In an ongoing tradition, the Triangle .Net Users Group will be hosting a special December main meeting featuring a number of “Lightning Talks” by local presenters and a pot luck dinner. It’s a great way to get a full dose of technical info while enjoying a fun and festive gathering with your peers in the local .Net community.

sign up to give a talk ...

sign up for a dinner item...

Please help spread the word! I look forward to seeing you there!

NOTE : Meeting is Wednesday December 14, 2011.

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I’ve been blogging for quite a while now, and I’ve been amazed how my posting here have introduced me to many great people, helped others, and resulting in some really interesting opportunities for me. Over the last year and a bit, with the rapid flow of information through twitter and other online resources I’ve slipped out of the habit of frequent blog posts that I’ve previously done and enjoyed.

Starting today I plan to change that.

Now don’t worry, I’m not going to try and make up for lost time with a landslide of new posts today, but I do plan to return to a more consistent routine of posts. If you’re still reading this, thanks for sticking around.

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One week from today, on Saturday November 5th a number of North Carolina software developers will be spending the day at camp… Code Camp. If you’ve never attending a Code Camp, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to learn, network, and be both inspired and motivated to expand your skills. A number of speakers from near and far will be presenting on a variety of topics. To top it off, this event is free thanks to the support of a number of generous organizations.

For more information and to register visit http://codecamp.org.

Posted in Community | TRINUG  | Comments [0] 

After weeks of waiting, enduring silence and rumors, developers finally got their first public look at Windows 8 at Microsoft’s BUILD conference. People here at the conference were pretty excited about what they saw, and I can imagine many, many more watching remotely were also excited, or even relieved to see the details. Having talked to a number of people about their expectations a lot of people were very concerned to learn about the future of the technologies they have invested in both personally learning and financially building into projects. 

For people who were worried, maybe the biggest news for them is that if your application runs under Windows 7 it will continue to run under Windows 8. That being said, we can not expect innovation without change at some point along the way. Windows 8 introduces “Metro style Apps”, a new multi-language, multi-view technology. By multi-language it means that native languages such as C and C++, managed languages like C# and VB.Net, but also JavaScript and have equal access to the Windows (WinRT) APIs to interact with windows. In reference to the views, it allows the use of HTML/CSS with JavaScript and XAML with both C# and C++ applications. The “Metro Style” applications are part of an “immersive”, “touch first”, “no compromise” user experience that spans all aspects of Windows 8.

[slide borrowed from \\Build\  keynote

As you can see in the above diagram, the new “Metro Style” apps run along side the traditional “Desktop Apps”. Again, this means that the app you are working on today will continue to work on Windows 8. In many ways, today marks the begging of a new era in Windows application development. Well that may sound sound a bit outlandish, it’s true. This no application model not only allows a new model for application interactions, it promotes it with a variety of services to let apps communicate with each other and with other devices through the cloud.

Bottom line, Windows 8 is going to be a game changer that creates many exciting opportunities.

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Have you been to the MSDN site lately? I ask because I know that personally when I need to lookup something information related to my development efforts I’ll just search for it, often getting a mix of hits, instead of heading right the “the source” for much of this info. Admittedly, in the past some information had been hard to find on site, but if you haven’t checked it our recently, the MSDN website has undergone some changes.

A quick glance at the site shows a much cleaner looking design, with what seems to be much better organized information. For a fun comparison, here’s what the site looked like a few years ago.

Below the main menu, the site is dividing into three “portals” separating content by Platforms, Tasks, and News.

The Platforms page provides some overview information and easy access to dive further into Desktop, Web, Cloud, and Phone development areas.

For other areas, a quick click on the “All Developer Centers and Hubs” link takes you to a nice site map for all of the major areas. As you continue to drill into topic areas, the trend of better organized information continues, pulling together a variety of documents, videos, links to articles, and other great sources of information.

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Recently at the D9 conference Microsoft demonstrated then next version of Windows.

“Windows 8 is a reimagining of Windows, from the chip to the interface. A Windows 8-based PC is really a new kind of device, one that scales from touch-only small screens through to large screens, with or without a keyboard and mouse. ”

In the demos, Microsoft showed off a some of the new interface and features. This video shows off some of it.

Microsoft also officialy announced a new conference this September called Build Windows where they will be sharing much more information with developers regarding Windows 8. In fact, most requests for additional details about Win 8 generates a “learn more a Build” response.

Since these announcements there has been a lot of speculation by individuals on what this means for current technologies and future development.  While I’ve heard some very interesting interpretations by people, I’ve also heard some things that I feel are completely inaccurate.  However not knowing all of the details myself, I’m not in a position to say what is accurate or not, but would encourage everybody be cautious about what they hear and read based on this early information, and of course…. “Learn more from Build”`

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A team from Microsoft Patterns & Practices have been working to create guidance for building “Modern Web Applications” in conjunction with an advisory group of individuals from the developer community.

“Project Silk provides guidance for building cross-browser web applications with a focus on client-side interactivity. These applications take advantage of the latest web standards like HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript 5 along with modern web technologies such as jQuery, Internet Explorer 9, and ASP.NET MVC3.”

To achieve this, the team is creating a reference application to give them a real world example to build and provide a sample to learn from.

The sample application and related guidance documentation are currently available at http://silk.codeplex.com and are free to download. The latest update was June 3rd, 2010 with Drop 10, and updates will continue to be made as the project continues.

I will be posting more on some specifics of the code and guidance, but wanted to share this initial post.

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Check out this WP7 created by Brandon Foy. If it reaches 200k views Microsoft will air it on TV.

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A number of Microsoft Developer Evangelists at Microsoft have put together a fun coding challenge in conjunction with Windows Azure. The challenge puts your skill and whit against others online via Windows Azure.

“How do you stack up against the coding competition? Play weekly and find out! ”

By using either a free Windows Azure trial account provided (for 3o days) or your own Azure account, you can develop your own player “bot” for the competition. It’s a fun way to learn about Azure and gain some experience publishing an application while at the same time have some fun with coding logic against the other competitors in a game of rock, paper, scissors.

There are a series of webcasts in conjunction to help get our started!

Let’s see if you can knock me out of first place!

http://www.rockpaperazure.com/

Update: Knocked from first place… now to try and get back!

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Recently I ran into a situation where I wanted to host an ASP.NET MVC web application and Silverlight application in Windows Azure. The ASP.NET application provides all of the backend services for the Silverlight application. This was all well and good until I decided to move the Silverlight XAP file from the ClientBin directory of the web application over to Blob Storage so that I could update the XAP file without the need to redeploy the entire site.

That’s when it broke.

When moving a XAP file to a different “site of origin” than the website, there are a number of cross domain issues that are potentially introduced. Tim Heuer has and excellent blog post “Hosting cross-domain Silverlight Applications” in which he details the main concerns and how to address the issues. In my case, it was the “XAP MIME Type” issue causing the problem. When Windows Azure Blob Storage was serving up the XAP file, it was not correctly indicating the “application/x-silverlight-app” MIME type. For security reasons Silverlight checks to see that the content is a valid Silverlight type, in my case not allowing the XAP file to run.

I had tried using a couple of utilities to copy my content into blog storage, which had seemed to work fine for image and video files, but not the XAP file and did not allow me to set the content types manually. [UPDATE: Azure Explorer will allow you to update MIME Types: http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/ ] To resolve the problem, I needed to upload a file to storage and set it’s mime type to “application/x-silverlight-app”. In the end, this is pretty simple to do so I crafted a little utility to properly deploy my XAP file using the following code.

var account = new CloudStorageAccount(storageKeys, true);
var container = account.CreateCloudBlobClient().GetContainerReference("clientbin");
container.CreateIfNotExist();
container.SetPermissions(new BlobContainerPermissions { PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Blob });
 
var blob = container.GetBlobReference(System.IO.Path.GetFileName(fileName));
blob.Properties.ContentType = "application/x-silverlight-app";
blob.UploadFile(fileName);

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If you’re looking at getting up to speed with some Windows Azure training , here are some webcast dates for you to mark down and register for, including the upcoming Firestarter event!

12/09: MSDN Simulcast Event: Windows Azure Firestarter

11/29: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Introduction to Cloud Computing and Windows Azure
12/06: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Windows Azure and Web Roles
12/13: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Worker Roles
01/03: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Working with Messaging and Queues
01/10: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Using Windows Azure Table
01/17: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Diving into BLOB Storage
01/24: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Diagnostics and Service Management
01/31: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: SQL Azure
02/07: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Connecting with AppFabric
02/14: MSDN Webcast: Azure Boot Camp: Cloud Computing Scenarios

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At the Silverlight Firestarter event today in Redmond (And broadcast live around the world) Scott Guthrie kicked off the show with a very exciting look ahead at some of the planned features for Silverlight 5. There were two strong themes to these new features “Premium Media Experiences” and “Business Application Development”.

The enhancements to media include Hardware Decode and presentation of H.264 using GPU support improving performance for lower power devices as well as “Trick Play” capabilities to play videos at different speeds (Up to 2x) with pitch correction. Improved power awareness will keep the screensaver from appearing while video is playing, but also allows the system to sleep when video is paused. Remote control support will also be added to media.

On the “Application” front, features improving text clarity and layout performance and “Fluid” layout capabilities. OpenType support has been enhanced and tracking/leading have been added. Enhancements have also been added for MVVM support and Databinding enhancements.I swear I could here Josh Smith’s excitement all the way in here in NC when he heard that Markup Extensions were being added as well. I think one of the coolest demos of the day was John Papa setting breakpoints in XAML (Yes, in XAML) and having the debugger stop when bindings were hit, providing the ability to step through the binding process and make solving problems easier. A GPU accelerated API was also shown, providing rich 3d visualization capabilities.

If you’re interested, a complete list of future features is available here as well as be sure to check out Scott’s Blog, Pete’s Blog, and Tim’s Blog for the latest info. (For info on the latest release of the WCF Ria Services Toolkit, check out Jeff’s Blog!) The information shared today was a strong indication of the continued commitment Microsoft has to Silverlight, and the exciting opportunities that exist for developers on the web, on devices, and on the desktop with Silverlight!

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