srinivi's blog

2008 Summer Olympics Coverage

srinivi — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:55:00 GMT

Here are all the ways you can experience the 2008 Summer Olympics from Microsoft and NBC:

Click http://www.nbcolympics.com/video to jump right in and experience high-quality, interactive video using Silverlight. This could even be better than being in Beijing! Get amazing, crisp HD video quality on the web that’s always optimized for your connection using Silverlight’s new adaptive streaming capability, watch up to four live streams simultaneously in the same player, and get expert commentary all within a rich Silverlight application running within the browser.

Beginning tomorrow and throughout the Games, the MSN homepage will prominently feature a dynamic Olympics module which will enable people to see results (or hide them if you don’t want any spoilers), get the latest news and see exclusive video coverage.

Get the latest medal counts by sport or by country, or find out about all 10,000 of the athletes competing in the 2008 Summer Games using the Live Search Olympics Instant Answer

Install the new MSN Toolbar that gives you one click access to the medal tally and many other highlights.

Beginning August 9th, Zune Marketplace will kick off a series of daily 2008 Olympic Games videos from NBC Sports, giving viewers special on-the-go access to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. For approximately 99 cents–$1.99 per episode (with post-Games content TBD), footage will include memorable highlights from the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, “best of” compilations, “best match” replays and a post-Games wrap-up feature. Users will be able to download each episode onto their Zune device for viewing whenever and wherever they go. Additionally, XBOX users will be able to purchase and download a daily wrap-up of the day’s events from NBC Sports, with a complete wrap-up at the end of the Games. And as you saw earlier today, from Windows Media Center, head for NBC Olympics On the Go service in the Online Media strip.

NBC Olympics On the Go in Windows Media Center, an Internet-delivered catch-up TV service from NBC Universal powered by Wavexpress’ TVTonic platform. This free download-and-play service differentiates Windows Media Center as the platform with the highest-quality Internet-delivered Olympics experience in the USA. You simply launch Windows Media Center and scroll down to the Online Media strip where you will find a link to NBC Olympics On The Go in default view. Follow the simple one-time installation steps and you’re ready to go.

Microsoft Source Analysis for C# (stylecop)

srinivi — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:54:00 GMT

Different teams in Microsoft use different coding styles and have their own standards.
The reason is largely historical. Some teams and products have been in existence for a very long time, with senior developers (used to coding in C++) and some migrating to managed code. There are many Microsoft products with both managed and unmanaged code.

Coding standards are very useful for projects/products with long life (and those which could go into sustenance mode).

Microsoft recently released Microsoft Source Analysis (internally was called StyleCop). This tool enforces a coding style for C# code. This tool can be integrated into an MSBuild based build environment too - http://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/pages/source-analysis-msbuild-integration.aspx

Microsoft Source Analysis blog

Why try and define your own coding standards when you could get the tool to enforce very well defined standards.

The tool currently supports only C# code and not ASP.NET. Obviously its not easy to modify all your current C# code to pass the tool's verification, but you could use the tool on new code. This would be a great time to define coding standards for your team.

NOTE: FxCop analyzes compiled .NET binaries, while StyleCop analyzes the original source code. This allows StyleCop to investigate issues in code that is thrown away by the compiler.

Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines

srinivi — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:18:00 GMT

The new family of Microsoft products - Windows Vista, Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008, IIS7, IE8 etc have very rich user interface and enhanced user experience. With the advent of rich development platforms like WPF, user experience & usability gets more importance.

There is significant user experience improvement in Windows Vista, with new features and enhancements for both end users & developers, and as we get ready to release the next operating system, establishing high quality and consistency for all Windows applications is very important.

There are many new UI improvements in Vista like, Task Dialogs

Aero Wizards

& Control Panels just to list a few

If you carefully observe all the above dialogs, there is a standard that we follow – be it the fonts or the spacing or the alignment of child controls and there are guidelines for designing a Vista based application. If you are a Windows app developer, to maintain UI consistency with Vista and upcoming OS, I suggest you read Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines

The UX guide is available for download too. It’s a 700+ page document but I think a must read / glance for all Windows app developers.

Some of the important – must read sections I think are Top Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience & Top Guidelines Violations

There could be some minor changes / additions to the guidelines with the release of Windows 7, but the core & crux would be the same.