Mario Esposito @ uncle Bill's house

Microsoft Gaze on MSN Entertainment

windrago — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:49:24 GMT

Hi world,

I want to let you know that the baby that I designed, worshiped and cuddled has been deployed, last night, on MSN Entertainment and more stuff is in the pipe. Like Maps, Product discovery with “walk in” features and so on. Enjoy, because the life is just an ad, click it or you lose the carpe diem forever.

Take care,
Mario

ps:a while ago a good friend that works in the health business said “[…] I have the perception that only fruit and binocular are changing the game. Isn’t it?!” – Doctors what do they know! Gaze it on!

Another beta is out, go and play with Gaze

windrago — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:14:27 GMT

What’s Gaze ?

A lot has been said so I’m not going to repeat anything, here is the short version of what Todd captured last time we met.

We just rolled out another private beta of Microsoft Gaze. An in-text advertisement solution that aims to help content owners in monetize better their content.

It also help users to find, in line, what they need to improve their readership.

You are welcome to sign up – last time the cap was set to 1000 users, which was reached in 27 minutes by the time the world noticed my post.

This time we let everyone on the earth play with the sign up site, but in order to run the Gaze gadget on your site you need to be approved. Otherwise the script that you get at the end of the registration process won’t run.

Questions?

I am all ears, go ahead!

My name is Mario Esposito and I’m a Program Manager for AdCenter Labs. I’m not a friend of Madonna or Whitney Huston however…

…Once in a while, I do play Gears of War on XBOX while my Sql Server 2008 machine runs my search queries.

Microsoft Gaze

windrago — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:01:37 GMT

Some more clues… The question is: Would you use that solution on your own blog?

Credit goes to Todd Bishop.

Microsoft Gaze – sneak peek

windrago — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:18:00 GMT

Last night I featured a blog post about Microsoft Gaze, a new advertising technology being developed in Microsoft’s adCenter Labs.

All the dogfood tickets were given away within the first 24 hours. Impressive, well done folks!

A generous lady took my joke about the pizza quite seriously. She sent over email a coupon (scan) for a Pizza Hut. I found that exceptionally creative. Well done Susan in-text ads fun!

The response has been tremendously positive among the users that received an invitation for our beta.

As matter of fact your creativity and enthusiasm has been so positive that handle all these communications and not to mention the pizza, is a little too much for my Italian naive work-attitude – tsk tsk…please don’t share that with my boss.

Therefore, I’ve decided to take down the Gaze post until the technology is officially announced. Which is soon anyway… Anyway do me a favor, on April 15th tune your Internet TV on the Gaze channel. Because if you’re a publisher or just a teen-blogger

Your ads just won't be the same anymore!

I thank Eric Krangel @ CNN/Money and in particular Todd Bishop @ TechFlash for their articles. Much appreciated guys. Stay tuned, we’re coming !

;mE

ps:The joke that I used in my previous post is here.

The best one

windrago — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:16:00 GMT

Microsoft awards a "patent cube" to all employees whose patent applications are submitted to the US Patent Office and a wooden plaque with a copy of the patent front page when it is granted, a process which usually takes 3-6 years.

I have collect a few patents over the years, not all in the IT business, but this one below is by far the best that I ever wished to have on my shelf. I envisioned what that cube represent more than 10 years ago. I pitched it for years and finally one day in 2007, someone from the sky said "...hey that's a great idea, let's protect it!" - marvelous, I said!

Custom presence status for Office Communicator 2007

windrago — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:30:00 GMT

A few coworkers have recently asked if it was possible to customize the status shown by Office Communicator. Yes, it is possible. Be aware that you should always and I mean really REALLY always contact your administrator before you compromise or expose your corporate network security. </legalwarning>

Ok now the fun part:

You may are not completely satisfied by the basic presence indications you can use with OC: available, busy, away … Communicator 2007 client allows you to configure and use customized presence information. The question that I answer today is how you can do the actual customization:

Create an .XML file (any name will do it - i.e: custom.xml) with a content similar to this :
<customStates>
    <customState ID="1" availability="online">
        <activity LCID="1033">Working from Home</activity>
    </customState>
    <customState ID="2" availability="busy">
        <activity LCID="1033">Playing HALO 3</activity>
    </customState>
    <customState ID="3" availability="busy">
        <activity LCID="1033">Meeting with Customer</activity>
    </customState>
    <customState ID="4" availability="do-not-disturb">
        <activity LCID="1033">Debugging</activity>
    </customState>
</customStates>
Make the file you have created above accessible. As rule of thumb if you can access at the file through any of the following protocols you're in a good shape.
- File share
- HTTP(s)
Create the following registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator\CustomStateURL = file://server/share/custom.xml

Restart Office Communicator.

Enjoy

Help the planet, thank you LiveEarth

windrago — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 01:41:00 GMT

After I read this post I realized that every action counts, specially the little ones. Maybe a lawn mower is not the #1 killer but everyone has got to play a little part in the show of the life.

Does matter if the climate crisis exists or it is just a cyclic earth evolution. That's not the point. It doesn't hurt to try and it DOES hurt to ignore the signals. Because clearly something is going on; no matter who the actors of this game are. The music has delivered it, now answer the call.

How green are you? You don't know eh, I figured. Here is a clue.

At Microsoft, we bring the same spirit of innovation to global citizenship that we have always applied to our business. Our Global Citizenship Initiative like the one that brought together million of people is a clear sign of that statement. We're fostering a more secure computing experience for people everywhere, while we help the planet as well. So coooool!

Mario

Where's the Italian voice?

windrago — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:51:00 GMT

A few of my Italian friends have filled my inbox with the same specific question. I want to write a voice app, where's the Italian voice?

Apparently either Live search and the others are doing a good job at answering to this specific question. So I step up [I love this American idiom, makes me laugh] -- Click here and the world well shine for you.

Enjoy

Mario Esposito

Hey Bill can I have a promotion? Sure, check my calendar...

windrago — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:54:00 GMT

Have you ever wished to have a personal Executive assistant? A beautiful voice, perfect in his/her work attitude, ready to act and sum up what you have just put on her todo list?

I did and I have one even if I'm not even close to the executive atmosphere!!

Paul Duffy with a magic Harry Potter English accent masterfully demoed exactly this scenario during Bill's keynote at CEO Summit. Paul asks for Bill, but he is unavaible at that moment, the Personal Assistant then let Paul schedule an appointment with Bill about his promotion.

Which of course got a laugh from the CEOs in the audience. VOIP ohhh Let's break barriers!!

Ohh dear, a Genius in action! One of my friends have blogged about it and he managed also to find a video of the demo. You got to watch it.

Happy frieday to everyone.

Mario

I love you and I'm not a virus

windrago — Tue, 15 May 2007 03:19:00 GMT

As a formal member of the speech team when I came across the following post I felt like an assert violation that all of the sudden pops on the screen. Full of joy. We will discuss about my associations between my emotions and exceptions another time. For now let's focus on the following exerpt:

Have you ever tried to call someone at Microsoft or Google? I have. I’ve even memorized Microsoft’s number but won’t give it here cause I’d hate for Jeff Sandquist to get a ton of crank calls. Anyway, both Microsoft and Google have switchboard numbers.

But the Microsoft switchboard rocks and I guess you want to know why... Well, go on and read more.

Yes, this post is full of pride but you know what? It's all deserved. It's all about to listen to the customer and make the right product for the market. It's as simple as that. But looks like that only a few have the right recipe in their hands. <shrug of joy>

Thanks Robert for your post; I love you and I'm not Melissa.

Mario Esposito

Which OS are you?

windrago — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 02:04:00 GMT

Here is mine.

Which OS are You?

Podcast time

windrago — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 22:26:00 GMT

Wow, I was one of the last people on earth to believe in the blog craze. I remember saying... "Why does it matter? It’s the newsgroup concept, mixed and reused..." ok ok...I was partially wrong; I admit it with no fear.

But I found out about the podcast blog-innovation quite early. Actually when I started to use it, I didn't know that my technological monologue had a name!

Currently my podcast is in Italian, because it takes me less time to bake it up. The current theme is VSTO because the product rocks and I work there. If this doesn't sound good enough to you, it's only because you haven't tried the product yet. Believe me, it will blow up your mind <work passion = off />

I'm working on a better structured format for my podcast and I will experiment with it in Russian as well. Stay tuned.

VSTO se ti piace lo usi

windrago — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 22:26:00 GMT

Benvenuto nel mio blog scritto da un Italiano a Redmond. Suona buffo ma e' cosi'. Nel periodo trascorso in Italia, mi lamentavo di quanta poca documentazione tecnica fosse disponibile relativa ai prodotti Microsoft nella lingua del bel paese.

Chi sono e come la penso e' un argomento che richiederebbe del tempo, ma se vuoi avere un infarinatura questo e' il mio sito personale. Una volta il sole 24 ore mi ha descritto come “un personaggio sui generis”, forse c'avevano ragione.

Sono uno SDE\T in un team di brillanti menti e insieme stiamo realizzando la futura versione di VSTO, che sta per visual studio tools per office, se continuano ad aggiungerci nomi vicino fra poco ci vorra' un 21 pollici per leggere tutto il nome.

Il prodotto e' veramente cool; parlavo cosi' anche quando ero in italia, quindi non ti offendere se leggerai qualcosa che sembra uscito da un traduttore automatico. Qui i tempi sono stretti e il mio blog deve prendere poco tempo, specie per il fatto che e' in due lingue :)

Cosa fa VSTO? Installando visual studio e Office System professional puoi rendere programmabile [customize] un documento word o excel. Che cosa vuol dire? Vuol dire che ti ritrovi word/excel dentro l'IDE di Visual Studio e lo tratti [sviluppi] come se fosse una winform. Usando componenti winform e codice dot.net. Ovviamente ho sintetizzato milione di righe di codice e milioni di dollari di marketing in 2 righe, ma all'atto pratico e' quello che ho appena descritto.

Perche' si dovrebbe scegliere di usare VSTO e non VBA, d'altra parte le due cose sembrano simili. Wrong!! [io parlo cosi', meta' e meta']

Il fatto e' che :

VBA non offre un debugger sofisticato come quello di VS
VBA e' solo Visual Basic oriented e questo vuol dire niente codice ad oggetti e 100% class oriented
VBA usa un runtime testato negli anni ma da una percentuale piccolissima, paragonata a quanti milioni di utenti nel mondo usano .net

VSTO e' la luce, l'unica salvezza, la fede, il perche' adesso e' chiaro.

Mano a mano che aggiornero' questo bLog toccheremo tutti i punti fondamentali dell'uso di VSTO, in particolare della parte su cui il mio lavoro quotidiano si svolge, la ServerDocument. Una parte dell'object model che ti consente di utilizzare documenti office sul server senza dover installare office.

Usare come? Estrarre e igniettare dati sostanzialmente, attraverso qualunque fonte di dati. SQL/WS e acqua cadente.
Se hai richieste particolari sull'argomento, richieste di articoli/post, fatti sotto, il tempo e' poco ma il mio lavoro mi piace e' questo avvantaggia sia me che te [come utilizzatore].

Abbiate fede, abbiate VSTO

How to learn to love a Customized document

windrago — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 21:39:00 GMT

                                 The Complete Guide of:
                       Learn how to love a Customized document
    ------------------------------------------------------------------

     Table of contents:
     ====================================

     A. Purpose of the guide
     B. The first meeting
     C. Phase I.   - "I build you"
     D. Phase II. - The code body language
     E. Phase III. - Actually doing it with View controls
    =====================================

    A. Purpose of this guide.
    -------------------------

      Firstly, this isn't a joke guide but a very serious topic (hiihihi). All the methods described here are working, and with not too much difficulty.

      Don't expect that you will be able to love a customized document in one week. Not with this guide anyway. If you have the time, patience, and some manners, you will succeed.

      I don't pretend to be a big expert in Office Documents; I'm not. But after some experience with them, I can provide you with some information that can help you, with the first moves between his [runtime] and her [server class] business.

      I will happily update this guide and improve it, with your help of course. Please send me comments and to help make it better.

Dedicated to Brent, who helped me to compile it without even knowing it...

    B. The first meets
    ------------------

I believe you have an Office System suite installed you can experiment with. If you don't, buy one. For our purposes, every mid-looking box will suffice. Every one can own an Office Professional suite, especially if you are an MSDN subscriber, but this is not the time and place to explain how to get one. (maybe in the next "completed guide of...").
If you don't have an Office System yet, at least try to achieve a meet with one, legally!.

Just in case, if you have installed WordStar, or my God... StarOffice, remove it immediately! You have to see the un-customized document as a nice girl that anybody would love to make a family with. So said, if you want to continue seeing this document [her] you have to remember the following:

    * Let her talk. If she has a lot to say - just listen. Make sure the Microsoft Office Speech package is installed and the headset is working properly.
      A node with the head and some leading questions will do.

    * If she is permanently silent [because there is no code behind], you can try following some of these tips before starting to customize her.

Ask about:
           - herself (do you like the databinding, etc?.)
           - features (although it seems to be boring, you can talk for hours on this subject)
           - her design preferences (If she mentions an aspect that you dislike, don't show it to her and his PM. Just hide it.)
           - tell her about yourself (what a cool developer you are with VSTO 2.0)
           - ask her if she knows how to bind a range to an object through the VS wizard.
           - and the most important: don't answer with yes or no to any message-boxes. Those above are chat-compile-stoppers.

Expand you code-speech.
        - tell her jokes
        - remember to have a lot of humor - Office documents like it.
        - very important : don't be serious.[Like me now ihihihi]
        - Mind your manners: don't hit Menu>Build rudely nor curse.
        - smile : release the tense and make the code healthy.

        If all the above fails, and you can't find a common language [runtime] with her, you probably won't keep with her a long time on that environment. Typically you have installed the wrong Office version or the PIA's are missing. You're such a young boy.... In this case let me introduce all the necessary steps in order to be successful.

    * What to do the first time
       Tell her that you have a nice VS home [Visual Studio] and maybe you can share some good data coming directly from the SQL Server land. That's the moment where the love begins. File, New, Office Document, use an existing document and hit finish.

to be continued...

ServerDocument and me

windrago — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 23:26:00 GMT

Hi there. My name is Mario, I'm an Italian that is experiencing a wonderful time in a cool ms group. What do we do? We're building Visual Studio Tool for Office 2.0, aka VSTO2. If we continue to add more words to the name, sooner or later a Sony Plasma will be required if you want to see the entire name in one line.

What's about my blog?
Well, I love to read and write, and I'm pretty good in my own language. But, I'm far away from being good in other languages, so I decided to practice a bit..... Hmm, I can see your skepticism though the wire, which is better for me... but don't blame me later because I warned you.

Consideration
I love my job (SDE/T) because it is fun and unpredictable. I want to transmit these emotions to you by telling stories and making funny examples about life.

ServerDocument
ServerDocument is the server feature in the next VSTO release. Outside of mS, people are counting the days untill they can use this feature. Stats, researchers and mind-readers are telling me that you wanna it, you desire it and your partner has choosen the VSTO brand as a tato' on the shoulder because of it. But if you do not feel so, it's only means that you're walking in the darkness of the Uncustomized Problem and I should save you. [Do I look like a kind of Pope's subsidiary?]

What's the Uncustomized Problem?
Currently you have an Office document, let's say Excel, because you like numbers or to play “Battle-ship”. You want to add some bubbly effects in your document. You want to connect the document against SQL server, grab the data, apply some business rules, and then render the data inside a paragraph or a list. I know, you're laughing such as an Italian that is answering at the cell-phone in Rome [this means loudly]. You figured out that you can already do this and you may have already done it, probably using VBA or building your wonderful ATL object or maybe just through Office System.
Ah & Ah!!. It's my turn and I AM the Italian with the cell-phone now! [actually I really am]
What's about to do the same thing in 5 minutes?
In C# or VB.net though Visual Studio 2005? ** Things are different now! **

Office documents are cool and they are simplifying the way how people read and write information, but they are incapable of expressing themselves as a winform application does; at same time a winform does not own the beauty and the grace of a Word document or the sharpness of an Excel workbook. That's where the Uncustomized Document problem lies. An office document without the power of the .net framework and the help a great VS debugger offers is just a document. Thanks to the Trinity family the problem is solved. VSTO is the cure, the revolution, the new Office world in the developer hands. Woow the last one sounds so cool that I should route it to the marketing guys.

Now, that I cleared the facts, let's introduce the core of what I'm going to talking about... the ServerDocument.