Somasegar's WebLog

Watching Microsoft Popfly evolve has been incredibly exciting for me.  With its Silverlight-based drag-and-drop capabilities, Popfly has been a fun and easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications.  Popfly has won the hearts and minds of many, many people as evidenced by a lot of favorable press coverage and awards. 

Today, I am excited to announce the alpha of the Popfly Game Creator. 

The Silverlight-based Game Creator is a very rich and yet very simple way to create all sorts of casual games without having to write a single line of code.  Whether it is a space shooting game, a racing game or a maze, the extremely friendly and interactive UI guides you, the user, to express your creativity. 

You can start with a known collection of game templates that are already built in and customize and share them, or start with a fresh idea and a clean canvas and build your own game.  You can add actors, scenes, background scores, behaviors, movement, etc, from a large library and bring your games to life in a matter of minutes.  And, over time, we will be allowing you to add to the library, similar to the concept of blocks with the mashup creator.  And like the block editor and mashup creator, for those that feel that they need more functionality, they can easily step into source code, editing and previewing as they make changes.  Casual games created using the Game Creator will have all the same attributes that Mashups and webpages built with Popfly have – they can be rated, shared and embedded as Windows Vista sidebar gadgets and on Facebook.

The intent and the concept behind the mashup creator and the game creator are the same.  Software creation, so far, has been restricted to those that can code.  We are trying to “democratize development” such that anyone with a neat idea and a little bit of time can express themselves.  The mashup creator was one step in that direction, and we will continue to innovate and expand the features to enrich the mashup experience.  We are now adding another dimension that people enjoy doing – game creation.

Give it a try.  It is on the usual Microsoft Popfly site.  Click on “Create Stuff” and pick “Game”.  You will see a lot of samples and Help to get you started like this video which is a “how to” for building a space shooter game. 

Namaste!

Last year the Microsoft Expression team shipped a new suite of tools for creative professionals. This first release of Expression Studio marked a significant milestone in the history of development tools at Microsoft, delivering superior designer-developer workflow and providing designers a set of interaction design, graphic design, Web design, digital asset management and video production tools to deliver better user experiences on Windows and the Web.

I am pleased to announce, just one year later, the team has done it again with today’s release of Microsoft Expression Studio 2.

I wrote about the beta release of Expression Studio 2 announced earlier this year at MIX08.  Since then, the team has put the final touches on  Expression Web, Expression Blend,  Expression Design, Expression Media, and Expression Encoder delivering over 100 new features ranging from support for Silverlight, .NET Framework, Office 2007, and Office for Mac 2008 to PHP and Adobe Photoshop import capabilities. You can learn more about the latest Expression Studio features here.

With Expression Studio, designers can do some pretty amazing things with unprecedented levels of productivity.  Also, the seamless integration between Expression Studio and Visual Studio 2008 (and Visual Studio 2005) allows unparalleled collaboration between designers and developers.  Microsoft partner and customer examples can be found in the Silverlight Showcase and the Expression Gallery.

I am also very passionate about investing in future generations of designers and developers and enabling them to have friction-free access to technology.  One program I am really excited about is Microsoft DreamSpark which provides millions of students around the world free access to Microsoft products like Expression to help them on their path to becoming tomorrow’s technology leaders.

Additionally, we are introducing the Expression Professional Subscription, a premium product for professional designers that complements the MSDN Subscription for developers.

You can download fully-functional, 30-day trials for each Expression product on the main Expression site.  I encourage you to send us your feedback and suggestions by joining the Expression Community which is actively monitored by members of the Expression team.

Namaste!

More and more developers around the world want to create world-ready applications and this requires various types of support from the .NET Framework and Base Class Libraries such as the ability to support culture and language-specific conversions or interact with the Input Method Editor (IME). 

We often receive feedback from customers requesting additional globalization support in our products.  The Visual Studio International Pack 1.0 which released recently, is designed to fulfill some of these customer requests.  We hope that the features provided here will enable developers to more easily create international applications to meet the needs of their globally diverse customers.

The following seven features are provided in the 1.0 release of the International Pack.

·         East Asia Numeric Formatting Library – The EA Numeric Formatting Library formats numeric data into Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean capital style numeric strings with support for four different formats.

·         Japanese Kana Conversion Library – This library helps to convert the Japanese Kana character set to Hiragana, Katakana, Half-width Katakana and Roma-Ji representations in Japanese.

·         Japanese Text Alignment Library – The Japanese Text Alignment library supports the “Justify Distributed” alignment to render the strings in the  Japanese-specific alignment style.

·         Japanese Yomi Auto Complete Library – To provide the AutoComplete feature in a text input field, an application must predict the word the user wants to enter based on those characters already typed.  Although this seems quite natural in English, it’s quite different in Japanese or other East Asia languages when using the Input Method Editor. The AutoComplete feature predicts the word based on the strokes the user enters in the IME. The Japanese Yomi Auto-Completion library provides the API and a Textbox that supports Japanese IME-aware auto-complete input.

·         Korean Auto Complete TextBox Control – The Korean Auto Complete Textbox Control supports IME-aware auto completion and IntelliSense features for Korean.

·         Simplified Chinese to Pin-Yin Conversion Library – This class library enables developers to retrieve the polyphone, homophone, Pinyin and stroke count properties of Simplified Chinese characters.

·         Traditional Chinese to Simplified Chinese Conversion Library and Add-In Tool – This conversion library converts text in Traditional Chinese characters into Simplified Chinese and vice versa.  Unlike the Char-To-Char conversion provided by the Win32 API, this library converts the Chinese text on a word-to-word basis.  In addition to class library support, this component also provides an add-in tool for Visual Studio that converts resource strings between Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

The Visual Studio International Pack is available in 5 languages (Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and English).  It is available for download from the Microsoft Download Center.  We are currently planning version 2.0 of the International Pack.  We welcome your feedback on the International Pack 1.0 and suggestions for 2.0 at vsintlpk@microsoft.com.

Namaste!

We aspire to reach customers from around the world with our products.  People speak and work in different languages depending on where you are in the world.  To make it easy for people to be able to use our products in a language of their choice, we localize our products and the documentation that goes with that into a number of languages.  I have always said that we run into a scale issue no matter how much energy and resources we put into this.  To me, one way to truly reach scale here is to enable the community to localize into their favorite language which will certainly augment what we do and provide broader reach for our products to customers around the world. 

Community localization uses a combination of machine-translation and post-editing by community members to extend the reach of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework to new languages and locales.  Full community localization for Visual Studio includes two pillars - a Visual Studio Language Pack for software and an MSDN Translation Wiki for documentation.

I am pleased to announce that as of today, Brazil is the first of what I hope will become new geographies in which we can provide such a community localization offering. 

In March, we released the first Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions Language Pack in Brazilian.  The Language Pack, which is a free add-on that installs on top of the English version of the product, provides partial localization into Brazilian Portuguese of about 70% of the user interface.  

Today, we are announcing the release of MSDN Translation Wiki v2 for Brazilian Portuguese which provides an infrastructure for users to edit machine-translated content and add comments, code snippets or content to the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 documentation.  This is hosted on MSDN2 and therefore it is fully accessible through F1 within the Visual Studio 2008 Integrated Developer Environment.  This also provides a light-weight, inline sentence-level editing experience that propagates user edits automatically throughout the site. 

With MSDN Translation Wiki v2 and the Visual Studio Language Pack we are empowering developers in Brazil by offering a fully integrated solution for those who want to be able to use Visual Studio and read the related documentation in their native language.

It is great to see us partnering with our Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and some of the most prestigious academic institutions in Brazil in these community localization projects: MVPs have helped us define the core Visual Studio terminology through a community glossary forum; computer science students from Pontifícia Universidade Católica and Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica helped improve the quality of a portion of the content by tech reviewing and post-editing the most popular topics after they were machine translated; students from the Engineering school of the Universidade de São Paulo translated and tested part of the Visual Studio Language Pack.  MVPs and Microsoft Student Partners and other community members will help us as moderators on the Translation Wiki site, reviewing and approving translation edits and suggestions.

I am very excited to see such great progress made in Brazil. My international team is now looking at expanding these and new language solutions to several other markets for the next version of Visual Studio. If you interested in participating to these community localization projects and assisting with translating into your native language, please contact Cristina Nardini of the Community Localization Team.

Namaste!

A few weeks ago we announced the DreamSpark program which allows students free access to many Microsoft developer technologies.  I wanted to share with you something related to this program that I was impressed with this week. 

A young developer, Nathan, contacted me to share a project that he was able to create with the software he downloaded. 

Nathan recently downloaded XNA Game Studio Express and created his first game!  He found some code snippets on CodePlex and pulled together a fun little game incorporating his love of games with a little bit of humor over his student debt that he hopes to pay off with a career in software development.

I wish Nathan good luck with XNA studio and our other development tools as well as all the other students out there who have taken advantage of this program.

Namaste!

In early January, we delivered a Beta of the Visual C++ 2008 Feature pack.  I am pleased to announce that the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack has shipped!

The Feature Pack provides several exciting features for C++ developers, such as a major update to MFC and an implementation of TR1.  Using the included MFC components, developers can create applications with the “look & feel” of Microsoft’s most popular products – Microsoft Office, Visual Studio and Internet Explorer.  New components include the Office 2007 Ribbon Bar, Visual Studio docking and auto hide windows, Vista theme support, “on the fly” menu and toolbar customization, Shell management classes and much more.  Our implementation of TR1 contains a number of important features such as smart pointers, regular expression parsing, containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc) and sophisticated random number generators.

This product is a freely available download to any Visual Studio 2008 Standard or above customer and is fully covered under Microsoft’s standard support policies.  

You may also want to take a look at the online documentation and walkthroughs for both MFC and TR1.  The MFC documentation provides some great content to get you up and running quickly with the new components. 

Namaste!

About a year ago I blogged about Software Factories and the great response from people who were using them. 

Software Factories have continued to be a useful resource for the community and we are invested on updating them based on your feedback.  A few weeks ago we released a refresh of one of these kits to target Visual Studio 2008. 

The Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of resources designed to help you quickly and consistently build Web services that adhere to well-known architecture and design patterns. This collection of resources includes patterns and architecture topics in the form of written guidance and models with code generation in the form of tools integrated with Visual Studio 2008.

This update addresses specific feedback from the original release:

-      The tooling should remember the information provided so it does not have to be provided each time the source code is generated.

-      The next version should focus less on the data access and business logic tiers and more on the service interface.

-      Help those who want to modify the Service Factory source code; doing this is not a straightforward process.

-      Wizards are okay some of the time, but a visualization of the services is a better experience.

-      Services should be designed in a technology-independent manner.

To learn more about the Service Factory, please visit its official home on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/servicefactory.  I encourage you to also visit the community site at http://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory.  The community site contains hands-on labs for both using and extending the Service Factory, discussions with customers and field, known issues, and roadmap information.

Namaste!

We recently revamped the website for the Visual Studio Express Editions and made it Silverlight enabled. 

The approach was to add Silverlight without making it look like we just dropped something new into our existing site without any thought.  I loved how the site turned out and decided that it would make an interesting case study for people out there who are thinking about taking their own website and giving it a new life with Silverlight.

According to the team, taking a static html site and making it into a Silverlight site was a fun process.  We had two people work on it, a developer responsible for writing the XAML and JavaScript and a graphic designer.  In keeping with the vision of the VS Express site of being simple, engaging and light (not many deep pages), we wanted to make sure the site clearly conveyed what Visual Studio Express was, how the tools can help someone and how someone could benefit from learning and using them, while at the same time keeping it cool and cutting edge. We also did not want to completely replace the existing Web site, so we reused the existing graphics that we already had. 

Each Express product has a lot to offer that we want to showcase, but our goal was to keep things “thin”. The previous Visual Studio Express site had Product Tours we wanted to continue to offer; however, using static HTML would be a significant amount of HMTL coding, significant increase in the number of pages, and the menu navigation would get too complex.  Silverlight offered the best solution in that it allowed us to create hot spots on a screenshot of the product and associate the hotspots with an image.  Using Silverlight, we were able to contain substantial interactive content and numerous graphical links on one landing page, instead of splitting the core navigation into several HTML pages. The end user experience is much more fluid.

We were able to reconstruct the graphical page layout in Microsoft Expression Blend, adding panels and buttons for any new and dynamic features.  Blend also let us add transitional animations, such as panels opening and closing, and button rollover effects.  We developed a Javascript class to wire up interactivity and supply the interface with some content from an external XML data source. The final application was embedded in a layered webpage alongside other HTML elements.  Blend allowed us to easily create and alter user interface animations during development.  This helped for aesthetic consistency and the creation of small visual cues for user interaction

One of the main goals was to enable the visitor to view the site whether or not they have Silverlight installed.  This is enabled by a simple JavaScript test on the client side.  If Silverlight is not installed, the area would contain the Silverlight content is sized to position the "Install Silverlight" link in the center of the page, and a timer is set to periodically look to see if Silverlight is installed which enables the page to update itself if the visitor chooses to install Silverlight. This removes the need for the visitor to refresh the window.  If Silverlight is installed, the default content is hidden.  We included a inplaceInstallPrompt attribute on the call to create Silverlight to ensure that the visitor is not sent to a new page to install Silverlight. This creates a better experience for the visitors, as the complete Silverlight install can then happen within the context of the site. The timer then ensures that once Silverlight is installed, the new content is displayed.

The tools and frameworks that were used for this project were the Silverlight 1.0 runtime and the SIlverlight SDK along with Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite, Expression Blend, and Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008.

Over time, we are taking more and more of our existing web properties and enabling Silverlight content to deliver richer and more immersive experiences.

Namaste!

Last week I was in India as part of the world wide launch of Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server. 

It was a lot of fun – being in India, being able to talk to developers and IT Pros, celebrating the great work that the “Heroes” (developers and IT Pros) do in terms of amazing things with our products and launching a set of great products.

Some of you are aware that I really enjoy watching movies whenever I get the chance.  So I loved the approach the team had taken with hosting the events in movie theaters across the country – inviting developers and IT pros to spend the day learning about our launch and then finishing up with a movie. They even rolled out the red carpet for us.

It has been great to see the enthusiasm of our customers for this new wave of products.  The events have been a celebration of the great efforts of developers and IT pros in India taking their own time to support their organizations and help people.  The team hosted a contest and I had the pleasure of presenting awards to the "Top Heroes".  Three of these heroes will be joining us at TechEd this June. I wanted to share one of their stories with you.

To set the stage, in India some might argue that the sport of cricket is nothing less than a religion.  Rajesh Shirpuram had to deliver a mechanism for 'On Demand Live Scorecard', which would be integrated with live online broadcast of matches.  But it being cricket, the demand wasn't just to provide a scorecard but a detailed, near real-time scorecard that did not obstruct the view of the live action.

Shirpuram had his task cut out for him. First he had to find out a way to deliver the latest scorecard without reloading the page, which would have otherwise disrupted the online TV component. Next, he had to deliver the scorecard in a manner that the viewer wasn't distracted from the live action. To load the scorecard without refreshing the page, he developed a web service call using WCF that was placed from browser to server side web service. The optimized data returned by this web service was integrated with Silverlight DOM to display the score.

Thanks to Shirpuram's efforts, millions of online viewers could enjoy the game of cricket like never before.  This might not seem heroic in the traditional sense of the world – no lives were saved – however to those online viewers, he is a hero.

Namaste!

Last year at MIX, I decided to sit in the audience and watch Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie deliver the keynote among all the other conference attendees.  Even though I knew what we were going to present, it was still fabulous to sit in the audience and watch the electric reaction as we talked about the potential that we opened up with Silverlight, Expression Studio and Visual Studio. 

At MIX07, we delivered the first full version of Expression Studio and in November, we launched Visual Studio 2008. The industry’s reaction to these advancements has been phenomenal.

MIX08 started today and the excitement continues to build.  Within four months of its release, Silverlight is already powering more than 8,000 applications and organizations are using it to deliver superior Web-based experiences to their customers including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal.

We have been committing Silverlight support for mobility since day 1 as mobile support is vital to Silverlight’s core value to ‘run everywhere’.  Yesterday Nokia announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available on its S60 on Symbian OS and Series 40 as well as all Nokia Internet tablets.  Not only will this agreement improve the experience for mobile devices users, it also creates new opportunities for developers and designers by allowing them to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms and computing devices in a consistent and reliable manner.

Just this morning we announced plans to partner with Move Networks, who provide the technology to stream some of the most popular shows on television, to integrate its high-quality video streaming technology into Microsoft Silverlight.  This will result in video streaming technology that allows videos to start faster, play smoother (with no buffering), and deliver higher quality video resolution.  Within a single environment, designers and developers will be able to seamlessly integrate unique branding and navigational elements within, around and on top of the highest quality online video on the Net.

Additionally, developers can now access the eagerly anticipated Silverlight 2 beta.  Highlights of the beta include a WPF-based UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier, as well as a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications and rich networking support.  One of my favorite features, ‘Deep Zoom,’ was showcased by Hard Rock during the keynote. The smooth in-place zooming and panning that Deep Zoom allows is a true advancement and raises the bar on what image viewing can be.  Through this feature, it's now possible to make high resolution images easily consumable on the Internet.

To deliver on the promise of integrating designers more seamlessly into the development process, we also released Expression Studio 2 beta which I blogged about earlier today.

I am very pleased to see all of the progress we are making on our mission to offer a common and complete application platform and tools offering that ranges from the standards based Web, to rich interactive applications, to the desktop and devices. 

Namaste!

I was very excited last year when we released the first version of Expression Studio to help bring the professional designer into the software development process for client and standards-based web applications.  This suite of designer tools opened up a new world of creative possibility for applications. 

Today we released the beta version of Expression Studio 2 which includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder.  This release continues to enable building rich client applications with WPF and also helps designers target Silverlight for delivering stunning web applications.

There are many exciting new features in this release.  For example, Expression Web allows you to design PHP documents in addition to ASP.NET 3.5, opening the door for a new range of designers to create their standards-based designs using Microsoft tools.  Expression Blend has an improved interface that speeds up your workflow and facilitates navigating your documents more quickly with the new breadcrumb toolbar.  Expression Design includes an advanced slicing feature that helps you target individual slices as separate formats, including Silverlight canvas, WPF canvas, WPF resource dictionary, HTML comp, XAML, PSD, and PDF.  Expression Media makes digital asset management easy by allowing you to import more than 100 different media formats using drag-and-drop, including digital camera RAW files, then share the resulting catalogue with fellow team members.   Finally, Expression Encoder has higher quality and faster encoding for Silverlight and the ability to perform simple video edits.

To enable designers to begin exploring the power of Silverlight 2, today we also released Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview, a pre-release of the next version of Blend (post Expression Studio 2) that will eventually ship alongside Silverlight 2. As Silverlight and other platform technologies continue to advance, we will regularly release refreshes of our developer and designer tooling.

With Expression Studio 2, we are also introducing the Expression Professional Subscription, a new premium offering targeted at professional designers which complements the existing MSDN subscriptions for developers.  This annual subscription will provide convenient access to the newest Microsoft and 3^rd-party software.  The subscription includes free updates to future versions of included products (e.g., Expression Studio, Visual Studio, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Office 2007, Visio and others) during the subscription period guaranteeing you have the latest tools for delivering your designs.  We are also including preconfigured virtualized environments with Microsoft servers and services such as Windows Server 2008, IIS7, and SQL Server to help designers get going quickly.

Inspiration, freedom to explore and self expression are important elements of the creative process and the Expression Community site we launched last week is about bringing professional designers together to inspire each other, discover new techniques and share their creations with fellow community members.  We want this site to strengthen our ties with the spectrum of designers at all levels by providing a rich destination for learning, sharing and discovery.

Whether you are creating visual artifacts, animating your application, building your website, editing videos or generating encoded content, Expression Studio has the tool for you.  You can access the beta here and send us your feedback as well as join and participate in the Expression Community.

Namaste!

Earlier today I blogged about the world wide launch of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. 

As just a quick update, I’d like to share with you a few links to some videos that will give you more insight into today’s activities.

Channel9 Interview with me, Bill Laing, and Ted Kummert: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=386441

Webcast of Steve Ballmer’s Keynote today in Los Angeles: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/hhhlaunch/default.mspx

Namaste!

A few weeks ago I talked to you about MSDN Code Gallery and the range of resources available from snippets to SDKs. 

To add another resource to enhance your development experience, today we’re launching the Visual Studio Gallery.  This site provides a catalog that showcases free and commercial products that complement or extend Visual Studio.

The broad range of solutions you’ll find on the Visual Studio Gallery will give you a sense of the momentum we’re seeing around Visual Studio Extensibility.  We have a large and growing group of partners building businesses on the Visual Studio platform, and we have a growing developer community focused on extending Visual Studio to create new tools.  For example, a number of in-house developers and enterprise teams are building productivity and methodology tools that are specific to their needs.  We’re also seeing a broad uptake of the Visual Studio 2008 Shell which we announced in November.

Visual Studio Extensibility(VSX) is an inclusive set of resources and capabilities for all Visual Studio developers.  For example, you might want to install one of the extensions you find on the Visual Studio Gallery -- the easiest way to extend your development experience.  Or, you might want to build a coding tool for your development team – you can use the free Visual Studio SDK to build it, and you can ship it in the Visual Studio 2008 Shell.

The Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Center points to the latest SDK, the Visual Studio Shell redistributables, and how-to resources to get you started.  

We already have hundreds of extensions listed on the Visual Studio Gallery, and for me personally, it’s very cool to see the innovation built on Visual Studio from our partners and the development community.

Namaste!