MSDN Utopia : Mobile

Envision: Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and the competition

Salva Patuel — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:22:00 GMT

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is nearly here (out at the end of this week), I want to highlight key announcements in TechEd and give you an overview on the competitiveness area.

User Interface Changes: Beta 2 includes improvements in animation support, error handling and reporting, automation and accessibility support, keyboard input support, and general performance. This release also provides more compatibility between Silverlight and WPF.

Silverlight 2 Controls: Beta 2 includes a new templating model called Visual State Manager that allows for easier templating for controls. Other features include the introduction of TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort, performance increases and more. Most controls are now in the runtime instead of packaged with the application.

Networking: Beta 2 includes improved Cross Domain support and security enhancements upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications (“push” from server to Silverlight client).

BCL: Beta 2 includes improved threading abilities, LINQ-to-JSON, ADO.NET Data Services support, better support for SOAP, and various other improvements to make networking and data handling easier.

Deep Zoom: Beta 2 introduces a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles, as well as a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom. Better, event driven notification for zoom/pan state is another improvement in Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

Moonlight: Another interesting areas that I want to highlight is the imminent release of Moonlight for Linux support, check this blog: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/May-13-1.html

Silverlight Mobile: This is quite hermetic but Windows Mobile and Nokia based (S60, S40, N8xx Internet Tablet) devices as a first priority, they will support in the a version of the Silverlight 2 plug-in.

How is Silverlight different than Flash? Flex? Adobe AIR?
Some of the scenarios for Flash and Silverlight usage are similar, such as rich media/video within websites, or interactive rich content for e-commerce, e-learning, or advertising. However, Silverlight uses a dramatically different approach for creating and delivering experiences in a way that aligns more with our customers’ development and deployment needs.

Microsoft’s client/web platform offerings span Windows to the Web, and include emerging surfaces such as the media/living room (Xbox360, Media Center PC), as well as mobile devices. Each of these platforms has shared capabilities and development tooling, but greatly different performance and integration characteristics. By comparison, Flash, Flex, and AIR are all variants of the Flash animation plug-in that Adobe acquired from Macromedia. They share a presentation and programming framework that was first developed for “skip-intro” and other pre-broadband experiences in the browser, and have incrementally evolved to add better programming, but lack the integration, performance, and tooling necessary to build many of the apps and content experiences that will be increasingly of interest to many businesses.

Silverlight, WPF, and ASP.NET AJAX share development and design tooling support with Microsoft Expression and Visual Studio product lines. With these tools, designers and developers can collaborate more effectively than ever before to design and implement superior UX. Adobe’s tooling and application frameworks are very focused on animation and cosmetic design, traditionally for the creative professional and not the application development audience.

Flex: For enterprise line of business (LOB) applications, Microsoft offers a breadth of solutions for building business applications that directly integrate with Microsoft Office, as integral parts of the Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and SharePoint Server experience. Flex is a new technology built on the Flash animation plug-in which allows developers to build richer Web-based UI and connections to server data. However, Flex lacks deeper integration into the environment where most of these LOB applications are used.

Adobe AIR: Web standards based development using AJAX is a proven technology for developing compelling and easy to deploy applications to the desktop with zero-touch requirements for additional client side infrastructure. Microsoft has shown continued innovation and commitment to this space with our Internet Explorer browser, our Live services, and our ASP.NET AJAX scripting capabilities for server code that delivers compliant Web standards to Mac and Windows clients.

Windows Mobile Briefing Sessions (6.0 / 6.1)

Salva Patuel — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:59:00 GMT

If you have missed one of my sessions during the EMEA Windows Mobile Briefing you can find the recordings of our last Finland event. During this event I was covering also the first session and we had a large attendance, upon the demo using the orientation aware control didn't work :) (I had cut and paste the application blocks instead of copy and paste!) but we had a lot of fun. For the material and demos please check my other post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/salvapatuel/archive/2008/02/24/emea-windows-mobile-tour.aspx

Session 1 - Ready, Set, Go! | Silverlight presentation
This first session sets the scene for the day and kicks off with a quick look at the mobile developer landscape. Among other things, we will see what resources are available to the device programmer and how the pieces fit within the bigger Windows desktop and server platforms. A key piece is an overview of the recently released Windows Mobile 6 operating system. The session wraps up with a look at and demos of the brand new Visual Studio 2008 development environment which promises even better integration and powerful new features for device developers.

Session 2 - Windows Mobile in Practice | Silverlight presentation
Features are great but we live in the real world. This session takes a realistic scenario and shows how Windows Mobile 6 and the upcoming .NET Compact Framework 3.5 can be leveraged to provide a compelling Proof-of-Concept in very few lines of code. See a wide variety of features being demonstrated, from location awareness to making phone calls programmatically. The session will provide an understanding of how everything can be tied together in an end-to-end solution.

Session 3 - It's the Business | Silverlight presentation
Enterprise solutions are increasingly being mobilized for the new technically-savvy workforce. However, these solutions need industry-strength quality and features that will support the complex requirements these organizations have. This session will begin by looking at SQL Server Compact Edition, the sophisticated data storage solution that allows data synchronization with back-end databases. We then show how you can leverage industry design patterns and application blocks to provide a lower-risk, tested approach to solve common problems. Finally, a quick review of the Microsoft Dynamics mobile offerings will round off the options available for enterprise use.

EMEA Windows Mobile Tour

Salva Patuel — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:24:00 GMT

Thanks everybody for attending to my sessions at the EMEA Windows Mobile Tour, I hope you have enjoyed the sessions.

As promised, find here the decks and the demos that I have presented:

· Applications block 1

· Applications block 2

· Applications block 3

You can find a word documents on Demos to help you set up the demos, feel free to contact me if you have trouble with them.

For Microsoft Patterns & practices please click here . For codeplex mobile projects please go here

If you are looking for mobile images for the emulator using 6.1 check here

Please feel free to leave feedback about the sessions and suggestions about what we can include on future ones.