Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : web 2.0

Web 2.0 talk at TechTalk

pooyad — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:18:00 GMT

We held the first "TechTalk" today at Al Murooj Rotana for Partners who work with Microsoft with sessions on:

· Introducing Windows Azure - Anton Delsink

· Windows 7 - Wilson Xavier

· Web 2.0 - Pooya Darugar

· Network Access Protection - Zahid Tikrity

Unfortunately I had to do my session in 45 minutes as we were running late, but as promised the slides are here for your review. I tried to look at Web 2.0 from a holisitc view, starting with Web 2.0 in the enterprise and then discussing the more well known web facing side for both user experience (AJAX, Silverlight) and the infrastructure (RSS, Live Services, ...)

This will be an ongoing series where you'll have a chance to connect with me and my colleagues from the Developer and Platform group as well as the Consultants who give their real life implementation experience. If you'd like to attend, let me know as these are by invitation events.

Web 2.0 Tech Talk

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: web 2.0)

Silverlight for Flash designers and developers

pooyad — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:13:00 GMT

I've been spending more time with the web design agencies in Dubai and it's a whole different world than the SOA work I do with the large enterprises, for one thing their offices tend to be much cooler. We speak a lot about Sivlerlight and the power of .NET in the browser and one of the most frequent requests is how does a flash designer or developer get started with Sivlerlight.

Project Rosetta is a great way to get started. There are 9 lessons there right now that walk you through the basics of Silverlight all from the point of view of someone with a flash background.

TBot (Messenger Bot) for translations

pooyad — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:26:00 GMT

Live translator has been around for a while and its quite cool, being able to translate whole pages and see both the original and the translated version side by side. Unfortunately it is blocked in the UAE by Etisalat (the major ISP) as all translation services can be used as sort of a proxy to access unauthorized web pages. Leaving the decision to do this alone for now, it meant that a lot of users in the country could not use this great translation service. Now we have a solution, introducing TBot.

Simply add "mtbot@hotmail.com" (without the quotes) as a friend on Live / MSN messenger and start communicating with it.

Type "TBot?" and it will give you the menu choices to set your from and to languages. All of the languages from the Live translator site are available, including Arabic. You can change languages at any time by going to the "TBot?" menu and selecting the right option.

Try it out and see what you think, especially the arabic.

Cloud computing explained

pooyad — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:11:00 GMT

I've been asked a lot more recently about "Cloud Computing" and especially how Microsoft is playing in this area, I'll link to the articles when they come out. In the meantime David Chappell has written a nice summary of the current state of cloud computing platforms and describes some of Microsoft's work in this area. The paper is very focused on the enterprise aspects of cloud computing but remember that Microsoft has a huge array of assets in this area including ones that consumers can use today with the Live offerings and the Mesh platform.

Biztalk Services is already available for use and does a great job of managaing identity in the cloud for developers. SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) gives developers on demand storage with the ability to query the stored data, available in beta. There's lots for developers to play with already but look for a lot more exciting developer oriented could computing announcements at PDC this year.

How to split a powerpoint slide into 2 - Community Clips

pooyad — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:34:00 GMT

I just uploaded my 1st video on Community Clips :) It came from a discussion we had this morning in a meeting as we were previewing some powerpoint slides. The slide had gotten quite long with a lot of text and we wanted to split it into 2 slides. One person suggested to simply copy the whole slide and delete the top section in the duplicate copy, making 2 slides. The other person was certain that there was a command for it as he had done it in the past. I used the Office Search Commands utility to search for the "split" command but didn't find what we were looking for. A quick internet search showed the article that describes how to do the split, but since we were searching multiple pages and only scanned the results, it didn't seem like the right answer. Either way, we used the old copy and delete method and got what we needed.

Once the meeting finished, I had a chance to re-read the instrcutions and actually try them and it works. So I decided to create a quick Community Clips video to maket it visual and a little more interesting than the simple text description. So here is my 1st Community Clips video, hope to see some of you creating some for your favorite Office task (or really any other video tips):

Easiest Screen Capture tool I've ever used

pooyad — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:58:00 GMT

I've been looking for a good, free and easy to use screen capture tool and today I finally found one I like, Community Clips, and it turns out it's from the Microsoft Office team. It uses Media Encoder underneath and does a good job of compression with little quality loss. Saves the files as WMV and can even post online for you on Soapbox, For my use, I'll be doing quick demo videos for screencasts. Most likely will end up hosting it in Silverlight streaming for the blog entries :)

Deep zoom composer

pooyad — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:53:00 GMT

If you liked the Hard Rock demo from MIX, here's how you can easily build something similar yourself with the Deep Zoom Composer. It's based on the same technology that powers PhotoSynth (SeaDragon) and makes creating these deep zoom applications very simple. Check out the deep zoom version of the Silverlight 2.0 reference poster with 3 lines of XAML and the composer powertool.

Day 1 at MIX

pooyad — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:25:00 GMT

After a long long journey from Dubai, I finally arrived in Las Vegas for the first day of MIX08. A very exciting day for me to see Microsoft make some big announcements around the future of our technologies on the web. Check out the official MIX blog recap of the keynote announcements, for me the Beta of Silverlight 2.0 is the biggest thing. I've been playing around with it for a little while and it's amazing, take a look at ScottGu's 8 part post on Silverlight 2.0, it'll make the power very clear, Silvelight 2.0 = .NET in the browser.

There were some very impressive demos shown in the keynote, the AOL mail client shows how far web applications have come. For another fun one, check out the Hard Rock Memorabilia demo, if you like your iPhone zooming (by the way is it just me or does every attendee at MIX have an iPhone or what?) you'll like this demo.

For anyone who couldn't make it to MIX, you can catch the recording of the sessions here: http://sessions.visitmix.com/

Popfly: Building simple and quick apps - Sharjah Airport Arrivals

pooyad — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:12:00 GMT

As those who've attended my sessions will know, I really like Popfly, I think it's the future of how people will build applications, and it's also incredibly cool to demo. It qualified as one of PC World's top 25 most innovative products of the year.

I had some extra time this weekend and built a quick application using Dapper and Popfly. This basically takes the Sharjah Airport Flight Information available as an HTML table and converts it to XML and RSS (using dapper) and then gives it a user interface and process using Popfly.

It was very simple to build and didn't require any code, you can check out the Popfly project yourself. I made 2, one is a silverlight based gadget that filters the list for all "Arrived" flights and shows them in a gadget. The 2nd takes the flight number as user input and returns the status of the flight(s).

Anyone can sign up for Popfly with a LiveID, my projects are shared so you can take them and improve them.

P.S. Anyone using Facebook should also check out the Facebook block in Popfly to create very simple facebook applications, I've already built a few to get my pictures out of facebook and embed them on my personal blog and am working on a slightly more complicated one to bring the richness of Silverlight animations to the slideshows.

lIVE writer for x64

pooyad — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:50:00 GMT

Forgot to mention in the last post but the new Thinkpad is 64 bit. One drawback of this is that Windows Live Writer (Beta) does not support x64 yet. Fortunately there is a workaround, it is currently unsupported but if you can see this blog post then it means that it works :)

Unsupported Windows Live Writer for x64 (on Skydrive)

Microsoft Tagspace: Web 2.0 for Microsoft technical content

pooyad — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:47:00 GMT

Here's a very useful new way of classifying technical information on Microsoft technologies. One of the hardest things I've found is to locate the right technical information form reliable sources. There's always MSDN, but there's so much more out there and searching in the tradiational way doesn't give you all the web 2.0 benefits of social bookmarking and tagging. Introducing Microsoft.com Tagspace

"a new set of tagging services we are developing to support social bookmarking on Microsoft.com and associated sites. These services will give you, the consumer of content on these sites, the power to identify, define, catalogue, and share what interests you, in ways that make sense to you. You benefit because you can keep track of the resources you find interesting; others benefit because they can see how you and other users classify content of interest"

You get a nice classified set of Blogs, Technical Chats, Webcasts, Newsgorups, Forums and communities. Join in today by installing the bookmarklet and tagging stuff.

Microsoft Virtual Earth

pooyad — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 13:04:00 GMT

In my previous post I mentioned 2 great uses of mashups for business. The wow factor in both of those applications is based on Microsoft's Virtual Earth. This mapping technology is great and easy to use. Anyone can incorporate the maps into their site or create their own mashups. If you're using Atlas you can make some really amazing applications, but even in its simplest form Virtual Earth is great. It's very easy to start (I'll be developing a virtual earth based application as an example) and all you need is here: Getting Started with Microsoft Virtual Earth

Lastly, if anyone is using the older Mappoint technology, you can get our help in migrating to Virtual Earth.

Mashups for business

pooyad — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 13:06:00 GMT

John L. Scott, and Coldwell Banker Bain real estate companies in the Northwest United States have some of the most impressive applications to take advantage of the mashup concept. They make great poster children for Web 2.0 being used in the business world. We've all (well, those of us looking for apartments in a major US city) seen the craigslist apartment finder and maps mashup but here are a businesses that are taking the concept further by not just hooking 2 other company's information together in a mashup but actually adding their own content (property photos, details) from their DB and enhancing the mashup even further.