Nigel Parker's Outside Line

Windows 7 Media Center - Sky Digital + Freeview HD Setup.

nparker — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:21:00 GMT

I have been getting a lot of questions recently about my home media center setup since I told people that I have moved to the Windows 7 Release Candidate.

I thought the best way to address things is with a blog post.

You may or may not be aware that Windows 7 opens the door for watching Freeview HD natively without the need for any additional codec's to be installed inside of Media Center.

Prior to upgrading to Win7 RC I was running Vista 64 bit with a Hauppauge WinTV PVR500MCE card.

It was a good card (albeit a bit pricey) back in the day but all I can say now is DON’T BUY ONE!

This card is old and doesn’t have a 64 bit driver that supports >3GB of RAM so you need to limit your system RAM using msconfig if you want to make it work. Besides there are newer, cheaper and better options.

I replaced the card with a Hauppauge WinTV HVR2200 MC PCI-E $199 NZD which Windows 7 installs the drivers for automatically and eats as much RAM as you throw at it. This card gives you three tuners (1 S-Video that I use for digital Sky and 2 DVB-T tuners that I use for Freeview HD).

If you are planning on connecting digital sky in addition to Freeview HD you will need a couple more things.

1) A Microsoft MCE Remote Control with an Infrared Blaster (which unfortunately appear to have been discontinued so are very expensive at stores that still hold stock). That said you may be able to use the Hauppauge MCE Remote Control Kit instead, but I haven’t tried it.

2) Also you’ll need a S-Video & 3.5mm Audio plug to connect the sky digital to the HVR2200 card.

Once you have this setup the next challenge you face is getting your channels mapped with a working Electronic Program Guide (important for series linking and avoiding old VHS style manual recordings). Unfortunately there is currently no supported guide for MCE offered by Freeview or Sky in New Zealand.

That said if you have opted for a tuner that supports DVB-S you get a 7 day Freeview guide automatically via the satellite. Alternatively the DVB-T broadcast (Freeview HD) gives you a now/next guide automatically for the next few shows.

If you have access to a licensed EPG from a third party, Australian company mobilewares is offering a 3rd Party EPG Importer For Windows 7, signup to try the beta.

One of my favourite TV features of Win7 Media Center is the way that you can get captions on live and recorded TV when you press the mute button.

Also I love the audio pitch correction so that people don’t sound like chipmunks when you play back at 1.5x by pressing the >> button. This feature is great for watching news and long sporting events.

Another great thing about this setup is the extender story to get HD Freeview in other rooms of the house.

I own a Linksys Media Center extender that I brought a while back during a stock clearance sale. Again DON’T BUY ONE! Linksys, as far as I’m aware, are not updating their extenders to support the codecs needed to play TV in Win7. Mine now sits in the lounge on top of the MySky HDi box for playing music, photos and movies via HDMI from Win7 to my main TV.

A better extender solution is to buy an entry level XBOX 360 (currently under $300 NZD) and an HDMI LCD monitor with built in speakers for around $340 NZD.

Like any technology solution there have been a few teething issues. Namely when watching recorded HD TV on the XBOX extender audio sometimes gets a little out of sync. I find pressing pause and then play fixes this. Also for some crazy reason once you connect to XBOX live to download the hd codecs you appear to need to be connected to XBOX live from that point on when you launch media center! This isn’t a problem really except the other day when the login service for XBOX live was unavailable I couldn’t watch TV on my XBOX extender! I have raised this issue with the XBOX NZ team.

UPDATE:

arebee wrote: The Xbox 360 Live login requirement for the extender to work is Beta only and won't be required for release.
Tue, Jul 07 13:47:50

You will need plenty of hard drive space if you plan to archive programs after you view them.Win7 Media Center uses a new .wtv container which is about 3.5GB per hour for H.264 content.

Windows Live Movie Maker (currently available in early beta) is one of the few programs that I have found that can work with wtv files natively, also right clicking “convert to DVR-MS” works for content that is not HD.

All in all the solution I have is wife friendly (more so than MySky we’ve found) via a simple to use remote control and a very intuitive user interface.

Bing Photo Contest

nparker — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:46:00 GMT

I’m enjoying watching the social dynamics of the bing photo contest play out.

Some photos are bubbling up because they are generally good

Others beacuse people ask their friends to rate them high.

If you start Rating Photos Yourself you will realize how poor the quality is of most of the material that is being submitted.

I submitted a few photos of my own and it is clear that people are favoring the classic sunset/ landscape type photos to the more abstract themed ones.

That said if you are on facebook and like any of the images below please click on the image and vote me up.

Vote for the Nouméa beach

Vote for the Sydney bridge

I can’t understand why people rate my beer photo from Bruges so low (1.6 out of 5) it is one of my personal favourites.

Vote for Bruges

Thanks!

Wellington Code Camp Completed, SharePoint Conference Tomorrow

nparker — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:00:37 GMT

This week the MSDN Flash is all about spreading the word of three awesome community run events past and present.

The Wellington Code Camp. took place on the 13/14th June
The New Zealand Community SharePoint Conference is tomorrow in Wellington.
Barcamp Auckland 3 is coming up on the 11th July in Auckland.

Although I didn't attend Code Camp I hear that Ivan's dance moves were legendary. Code Camp was enthusiastically organised by Kirk, Ivan, JD, JB and Owen. Here are a few blog posts that I found summing up the event:

Building Solutions Using Microsoft Products - Andrew Tokeley
Code Camp learnings - Kirk Jackson
Maintainable Code: one step further - Bevan Arps
.NET 4.0 Code Contracts - James Newton King
The Microsoft Sync Framework - James Hippolite
LINQ, lambdas and extensions - Matthew Hintzen
Owen Evans promises to have videos of the sessions for you all shortly.

Off the back of the Code Camp, the new Wellington Silverlight User Group was formed. Their first meeting is tonight, so try to get along to it!

The buzz is really starting to build around the New Zealand SharePoint Conference that is set to kick off tomorrow. Word is that there are still a few tickets available so register now if you can make it along! If you can't get there follow NZ SharePoint to stay up to date. The New Zealand Community SharePoint Conference is the brainchild of three SharePoint MVPs Debbie, Mark and Chandima.

Not to be outdone by Wellington, Auckland is hosting BCA3 on Sat 11th July. BCA is focused on the cross-pollination of ideas and knowledge.

Finally on the topic of awesome events don't miss out on the NZ IT Industry's best technical training event. Tech-Ed NZ is taking place in Auckland on the 14/16th September. We have 14 simultaneous tracks of content and have sold more than half of our event tickets!

Register for Tech Ed before 31 July and you will automatically go into the draw to win one of seven Canon IXUS 100 IS digital cameras. Full details of the Tech Ed special offer are here.

Yellow Maps

nparker — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:12:00 GMT

The dynamics between Google and Yellow is certainly an interesting one to watch as their business models converge into one of healthy “coopertition”.

Check out this article from stuff from earlier this year: Yellow Pages, Google discuss joining forces

An alliance would mean internet users would be able to search for and see the location of 200,000 businesses listed in Yellow Pages by logging on to Google Maps.

Yellow would use Google to provide maps for its yellow.co.nz website, spelling an end to head-on competition between the old and new powerhouses in the business directories market.

Well last Friday the first phase of this was completed by Keith and the team at Marker Studio who have released a beta of the new Yellow Maps site.

Alongside the beta launch I noticed the increased effort to direct people to the Internet Explorer 8 version powered by Yellow in the face of increased competition by MSN and Yahoo NZ to drive users to their IE8 custom versions.

It is great to see that the new Yellow Maps site is deployed on Windows Server 2008 using ASP.NET 3.5 and the URL Rewrite Module for IIS7 to drive positive SEO outcomes. Check out Keith's post on IIS7 Extensionless Urls and Kentico CMS 4.0.

I particularly like the clean url’s for directions e.g. http://maps.yellow.co.nz/map/auckland/#to=Kiosk+Rd|Kari+St

The timing of this is interesting to say the least as Google Local Lures Small Businesses With Their Own Web Dashboard

Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard…

Combine this with Google's push to give New Zealand businesses $75 worth of Free AdWords and you have a strong focus by Google to engage the SME business market in New Zealand directly.

I think the opportunity for Yellow is to use the best of everything that is out there and add “greater” value than simply using a “white labelled” Google solution “out of the box”.

Last month I spent a few days with the Marker team in Wellington where they prototyped alternative views for Yellow Maps using Silverlight 3, localised Twitter and Virtual Earth in combination with Google geo-location services and StreetView.

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed you can try a Silverlight 3 prototype of Yellow Maps online at http://a.bility.co.nz

This will be an interesting area to keep an eye on especially due to the recent acquisition of wises and finda by Yellow back in February that occurred not long after Trade Me chose to turn off their mapping site Smaps that was based on the ZoomIn engine.

I see that Lance Wiggs has blogged his own opinions of the NZ market for business listings online. IMO the comments below the article are more telling of the opportunities that are left to explore.

GOVIS09 Videos Making Windows Media Streaming work Cross Platform.

nparker — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:42:00 GMT

It is funny the things that can start on Twitter these days. Take this Twitter conversation between Don Christie (President of NZOSS) and Kevin Ackhurst (Microsoft NZ MD).

I guess this is my opportunity to explain the situation and offer a solution.

GOVIS09 videos have been published exclusively using Microsoft Media Server (Microsoft's proprietary network streaming protocol used to transfer unicast data in Windows Media Services). In itself Windows Media Streams have some advantages in that the video isn’t downloaded or cached on the local machine; it is scalable and supports live events and you can instantly move to the end of the video without waiting to download all the in between bits (unlike video solutions like YouTube).

Incidentally we have released Microsoft Media Server Protocol Specification document and there is a free, open source implementation of the MMS protocol.

There are multiple ways to consume and play Windows Media Streams that I will get onto in a moment but the root of the problem identified above is that the ISV that delivered the GOVIS solution is delivering a Windows Media Player only solution that doesn’t work on Mac or Linux.

To answer Colin Jackson’s question, “I though Microsoft ~~was~~ is an interoperability company now?”

I thought I’d take on the challenge to present the existing published GOVIS video streams inside a solution that plays cross browser and cross platform using Free and Open Source Software.

1) I chose to present the videos using SilverStripe (2008 New Zealand Open Source Software Project of the year) running on Windows Server 2008 R2. (Single click install using the Web PI).

2) I download the FOSS JW WMV Player from Google Code

3) I linked it all up at http://compati.bility.co.nz

The next challenge was to test that this plays out fine on a Linux desktop.

I followed Grant’s excellent post on getting openSUSE to run under virtual PC. Since I’m running Windows 7 I was able to take advantage of the awesome new Virtual PC beta that takes advantage of the Intel™ Virtualization or AMD-V Technologies.

Once SUSE was up and running I popped over to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

Moonlight is a free, open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems (You can download a tarball of the source here).

I popped back to http://compati.bility.co.nz and accepted the license for the Windows Media Codec's and Voilà I was watching the Windows Media Services GOVIS09 videos in Linux.

The next task was to create pages for each of the videos listed on the GOVIS site. I must admit that I was surprised to find that a quarter of the videos would not play!

At a quick glance there appears to be a low level encoding error on the following fifteen videos (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15) which includes ironically Don Christie’s presentation. I'm keen to look deeper into this issue to understand more about what is going on with those affected videos.

I have linked to the other 42 working videos for your enjoyment from the home page at http://compati.bility.co.nz

Enjoy!

UNPLUGGED – Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 3

nparker — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:25:00 GMT

I have previously written about the UNPLUGGED road trip that Mike, Nathan and I have been on.

I also mentioned that I would be making a screen cast and sharing the source code from the Silverlight 3 Line of Business demo that I delivered. The demo that I presented was based on Scott Morrison’s two sessions from Tech.Ed North America.

Watch a video of my session using Smooth Streaming.

Also on Channel 9…

The source code for these presentations is available below (includes activity control):

I also updated my presentation to cover the May release of RIA Services from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices (this site also includes tutorials and white papers).

I will do another post shortly on how I built the Tech.Ed Tweet Vote demo that I showed in the first part of my UNPLUGGED session.

Other Posts that are worth checking out:

Microsoft UNPLUGGED

nparker — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:24:12 GMT

Last week we kicked of the Microsoft UNPLUGGED Road show visiting locations around New Zealand including Palmerston North, Tauranga, Hamilton and Auckland presenting technical sessions for Developers and IT Pros on Windows 7 and Silverlight 3.

Check out this short video of the events so far and the photos on DeepZoomPix.

Today we’re presenting in Christchurch heading to Dunedin and Wellington over the next two days. There is still space if you’d like to attend the Dunedin or Wellington sessions.

For those that are not able to attend in person the sessions will be recorded and made available at microsoft.co.nz/unplugged some time next week.

Expression For Art’s Sake – 3 1/2 Day Silverlight 3 Camp – Wellington, NZ

nparker — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:29:00 GMT

There’s no better way to try a new technology than getting people together to learn, share and build on top of it. So, that’s what we’ve been doing with Silverlight and Expression Studio for the last couple of years: Inviting a board array of developers and designers (you) to come spend time with us.

The Aussies held their event last December, so now it was New Zealand’s turn!

Tim has already written about Expression For Art’s Sake that took place in Wellington from the 20th to 23rd of April last month and now it is my turn to provide some more detail.

At the highest level I organised this event to get developers and designers of all different experience levels working together to get hands on with Blend 3 and Silverlight 3.

For those of you with short attention spans I have created a “super fast” overview video highlighting the 30 hours of workshop in just seven minutes!

For every one else here is a one hour summary video of the first two and a half days (download).

The Group Dynamics

3 Master Trainers

Tim Heuer, Arturo Toledo, Zef

The Teams (17 companies, 33 people)

Click Suite – Cam, Pieter
Datacom – Ben, David, Ronald
Datacraft – Dom, Mark
Gen-i – Craig, Tim
ICE Interactive –Nigel, Melissa
Intergen – Raymond, Andrew
Marker Studio – Darren, Keith
NV Interactive – Brent, Nadia
Phosphor Essence – Aaron, Toby
Provoke – Callum, Isha
Pure Direction – Grant, Darko, Dave
Signify/MSO Design – Charles, Stacey
TePapa – Tim
Y&R/ Microsoft – Vikki, Aditia, Samuel, Kris
Xero - Jeff, Kirk

Challenge #1 – Build a “Hello World” in Silverlight and deploy it to a production web server.

This was a fun activity as introduced an element of “chaos” in securing the domain name for each team. I wanted to introduce teams to the WebPI and present a task that they may not carry out in their own organisations.

The servers that were “claimed”:

Click Suite – http://leacha.bility.co.nz
Datacom – http://ina.bility.co.nz
Datacraft – http://no.bility.co.nz
Gen-i – http://separa.bility.co.nz
ICE Interactive – http://dura.bility.co.nz
Intergen – http://opposa.bility.co.nz
Marker Studio – http://a.bility.co.nz
NV Interactive – http://surviva.bility.co.nz
Phosphor Essence – http://mova.bility.co.nz
Provoke – http://naviga.bility.co.nz
Pure Direction – http://capa.bility.co.nz
Signify/MSO Design – http://lika.bility.co.nz
TePapa – http://staina.bility.co.nz
Y&R/ Microsoft – http://via.bility.co.nz
Xero - http://lia.bility.co.nz

Getting To Know Each Other – WEREWOLF!

What is a few lynched villagers amongst friends?

Challenge #2 – Developing a Mobile Phone for a Kiwi

The challenge here was to start to think about the design process and work together under pressure to present a brief.

Here is a sample of the designs that the teams came up with:

Challenge #3 – Develop a Calculator with a User Control

What were the “New Features” of Silverlight 3 that the teams used most in the Projects?

Designers:

Developers

From here we moved onto projects that would lead to teams Final Presentations.

Some of the teams put their solutions online for you to try.

Silverlight 2 Projects available to try online:

Click Suite – http://leacha.bility.co.nz

Gen-i – http://separa.bility.co.nz
ICE Interactive – http://dura.bility.co.nz/#Recipes
Intergen – http://opposa.bility.co.nz
Marker Studio – http://a.bility.co.nz
Pure Direction – http://capa.bility.co.nz (Login test/ password)
TePapa – http://possi.bility.co.nz/timtate/
Y&R/ Microsoft – http://via.bility.co.nz/Bliss/
Xero - http://lia.bility.co.nz/MapTest1TestPage.aspx

Also available is the y&soft blingulator.

Final Presentations:

I have made a video that highlights the final presentations (download). All in all the teams did an awesome job going from zero to hero and surviving this very intense, compact training environment.

I have also combined both videos using Smooth Streaming as well.

Online Feedback from the attendees:

Tim wrote:

Before this week I had hardly touched Silverlight and now I don’t think I can live without it. Even though Silverlight is very different from Flash, I think having that Flash background let me pick it up fairly quickly.

Darko wrote:

All in all I think it was a very successful week. Everyone learned a lot and the mentoring from Tim and Arturo helped heaps. If I could improve anything, it would be to make it a day longer just so that there is a proper wind down. I’m really looking forward to working with Silverlight more.

GREAT WORK everybody!

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4 Beta 1 Available Now

nparker — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:55:00 GMT

Today Soma announced that VS 2010 and .Net FX 4 Beta 1 is available to MSDN and Technet subscribers. Everyone else can download the bits on Thursday NZ time.

For more details visit the Visual Studio 2010 Product Page. Please visit http://connect.microsoft.com in order to log bugs and give general feedback.

Check out the new videos at Channel 9: Visual Studio 2010.

Tech.Ed New Zealand Tickets Selling Fast!

nparker — Mon, 18 May 2009 01:34:14 GMT

Tickets for Tech.Ed New Zealand went on sale first thing this morning. By lunchtime 56% of the early bird tickets were sold!

I don’t know what to say but here we go again! Tickets will sell out once again and early bird will most probably be gone by the end of the day. The early bird 20 packs have already sold out.

To get you in the mood check out the keynote from Tech.Ed 2009 North America.

Got a great idea for a session?

This year we are trying something a little different and we are issuing a Call for Content. If you think you could present a great Tech.Ed session (or know someone that could) why not go to the Call for Content tool and suggest it? Over the next couple of months we will be looking for great session ideas to incorporate into both Australia and New Zealand Tech.Ed conferences. Mike has posted some tips around what makes a good session.

You can contribute to Tech.Ed #tenz9 via Twitter, Flickr and blog posts. Tagging guidelines.

NZsynth – How It Was Done

nparker — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:10:26 GMT

Previously I wrote and demoed the NZsynth application that was built for the WEB09 keynote. This post is detailing how it was made and introducing version two (Zoom all the way in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image).

WATCH THE VIDEO that goes end-to-end on the development of the application (mainly building the mosaic and the extension that Tim Tate created to make the tiles clickable).

The video is also downloadable from Channel9

The Code

It goes without saying that this code is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights it is demo ware and should be treated as such.

Flickr Image Download Code

Mosaic WCF REST Service (Including Flickr Database File)

NZsynth

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/ Hot keys in previous post

Tim’s Silverlight 3 Code and Demo

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed pop over to http://possi.bility.co.nz/timtate/ to look at a running version of Tim’s solution.

NZsynth V2 Source (excluding image tiles)

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/nzsynth (Zoom right in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image)

Key tools

WEBPI to install Visual Studio Silverlight Development Tools & SQL Server 2008 Express
AndreaMosaic
HD Make
Deep Zoom Composer
WCF REST Starter Kit
FlickrNet

Other Resources/ Examples

Jellyfish Deep Zoom
Deep Zoom Image Generation with DeepZoomTools.DLL
My post DeepZoom-Tastic
http://tr.im/photosEFAS (DeepZoom Pix Photos from Expression for Art’s Sake)
Miss March and Other Distractions (Parental Advisory)
Deep Zoom++ : Build Dynamic Deep Zoom Applications with Open Source

All this got me thinking how this idea could be extended further?

National Geographic have been doing some interesting work with photosynth recently. Check out the Sphinx below.

This is why I was intrigued to see they too have developed a mosaic experience called Infinite Photograph. It is not as smooth or free flowing as the nzsynth mosaic demo but it has a great touch that it repeats on itself after a few layers giving you a “feeling” that you can zoom forever. Also double-clicking images brings up more details like in Tim and my examples.

I guess beyond this we then need to think about video and using dynamic frames in a form of “massive” stop motion animation. If you haven’t seen it yet the YouTube Mosaic Music Video may give you some insight into where my mind is heading.

NZsynth and WEB09

nparker — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:56:00 GMT

It started as a conversation I was having with Brett Roberts regarding options for promoting NZ online at a time when tourism was taking a hit from the current economic climate. From there we discussed the proposed National Cycleway and this lead to a conversation about “crowd sourcing” images that people have already tagged as New Zealand to construct a demo from our shipping Silverlight 2 technology.

This conversation tied in well with a looming keynote slot at WEB09 where I had a 5-10 minute demo slot. The biggest problem was that I only had three days to build the “demo-ware” prototype and present it to a room full of web influential's!

Needless to say after a nervous period fighting with the failing conference WiFi. I switched to the hotel wireless and pulled it off!

Watch a 6 1/2 minute video of the demo I showed at the conference (this time the video is hosted on a US based server so the experience won’t be as good for Kiwis as the demo further down this post).

I have also posted this video on Vimeo (download available).

The demo app is hosted on a development server at Swizzle in their Telstra Albany datacenter. The fact that server was only 1 hop away from the conference venue meant that I could stream video via wireless at 2.4 MBS over the hotel wifi using smooth streaming with NO CACHE! I would go as far as saying that this was the Best Quality Internet Video that people in the room had ever seen stream over the Internet and all this in an environment when no other presenter could get their “US” based video to play without buffering! Goes to show the importance of peering for local content!

As mentioned at the event the “Excellent" video was generously provided by Making Movies for use as stock footage in the demo.

If you are in New Zealand and have a direct connection to the Auckland Peering Exchange I recommend that you try the demo steps for yourself by navigating to http://possi.bility.co.nz.

WEB09 Demo V1

1) Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the Mosaic and the slider to switch between Mosaics with more or less tiles.

Needless to say there was some smoke and mirrors in play during the demo…

Key combinations to try

SPACE bring up photo, mouse click on the image to hide again.
Q to show my photo collection (click on faded background then W to hide)
A to show a photosynth of museum S to hide
Z to show a photosynth of statue (P inside the photosynth to hide photos and show 3d model) S to hide
X to show a photosynth of blackout protest
V to show smooth stream video B to hide (needs to be done last)

In retrospect I didn’t like the way that the watermarked text that I applied to each individual photo tile looked after it was added to the mosaic. Also the tiles were being cut when they were being laid out in the Mosaic so in some cases (like below) the watermark attribution was being partly obscured or not visible at all!

For stage two I wanted to figure out a way to get rid of the watermark all together and work out a way to make individual photos in the Mosaic clickable.

I hadn’t been able to solve this problem in my demo so I used SPACE to bring up a single photo to show my thinking but not having it working.

Tim Tate came up to me after the keynote and we started discussing how I had built the demo and how he could look at productionizing the code for an upcoming exhibition at Te Papa museum in Wellington. Following our conversation I invited Tim to the Expression For Art’s Sake event in Wellington the following week and the rest as you say is history. Tim was able to solve the big problem I had above and this lead to me building a V2 of my demo which I will show you soon.

Tim wrote:

Before this week I had hardly touched Silverlight and now I don’t think I can live without it. Even though Silverlight is very different from Flash, I think having that Flash background let me pick it up fairly quickly.

I will post again shortly with a more detailed description of how I built the demo above including source code and a preview of Version 2 inspired by Tim’s work. But in the meantime it worth calling out the great piece of software Andrea Mosaic that I purchased to pull the base 3 Gigapixel tile sets.

Stay tuned to more…

Update on Silverstripe and the WebPI

nparker — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:03:39 GMT

In March I wrote about SilverStripe and the work that we had done with them to add them to the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

This month PC World has picked up the story and published this one pager (the article isn’t online yet but may turn up on PC World’s website later this month).

At the time of MIX Siggy mentioned their intention to add SQL Server support in their next release. Last month they added SQL Server 2008 support to an unreleased trunk of their application and introduced the SQL Server alpha module.

This early release uses the standard mssql function that ships with PHP. We are actively encouraging and supporting Silverstripe to also test with the open source PHP SQL driver extension provided from Microsoft that should improve performance, reliability and scalable when integrating PHP with SQL Server 2005/2008 on Windows.

The intention is once released to update their installer in the Windows Web Ap Gallery to include this option making SilverStripe truly a “1 click” install on any “out of the box” Windows Server or development machine via the WebPI.

Since MIX I have been encouraged to read what the open source community has been writing about this partnership:

Ex Zend Technologies guy Scott Dahlgren wrote:

More Than Talk

Wow - this is huge - and in fact all of these pieces do fit together into a very powerful story, but it took until now for me to really get it. Microsoft is in fact serious about working with the open source community. They are not just talking about it and rolling out nice marketing programs, they are actually delivering.

Also at MIX, Thomas Deml did a demo on IIS the whole time using Silverstripe during his Developing and Deploying Applications on Internet Information Services (IIS) talk.

Siggy mentioned in an email to me that the month after MIX that downloads of SilverStripe CMS grew ~62% for the month. A figure that he attributed partly to releasing a new version of SilverStripe CMS as well as being on Slashdot and Ajaxian. That said 37% of downloads were directly attributable to the Microsoft Web Platform Installer!

Tech.Ed ANZ Call For Content

nparker — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:30:57 GMT

The Tech•Ed 2009 season kicks off this week in LA, and the show comes to Australia and New Zealand in mid-September. We’ve just opened the Call for Content tool so now’s the time to submit that great idea for a session.

Go to the Call for Content tool and register with your email address and the RSVP code TechEdANZ. Fill in all the details and hit submit. You can come back to the site at any time to update or review the progress of your submission.

Before jumping in check out Andrew Coates blog post on

Tips for Successful Submissions and also the details of the different Tracks and Technologies.

ROAD TRIP! MSDN Unplugged Coming to a Town Near You

nparker — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:21:36 GMT

Join us for the May - June 2009 UNPLUGGED Roadshow as we visit locations around New Zealand presenting technical sessions for Developers and IT Pros.

Choose from either the MSDN Stream for Developers or TechNet Stream for IT Pros. At the end, get the opportunity to install Windows 7 RC on your PCs too at the Installfest. We'll have Window 7 RC DVDs to giveaway too.

MSDN Stream: Developing for Windows 7 and Silverlight 3
Find out how to get started developing rich applications for Windows 7 and Silverlight 3. Two sessions, presented by Microsoft New Zealand Developer Advisors, Mike Zeff and Nigel Parker.

Session 1: Windows 7 for Developers

Windows 7 contains many new features for developers that allow you to create very rich applications for your users, including the ability to touch-enable your own applications. This session will cover how you can take advantage of new Windows 7 features using .NET 3.5 to build rich client applications and we’ll also take a look at what’s coming in .NET 4.0. Presented by ISV Developer Advisor, Mike Zeff.

Session 2: Taking your Web experience to the next level with Silverlight 3

Internet Explorer 8 has been released and Silverlight 3 was announced recently at MIX ‘09. This session will show you how you can take advantage of Visual Studio and Silverlight 3 (with a touch of Expression Blend 3) to create line of business web applications that can run both inside and outside the browser. We’ll also show you how to take advantage of exciting features in IE8 that make your web site more ‘sticky’ for your users. Presented by Web Developer Advisor, Nigel Parker.

Installfest (Optional)
At the end of the sessions, you will have an opportunity to install the Windows 7 Release Candidate on your own machine. You bring your computer - we bring the Windows 7 installation and a Microsoftee to help.

A test PC for the Windows 7 RC should meet these minimum hardware recommendations:
1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
1 GB of system memory
16 GB of available disk space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory (in order to enable Aero theme)
DVD-R/W Drive or machine that supports booting from USB
Please bring a spare, non-production computer to install the software onto. We will help with loading Windows 7 onto your machines, and will have wired or wireless Internet connections available for drivers and updates. If for some reason, Windows 7 does not have the appropriate driver for your computer hardware, we will do our best to download drivers off the Internet and get them onto a USB key for you. We won’t be able to provide “support” afterwards, but we’ve created an online forum where you can ask questions.

If you didn’t get a chance to download your own copy of Windows 7 RC we will have a supply of Windows 7 DVDs.

What you need to know before installing the RC.

Optional Installfest 12.30pm - 1.30pm.

Level 300 for Developers, free to register.

Dates and Location
25 May: Palmerston North - register
26 May: Tauranga - register
27 May: Hamilton - register
28 May: Auckland - register
3 June: Christchurch - register
4 June: Dunedin - register
5 June: Wellington – register

TechNet Stream: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
If you're an IT Pro, join Microsoft IT Pro Advisor, Nathan Mercer as he presents these technical sessions demonstrating the essential features of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. More information and details.