Swiss MSDN Team Blog

15 days left to Silverlight 3 & Expression 3 Launch

The Silverlight & Expression v3 Launch Event will be held at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco on 10 July 2009 at 10am Pacific. Soma S. and Scott Guthrie will make the keynote address. For the broader audience, we will launch a Virtual Launch Event (seethelight.com) on the same date.

Register for TechEd Europe now and save up to € 600*!

This year TechEd Europe will take place in Berlin, Germany from 9 – 13 November. There are two major changes versus last year.

Developers and IT Professionals united

Customer feedback has shown that TechEd attendees prefer that content for IT Professionals and Developers is available the same week so that both audiences can profit from crossover content.

Pricing model has changed

*While Super Early Bird and Early Bird offers were available within fixed timeframes before, they are now based on seat allocations. Therefore they are subject to availability. Prices have started at € 995 and end at € 2’195 (excl. 19% VAT). The current price (at time of blog publication) stands at € 1’595 (excl. 19% VAT), so you can still save € 600 if you register now. Please check the current registration price here before you register!

Swiss Country Night

Also this year, we will do a Swiss Country Night, where you can delight yourself with food and drinks and network with fellow colleagues. We will contact you in October and provide you with exact location and timing details. The country night will most probably be on Wednesday, 11 November from 18.30 onwards, after the last session ends.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Toolkit Released

While this has been a much-awaited release for the developer community, some confusion has arisen in the media. To clarify, the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit (DTK) is not an SDK. The DTK contains emulators, gesture APIs, and samples useful for developing Windows Mobile 6.5 applications. Developers will still need to install Visual Studio and the Windows Mobile 6 SDK prior to running the tool kit installer.

Programmierung von Unified Communications (UC)

Wenn Sie an der Programmierung von Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 resp. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 interessiert sind, dürfte Sie das folgende Angebot interessieren.

Microsoft Press stellt im Zusammenhang mit ihrem 25jährigen Bestehen zwei e-books im Bereich von UC kostenlos zur Verfügung. Das Angebot ist nur bis zum 24.6.2009 gültig.

Programming for Unified Communications with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 By Rui Maximo, Kurt De Ding, Vishwa Ranjan, Chris Mayo, Oscar Newkerk, and the Microsoft Office Communications Server team

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Resource Kit By Rui Maximo, Rick Kingslan, Rajesh Ramanathan, and Nirav Kamdar with the Microsoft Office Communications Server Team

Weitere Ressourcen zu UC

An den TechDays 2009 in Bern haben wir UC ausführlich vorgestellt. Die Präsentationen und Webcasts finden Sie hier. Die entsprechenden Präsentationen heissen “Unified Communication APIs” und “OCS 2007 R2 Overview”.

T4 Template Editor support within Visual Studio 2010

One of the nicest features within EFv4 (the next version of EF which will be also part of .NET 4) is the support for POCO classes and self-tracking Entities (entities which know how to do their own change tracking regardless of where our changes are done; really cool for n-tier scenario!!!).

In order to generate POCO classes and Self-tracked Entities, Microsoft plan to ship T4 Templates, which allow to completely replace EF code generation with custom code. Unluckily Visual Studio 2010 does not provide an out of the box T4 Template Editor.

The good news is that there are already 3rd party solutions available in order to edit T4 templates. Here the ones I found:

à   http://www.visualt4.com

à   http://www.tangible.de/modellingtools_teaser.aspx

     (you can download and install it using the new Extension Manager functionality of Visual Studio 2010. Extension Manager is available within the StartPage of VS2010)

Windows 7 Applikations-Kompatibilität: Support Möglichkeiten

Windows 7 RTM wird bereits im Juli 2009 erscheinen. Falls Sie als Softwareentwicklungsfirma Ihre Applikationen noch nicht auf Windows 7 getestet haben, ist es jetzt höchste Zeit dazu.

Falls Probleme beim Testen auftreten, nutzen Sie am besten das neue MSDN Forum Application Compatibility for Windows Development. Die Verwendung des Forums ist kostenlos und Microsoft antwortet innerhalb von 24 Stunden.

Sobald Sie bestätigen können, dass Ihre Applikation(en) mit Windows 7 kompatibel sind, haben Sie die Möglichkeit, diese auf isvappcompat.com zu registrieren. Danach wird sie im Windows 7 Compatibility Center (https://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/windows-7) aufgelistet werden und Sie können von der Marketingunterstützung profitieren.

Windows 7 Training Kit für Entwickler

Eben ist der Release Candiate (RC) des Windows 7 Training Kits erschienen. Es enthält Präsentationen, Hands-on Labs und Demos zu den folgenden Windows 7 spezifischen Themen:

• Taskbar
• Windows 7 APIs
• Multi Touch
• Sensors und Location
• Ribbon
• Trigger Start Services
• Applikations-Kompatibilität
• weitere

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=12100526-ed26-476b-8e20-69662b8546c1&displaylang=en

Sind Ihre Applikationen mit Windows 7 kompatibel?

Was Sie beachten müssen, damit Ihre Applikationen zu 100 % auf Windows 7 lauffähig sind, erfahren am 7. Juli im Windows 7 Application and Certification Seminar, welches wir im Raume Zürich durchführen werden.

Weitere Infos und Anmeldung: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032417884

Did you know that if you’re an MSDN Subscriber you can get Telerik WPF controls FREE ? : Misfit Geek

cross-posted from Laurent Kempé’s blog

Telerik, a leading vendor of .NET UI components and tools, has a special offer for all active MSDN subscribers !!

A free Developer License for RadControls for WPF ($799 value), with community support only.

This license gives you access to all of the Telerik WPF controls for use in unlimited personal or commercial projects.

Take advantage of the offer and enjoy a powerful WPF grid, scheduler, animated 3D charts and gauges, and everything you need to build rich and visually stunning WPF line-of-business applications.

The offer is valid through July 31st, 2009. To claim your free license, log-in to your MSDN Subscriber account and look for the “Exclusive Deal from Telerik” on the MSDN “Special Offers” tab.

Did you know that if you’re an MSDN Subscriber you can get Telerik WPF controls FREE ? : Misfit Geek

Some people could not find the link on MSDN, so here it is how I did it. Login on MSDN with your credentials, move the mouse on your login name on the top, on the menu click on the Download and Product Keys, then on the tab Special Offers as on the picture. You get to the list of offers containing the Telerik One.

Windows Mobile 6.5 DTK available!

The DTK (Developer Toolkit) for Windows Mobile 6.5 has been made available for immediate download. The term “DTK” was a bit puzzling at first, but the Windows Mobile Team blog describes it well:

The new DTK adds to the existing Windows Mobile 6 SDK which is required to run the new DTK. Both together deliver emulator images, the new gesture APIs, and samples useful for developing Windows Mobile 6.5 applications in Visual Studio 2008.

Migration guidance for WF Developers

Yesterday MS has posted four initial Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) migration guidance documents to help current WF developers evaluate the new WF programming model that is being introduced in .NET Framework 4. The documents are being authored by the PM team, and will be receiving regular updates as we progress towards RTM of .NET Framework 4.

The four initial documents are:

·      WF Migration Overview - Overview of the document collection and an initial starting place for the WF3 developer

·      WF Migration: Best Practices for WF3 Development - How to design WF3 artifacts so they are more easily migratable to WF4

·      WF Guidance: Rules - Discussion of how to bring rules-related investments forward into .NET 4

·      WF Guidance: State Machine - Discussion of WF4 control flow modeling in the absence of a StateMachine activity

The team will be supporting customer feedback and requests for the documents and accompanying sample code in the WF 4 forum on MSDN

For more information have a look at the following post of the WF and WCF 4 Team.

Microsoft .NET Swiss Innovation Award 2009 – Winner: evidence nova, Glaux Soft AG

Glaux Soft AG, represented by Beat Kiener, have won the Innovation Award 2009 for their

evidence nova is a Client Relationship Management system that has been developed by Glaux Soft AG and it is currently in an advanced pilot phase at Swiss Olympic.

The next figure illustrates the technologies that have been used to implement evidence nova.

evidence nova, as well as the Altran Information Management system that has also won an innovation award, belongs in our opinion to a new generation of Line of Business applications. In common, they share and profit of the use of Silverlight to implement their clients.

Silverlight fulfills better than any other technology the needs of Line of Business applications, from different angles:

• USERS: they need responsive, rich user interfaces
• DEVELOPERS: they need productive tools and mature frameworks and languages
• ITPROS: they need to have costs under control and avoid expensive deployments.

evidence nova extends even further this concept of new, rich browser application: The Glaux Soft team decided to build a solution that doesn’t require nor make use of a scrollbar. The application is optimized to use the visible browser surface and, thanks to a very smart algorithm, the block of contents are rendered to maximize the information accessibility. The result is a very functional, screen resolution independent, fluid interface that is extremely pleasant to work with.

The architecture of evidence nova, shown in the figure below, is also very modern and allows to build dynamically the Silverlight 2 based, fluid user interface.

Under the The Kieners Blog, you can find additional information, access an amazing live demo, and watch a video that shown the capabilities of this award-winning solution.

An awesome work!

Microsoft .NET Swiss Innovation Award 2009 – Winner: Project Codename “ATLAS”, Bixi Systems AG and Trivadis AG

Vincenzo Stefanelli (Bixi Systems AG) and Peter Kämpf (Trivadis AG) have won the Innovation Award 2009 for their

The currently 8-man-years project is in an advanced pilot phase and it is planned to go live mid of FY10. “ATLAS” has been developed jointly by Trivadis and Bixi Systems for Bixi Systems, to manage and control access to buildings and offices.

As you can see from the figure below, this project makes use of several new Microsoft technologies.

The solution has been developed with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, using WCF to communicate and WPF to build the front-end, which integrated the “just-released” WPF Office Ribbon and WPF Datagrid controls.

If this is not impressive enough, please consider that the „ATLAS“ user authorization is based on claims and is implemented with Geneva, Microsoft “v.next” claims based access platform (currently in Beta 2).

Aside the great use of Microsoft newest technologies, this project was honored with an award for the (let me say please) perfect project management approach, using a SCRUM-based development process supported by Visual Studio Team System. Thanks to this approach, the project team has always had a clear vision of the project state and its progresses, helping a lot in the planning and decisional process.

In the (German) words of Vincenzo Stefanelli, Head of development at Bixi Systems:

An awesome project work with very innovative technologies and approach: A fully deserved innovation award!

Microsoft .NET Swiss Innovation Award 2009 – Winner: Altran Information Manager, Altran AG

Altran AG, represented by Frederic de Simoni and Dieter Werner, have won the Innovation Award 2009 for their

The Altran Information Manger (AIM) is a resource planning system that is currently used by the “Führungsunterstützungsbasis der Armee”.

Being the resource planning a typical process-driven activity, the AIM has been built fully process-driven to better suite the way of working of its users. The video at the end of this post illustrates well this concept.

AIM is also completely configurable and loaded dynamically from its repository. This has been made possible by the use of the following technologies:

If we take a look at the application architecture in next figure, we see how the SQL Server back-end stores the definitions

• of the front-end, which is Silverlight 2 based and rendered via XAML
• of the processes, which are Windows Workflow Foundation based and rendered via XOML.

Knowing the current status/step and the selected next action, the application server is able to build on the fly the next process step and the related Silverlight mask.

Take a look at the resulting application watching the demo video below!

So, the newest Microsoft technologies and “XAML and XOML on demand”: Definitely a very innovative approach that deserves an innovation award!

Microsoft .NET Swiss Innovation Award 2009 – Winner: Diagnostics Clinical Information Management, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG

Christian Strauch and his team at F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG have won the Innovation Award 2009 for their

The Sample Management Module (SMM) of the Clinical Information Management system it is used for so-called “Items lifecycle tracking” and it has several amazing peculiarities:

• Flexibility: Undergoing SMM the international and country-specific regulations that apply to pharmaceutical systems, it needs to be extremely flexible in order to accept the most disparate kinds of samples without code changes. This is necessary because code changes imply a complete re-validation of the system, which is time- and cost-intensive.
  SMM achieves its highly flexibility through an “extreme” use of the XML features provided by SQL Server 2008.
• Responsiveness: The web-based front-end of the application is required to deliver responses within 5 seconds. Considering the large amount of data (currently 10Mio records in the main table but expected to reach soon 30Mio) and the extensive use of XML as a datatype (think about indexing and parsing!), the achieved responsiveness below 5 seconds is remarkable – And have some implications on the necessary hardware, discussed below.
• Context-Sensitiveness: The entire web front-end is context-sensitive. By clicking on any item, a context menu is built on the fly with the operation available on that item, based on the peculiarities of the item and the right of the current user.

The result is an AJAX-based front-end (watch demo video), deployed on 15 web servers. This front-end “extracts” its data from a SQL Server 2008 database on a Server with 16 core and 256GB of RAM, using SAN-based storage. It is currently the most powerful server at Roche!

At minute 17:50 of the video Keynote Developers & Architects you can find the presentation of this case and a demo of the AJAX-based User Interface. This video is available under http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/msdn/de/techdays/Presentations.aspx.

An awesome project on the newest Microsoft technologies with a lot of innovative ideas to produce this very flexible and responsive solution.

Microsoft .NET – Swiss Innovation Award 2009

About one month ago at TechDays 2009 in Bern, Microsoft Switzerland has honored 4 brilliant solutions with the

This post introduces the following 4 ones that describe the award-winning projects.

Please note that the next Innovation Awards will be assigned at TechDays10 in Basel (Congress Center, 7-8. April 2010).

Before that venue, there will be another occasion to have your great work recognized with an award: At the second edition of Shape (Zurich, Swissôtel, 27-28. October 2009), the Microsoft Switzerland Web Conference, we will be assigning the Silverlight Awards 2010 in cooperation with Best of Swiss Web to the best, Swiss Silverlight solutions.

Below, a picture of the award-winners:

From left to right:

• Stefano Mallè (Microsoft Schweiz GmbH)
• Christian Strauch (F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG)
• Peter Kämpf (Trivadis AG) and Vincenzo Stefanelli (Bixi Systems AG)
• Frederic de Simoni und Dieter Werner (Altran AG)
• Beat Kiener (Glaux Soft AG)

The awarded projects were presented during the Developers Keynote of the Techdays09 in Bern, which was recorded and is available under: www.techdays.ch