<nick:node> : Learning More

MSDN Subscriber Evening - Building UX with Silverlight 2

niwong — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:26:55 GMT

I did a session last Wednesday (9 Apr) -- introducing our Rich Internet Application technology Silverlight to our MSDN subscribers.

In the session, we re-acquainted with Silverlight 1.0 and its AJAX-like programming model, but dedicated most of the time to introduce Silverlight and the new .NET development paradigm.

I've put the slides from the presentation, as well as the comics-book viewer sample project used for the code walk-through on my SkyDrive and you can find them here.

The sample code demonstrates Silverlight 2 controls (particularly Layout), control data-binding, asynchronous data fetching and LINQ. Much of the work was based off samples by Joe Stegman and Scott Guthrie.

Channel 9 Interview: Miguel de Icaza and Dragos Manolescu

niwong — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:45:18 GMT

This is one of my favorite video interviews coming out from Channel 9 this year. In this post, Channel 9's intrepid reporter Charles Torre interviews Miguel de Icaza and Dragos Manlescu.

Miguel de Icaza is, of course, the famed free-software developer who started the open-sourced Mono project which implements C# and other .NET tools on non-Microsoft platforms such as Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. Miguel is also leading the Moonlight project that puts Silverlight on Linux.

Dragos Manolescu is a computer scientist on the Microsoft team. Formerly an architect with the Patterns and Practices group, and is now part of the Live Labs team who released innovative technologies such as Volta, etc.

Together in the video, the three gentlemen had a enlightening conversation about open source, the Mono and Moonlight projects, the tensions between business and free software ideals, and perceptions about Microsoft as a company.

Great video worth watching!

Sample Code: Silverlight 1.0-enabled Quiz

niwong — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:43:28 GMT

A Customer who asked if a quiz-type application can be enabled by Silverlight.

The answer is yes (obviously ) and I had to put my rusty coding skills to work over a good part of a Saturday afternoon.

The result is a Silverlight 1.0 proof-of-concept application, which meant adopting an "AJAX-styled" coding model with JavaScript. In fact, just for the heck of it, I wanted to go the full client-only approach which meant no ASP.NET AJAX server-side controls, etc.

The code demos a couple of simple features:

Quiz questions are easily configurable with a XML data file. The Silverlight application accesses the quiz as JSON data with a simple web service. This was simply achieved by first converting the XML data to JSON format at the server-side with XmltoJSON C# code (made available at http://www.phdcc.com/xml2json.htm). To allow the web service to be accessible (invoke-able) by the client JavaScript, I also marking the web service with the System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService attribute.
An auto timeout (set to 10 seconds) is set for each quiz, this is done with a XAML animation storyboard to mimic a timer. Jesse Liberty details this useful technique in his blog here.
At the client end, I dabbled a little with the JavaScript Prototype library to demonstrate interaction between the Silverlight application and the host browser's DOM.

The application can definitely do with polishing (e.g., with some creative design work, one can imagine fireworks animation when the user gets a correct answer,) but this should serve as a nice simple base for extensions, tearing apart, etc.

Links:

The source code is available for download at my SkyDrive here.
The application can also be viewed online here.

Microsoft Singapore .NET Briefing - Web UX Technologies

niwong — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:19:51 GMT

On 30th January, we did the first of a planned series of web-related technology talk events -- this time focusing on Web User Experience (UX). I'd like to thank everyone who attended and stayed back late (we overran by 45 minutes!) I think we had a lively time.

We covered the following in the 3 hour presentation session:

An overview of the spectrum of Microsoft's user experience technologies. This spans from the ubiquitous web-based (such as ASP.NET AJAX) to rich user interfaces leveraging platform capabilities (such as Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Mobile), and finally to the new class of Rich Internet Applications (enabled by Silverlight.) We also showed (or, in a specific instance, attempted to show ) real-life applications deployed by customers / partners using these technologies.
Jocelyn (our ISV Developer Evangelist) then did a code-talk / demo session on ASP.NET AJAX. Be sure to check out the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit -- you saw how easy it was to add interactivity to ASP.NET web applications!
We had Yong Hwee from patroids creative works who shared first-hand experience on developing their first project on Silverlight.
I then did a code demo on how we actually developed a real-world Silverlight 1.0 application using Visual Studio and JavaScript. Of course, you can also build video-rich application in 7 steps, and no code with Expression Media Encoder.

My presentation decks for the session can be found on my SkyDrive. You can find Jocelyn's presentation deck (Overview of ASP.NET AJAX) here.

I have also uploaded my two slide decks, which can be accessed from the links below:

(I will be sharing the Silverlight demo code as I clean it up for public consumption, so do check back this blog again in a week or so...)

Prelude:

Do keep a look out for the next event entitled "Building Web 2.0 Mash-ups" -- where we will talk and demo building Facebook applications with Visual Studio, creating mash-ups with Windows Live Services, and introduce cool technologies like PopFly, etc.

This scheduled for the evening of 12 March 2008 -- keep it free!

CodeProject Article: Silverlight Controls - The Path to Reusable XAML

niwong — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 04:13:03 GMT

Came across this very nice article by Justin-Josef Angel on the Code Project web site -- Silverlight Controls - The Path to Reusable XAML.

I've been working on a few Silverlight 1.0 projects recently, and a consistent struggle on these has been to maintain data-presentation separation, as well as to adhere to object-oriented principles when dealing with JavaScript and XAML.

This article provides the clearest, most prescriptive guidance I've seen to-date on the use of the JavaScript Prototype pattern to support as "code-behind" for XAML-defined user-interface elements.

Justin-Angel does a code walk-through that refactors Richard Z's JellyBar sample (which emits XAML dynamically in code with JavaScript) into a "One JavaScript class - One XAML file" model. The result, as the author says, is "it's extensible, it's maintainable, it's object oriented."

Also check out the cool trick with with Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript comments syntax in building the "class constructor" function!

To all who celebrate, Merry Christmas!

Technorati Tags: silverlight,javascript

Dopod / HTC Upgrade to Windows Mobile 6

niwong — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 07:49:11 GMT

Dopod 838Pro, 810, P800W users should be happy to note that the long awaited upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 is finally here. See the HTC press release, "HTC Offers Windows Mobile 6 Upgrade" for more information.

The shortcut to the download page is at Windows Mobile 6 Upgrade Program login page. A login password is required.

Technorati tags: dopod, htc, wm6, 838Pro

Windows Live Quick Apps

niwong — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:46:50 GMT

Lots of exciting stuffs are being announced at the Microsoft World Partner Conference (WPC.)

Windows Live Quick Apps (Beta) are showcase online sites that demonstrate the applications that can be built using the Windows Live Services. Two Quick Apps were unveiled today:

For example, the Bicycle Club demo site shows a mashup using Windows Live's Virtual Earth with Silverlight Streaming services to synchronize a simulated bike ride on the map with a video -- very cool!

For many months now we have been talking up our "Software + Services" strategy.

A key concept in this new world is the notion of "Web 2.0"-type mashups, where web applications are created by composing & aggregating services available over the Internet, rather than building them ground-up.

Given a rich set of services and well-designed programming model, web sites can be built and deployed quickly, fully leveraging on the services and the network as a platform for content storage.

Windows Live provide just such a platform for developers, offering core service-based capabilities such as Live Spaces, Silverlight Streaming, Live ID, etc. while ensuring availability, reliability, and security.

More Quick Apps should be forthcoming. Meanwhile, get the source code for the two released applications on CodePlex.

Silverlight - Light up the web!

niwong — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:57:51 GMT

WPF/E is now Microsoft Silverlight.

To learn more, go here.

Developers, go here.

Firefox, Safari on Mac welcomed...

(I realized this is one of the hundreds of blog posts on MSDN this evening on Silverlight, but this is too cool a thing not to be part of!)

Real-World Examples of Office Business Applications

niwong — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:26:00 GMT

The most effective way I found when sharing with Customers and Partners the concept of Office Business Applications (OBAs) is to show screen captures of possible application scenarios. Unfortunately, not many examples showcasing Office 2007 that can be publicized yet exist ... until now.

In the Convergence conference event that just recently concluded, the Microsoft Dynamics team showcased working examples and prototypes of Office clients interacting with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics GP ("Great Plains") products. (More information can be found at Mary Jo Foley's All About Microsoft blog entry: Microsoft shows off its future business-app user interfaces.)

We can glean a couple of scenarios revolving around Office clients (Outlook, Word, Excel) and SharePoint Server.

For example, Microsoft Dynamics CRM uses Outlook as its built-in interface -- which makes perfect sense since a mail client is the most common entry point for managing customer and contact oriented information and activities.

I am particularly partial to the the following screen which shows Microsoft Word leveraged as a report with embedded business data pulled from Dynamics ERP application. Microsoft Word's content controls, OpenXML file format, and custom Task Panes enable richer interactions with the Line-of-Business backends while preserving clean data / view separation.

Finally, Microsoft SharePoint provides a rich role-based user interface for composing different information. In the example below, we see a Sales Center page in SharePoint with an Excel services web part serving as an effective intranet dashboard.

Go to ZDNet.com gallery for more screen shots of how Dynamics can and will work with Office: screen shot gallery.

Technorati tags: microsoft, dynamics, office business applications, oba

Conversation with a MVP: Alan Andrews Dias

niwong — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 08:52:00 GMT

One of the most fulfilling and interesting aspects about my role in Microsoft is meeting interesting people - Customers, Partners, Microsoft colleagues from other parts of the world. A special group of folks I particularly respect is our MVPs (or Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals.) These are the guys who are driven by pure passion for technology and generosity in helping the Microsoft technical community.

In my two short months in Microsoft, I've had the pleasure of working with a couple of our MVPs and most of them have very interesting backgrounds. Following is a short "virtual interview" I did with my friend - Mr. Alan Dias...

Who are you, where do you live, where were you raised?

I am an IT enthusiast currently living in Singapore and identify myself as a Global citizen. I started my life in Tanzania (East Africa) where I had my formative schooling until I moved along with my parents to Portugal and later on to Goa – India where I completed my studies and finally settled down in Singapore.

In the mid sixties African schools enforced Swahili as a medium of instruction and so I started my schooling in Swahili. I simultaneously learned Portuguese from my Portuguese speaking parents of Indian descent. Both my parents strongly believed that English would be the right ingredient to arm me in the corporate world and decided to move me to study English in Goa … the land of my ancestors. The rosy picture painted thoughtfully by my parents was far from reality as I had to struggle with 3 new languages Hindi, Marathi and English. Now, I can speak Swahili, Portuguese, and English with passable grammar and diction and get by with a sprinkling of Malay, Mandarin, Hindi and Konkani (a Goan language) enough to order at the food court.

A global citizen... So what brought you to Singapore and what do you do for a living?

Wanderlust had got the better of me and I eventually landed up in Singapore where I work as Director of Training and Technology for an educational training provider which runs Microsoft courses. In fact, we are a Microsoft Certified Partners for Learning Solutions (CPLS). Additionally, we provide IBM training.

I dabble with technologies from both IBM and Microsoft and have done well. I received the Global Best Instructor Award in Lotus Notes for Asia-Pacific for 3 years and have been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for the last 2 years in Mobile Application Development.

So you are a MVP – what do we mean by that?

The MVP title, I understand is conferred by Microsoft to people who contribute to the community using Microsoft technology. My relationship with Microsoft started a decade ago when I first volunteered to present Tips and Tricks in using Windows XP to a group of Computer professionals at a Tech-Net event. The presentation was well received which led to more presentations at a wide variety of Microsoft events such MSDN day, MSDN Connections, Polytechnics and Universities in Singapore as well as at Microsoft Job Street event, Microsoft Non Profit Organization day and at SGDONET (a local .NET user group).

I founded the Singapore Small Business Server User Group (http://sbsug.sg) due to request from IT companies and the Microsoft Product Manager. The group grew from 10 users to 150 and now has a council formed by volunteers and was responsible to spawn two SBS MVPs.

So what sort of technologies have you had the chance to play with these past few years?

I have lost count of the technologies I have handled since the last 26 years but I frequently use Visual Studio.NET, SQL Server 2005 and occasionally Java and allied technologies around these products. Going forward I see a potential in 3 basic areas which include Network Readiness Index (E-Business and e-Governance), Mobility and Broadband services (WiFi, WiMax).

Going forward, which application technology areas excite you? Or what do you see as potential?

I am excited with technologies that help improve real-world businesses (revenue growth and cost reduction) and am drawn towards innovations such as virtualization and consolidation technologies.

These days, I see opportunities opened with the release Office System 2007 and VSTO 2005 SE. A company can maximize the value from existing Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and SharePoint investments even more with Office Business Applications (OBA).

I have been working with the OBA concept for more than a year in Singapore and this year I was invited by Microsoft to speak at Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) on “Using Microsoft Office 2007 as a Powerful Development Platform with Visual Studio Tools for Office.” There were more than 300 developers who attended the seminar and over many of them were so impressed by OBA that they have expressed interest in developing a new breed of application by extending Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. I was not surprised, as I have been having similar responses when I showcased OBA at other events.

With OBA you can extend your Microsoft Office to fit into three main areas which are Unified Messaging Communication and Collaboration (which simplifies a team working together), Business Intelligence (which enables business insights with capabilities such as server-based Excel and so on) and Enterprise Content Management (which allows people to find and use role-based information.)

Any closing comments?

I'm thankful to embark on the journey of learning with many hardworking students and hope I have contributed enough to the society to make a small difference.

Thank you, Alan.

You can learn more about Alan at his MSDN MVP profile page.

Singapore OBA Workshop - 29th January 2007

niwong — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 11:08:00 GMT

We held a Office Business Application (OBA) workshop at Microsoft Singapore last week. The session gave attendees (both our enterprise customers and ISV partners) an introduction of our OBA initiative. In the session, I covered an overview of the business drivers and rationale behind OBAs and our esteemed MVP, while Praveen Srivatsa dived into the technical bits, showcasing new client and server capabilities offered by Microsoft Office System 2007.

We want to thank all attendees for the support, and for staying with us till the evening - even as the workshop ran almost 1 hour behind time due to the sheer amount of information.

A number of questions were raised during the session, and I'd like to post our responses here:

Reading Office 2007 Documents with Office 2003: Microsoft Office 2003 can open, edit, save to the new Office 2007 file formats with the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack download (for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.)
Microsoft Office Open XML format: More information about Open XML can be found here. Some other points raised on OOXML:
- The Ecma International standards body approved Office Open XML as an Ecma standard on 7th Dec 2006. Read more in this press release.
- In the workshop, we showed how an Open XML file can be manipulated by renaming it to a .zip file and then manually changing its content. In the real world, this can be done programmatically with .NET 3.0's System.IO.Packaging namespace -- demonstrating the extensibility and malleability of the format. Go to the Open XML Developer web site for loads of samples.
- For those interested, check out the Open XML Translator project at SourceForge that will help translate between Open XML and OpenDocument formats.
A number of attendees wanted to learn more about backend Line-of-Business (LOB) systems integration (e.g., SAP). Depending on specific scenarios, integration can be done by consuming web services directly from the client, or with Microsoft SharePoint Server's Business Data Catalog (BDC).
There were additional discussions on security, and Lotus Notes integration.

The post-workshop survey also yielded some interesting insights:

About 85% of the attendees felt more aware and positive about OBA after the session
A majority of the folks felt that knowledge management (business intelligence, management reporting) OBAs bring the greatest benefit to their organizations.

The slide decks from the session are attached. Do check out this web site again in a week's time when I'll post some sample codes.

Office Business Application - Introduction.zip

Office Systems Technology Session 1.zip

Office Systems Technology Session 2.zip

Meanwhile, if you are from Singapore, I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback on how OBAs can help you and your business. Write to me through this contact form.

Office Business Applications (OBAs)

niwong — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 14:50:25 GMT

A Real-Life CRM Deployment Annecdote

One of the companies which I used to consult with prior to joining Microsoft had a very interesting conundrum a number of years back. This company just implemented a pricey enterprise-class CRM system, and mandated that all field sales staffs to input customer information (contacts, activities, etc.) into the system.

In reaction, the field teams objected loudly:

Most of them are already maintaining this sort of information locally on their notebook computers - in Outlook contacts, or in Excel spreadsheets. Obviously, they loathed to do what is seen as additional administrative work;
They found the new system's user-interface difficult to use, and did not want to invest time to learn it;
The new system was unable to support offline usage.

After weeks of coaxing which yielded little improvements, the sales department had a creative solution to the impasse. The sales persons agreed to submit the required information monthly (in a Excel spreadsheet with a agreed-upon format) to a temporary staff who would then key in the data into the CRM system.

The Results Gap

The scenario above described what Microsoft calls the "Results Gap" - the disconnect that exists between people and enterprise Line-of-Business (LOB) systems such as ERPs and CRMs. Talking to customers here in Singapore, it is apparent that effectively integrating or surfacing data into and from ERP systems remains as one of the key challenges facing IT.

Enterprise LOB systems are great with structured business processes (typically represented as flow-charts), but ignore the fact that these only tell part of the story. The reality is most of these structured flows do not capture the "out-of-band" work done by people to support the business -- activities such as emailing, exchanging documents, phone conversations, workflow with other team-mates and customers, and so on. The complete business process is therefore an amalgamation of structured business processes with many ad-hoc, people-to-people collaborations.

The Results Gap impacts businesses negatively:

Important data remains on end-user local systems, and are not synchronized back to LOB systems (where they should belong);
Unmanaged ad-hoc collaboration gives rise to data chaos (e.g., multiple versions);
There is reliance on a few power users for critical enterprise information

Enter the OBAs

OBAs (or Office Business Applications) are a new class of enterprise composite applications that aim to close the Results Gap by connecting people (with their messy collaboration) to structured business processes.

The concept of an OBA is certainly not new -- custom solutions that integrate Office client applications with backend systems through web services, and commercial applications such as SAP/Microsoft Duet are all good concrete examples of OBA implementations.

However, the Microsoft Office 2007 System that was recently released will enable even more interesting OBAs while simplifying development. Going far beyond Office 2007 Ribbon customization, the Office System provides many client and server platform services:

Customizable user experiences on the Office client applications (Ribbons, TaskPanes, etc.),
Flexible OpenXML document format,
Role-based, personalize-able web portal (SharePoint Server)
Improved workflow, search, content and document management services,
New powerful server capabilities such as Forms Server, Excel Server
Built on .NET platform...

OBA Scenarios

With all these firepower, it's not hard to imagine the following OBA scenario for an Excel-based Expense Claims application where end-users fill in espense claims in an Excel "form". The form is routed according to defined Workflow rules for approval. Managers view the claims requests from within Outlook and take appropriate action. Final data is pumped into the backend ERP or Finance system, and the Expense Claims form is archived on a document server. The Manager can generate an Expense report from within his own Excel application which pulls down the necessary data from the backend system, and then generates charts or pivot-table for analysis.

Other scenarios include Contract Management (integrate Finance & Document Management LOB systems with Word, Excel), Sales Automation (integrate CRM LOB system with Excel, Outlook).

OBAs In Singapore

I personally feel OBAs represent a very neat approach to solving many real-world challenges faced by enterprises. This translates to opportunities to many of our Customers and Partners (ISV and SIs alike.)

Meanwhile, check out the following resources for more information about OBA:

Office Business Applications Developer portal: Recommended starting point site for all things OBA
Office Business Applications (OBA) Team Blog: Newly minted OBA Team Blog
VerticalWare: Javed Sikander's blog for Office and OBA-related information
MSDN Solution Architecture center site for Microsoft Office: For technical information revolving around Microsoft Office (and hence OBA)

Up next, some follow-up on the first OBA Workshop held in Singapore, and more on OBA and SOA...

Technorati tags: OBA, office business applications, office platform