn - how they play together

jcmaslan — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:13:00 GMT

The data exchanges in the Longhorn demo for Commercial Real Estate prompted questions about the way Biztalk, Indigo, and Longhorn work together.

Scott Woodgate's PDC session DAT420: BizTalk Server 2004 with SQL Server “Yukon” DTS and “Indigo” helps clarify (ppt here). Biztalk will use Indigo as a Biztalk transport for secure, reliable, transacted services. The Longhorn client will also use Indigo, so you'll have an easy way to connect roaming clients into business processes.

On Being a "Longhorn Evangelist"

jcmaslan — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:29:00 GMT

I’m *still* amazed by the Internet.

You’d think that after having used it for 20 years, and having been at the center of the Internet boom at Inktomi, I’d lose just a little of my fascination. But once again, I feel like the guys from “Tin Men” who marvel at the fact that their everyday salad ingredients come out of the ground.

Why? Because I’ve gotten lots of email from around the world this week after posting 1 file on 1 site.

I sometimes forget the international scale of the Internet; I also forget how odd jargon like “Longhorn Evangelist” might sound. In fact, one email asked me what I meant when, at the end of the demo video, I said “I want you to be a Longhorn Evangelist.” Even in the USA, I get questions about the “Evangelism” title on my business card. It makes me wonder whether the term is just too overloaded with religious zealot connotations – especially in today’s climate – for use in a job description. So let me explain what I meant.

Longhorn Evangelism is all about helping developers see and exploit the opportunities for their business – to be excited about building on Longhorn’s new platform technologies. No one can be excited about something they don’t understand; so job #1 is to “grok” Longhorn. That means going deep on the technologies and re-emerging with a clear picture of the salient features of the platform. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a demo is worth a thousand pictures. A concise demo that cuts through the noise, showing Longhorn’s value in your specific application scenarios, does wonders. So far, I’ve simply described someone that’s good at evaluating and applying technology. The transition to “evangelist” comes when you see the opportunities with such enthusiasm that you can’t stop telling everyone you know about Longhorn J Have fun.