What's Rockin' in Singapore

Microsoft's New Year's Greetings!

Counting down with Silverlight - http://www.office2007quiz.com.sg/greetings/.  Check back again in a couple of days .  

(Can't wait for the new year to arrive earlier?  Here's the preview.)

More updates in 2 day's time.

Came across this very nice article by Justin-Josef Angel on the Code Project web site -- Silverlight Controls - The Path to Reusable XAML.

I've been working on a few Silverlight 1.0 projects recently, and a consistent struggle on these has been to maintain data-presentation separation, as well as to adhere to object-oriented principles when dealing with JavaScript and XAML.

This article provides the clearest, most prescriptive guidance I've seen to-date on the use of the JavaScript Prototype pattern to support as "code-behind" for XAML-defined user-interface elements. 

Justin-Angel does a code walk-through that refactors Richard Z's JellyBar sample (which emits XAML dynamically in code with JavaScript) into a "One JavaScript class - One XAML file" model. The result, as the author says, is "it's extensible, it's maintainable, it's object oriented."

Also check out the cool trick with with Visual Studio 2008 JavaScript comments syntax in building the "class constructor" function!

To all who celebrate, Merry Christmas!

Recently, ComputerWorld did an interview with my boss, Daniel Ingitaraj, Director for Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Singapore and Lee Lup Yuen, Principal Consultant of NCS. Both of them spoke about the upcoming trends and patterns of Software plus Services. You can read more here.

MediaCorp TV will be activating their Silverlight-powered Star Awards 2007 "LIVE" Update site later today (Sunday, 16 Dec) at 7pm.

The Star Awards is, of course, MediaCorp TV's annual gala event celebrating and recognizing Singapore's own TV celebrities. 

This year, for the first time in the show's history, the live TV broadcast will be complemented by an online experience. The Star Awards "LIVE" Update site will provide supplementary event experience with simultaneous updates of on-scene and backstage media content (blogs, photos and videos.)    

Microsoft Silverlight is used to deliver an interactive photo and video viewing experience over the web, integrating with MediaCorp's content management back-end.

The MediaCorp IT team did a great job -- learning about Silverlight and delivering a great looking site in about two months.  Thanks also to my erstwhile colleague John Eldridge who worked closely with the MediaCorp team .

Some behind the scene facts:

1. The site runs on Microsoft Windows Server and IIS
2. Microsoft Silverlight provides rich media interaction experience with photos and video content pulled from their content management system
3. Blogging capability provided by the Telligent Community Server (the same partner blogging product / engine used in Microsoft for MSDN blogs)
4. Video is streamed with Windows Media Services (WMS) on Windows Server 2003

For all our partners building mobile solutions, we've just launched a site to help enable our partners. Check out the new site at INNOVATE ON Windows Mobile

Microsoft patterns & practices are Microsoft's recommendations for how to design, develop, deploy, and operate architecturally sound applications for the Microsoft application platform. It has evolved over the years with a fantastic accumulation of very valuable best practices and guidance for our customers and partners. Visit the sites for the latest updates. Many people have asked me for books and white papers. Nowadays, the best way to get the latest information would be via web site. When books are published, the content could be outdated. You can download the latest patterns & practices April 2007 DVD at zero cost. Of course, you can explore a lot of other invaluable information at this site. Check out the patterns & practices: Complete Catalog if you are lost. Happy browsing!

To encourage the adoption of Silverlight, sites which have implemented Silverlight in an innovative and fun way are encouraged to submit their work as showcases on the Silverlight showcase http://silverlight.net/showcase/Default.aspx. To date, we have 3 Silverlight showcases from Singapore! 2 from MediaCorp (Star Awards Video Gallery and Campus Yummy Hunt) and 1 from LTA (VR-10). Visit the sites to give your fullest support and keep the Singapore flag flying!

A lot of people have been asking me about the differences of WCF and WF in .Net framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 as compared to .Net framework 3.0 and WCF/WF extensions in Visual Studio 2005.

There are quite a lot of differences in terms of the tooling perspective.

Tools introduced in VS2008

· Project templates (for web hosted, self hosted, workflow services, and syndication services)

· "Autohost" F5 experience which allows you to have a service up and running in a cassini like host (think the way ASP.NET applications work), without having to write a console app or anything

· Test client (which goes along with F5), which will auto-magically reflect on the service and generate a UI to call the service and to see the response.  Again, this eliminates the need to write a second console app just to call the service

· Integration of WCF config editor

Features of WCF introduced in .NET 3.5

· HTTP programming model (Channel 9 video here)

· WF+WCF integration (Channel 9 video here)

· Syndication support

· AJAX support (JSON-based message encoding)

Back in Nov 2007, the annual affair for Microsoft Strategic Architect Forum (SAF) 2007 was held at Microsoft Conference Center (Redmond, USA) for 3 days. All the SAF sessions are available to download (all: audio/video, slide decks and transcripts) at http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/saf.

In Singapore, we run a scale down forum of 1 day back in May this year. Next year (2008), we would be running a similar Architect Forum in Singapore. Stay tune for more details!

We're hosting another Walk the Success Lane for Students tomorrow on December 8 at the Microsoft auditorium.  I'm pretty excited about this one as we're covering a wide-range of exciting topics including Facebook developing in .NET and game development using XNA.  As usual, we also have non-tech topics - Chewy will be speaking on life learnings from the corporate (and non-corporate) world and I'll be talking about exciting opportunities in the Imagine Cup.  And back because of popular demand, Yizhe will be talking about cool stuff/technologies from the Microsoft Singapore Innovation Center - definitely a session not to miss.

See you tomorrow at 12:30PM!  (And if you're reading this just now, don't worry, just come on by if you're interested.  We already have some 250 registrations, but not everyone of those will show up and I'm sure we can find more chairs.)  ;-)

Neat resources:

http://www.sheltonblog.com/archive/2007/12/06/presentation-and-demonstration-from-the-microsoft-robotics-developer-dinner.aspx

For those of you who can't wait to get started on getting up to speed on Visual Studio 2008, here's a VPC that contains the VS 2008 Training Kit that you can use to skill up.

Download details: Visual Studio 2008 Rhythm Training Virtual PC (Vista)