Nigel Parker's Outside Line : training

Tech.Ed New Zealand T-2 Weeks

nparker — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 03:44:00 GMT

We are now only two weeks away from Tech.Ed New Zealand!

If you haven’t purchased your ticket yet to the event there is still time to register.

Now as you may be aware Tech.Ed Australia “SOLD OUT” this year with a deal to give each delegate a netbook running Windows 7. We got a bit of feedback for not doing the same thing but I feel we have an offer available that is just as compelling. If you are attending Tech.Ed NZ you still have four days to purchase your HP Mini 5101 Notebook with Windows 7 Ultimate for an estimated saving of $500 NZD (if you compare the ticket price to Tech.Ed Australia and then convert to NZD’s the difference is approximately the cost of the netbook).

One of the things I’m working on presently is the Keynote and as you may have read in the last MSDN Flash newsletter that this years keynote is being delivered by Chris Liddell. Chris is the Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft Corporation meaning that he holds the key to the proposed 9.5 billion USD that Microsoft plans to spend on R&D this financial year. Also Chris is a New Zealander which will help give his presentation a local perspective. I have the daunting task of writing and delivering a five minute demo during Chris’ presentation so I a bit nervous and excited about stepping up to the plate.

Mike has done a great job ensuring that we have quality content at this years event and we have now published the most up-to-date information on 14 Tracks, 128 Breakout Sessions, around 100 Hands-on Labs. Please note that adding a session to your personal schedule does not guarantee a seat in the session; sessions are filled on a first-come, first-seated basis but I do recommend you take a trip to start planning your sessions to help us with room planning so that we don’t experience too much overflow during the event.

As we do every year we are running some Ancillary Events around Tech.Ed.

The first being the community run Auckland Code Camp, that is free for all to attend (not just Tech.Ed delegates) on Sunday 13th September.

Kirk Jackson has blogged about the event. Register your place for Code Camp at http://www.codecamp.net.nz

The other opportunity is the Tech Girls Dinner on Monday 14th September, 8.00pm

Tech Girls Dinner is complimentary for delegates to attend and costs $99 for others seeking individual tickets to this dinner. If you are interested in attending register now.

I have also organised for Giorgio Sardo to deliver an intense two day tour of Auckland and Wellington off the back of Tech.Ed

Giorgio Sardo is a Technical Evangelist in Microsoft Corporation working in the Internet Explorer team. Moving from Italy to the United States, he studied at Polytechnic of Turin and successfully obtained a Master of Computer Engineering with distinction. Before joining Microsoft, Giorgio leaded a national university community forum in Italy and won the Imagine Cup worldwide championship. He started his experience in Microsoft UK as User Experience Consultant, delivering stunning solutions based on Silverlight, WPF and Mobile and presenting several sessions at Microsoft conferences. In 2008 he has been nominated Best Consultant of the Year from the British Computer Society. Early 2009 Giorgio moved to Redmond, where he currently focuses on Web Client technologies, such as Internet Explorer and ASP.Net AJAX. His blog is blogs.msdn.com/Giorgio.

Giorgio, is set to present at the HTML5 Is Alive! session at the Auckland Web Meetup at 6pm on Thursday the 17th September in Auckland alongside our resident Mozilla hacker Robert O'Callahan.

At the time of writing this there are 39 spots left so Sign Up if you are interested in attending.

For those of you in Wellington we are running a similar session with Giorgio at 10:30am on Friday the 18th September as an MSDN Unplugged event. Spaces are limited for this session as well so please register now if you would like to come along.

See You At Tech.Ed!

UNPLUGGED – Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 3

nparker — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:25:00 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:

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

nparker — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:29:00 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

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 the Silverlight 3 projects online as well.

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!

NZsynth – How It Was Done

nparker — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:10:26 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.

MSDN Flash - Web 09: It's about User Experience, and the tools to create it.

nparker — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:01:00 GMT

Software developer and entrepreneur John Ballinger has been running the Auckland Web Meetup for the last two years. During this time, the group has grown from about 20 to an incredible 550 members.

The group meets once a month at the Media Design School in central Auckland for an evening of presentations on web-related topics, with a break for beer and pizza halfway through. The response Ballinger got from the web community, and the huge interest he saw in joining the group, made him think there was demand for a bigger web event in Auckland.

"I wanted to create an event that would inspire web developers and designers, as well as online entrepreneurs, by bringing some of the rock stars of the web to Auckland." says Ballinger.

Web09 is now a reality, and despite the harsh economic climate Ballinger has managed to book a list of high-profile international speakers. I have worked with John to ensure that the best Microsoft has to offer are part of the billing.

Web09 will be held on 17-18 April, as part of the event, there is an exclusive one-day Microsoft pre-conference workshop, featuring for the first time in New Zealand Tim Heuer, Corrina Barber and Arturo Toledo. The workshop is happening on the 16th of April covering the essence of content presented at MIX09 in Las Vegas.

The good news is that I have negotiated hard to get an exclusive deal for MSDN Flash subscribers to attend the event.

By subscribing to the NZ MSDN Flash Newsletter (if you haven’t already) and entering the coupon code MSDNWEB09 in the signup page at http://www.web09.org/tickets.php you can receive a whopping 20% off the $745 conference price and a massive 50% off the $115 MIX essentials workshop valid until Friday the 13th March.
This offer won’t last... sign up now and be one of the first in New Zealand to get trained on Silverlight 3.

Thanks for reading! Until next time.

Nigel Parker
Web Development Advisor
Blog

Check out http://blackcaps.co.nz/. Microsoft gold partner NV Interactive has added mark-up to support for IE8 Web Slices to track the live cricket scores for the upcoming State Shield and Indian cricket tour of New Zealand starting this week.

Microsoft Expression Newsletter
Are you interested in creating rich desktop and Internet applications? Get into the act immediately, learn how to use the new stuff before everybody else does, sign up for the Microsoft Expression Newsletter.

Don’t forget the Internet Explorer 8 Competition
We’ve had lots of entries for the IE8 compatibility competition, everyone is very keen to win the “I’m a PC” skateboard obviously! Send a screenshot of your company’s homepage in IE8 to mailto:nzeditor@microsoft.com?subject=IE8%20Competition by 6 March (extended from 28 February)! More details here.

Live Services Jumpstart – Day 1 Morning Session

nparker — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 04:48:00 GMT

As mentioned previously I am over at the Live Services Jumpstart Training in Sydney this week along with a few other kiwis.

Day 0 for me was a chance to do a photo walk in Sydney.

It has been a while since I’ve been in Sydney and it was great to get reacquainted with an old friend.

Day 1 has kicked off with Dr Neil doing an all up technical overview of existing Live Services.

This is a bit of a refresher for me as I’m quite familiar with what services are available at http://dev.live.com but it is interesting to see these existing services beginning to migrate to the Azure Services Platform.

Tomorrow is all about the Live Framework (Mesh Services) and how we bring all these services together through a common SDK (the left box of the second tier of the picture below).

After Dr Neil’s session the morning was a dive into identity delivered by James McCutcheon my summary is below:

Identity - “LiveID is the submit button”

Web developers - Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK 1.2 describes a platform-independent interface for implementing Windows Live ID sign-in on Web sites of all kinds. This release includes a sample application for each of seven different programming languages: ASP.NET (C# and VB), Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
Client application developers can use Windows Live ID for authentication as well - Windows Live ID Client 1.0 SDK
Visual Studio ASP.NET developers - Windows Live Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio November 2008 CTP
Delivering Data Portability – Delegated Authentication SDK v1.0

Important if you are trying this stuff you need to get your Application ID and secret for Web Authentication. Without it you will get an “Windows Live ApplicationID and Secret not provided” error.

During the setup here I chose “mydemo.com” for the domain and the return URL. Problem with this is that I don’t own this domain so I updated the mapping in my host file to get this to work. You may need to think about this when you are setting up your project.

Your application ID and secret should now be saved. To confirm that they are saved, open the web.config file and find the configuration section near the top of the file. This should contain an appSettings section. This section should look something like the following…

<appSettings>
   <add key="wll_appid" value="APPLICATION_ID"/>
   <add key="wll_secret" value="SECRET"/>
</appSettings>

There is also a community preview of using LiveID as an OpenID provider.
Microsoft Federation Gateway Service as a single sign-on provider for LiveID – check out the Identity: Live Identity Services Drilldown session from PDC.

Artist in Residence Melbourne Dec 1-5

nparker — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:43:39 GMT

Michael Kordahi and Shane Morris are holding an Artist in Resident (AiR) in Melbourne from Dec 1-5.

Michael wrote:

For those unfamiliar: AiR is a program whereby a developer and designer pair get together and build something in Silverlight from scratch.

It goes for 5 days where you start with some training (day 1), conceive an idea (day 2) and build (days 3 - 5) under the guidance of a qualified trainer.

It is a great way to get going on that Silverlight project that you’ve always wanted to do.

If you work as part of a dev/designer pair, have a project that you’re commencing (or want to commence) then AiR might be for you.

If you meet the criteria and are interested in crossing the ditch contact Michael or Shane to request a spot!

For NZ based designers wanting to get started with Expression there is a growing pool of resources that you can tap.

Live Platform Jumpstart 2009 in Sydney 8th-9th of December 2008

nparker — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:58:11 GMT

At PDC 2008 this week, we announced a new way to program Live Services, the Live Framework (in CTP). Check out the overview of Microsoft’s Live Platform Services.

Today we are making available the first preview release of the Azure Services Training Kit. The Azure Services Training Kit will include hands-on labs, presentations, and samples to help you understand how to build applications that utilize the Azure Services Platform. This PDC preview release of the training kit includes 11 hands-on labs that cover the broad set of services including Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services. These are the same hands-on labs that have already been used by hundreds of customers at the PDC.

You can download the Azure Services Training Kit from the Microsoft Download Center here.

Over the next few weeks we will also be releasing several samples and scenario-based demos that can be used to both demonstrate the value proposition of these services and understand how to use the SDKs, Tools, and Services themselves.

Please note: The Windows Azure hands-on labs can be used locally with the Windows Azure developer fabric that is included with the Windows Azure SDK. However, the .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services labs require a registered service account. You can apply for a services account here.

PDC sessions on this topic so far:

A Lap Around Windows Azure

Windows Azure: Essential Cloud Storage Services

Live Services: Making your Application More Social

Live Services: A Lap around the Live Framework and Mesh Services

A Lap Around the Azure Services Platform

On the 8th/9th Dec in Sydney we are holding a 2 day Live Services Jumpstart provides in-depth technical training sessions (level 300-400) on Microsoft’s cutting edge consumer web platform technologies that help developers / partner organizations build rich web applications, sync and share them across devices and more importantly, build audience for the web applications.

The Jumpstart event contains several in-depth sessions, hands-on code labs and informal Q&A.

You can learn more about the event at http://lpjumpstart.com

The 2 day agenda is at http://bit.ly/agenda

Capacity is limited to maintain a setting that fosters dialogue among all participants. However, we’re eager to accommodate you if we can, so please register at http://bit.ly/Register and we will contact you shortly to let you know if your registration has been accepted.

If you are accepted into the training there will be no cost associated but T&E will be your responsibility.

Next Thursday in Sydney is also Liberation Day in Australia.

SteveB will be talking about our developer vision (especially around S+S) – this is not to be missed. Following Steve, we’re going to be joined by Gianpaolo Carraro and Tim Sneath.

Gianpaolo will go into more depth around the services component. He is an expert on the topic and will be hot off PDC announcements.

Tim is the windows client (WPF, Vista, Silverlight etc) evangelism lead at Microsoft. He’ll be going into more depth around the software component.

The event will be streamed live on Thursday 6th Nov 5:30pm NZ Time over at http://www.microsoft.com/australia/powertodevelopers/

Training on all the Latest Stuff!

nparker — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:39:00 GMT

Great news the .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training kit has been released containing six hands-on labs, made up of the following technologies:

ADO.NET Data Services
ADO.NET Entity Framework
ASP.NET AJAX History
ASP.NET Dynamic Data
ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET Silverlight controls

Also available is the Kigg Starter Kit (A Digg like application developed with ASP.NET MVC Framework, LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET AJAX)

Scott Hanselman's MIX session on MVC is also well worth a look if you are that way inclined. BTW if you want to see Scott at Tech.Ed join the Bring Scott Hanselman to Tech-Ed Australia group and make some noise.

I enjoyed the DNUG talk at Ellerslie last night on MIX08 a developers perspective especially building the DeepZoom SL2 project. Check out this video and http://photozoom.mslivelabs.com/ to learn more about deepzoom.

I was asked if you could bypass the DeepZoom Composer and create your composition using code. The Answer Yes, Included as part of the Deep Zoom are command line encoding tools that allow you to generate the output files needed without having to use the Deep Zoom Composer. Also if you would like to create collections that can randomise each image's location programatically "rather than one big image" you can do that to. Also Jamie has a primer on the deepzoom technology if you would like to go deep.

As I mentioned ScotGu has a great list of Silverlight 2 resources on his blog.

In fact after lifting the lid off SL2 yesterday I was inspired to "re-work" my video reflection demo from SL1 to SL2. The video is below, code is here (minus the video)

Download a better looking WMV version (14.5MB)

Also Silverlight Streaming now supports the free hosting of Silverlight 2 applications. Check this post on the Naked XAP upload enabled in Silverlight Streaming.

P.S. Those of you who aren't subscribed to the MSDN Flash the code from my recent VS2008/ ASP.NET presentation is on skydrive and you might also find this link useful.

If you want to see me present on the new stuff in person come along to one of my MSDN Unplugged events coming up in May.

Free Training DVD's in New Zealand

nparker — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 07:21:00 GMT

How would you like hours and hours (in fact weeks) of training and sessions on WPF, Silverlight and everything Web Related?

Arturo Toledo has even given us permission to share with you the Expression Blend, Web and Silverlight Hands On Labs from MIX!

One of my favourite labs is building the Expression Blend: Color Swatch that appears in the Blend Samples.

If you live in New Zealand take a trip to http://www.microsoft.co.nz/nextgeneration and grab a copy of the DVDs (including > 20GB of love) while stocks last!

We'll even throw in a bonus DVD of Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 (Beta 1).

Enjoy!