Nigel Parker's Outside Line : ASP.NET

ACP Media Development Leads To Pure Direction

nparker — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:32:00 GMT

I have been working with the team at ACP Media for a couple of years and finally at the Expression For Art’s Sake event at Wellington a couple of weeks ago I had a chance to catch up with Dave Harvey, Grant Archibald and Darko Zoroja to discuss their work with Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC and jQuery.

Check out the video that I shot on location at the Expression For Art’s Sake event in Wellington. In the video the guys talk about their first “Silverlight 1” development integrating video into the Auto Trader website.

Followed by a “New Car” area of the site built with ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and Silverlight 2 DeepZoom (Based on the JellyFish engine).

Try out both the premium Silverlight version:

And the comparative jQuery version:

The latest site that they guys launched just this week is AA Carfair. It is based on the Auto Trader back-end and is built completely from the ground up again using ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and Silverlight Video.

The guys have chosen to form a new company specialising in Silverlight development called Pure Direction which has just became a NZ BizSpark start-up, best of luck for your new venture and I look forward keeping up with your new developments.

Technical Briefing Wrap and HOLIDAY!

nparker — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:38:00 GMT

First of all what does it look like to talk to nearly 2000 people?

Well here is a picture I found on flickr of 900 people... yup I'm in there #9 top row.

Think double this and we will be just about there!

It was all of you that made this event so successfull, THANKS!

Darryl did a great job of MC'ing the keynote at the events and holding it all together! The mindscape guys have done a great job bringing my backgroundmotion idea to life!

Presentation: Web Standards Compliance

Presentation: Extending Application Reach

Presentation: Building Composite Applications

In fact all the pptx decks are now online.

My presentation Building applications users love is there but without the link to the video that I promised.

Click the picture below to watch the Video!

I leave tomorrow for a trip around Europe with my wife and daughter followed by Mix in Las Vagas. The best part is that I'm not taking my laptop! See you again on the 7th of May if not a little sooner!

Emerging Web Technologies

nparker — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 07:56:00 GMT

I presented today alongside David Bolocker amongst others on Service Oriented Architecture, Web 2.0 and Mashups.

I even came up with my own quote...

"Software Convergence, is not the reduction of solutions but the expansion of presentation & information to user combinations."

Check out my presentation at http://gobeyond.net.nz/brightstar and tell me what you think.

Michael Sampson live blogged the event.

Machinima, Scott Guthrie and WPF/E

nparker — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 01:01:00 GMT

On April Fools day 4 years ago Red vs. Blue smashed onto the Internet.

It has been credited with bringing new popularity to machinima, helping it to gain more mainstream exposure, and attracting more people to the art form.

In the world of user generated content the machinima technique involves synchronising video footage from a game to pre-recorded dialogue and other audio.

Scott Guthrie, stars in a special episode describing ASP.NET AJAX... Check it out at http://channel9.msdn.com/playground/wpfe/rvbplayer (it uses the Feb CTP version of WPF/E).

Incidently... 60,000 unique sites deployed pages using the final ASP.NET AJAX V1.0 bits within the first month of release!.

Scott Guthrie and the DPE team at Tech.Ed 2006 NZ.

Full series are available at http://rvb.roosterteeth.com

Do you work with ASP.NET? Take 2 hours to learn AJAX!

nparker — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:12:00 GMT

We have just released a FREE 2-hour clinic to learn about the rich functionality that ASP.NET AJAX Extensions provides for building highly responsive and enhanced web applications. In addition to learning about the different server and client components of ASP.NET AJAX, you will also learn how to build new ASP.NET AJAX applications and how to upgrade existing ASP.NET applications to take advantage of ASP.NET AJAX.

This clinic is appropriate for experienced .NET Web Developers and Software Architects who are looking to incorporate ASP.NET AJAX within their existing and future solutions.

Enjoy!

My Tech.Ready (Well at least the parts I can talk about)

nparker — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:52:00 GMT

I'm starting my long flight home from Seattle to Auckland. Please join me for another long convoluted post about this week abroad all written and linked while disconnected from the Internet ;)

Each year technical Microsoft staff that are based out in the field fly to Seattle to attend a week long technical breifing. The briefings takes place twice a year and unfortunately I have got myself into the winter cycle. That said the weather has been great! I'm sitting in Seattle airport watching the sun set over the snow capped mountains and there is hardly a cloud in the sky.

The purpose of the briefing is for us to network with others doing the same job in other countries, to learn from product teams and to feed back customer information that we have encountered in our geographies.

This event is the pre-cursor to public events like Mix and PDC where many of the technologies we are discussing are seen in public for the first time.

So what are some of the stats for this year's event?

There were 6000 people in the keynote on Monday morning, there were ~700 session with >35 sessions running concurrently in each timeslot.

Since every session was recorded and streamed around the company worldwide in real time. This conference became the largest live meeting site in the world.

I made an effort to track down, see sessions and introduce myself to some of Microsofts new hires during the week.

I very much enjoyed Will Tschumy's (Ex Director User Experience for Flock) session on brokering the User Experience conversation with developers. Ethnography was mentioned more than once but the general principal here was that if you invest in UX upfront in a project it is much cheaper and easier than making changes later. The more time I spend with User Experience people the more I am convinced about this... if you are in Auckland on March 15 you might like to attend Intergen's twighlight event "Why User Experience and Usability are important to businesses online". Also I recommend reading Allan Cooper's "About Face 2.0" as a great introduction to the principals of User Experience.

I attended an architecture de-brief for the Otto project. This is a client based e-commerce store that extends Otto's web site to offer a premium service to their customers (similar to the New York Times reader). This was very insightful particular as we learnt how the project was designed by a German pioneer design company SinnerSchrader. Since showing this project at the Windows Vista consumer launch in Europe Otto has received many requests by other online and catalog retailers to license the engine they have built for their own WPF based client stores. If you have .Net 3.0 installed or are running Vista check out the Otto Store here (warning takes a long time for the inital catalog to be downloaded and cached locally and at the last stage they have there window on top of other windows which is annoying). I took a couple of screen shots of Otto in action below.

Watch Videos of models wearing the clothes... Add Clothes to your wardrobe and dress your model up with the clothes that you choose.

The store is harder to navigate if you don't understand German but a couple of things to note, all the images in the offline store are syncronised with images available on their website and are simply presented in a different way. The catalog is "updated" from the web each time you open it. The 'Mix n Match' (shown above) allows you to experiment and dress the model with different outfits as you browse the store. If you've read 'the long tail' you'll realise what Otto are doing here. They are using a smarter UI to make their catalog more accessible to their customers so that they can sell their products further down the tail thus creating a competitive advantage in a world where shelf space isn't limited and your preferences can be visually served up front and centre.

Bill Gates' presentation on Wednesday was very good. I have seen Bill speak at conferences a few times now and this was IMO indeed his best work. It was a very forward thinking presentation he talked about Microsoft Research and some of the projects that moved out of the research labs into commercial projects. It was interesting to hear about the tablet PC's begining in research and that there are more than two million tablet PC's sold world-wide. I've mentioned many times that I love my tablet. This morning I downloaded todays New York Times into the reader & used pen flicks to turn the pages reading in portrait mode in the tiny seats as I flew into San Fran. I couldn't help but smile when I saw others struggling with paper newspapers in the same seats! Incidentally I learnt this week that the Ny Times are now getting more page views in the reader than on their website!

Bill also talked about Moores Law and how the "free lunch" speed increases in our processors is coming to an end (possibly around 5GHZ) & how a much greater emphasis in the future will be put on writing parallel code for client machines running 8 or 16 core processors. Bill talked again about the concept of verifiable composability. In this brave new world we may need to go back to basics and re-invent the way we write software to take advantage of the multiple cores that are at our disposal. I couldn't help but be taken back to this post from a few weeks ago. It is no secret that Bill regards Ray Kurzweil as the greatest futurist of our time and he referenced his book 'The Singularity Is Near' during his presentation. Bill spoke with passion & genuine excitement of what is just around the corner in this fast moving technology age. Greater processing power on the client coupled with advanced virtualisation and the widespread adoption of services & backup in the cloud makes for a very interesting future indeed.

Kevin Schofield, head of Microsoft research followed Bill Gates. MS research is this year celebrating their 15th Anniversary. Kevin showed some mind blowing innovation! If only half the things that Kevin showed cross the chasm and make their way into commercial innovation in the next 3 to 5 years the world will be a better place.

I was very happy also to see the progress with WPF/E. Tooling is getting better for both the designer & the developer and there is a nice open jscript + XAML model available to try today in the browser & cross platform (yup search engines can index it!). Check out this site (click the left icon then use alt+v then c to view source if you are using IE7) that was built usign WPF/E as part of the Vista launch in Slovenia. There are some big new announcements coming up in this area at Mix so book your ticket to Vegas or check this site on April 30.

On Wednesday night I went out with Tony Chor (Principal Group Program Manager Internet Explorer or 2IC for short). I must admit that I have been quite suprised by all the press (1, 2, 3) surrounding Robert's presentation at foo regarding Mozilla's proposed offline support for web applications. Juha wrote in his Friday fryup "I asked Nigel from Microsoft if Redmond had anything similar to this coming up, but it doesn’t look like it"... how can you take two unrelated comments like that & put them together? We are not talking about features/timelines/dates or codenames for the next version of IE just yet.

What I can tell you... The IE team has more than 200 team members (sorry Asa I low balled that number when I talked to you at foo) they are absolutely taking the standards route welcome Molly and as I said in my previous post as the standards bodies are looking at offline caching the IE team is looking at it too. That said will any web developers actually write their applications to support the new offline capabilities if they are made available by the browsers? IE has had support for some of this for a long time in the form of the userData behavior which is used by Google but very few others. It isn’t quite as powerful as what the WhatWG has proposed here but it is pretty close. In addition to WhatWG Robert wrote... "The only really new API is an API for storing application pages in the "offline cache", and that's just a new "rel" keyword for the element. So it should be pretty easy to add this to any browser."

I caution you all not to blow this up at such an early stage as this feature may not make it into the final build of FF (or IE)... does anyone remember places or winfs?

If you are running on windows and want an offline version of your gmail today why not use Windows Live Mail Desktop, I love it and I use it to work with my hotmail account while offline.

While we are back on the Windows client side at the launch of Vista Mary Jo Foley asked where are all the 3rd party Vista applications? In response Tim Sneath did a great job summarising a bunch of these (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8). Although this is a good selection it is by no means conclusive. One of the ones that I saw for the first time during this week was a "showcase " piece of art created by the leading design firm in Japan. they were experimenting with using 2D raster images in a 3D plane. This is what they came up with... .Net 3.0 runtime required... this is not a video click the camera icon then try interacting with the 3D environment by using the zoom controls while the animation is playing. Also I see Warner Brothers Japan has a Vista ap as well.

Another thing I did this week was spend quite a bit of time listening and talking to John Lam about dynamic languages and the web. John was the only presenter I saw running a Mac this week, I guess it's the best way to test cross platform. Again if you want to hear more go to Mix or check if out virtually late April. If you want to see what Microsoft is doing with dynamic languages today travel to http://asp.net/ironpython. It was great seeing Polita of "Blinq" fame involved in these presentations. What do you guys think about getting this team down to NZ and Australia for Tech.Ed?

Thursday night was the party, it is a challenging task to feed and entertain 6000 people but the organisers did a great job of doing just that. Each different part of the warehouse on the pier was set up with food, music & dance from a different part of the world. I very much enjoyed the Jam session where anyone could pick up an instrument & get involved... some MS employees had some real talent here.

For the keynote on Friday we were spoilt with a presentation by Chris Bangle (Director of Design at BMW). IMO Chris was brilliant & very inspiring (yes I know he has his critics). He started... I'd like to thank Microsoft for teaching me the secret of dreams. I now know that they are simply your brain defragging over night!

Chris took us all In a very insightful journey of car design... he explained the visual language of the surface itself he explained how his designers learnt the skills of "industrial origami" and showed us new techniques st shaping steel in a way that it is asymmetric and creates an emotional connection. He took us through the 3 step design process that they employ at BMW (Understanding, Believing, Seeing). He talked about the importance of computer modelling in car design but he stressed that their modellers are clay sculptures first so that they don't forget that the computer is simply a tool. Virtual design is important but you must take your creation out into the wild at some stage to ensure that it speaks to your target audience. Also Chris is a strong believer in putting the best tools into the hands of the Consumer. Everyone can read & write but there are plenty of great authors still earning a crust. Chris believes in having a 'Consumer Dialog' joining humanism with industry and seeking consumer contribution in the process of design.

I think Chris' presentation resonated with many in the room there is a real synergy with the design process at BMW and the sea change of user experience that is taking place at Microsoft. You just need to spend some time with products like Windows Vista, Blend and the 2007 Office System to experience the feeling that the software just fits and works with you.

I am now inflight halfway home... I'm still handwriting in portrait mode. I have all my notes to reference. My email (hotmail included) is available cached offline (along with all the Rss feeds from the blogsphere from the last week or so). My complementary upgrade came through on Air NZ and I am for the first time stretched out in a sleeper seat. I ate a great meal, watched Babel and drank some fantastic wine. Whats more I have power! very important as I had to run from my Seattle flight to make this connection. All we need now is WiFi on air NZ and I could actually post this... goodnight :)

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Released

nparker — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 04:04:00 GMT

Scott announced this morning that the final release of ASP.NET AJAX shipped this morning.

There are already a number of sites out there using the framework. Some of the more recognisable ones are the Live Image Search and Pageflakes and for a NZ example EcoBob although I am sure there are others.

What does shipping mean in this Internet age?

Well it means it is ready for prime time, run it in a production environment for free (whether it is backended by .net or not) and move the support issues onto Microsoft if the framework is not acting the way it should.

I see on the ASP.NET AJAX forums we have more than a quarter of a million users (some working full time for Microsoft answering community questions) generating almost 1.5 million posts on the topic.

Enjoy!

Rowan Simpson, Trade Me and Browser Wars 2.0

nparker — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 07:45:00 GMT

With the conversation going on regarding IE7's 100 million installation (thanks Tony), the contrasting Infoweek article and also Richard's Maxthon take, I was interested to see that Rowan has posted Trade Me's logs for December on his blog.

If you analyse Rowans numbers further it shows that in the 6 month period from July 2006 to Dec 2006 that IE (all flavours) lost about 1.36% to FF's gain of 1.1% amongst Trade Me customers.

Net Applications claims that during the same period IE lost 3.92% to FF's 2.66% gain.

I wonder if this is partly due to the large growth in Macintosh® computers over the last quarter.

Given this information (even though it is global) one would assume that the number of safari users on Trade Me would have also gone up more than 0.5%.

Since the advent of intel mac and parallels I've talked to a few people that are using a Mac to run both OSX and Windows. On Windows they use IE7 and on OS X they use FF.

Just another take on the same old argument that is doing the rounds... I'm sure we'd see this number leap again if apple allows FF to be installed on the iPhone ;)

On another note Rowan has also posted that as of the 9th Jan Trade Me is 100% ASP .NET 2.0!

It was almost a year to the day that Trade Me released the first pieces of .Net onto their site and it's been great to read Rowan's after migration summary post.

Brad Abrams has sighted some other real world customer migration experiences on his blog.

AJAX Security

nparker — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 02:18:00 GMT

This morning I was interested to read about a security hole that enabled you to steal someone else’s Google cookie and access their Google services (this is now fixed). You can only imagine how much identity theft hurts until it happens to you. Some years ago my 5 digit ICQ account was stolen from me using a dodgy IM. At the time I was gutted as ICQ was my gateway to IM and Free SMS and I had "street cred" created by having such a low number.

By chance I also noticed across my "virtual desk" that Joe Stagner has secured Caleb Sima and Billy Hoffman for a series of Webcasts on AJAX Security starting this week.

Unfortunatley they all start @ 6am NZ Time and require passport/ live registration.

Fri Jan 19 - 6am - Live From Redmond: AJAX Security Basics- The Building Blocks to Protecting Your Applications Built with ASP.NET AJAX

Fri Jan 26 - 6am - Live From Redmond: How Hackers Reverse Engineer and Exploit an ASP.NET AJAX Application

Fri Feb 02 - 6am - Live From Redmond: The Brave New World of AJAX Hacking (and prevention using ASP.NET)

Fri Feb 16 - 6am - Live From Redmond: The Next Generation of AJAX Attacks – A New Generation of Attack Theories

Fri Feb 23 - 6am - Live From Redmond: Best Practices: A Look at Developer ASP.NET AJAX Security Mistakes

But if you are an early riser and build web applications with AJAX this series may very well be worth a look.

Oh yeah and for any of you true hAck3rs out there, check out this article on Jim Christy at DefCon.

Expand Your Portfolio... it's a wrap!

nparker — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:09:00 GMT

Hey there,

Two weeks ago we met and presented to over 200 people from more than 85 companies across New Zealand!

We got some great feedback and had heaps of fun doing it!

I have got great feedback via email and I have had truck loads of people wanting to show their friends... learn more and try things out themselves!

What sites did we update/release?

http://www.microsoft.com/expression

http://www.microsoft.com/design

http://www.microsoft.com/wpfe

What did I showcase last week...

WPF

firstlook.nytimes.com

Blend (Beta 1)

thirteen23.com, harmony (itunes/Amazon desktop mashup), denounce (next gen rss/podcast reader)

Tools

SWF2XAML (v1), demo, video

AItoXAML

Expression Web (Available Now)

personifydesign.com

ASP.NET AJAX (Release Candidate)

sample sites, from NZ - http://ecobob.com

Vista Media Center

mobilewares, Media Center Extender Video

Sidebar

Building a WPF Vista Sidebar Gadget, Gadgets

WPF/E (Community Preview)

Playground, Flash/ WPF/E coexist

Windows Live

Fresh Logic Studio GPS Mashup

Queenstown 3D video, Virtual Earth 3D

Photosynth

Where are my custom demos?

Demonstrating Designer & Developer Workflow using a 3D Kiwi, code

NZ Vector Animation in XAML (requires .NET 3.0 Runtime Installed)

"experience is the product" video presentation (rough cut, includes preview of Right Hemispheres upcoming version of Deep Publish)

Rapid prototyping using XAML and Blend (requires .NET 3.0 Runtime Installed)

Where can you go to learn?

Back in June I blogged about learning WPF, after Tech.Ed I also posted a bunch of my videos (including the Tablet Montage) showcasing WPF.

The community site for Windows Presentation Foundation - http://wpf.netfx3.com

Videos for the release candidate of ASP.NET AJAX

Training for the Expresion tools

What has been released since?

Microsoft Robotics Studio Version 1

XNA Game Studio Express Version 1, Sharky (local XNA game developer)

3D Tools for the Windows Presentation Foundation - Example

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

Show me the video of what people are using WPF for.

5 minute overview video

Where is this conversation going next?

To Vegas Baby... April 30th - May 2nd.

Who do you recognise from "Mix and Mash"?

The person next to BillG looks like someone that I met at WebStock in March... what do you think?

Take some time over Christmas to pass that Suck Threshold.

Merry Christmas

TradeMe Design!

nparker — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 07:23:00 GMT

I was talking to Rowan a few weeks ago and he mentioned that TradeMe was working on a new CSS designed site (amongst other changes). How did Rowan put it? "it's an evolution rather than a revolution"... I think you could use this same quote when talking about IE7!

Check out the sneak preview at http://preview.trademe.co.nz, and also go and check out the commentary and provide your feedback!

I was hoping to see Natasha talk about this at UPA event in Auckland this week but unfortunately she didn't make it up... next shot WebStock Mini!

On another note a couple of weeks ago I was down in Wellington and I met with Rachel and the team at heliocell. We discussed their site http://www.gofetch.net.nz and some of the challenges they faced building a Standards Complient CSS driven site on .NET.

One of the things Rachel mentioned was the pains she went to to style some of the ASP .NET Server controls.

We can help with this!

If you are looking at creating custom output from .NET controls and even removing <table from your .NET site take a look at the CSS Control Adapters. The control adapters provide a pure CSS based rendering (no tables) for all of the ASP.NET Data (GridView, DataList, DetailsView, FormView, etc), Navigation (Menu, TreeView), and Login (Login, CreateUserWizard, ChangePassword, PasswordRecovery, LoginStatus) controls. Also Expression Web Designer (front page is dead) and ASP.NET for Designers is worth a look.

Well Done TradeMe and Team for evolving a putting a stick in the sand!