2007 Postings

By Don Burnett at July 08, 2009 09:15
Filed Under: WPF, XAML, Silverlight, netbooks, Multi-Touch, Mix Conference, LINQ, Expression Studio, DRM, Blog, Animation, 2007 Blog Entries

Monday, December 31, 2007

Tips of the Year for 2007 (Speeding up XP and Vista Both)

by Don Burnett

Over the holidays, I went to quite a few stores looking at new hardware and software.. A lot of people at these retail stores by from salesman and give their feedback about product speed and performance to the people they bought their computers from, so I asked what the major complaint that most people were having.. Most of the complaints was that Windows Vista was "slow" in situations that were common..

The over all biggest concerns were file copies and Window refresh and redraw with layered windows.. It kind of surprised me to hear this, but I took what was being as fact. I keep an eye on Microsoft's HOTFIXES so when issues like this spring up I fix these right away. Apparently though a vast number of consumers who buy through the retail chain don't know about these and companies like HP and others don't always suggest people install these until Microsoft decides to issue a service pack. So, as an end of the year, suggestion if you haven't installed the following updates, RUN don't WALK! to install these. You may see some very serious performance boosts.. Some of these are still being tested, so I would just advise you that you might not see these on Windows Update right away..

For Windows XP and Server 2003:

Performance is poor in a WPF-based application in which you have enabled layered windows in Windows XP or in Windows Server 2003

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937106

You may have to use this link to Request the Hotfix (Which Microsoft should just link to, not make people request it.)

Request the HotFix from Microsoft

For Windows Vista:

Performance for a WPF-based program that uses the layered windows feature may be less than expected in Windows Vista

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938660

Request the HotFix from Microsoft for Vista

Other Fixes:

Video performance may suddenly be reduced when certain Windows elements overlap the video window in Windows Vista

File Copy Hotfixes

You experience slow performance on a Windows Vista-based computer after you establish a VPN connection

Multi-GPU Performance Enhancement (do have more than one graphics card?)

Graphics performance can be improved in certain multiple-GPU scenarios on a Windows Vista-based computer

3rd Party FTP Server File Copies

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555564/en-us

VPN file copy performance Issues

You experience slow performance on a Windows Vista-based computer after you establish a VPN connection

Technorati tags: Hotfixes, Layered Windows, WPF, performance, speedup, vista, XP

Friday, December 28, 2007

Phizzpop Design Challenge Chicago- Video Diary

By Don Burnett

During the Chicago Design Challenge I had the pleasure to be asked to come out and help mentor the teams and take a look at the competition first hand. During this time I got some great footage of some of the teams going through their competition preparation. The folks at the time were really doing a lot of hard work.. I also got some footage of the actual event itself and some of the final product.

During the actual event I have footage in here too. Unfortunately during the event itself at the Underground, there was a lot of issues with audio and serious distortion due to the loudness in the actual venue. I unfortunately couldn't adjust very well for that. So my apologies for this up front, but the footage and the quality of the presentations (which I will be reviewing in a later posting) is worth taking a look at..

Double clicking anywhere in the video window below will bring the video full-screen.. Note I am not streaming this video, it's being downloaded via HTTP: buffering due to size constraints and my server availability..

Phizzpop Design Challenge Video Diary- Don Burnett

Attachment: DesignChallengeDiary_0001.wmv

Technorati tags: Phizzpop, Design Challenge, Chicago, Diary, Video

Posted by Don.NET at 1:12 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Labels: Design Challenge Chicago, Phizzpop, PhizzPop Design Challenge, Video Diary

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Seasons Greetings

by Don Burnett

This is probably my last post of the year here, to which I would like to wish everyone a great holiday season and thank you for your readership over the last year. I am planning a great 2008. May your 2008 be the best year ever.. Some things coming up in January, the launch of our pod cast and video cast. We are taking time to make the production values as professional as possible, not just folks sitting around in a room. I have been taking extra time with this due to my video production background, as I want this to shine. We are working with the folks at Screencast.com (and Techsmith) to make this a success. Techsmith is a great Michigan based company focused completely on user experience oriented products and they make the best tools on the market for screen capture and usability testing. If you aren't familiar with Morae, UserVue, SnagIt, or Camtasia Studio then you should investigate their site right now..

Speaking of great blogs and WPF/Silverlight Stefan Wick has a great site for folks developing WPF and Silverlight applications for TabletPC and Ink.. He has a super article on how to render ink and image to a bitmap using WPF. He also made a great Silverlight Holiday Greeting that is so cool that I wanted to give it as my holiday card to you.. He also shows you how you can add it to your own site.

Technorati tags: Screencast.com, TechSmith, WPF, Silverlight, Stefan Wick, TabletPC, Ink, Seasons Greetings

Posted by Don.NET at 8:17 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Labels: screencast.com, Silverlight, TechSmith, wpf

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

"Did you ever dance with the Devil in the Pale Moonlight?"

by Don Burnett

Okay so the quote doesn't really fit with what I am actually writing here, "but I just like the sound of it.."...

Sorry folks I could hardly resist that one after seeing the new Trailer for the Dark Knight. It looks way cool with a Joker done in a way that Nicholson or even Caesar Romero could have never brought out.. It was playing during the really great Will Smith movie "I am Legend".. Which is set in not so future New York.. It was neat seeing the fake billboards in the movie for the Superman/Batman Movie that had a release date of sometime in 2010... Anyone catch that stuff?? The logo looked cool. It had the batman/superman logo from the comic but with the new Superman logo..

"Why so Serious??"

Anyway the recurring theme of tonight's tidbits come from the Moonlight FAQ over at Novell..

Important answers that I am sure everyone want's to know about the Silverlight version for Linux.. This should fill in everyone about how video codecs, etc. will be available for Moonlight when it's released in 2008...

Quoted from their FAQ: "

..How will Moonlight be delivered?

Moonlight will be available as a single download from Novell which will include the browser plugin plus the Silverlight graphics engine and the Mono runtime. The codecs necessary to host Silverlight content on Linux will be available from Microsoft. The Moonlight installer will make obtaining the MSFT codecs a seamless step in the process.

I thought the codecs were Microsoft proprietary technology. How do I get those for Moonlight?

Microsoft will make these codecs freely available for Linux.

How much will Moonlight cost?

Similar to Silverlight on Windows, Moonlight will be freely available for all supported platforms.

When will Moonlight be available?

Moonlight version 1.0 will be available at the beginning of 2008.

Will Moonlight be feature compatible with Silverlight on Windows?

Yes.

Can I use Microsoft's Silverlight development tools to build Moonlight applications?

Yes

Will Moonlight be open source?

The Moonlight browser plug-in, the graphics engine and Mono runtime which will be available from Novell are open source components. The necessary audio and video codecs are proprietary components.

How are Microsoft and Novell collaborating to provide Moonlight?

This collaboration between Microsoft and Novell is a formal engineering development program. Novell is bringing the .NET-based Silverlight framework to Mono, an open source framework for running .NET applications on multiple platforms including Linux. Microsoft is providing a version of the necessary codecs for Linux.

Will Moonlight be available for Linux distributions other than Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop?

Yes, Moonlight will be designed to run on most Linux distributions, on any platform that Mono supports.

Why is Moonlight necessary when Flash already runs on Linux?

Moonlight provides users and developers of rich media another platform for delivering content. Moonlight provides users additional choice when creating content or viewing web-based rich media content.

Does this mean that Microsoft is officially endorsing Mono as an acceptable framework for running .NET applications on Linux?

We are focused on enabling developers and customers to run Silverlight applications on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems. Beyond this collaboration with Novell on the Moonlight project, Microsoft currently does not have plans to endorse Mono broadly...

Technorati tags: Silverlight, Moonlight Plug-in, Linux, Novell

Bah Humbug, Vista

By Don Burnett

Well I was very curious to how well Vista is doing over the holidays. So I decided to stake out my local Best Buy and Circuit City Retailers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I stood around for a while looking at hardware while a number of first time computer buyers. Everyone I saw there was impressed with the wide array of hardware from many companies.. However two out of five (unscientific numbers) had a question to ask.. I will walk you through what I heard..

Salesman: "Hi folks can I help you find anything today..."

Customer:" Well I would like to find a new computer, and I really like the hardware over here... But I do have one question can I get this without Vista but with XP. I hear from my friends it's slow and incompatible and has problems and I don't want it.."

Salesman:" Well the OS is new, it's less than six months old, it does have some problems but it is really nice. Even XP had problems when it came out three to four years ago, it's no worse than that was back then. So give it some time, but yes to answer your question THIS model's manufacturer has a downgrade program so you can get Windows XP still for it"..

Hearing this rather frequently in two stores was rather alarming.. Could this many people really have questions about the reliability of Vista. So when I talked to the sales folk and asked them, the general consensus is you can't easily fight perceptions about these kinds of issues very easily. You can "acknowledge perceived issues" and offset that. Some of them took the approach to say that Vista has problems with old hardware, but the new hardware we want to sell you is completely supported and it is not an issue at all with new machines because they are fast enough and "Designed for Vista"...

However, this perception issue is something that really needs to be turned around in people's minds. It is more widespread than I first thought it was. People hear things from others and word of mouth isn't working in Vista's favor this holiday season. However the same sales guys made a point to tell me that they had a bunch of first-time computer buyers to buy Vista and totally loved it. It was their first experience with computers and after buying it they had a very incredibly favorable response..

Macs, Parallels, and Vista, Oh My!

by Don Burnett

Well there are a few things amusing about the Apple Mac community. Most of it has to do with how they feel about PC's and Windows, and other operating systems. If you listen to the overall theme from Apple, with their Mac Vs. PC ads you'd believe that no one owning a Mac ever wants to touch Windows or needs to do interoperability with other platforms. Well, I have owned Classic Macs in the past as well as currently owning an Intel Leopard Mac, along with many Windows machines in the past. I have done development on QuickTime and Photoshop on the Mac for folks like Disney, Universal, and SegaSoft in the past.. So believe me I have covered the gamut of development. Having said that I like Apple's past and current work.

I use Windows machines too. I find the interface more sophisticated and customizable on Windows, but that's my own opinion. What I like about Macs is that they are very easy to use and work with and it's great for non-technologists. But in the current situation of things (even with Leopard and Vista) they both approach parity for ease of use and capabilities. There isn't one with a big edge over the other. I find many people not into "technology" like the Mac because they can get things done faster and approach people without a great deal of computer knowledge in a very easy to use way. Even though I really do like the "Mac vs PC" ads because they are witty, I don't find them very insightful or really say why it's better to use a Mac than a PC. Both platforms have very mature software for specific tasks. One really isn't that much easier to use than the other these days. But that's a perception issue that the individual will find.

I saw this video up on VisitMix.com and just had to respond, because I see it every day with designers, because they have got it right, they have merged the best together into one box and are using it..

Vista on Macintosh at IdentityMine

So expanding on the article there... What's attracting PC users to Macs these days, certainly not Mr. Jobs advertising. I asked a bunch of designers what appeals to them about having Apple hardware.. They told me the following:

It's the best of both worlds, all Mac's are Intel designed hardware with great performance.
They can run both Vista and OS X on the same hardware. The OS X Leopard disc includes drivers with BootCamp for Windows Vista. So you can run it natively or in a virtual machine with a product like VMWARE or Parallels.
The performance tracking under Vista gives the Mac hardware on a Mac Pro a "4.8" which is almost top of the line performance that you can get in Windows..

Here are some current Mac facts that the Mac community doesn't like to talk about but it's true...

According to Marketshare.Hitslink.com the marketshare of Mac's look like this (those hitting the Internet and looking at websites)..

Current Macs make up about 3.59% of the Internet consuming users, while dropping drastically to 3.22 is the older PowerPC chip based Macs. That seems to indicate people are going out and buying new Mac Intel machines quite a bit and the population of Intel Macs have caught up with and surpassed the PPC Macs of the past.. Note, just in browser usage it seems Vista is doing quite a bit better there than folks are giving it credit for a 9.1 percent..

This really speaks to the fact that every time I go do a design forum or conference I see many Mac laptops running Vista along with Mac OS. Someone told me, though I don't remember who that Mac hardware folks are the biggest group buying Windows Vista Ultimate retail copies. I don't doubt this at all.. Windows is so big, most Mac folks can't ignore it because of work or whatever reason, even if it's not the choice they use at home for themselves.

I am sure I will get some computer religious Mac Hack out there to be upset by this and reply to the information I am presenting here and tell me it's the Mac, but what is the Mac anymore it's just and OS like Windows, the hardware will basically run any OS out there you want.

It's really not my intent here to be smug, or to try to say "Windows is Better", but honestly this is what's going on in the market, people are en mass buying Apple hardware and putting Windows on it to run alongside OSX to get what they are required done for work or some other reason. Apple has created one of the best hardware compatible Windows systems ever, in addition to being able to run Mac OS (and Linux, and AROS, etc..). If you want a great hardware solution that's going to do what you need it to both on Apple and Microsoft platforms, go out and buy the Apple machine. You really can't get better price performance.

There might also be something to the fact that the "speed and performance" improvements may have something to do with their BIOS which isn't a legacy thing, like most PC hardware makers use. Intel also worked with Apple to provide a top of the line performance and design which completely shows through, no matter your OS of choice.. In my opinion if I was going out for performance, over the other PC hardware makers for a Vista machine, it would be hands down to Apple at the moment. Sure you have PC makers mimicking the design shapes of machines out there, but it's all about the overall design and how everything works together. In hardware Apple really has that down.

Unlike one of the commenter's on that VisitMix blog article who accused this of being "anti-mac", it's not. I think both articles, his and mine are telling people to go out and buy Mac hardware and explaining why people are doing it to run Windows and Mac.. It's actually a tribute to the Mac's hardware functionality. Apple gives you Windows support on Mac for a reason, and I expect that it will totally merge these platforms eco-systems in very new ways (Especially seeing Vista programs running along side Mac ones on the same desktop).

The story is a good one, because you finally don't have to "CHOOSE", consumers are winning this one with the melding of these to environments into possible one better one together.. It certainly makes the job easier for designers and is a better story if you have to work with both or even *WANT* to.. Which personally works for me..

If I were a zealot Mac user, I would consider the fact that the hardware wars are OVER.. It's not about what OS you run or what hardware really now (beyond the performance question, it's all the same hardware). I think the smart companies are realizing that most people's computer experiences with software are now in the web browser. It's what you have there cross platform is going to tell you who wins the hearts and the minds of the public. I think Silverlight for Mac and PC is one of those technologies..So it's not the OS but the browser that has become the center of the universe for most people now.

Technorati tags: Designers, Mac, IntelMac, Statistics, Vista, Ownership

Monday, December 17, 2007

Yahoo Messenger Vista- Quick Notes

by Don Burnett

If you are installing Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista and getting the message that ACTIVE MOVIE can't find component or can't find "ad2mpegin.dll" and also telling you that reinstalling the application might solve the problem, well it won't.. I got really frustrated by this, and hadn't been recommending people install this application. Until I realized Yahoo! was not the problem, Adobe was!

Here's the answer to the problem.. It seems you might get this message if you have an older version of Adobe Premiere Elements installed on your machine. If this is the case the answer is to simply copy the ad2mpegin.dll and ad2mcmpgdec.dll files from your Adobe Premiere Elements folder over to the Yahoo Messenger for Vista Folder (if you are on Vista x64 beware of the Program Files and Program Files (x86) pathing). Then your problem will be solved and Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista will perform properly..

I figured out this fix by researching what installs ad2mpegin.dll and it's Adobe Premiere Elements. Yahoo! Messenger isn't the only program that has a problem with this.. Adobe mentions this on their site, though I doubt the Yahoo! team knows about this yet, considering Messenger for Vista is still in testing.. This is another reason I am highly considering removing my purchased copy of Premiere Elements from my machine. I rarely use it anyway, and it's been a constant source of problems with compatibility with other software. Somehow considering who makes this, I am not surprised by this development at all

Technorati tags: Yahoo Messenger for Vista, Bug, Adobe Premiere Elements

Labels: Adobe, Premiere Elements

2007: The Year In Review, 2008: The Year to Come

by Don Burnett

I read many blogs, one of my favorites is by Aral Balkan. He keeps me up with what's going on in the Adobe community and also is working on a data exchange format called SWX for Flash and other technologies including PHP and others that allows you to pass complex data objects between server and client. At the end of year we all blog about predictions for the year ahead. His blog states "In my predictions for 2008, I talked about how we will be seeing more RIAs in 2008 -- both from Adobe and third parties -- how Silverlight is not going to have a widespread impact".

I have a very hard time not looking back at 2007 for myself and seeing the impact first hand. Silverlight is only in it's infancy. It isn't to version 9.0 like Adobe Flash is. I like Flash, I have used it on website designs ever since the days it was something called FutureSplash Animator. During that time FutureSplash was working with Microsoft to make it one of the first ActiveX controls for Internet Explorer 4.0. I was also there for ActionScript 1.0... and so forth.. Don't get me wrong I love Flash, but it's not the end-all multimedia plug-in. It fits the needs of many people but it's not a one-size fits all proposition.

I only need to look back some to look ahead...

Silverlight has been around for about nine months, before that it was called WPF/E.. What has nine months brought us... Well lets take a look at some Silverlight 1.0 applications..

A new world of video for the web and unparalleled functionality...

SilverlightTV Demo (Count em 9 Picture-in Picture Video sources)

Video Puzzles in 720p HD

Video Overlay for Advertising

Dynamic Languages running cross platform (with Silverlight 2.0, still in development) with Intellisense...

Virtual Earth Viewer

Video Editing from inside a Web Browser (Metaliq's Top Banana)

I look at these examples and I find myself in saying wow! I don't think we would have ever seen things like this a year ago, especially inside a web browser.. It has become a platform unto itself, running independently of any operating system, but running in many (including Safari and the Apple Macintosh).

But it's not just these examples, we see many being used in real life. Microsoft is busy documenting these world-wide and you can see them at Silverlight.net.. Before Silverlight the web had no HD video (even from those other guys out there). Let's face it the prevailing multimedia plug-in (when Silverlight came along) had no reason to improve or get better and only saw gradual UI/Animation/Video improvements. The web browser has become the center of life now for many users and their applications. Even with Silverlight being so new, the technology reflects that now mostly centrist view that many people have.

Building on that, how about a full "You Tube" style video site sample so you can build your own, with full media encoding? Thank you Vertigo..

The fact is Silverlight has had a very huge impact on the web already. If you want to see more go to Silverlight.net. In the showcase right now there are more than 94 different applications from over 30 countries profiled. If that's not impact, You've got me..

As far as it goes for My predictions for 2008, a new improved 2.0 with much of the functionality already available to Windows applications (WPF), and a great integration story with browsers and platforms..

One of the things people are predicting for 2008 is advances in 3D. Silverlight at the moment doesn't include it's own in-built3D engine, much like Adobe Flash. Mostly this is due to the need for hardware accelerated 3D but no way to know this is available because it runs in the browser and just what capabilities it might have (like shader technology and hardware acceleration).

That doesn't mean you can't run a Windows Application with Accelerated 3D right now from an IE browser window. The only caveat, is this isn't cross-platform like Silverlight and you must be on a Windows OS to view. But exciting as well, is the fact that, even with those limitations people are doing some great no-install applications. Including this one from a Japanese Zoo, which is an incredible 3D multimedia learning experience.

http://asahiyamazoo.xbap

So if you think Silverlight isn't making a serious impact, you only have to look at what's really going on to see that 2007 has been a great year for the technology and 2008 is going to be an even greater year, especially with .NET 3.5's release and Silverlight 2.0's impending release which adds the power of .Net applications to the "mix".. It's been an exciting year for innovation and there will be even more this next year..

Technorati tags: Year in Review, Silverlight, WPF, Impact

Posted by Don.NET at 12:48 AM 1 comments Links to this post

Labels: Silverlight, wpf, WPF (XBAP), XBAP, Year In Review

Sunday, December 16, 2007

The latest Addition to My Extended Family..

By Don Burnett

Sorry for the interruption here in regular content, but I am so excited and I needed to share.. I couldn't help but feel really happy for my cousins Teresa and Ray up in Ontario. They are having a beautiful baby boy.. This is the latest in 3D Imaging from GE...

Technorati tags: Teresa and Ray, 3D Imaging, my newest family member, still developing

Video.Show updated for Visual Studio 2008

By Don Burnett

Vertigo has been doing some excellent reference quality samples for both the Silverlight and WPF communities lately proving that you can create very professional applications and websites with not a lot of work. One of the most exciting reference web applications I have seen in a very long time is their Video.Show application. It supports end-to-end functionality and the code is very well written and is a great example of how you can create a "videos" type site, in the spirit of YouTube.com. Now having said that this sample doesn't support the sheer volume of videos that YouTube.com does every day, but it will get you on your way to your own video site.

You can download and install the source on CodePlex and then start delving into all the great functionality this site offers. One of the most exciting features about this site is that the site will let you encode videos using Expression Encoder for the site (if it's installed on your webserver).

It supports uploading videos to the Live Silverlight streaming site..

If you are trying to build such a site for yourself it gives you some great how-to code samples, including:

Video is hosting at Silverlight Streaming, which gives you 4GB storage and 700 Kbps bandwidth via Microsoft's worldwide Content Delivery Network
How to add user comments to the site that are time-based and are synchronized with video playback
Demonstrates how to a data layer built using Linq To Sql
Broad media format support (avi,mp4,asf,mpeg,dvr-ms,mpg,m2v,ts,m4v,vob,mov, and wmv) via Expression Encoder. That means you can upload quicktime movies, MPeg, DVD assets, and many more.
It will show you how to leverage the AJAX Control Toolkit to add animations and interactivity.
Encoding properties are configurable via standard Expression Encoder job files. This means you have total control of videos size and quality.
How to create a Cross broswer (IE 6 and 7, Firefox 2, and Safari 3) application.
It's Open Source!!! And it will show you how to create a webservice based architecture.

Technorati tags: Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight Streaming Service for video hosting, Silverlight Streaming integration via REST API, Expression Encoder, AJAX Control Toolkit, Visual Studio 2008, Packaging API (for Zip file creation), ASP.NET / .NET 3.5, Linq To Sql

Vertigo Rocks with Slide.Show for Silverlight

by Don Burnett

Vertigo is a great development firm they keep coming out with great application reference samples and code for the WPF and Silverlight Community.. In the past they have done such very work as Family.show for WPF (a genealogy program) and Video.show (a "mini" YouTube style site for Silverlight that takes advantage of Expression Media Encoder on the server-side).. The Slide.Show control would be great for professional photographers looking to show of their high quality pictures on a Silverlight based website.

They have recently release version 1.1 of their Slide.Show Silverlight "control" for doing great commercial quality slide shows with Silverlight. They have also made this release open source and available for download on Codeplex.

Technorati tags: Family.Show, Vertigo, Silverlight, Silverlight Controls, Video.show, Slide.show

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Design Challenge Chicago a Hit!

by Don Burnett

Over at CreativePro.com Shellie Hall has more great coverage of the Chicago Design Challenge. I had the pleasure of meeting Shellie at the Challenge and she did a very nice job with interviews and contest coverage. CreativePro is a great Site/Magazine for the creative talent. Her coverage was very complete and she is really a fun host and a total sweetheart. Rumor has it that yours truly might even been in some of the footage she has up on YouTube (and it didn't break her camera!).

Technorati tags: Chicago, Design Challenge, Phizzpop, CreativePro

Posted by Don.NET at 1:22 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Silverlight on the Apple Mac- The Story Continues

by Don Burnett

Since the 1.0 version of Silverlight has shipped on the Apple Mac platform, it has become a very popular plug-in, not just with users but with third party developers. It's hard not to see the potential for the plug-in's great cross platform video solution Silverlight presents. Sure it's new, and there are a few things they are still working out on it, but for most people it's a trooper. The Mac community has been clamoring for a way to natively on OS X encode Silverlight Video and output it directly on the Mac, especially in broadcast arenas. The Apple platform is famous for it's digital video solutions in QuickTime and Final Cut Pro is one of the most used professional editing tools out there.. Having said that, to create Silverlight video, until now you could only go part of the way, producing a WMV output file. To create Silverlight video then you'd have to import video into Expression Media Encoder (either .MOV (QuickTime) or .WMVs). That still left no native way of producing Silverlight video natively in OS X until now..

Enter Flip4Mac's Silverlight Support..

Flip4Mac makes a set of well known Components for Quicktime that allow it to play and manipulate Windows Media Video and Audio formats. The latest beta supports encoding to Silverlight directly and will add the well known media player and media skins that are available with Expression Media Encoder. This is exciting news for those looking to create Silverlight Video and not having access to a Windows box to do it.

Check out the new support today at Flip4Mac.com right now..

Technorati tags: Flip4Mac, Native Silverlight Encoding, WMV components for the Mac, OSX, Silverlight Video

Labels: expression, Expression Media, Expression Studio, Mac, media element, Moonlight, Moonlight Plug-in, podcast, Rich Interactive Applications, Rich Internet Application, rich user experience, Silverlight, Silverlight 1.0 GOLD, Silverlight Controls, Silverlight1.0, xaml, XAML and Silverlight Export. Quality 3D now on Silverlight.

Monday, December 10, 2007

'Tis the season for Great Contests and Prizes in the WPF Community

By Don Burnett

I received a notice about a great contest for creating WPF financial applications. It sounds like a superb opportunity to show off your skills and win some great prizes, including a trip to New York City.... Everyone (by the way) have a great holiday season! I look forward (as you) to a bright and shiny and peaceful new year.. If you are a great WPF developer and really want to show off your skills this is another great opportunity to do so.

Here's the Press Release verbatim.. Dig in folks (You know you want to enter this one).. and thanks to Katie Meenan for the scoop on this.. I will be following this one closely...

Press Release:

MEDIA ALERT

Contact:

Metia Inc.

Sheryl Lee / Tinne Teugels

Tel: +1 917 320 6462/ 6458

Email: sheryl.lee@metia.com or tinne@metia.com

LAB49 LAUNCHES WPF IN FINANCE INNOVATION CONTEST

NEW YORK, December 1, 2007

What: Lab49, a consulting firm that specializes in building advanced technology applications for the financial services industry, is hosting a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Contest to find developers capable of delivering revolutionary applications for the financial services industry. Using Microsoft WPF, contest participants are challenged to develop applications showcasing new and original ways to present and interact with financial data. With WPF luminaries Josh Smith, Rob Relyea and Charles Petzold serving as judges, participants will be judged on the originality of their application, the quality of the code, performance, appearance, and overall functionality.

Why: WPF provides a next-generation development platform for graphical user interfaces that incorporates two and three dimensional graphics and animations, real-time data feeds and rich user interaction. As an early adopter of WPF, Lab49 has been prototyping and applying Microsoft’s WPF to financial applications since its introduction. It was the first to create a prototype trading system entirely in WPF and the first to launch a dedicated Microsoft WPF development practice for the financial services industry.

Where: Contestants can find additional information and register at: http://wpfcontest.lab49.com.

When: The deadline for early acceptance is February 14, 2008. Deadline for final submissions is February 29, 2008.

The three finalists will be contacted the first week in March. On March 12, 2008 the finalists will appear at the Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference where the winner will be announced and prizes will be presented.

Prizes: The contest will give out over $15,000 in prizes. The grand prize winner will receive two nights accommodation in New York City for Microsoft's Financial Services Developer Conference, where the winner will be announced and the winning application demonstrated. They will also take home the Ultimate WPF Developer's Machine sponsored by Alienware. Along with these prizes comes an acknowledgement in WindowsFS Magazine as a premier WPF Developer and a WPF t-shirt signed by the product team at Microsoft.

Additionally, the top three finalists will win an AMD ATI FireMV Workstation Graphics Accelerator, ComponentOne Studio Enterprise 2007, Expression Studio, Visual Studio 2008, Xbox360 Elite with games, Vista Ultimate, and a Zune.

The first 25 applicants will receive a Corsair Flash Padlock, a subscription to WindowsFS Magazine, a ComponentOne t-shirt, three books from Microsoft press, and coupons for Xceed DataGrid for WPF.

For a detailed list go to http://wpfcontest.lab49.com

Who: Lab49 is a consulting firm that specializes in building applications for global financial institutions. Lab49's services range from design and deployment of next-generation trading systems to innovative risk aggregation and reporting systems to entirely new lines of business created through customer-facing technology.

Lab49, founded in 2002, serves leading global investments banks, hedge funds and mortgage institutions and has completed custom software engagements in equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, portfolio management, and real-time risk information delivery systems. Lab49 is the financial services division of Corpus, Inc., a global information technology solutions provider with numerous Fortune 50 clients in the Media & Entertainment, Telecommunications, and Banking & Financial Services verticals. Visit http://www.lab49.com and http://blog.lab49.com.

The contest is supported by, Microsoft, Alienware, AMD, ComponentOne, Corsair, FactSet, Windows in Financial Services, and Xceed.

Technorati tags: WPF in Finance Contest, WPF, NYC, Lab49, PRIZES, CONTEST

Sunday, December 9, 2007

The Sunday Night News

by Don Burnett

And the Chicago winner is... Clarity Consulting..

Well this has been a crazy busy week for me. I spent Sunday through Thursday at the Chicago Phizzpop Design Challenge, Mentoring and documenting the event? So where's the content you ask? It's in the pipeline. Instead of the usual blogging I decided to do it in video diary form. Since all of the other events aren't getting exactly the same level of coverage, I have decided to do the coverage of the Chicago Challenge in video diary form, to give you some perspective on how hard the teams worked. This was a bit of a challenge at first because a few of the teams decided to work off-site, making covering them and the other contestants (and giving the same level of coverage impossible). I wanted to document the event so the average person could follow the competition from start to finish and get an idea of how the contestants would be working from the training days to the actual competition hours before the first person ever entered the doors at the Underground event.

What can you learn from doing this? Well a whole lot! Not just how the teams did a great job under tremendous working pressure, but how they scaled their presentations to fit the working knowledge they had of the technology and how they could fit such a comprehensive challenge into one short presentation. I would like to say that each and every team did a tremendous job, on a very large and difficult set of parameters set forth by the challenge. I will be profiling three of the teams who were on-site including Clarity Consulting.

It was obvious those at home with the Microsoft toolset and who had previous exposure found the workflow easier and more effective to get their designs completed and out the door. Those that experienced the "learning curve" associated with being new to these tools also seemed to find they had more flexibility in the both the way they worked and the many options they had to approach their problems from different directions.

I asked the teams what they liked about the tools and for a "first generation product" most of them found the Expression Studio (and Blend specifically) very easy to work with after they learned about ordering of timelines and events. The most prevalent comment I got while talking to the teams a couple of days in to their work was they really felt the new workflow between their developers and designers/artists extremely easy and after a few iterations of work they realized that they weren't going to have the "work collisions" they had using other products for design and development.

Look for the video diary up on Phizzpop.com very soon. I am busy editing the content and encoding it (with Expression Media Encoder of course) and the content will be up very very soon. I am sorting through about 4 gigs of 720p HD footage to find the best highlights and tell the story. I expect some pictures up before the actual video.

Technorati tags: Phizzpop, Design Challege, Chicago, Video Diary, Winner is Clarity Consulting

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Design Challenge Day 2

By Don Burnett

Well all of the teams today were extremely busy, each has some very creative and different approaches to the problem they were assigned. I am waiting until the challenge is over to reveal the problem they were assigned. It's nice to see so many very talented people working so hard on the solution. The solutions and judging will be Wednesday night at the Underground, here in beautiful Chicago. The weather is crisp this time of the year.

The teams are busy at work, and we'll be lucky enough tomorrow evening to celebrate their great work. I have to say the dedication of the teams are far and above what I expected to see.. More news as it happens..

The questions coming out of the competition are interesting.. Here's a random sampling..

Can you change the z-order and layer a web browser using a <winformshost> and a web browser control in WPF? In other words WPF content on top of a hosted browser control..

Simple answer no, the Winforms controls always gets rendered atop WPF and there is no layering. However you can use the <FRAME> control to render out HTML and a web page in WPF and attempt some work around though no layering..

By contrast in Silverlight, you can layer XAML ontop of HTML and combine the two in the web browser..

If you want to check out some good examples of people playing with <winformshost>, <frames> and HTML check out these blog entries..

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2007/08/22/Z_2D00_Order-hack-for-WinForms-interop-controls-in-WPF.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2006/06/13/Controlling-zOrder-using-the-ZIndex-Property.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/llobo/archive/2007/02/26/capturing-frame-content.aspx

http://learnwpf.com/Posts/Post.aspx?postId=7d0f2ec0-6a1e-46ca-88ce-7e75f8457d63

http://blog.donburnett.com/2007/05/enterprise-wpf-and-goodies_21.html

More news upcoming...

Technorati tags: Design Challenge Day 2, Teams, Innovation, Creativity, Phizzpop

Sunday, December 2, 2007

The PhizzPop Design Challenge has arrived in Chicago

by Don Burnett

I have arrived today in Chicago for the Phizzpop.com Design Challenge. I am staying at the luxurious Hotel Sax next to the House of Blues. It's spacious and very comfortable. So why travel all the way from Michigan to Chicago? Well quite an exciting event is happening this week. Microsoft is holding the Chicago Edition of the Phizzpop Design Challenge. What's so exciting about this event? Microsoft is getting the best of the best designers together for a competition. This event is exciting because hopefully people will walk away from it with a whole new outlook in solving design challenges and issues in a limited amount of time. A lot of spectators at the competition are expected to be attending the event as well. It's not often you get the kind of talent in the room that Microsoft is bringing to the table for this event. The event will be held this coming Wednesday at Chicago's swanky The Underground nightclub. The winners of Wednesday's regional event will go on to national competition at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX.

If you haven't heard about South by Southwest, it's held this year March 7-11th. The interactive conference celebrates the creativity and passion behind the coolest new media technologies. In addition to panel sessions that cover everything from web design to bootstrapping to social networks, attendees make new business connections at the three-day Trade Show & Exhibition. The newest element of the event is ScreenBurn, which adds specific gaming industry programming as well as a two-day Arcade to the mix.

The event has grown over time, it also includes the SXSW MUSIC AND MEDIA CONFERENCE , which showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over fifty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW Trade Show and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature. The SXSW FILM CONFERENCE AND FESTIVAL emphasizes all aspects of the art and business of independent filmmaking. The Festival has gained international acclaim for the quality of its programming with a special focus on emerging talents who benefit from having their films in the company of the cinematic greats whose work is regularly presented.

Meet the Challengers

I hope this week to add a new feature to this blog and bring video blogging to document the competition first hand and interview some of the folks competing in the Design Challenge, plus a take an "insider" look at the competition. This wouldn't be possible without the full cooperation of Microsoft (and in particular Chris Bernard) for allowing me in to take an in-depth look at what's going on. Thanks so much to Microsoft for allowing me such an "all-access" pass to the event. Hopefully I can bring you this same kind of look. So keep a close eye to this blog and Phizzpop.com. This week as news happens, I will be posting it to Phizzpop, along with interviews and a action-to-action play-by-play of the event..

Technorati tags: PhizzPop Design Challenge, Competition, Design, Silverlight, WPF, Phizzpop.com

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Lang.NET Symposium 2008 is Coming..

by Don Burnett

Lang .NET is a forum for discussion of programming languages, managed execution environments, compilers, multi-language libraries, and integrated development environments. It provides an excellent opportunity for programming language implementers and researchers from both industry and academia to meet and share their knowledge, experience, and suggestions for future research and development in the area of programming languages.

Lang.NET 2008 will be held from January 28 - 30 on the Microsoft corporate campus in Redmond.

The conference program will focus on the pragmatics and experience of designing languages, implementing compilers, and building language tools that target either native or managed execution platforms, such as the DLR, .NET CLR and other implementations of the ECMA CLI. That is, on how to get real programming tools into the hands of real programmers to solve real problems, and on how researchers and practitioners can learn from each other to make this happen.

If you are a language designer, compiler writer, or tool builder in industry or academia, Lang.NET 2008 is a unique opportunity to directly interact with the architects of Microsoft language platforms. Microsoft language technologist will be very active participants in the conference but at least 50% of the program is reserved for presentations by non-Microsoft employees. Each day is concluded with a panel debate. In the evenings there will be ample opportunity for networking during the social events and dinners.

Technorati tags: Lang.NET 2008 Symposium, .Net Languages, Language Conference, Microsoft

Silverlight Does Love Visual Studio Express 2008 After All...

By Don Burnett

Dan Fernandez was extremely nice enough to respond to my blog posting.. Silverlight Tools Alpha's Requirements state Visual Studio Standard as it's lowest requirement.. So it was nice to hear from Dan who had this to say..

"My team owns Visual Studio Express and we are definitely adding Silverlight support by summer of next year for Silverlight 2.0 (1.1 was just renamed to 2.0).
See the 5th comment on my blog post on this: http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/11/19/top-15-things-to-love-about-visual-studio-2008-express.aspx

Cheers,
Dan Fernandez
Lead Product Manager
Non-Professional Tools"

Thanks Dan for the clarification, it's nice to hear the cost of getting into Silverlight development will be minimal for first time developers and students..

Technorati tags: Silverlight 2.0, Silverlight Tools, Visual Studio Express 2008

Friday, November 30, 2007

OS 4 for Classic Commodore-Amiga Hardware Ships

by Donald Burnett

Well some people thought it would never happen, but this ad showed up and software sellers are taking orders.. Apparently.. Commodore-Amiga machines are getting an updated OS..

Technorati tags: Classic Amiga gets OS 4.0, Acube, Hyperion Entertainment

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Silverlight 2.0 is coming..

by Don Burnett

Over at Scott Guthrie's Blog, Scott talks about the technology roadmap and what's coming ahead for a bunch of Microsoft technologies, including Silverlight 2.0 (1.1 + more features than you can count = 2.0)... ASP.NET Extensions Release and IIS 7...

Here's what Scott had to say about Silverlight 2.0 and the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Release.... Hold onto your jaw if it's loose because this is a huge functional upgrade. Needless to say I am excited..

-Don

Quote from Scott's Blog:

"ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Release

VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 include a ton of new features for ASP.NET development. We are planning to deliver even more ASP.NET functionality next year with a "ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions" release. The first public preview of this will be available for download next week on the web.

Next week's ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions preview release will include:

ASP.NET MVC: This model view controller (MVC) framework for ASP.NET provides a structured model that enables a clear separation of concerns within web applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and more control over the HTML that is emitted from them. You can learn more about it from Part 1 of my ASP.NET MVC Tutorial series. I'm hoping to find time this weekend to write and post Part 2 of the series.

ASP.NET AJAX Improvements: New ASP.NET AJAX features in the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release will include better browser history support (back/forward button integration, and server-side history management support via a new <asp:history> server control), improved AJAX content linking support with permalinks, and additional JavaScript library improvements.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support: The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release will deliver new features that enable faster creation of data driven web sites. It provides a rich scaffolding framework, and enables rapid data driven site development using both ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET Silverlight Support: With the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release we'll deliver support for easily integrating Silverlight within your ASP.NET applications. Included will be new controls that make it easy to integrate Silverlight video/media and interactive content within your sites.

ADO.NET Data Services: In parallel with the ASP.NET Extensions release we will also be releasing the ADO.NET Entity Framework. This provides a new modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information. We will also be shipping a new set of data services (codename "Astoria") that make it easy to expose REST based API endpoints from within your ASP.NET applications.

Silverlight 2.0 Release

Two months ago we shipped Silverlight 1.0 for Mac and Windows, and announced our plans to deliver Silverlight on Linux. Silverlight 1.0 is focused on enabling rich media scenarios in a browser, and supports a JavaScript/AJAX programming model.

Next year we will be releasing a major update of Silverlight that focuses on enabling rich Internet applications. This release will include a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and will enable a rich .NET development platform in the browser. Earlier this year we shipped an early Alpha containing some of the basic functionality of the release. Our next public preview will add considerably to this feature set. Some of the new .NET specific features in the next public Silverlight preview will include:

WPF UI Framework: The current Silverlight Alpha release only includes basic controls support and a managed API for UI drawing. The next public Silverlight preview will add support for the higher level features of the WPF UI framework. These include: the extensible control framework model, layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, and control template and skinning support. The WPF UI Framework features in Silverlight will be a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in last week's .NET Framework 3.5 release.

Rich Controls: Silverlight will deliver a rich set of controls that make building Rich Internet Applications much easier. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for core form controls (textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc), built-in layout management controls (StackPanel, Grid, etc), common functionality controls (TabControl, Slider, ScrollViewer, ProgressBar, etc) and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, etc).

Rich Networking Support: Silverlight will deliver rich networking support. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for REST, POX, RSS, and WS* communication. It will also add support for cross domain network access (so that Silverlight clients can access resources and data from any trusted source on the web).

Rich Base Class Library Support: Silverlight will include a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). The next Silverlight preview release will also add built-in support for LINQ to XML and richer HTML DOM API integration.

Previously we've been referring to this .NET-enabled Silverlight release as "Silverlight V1.1". After stepping back and looking at all the new features in it (the above list is only a subset - there are many more we aren't sharing yet), we've realized that calling it a point release doesn't really reflect the true nature of it. Consequently we have decided to change the name and refer to it as "Silverlight V2.0" going forward.

We will be releasing a Beta of Silverlight 2.0 in Q1 of 2008. This Beta will support a Go-Live license that enables developers to begin building and deploying Silverlight 2.0 applications.

We will also be releasing a free Visual Studio 2008 tools update that provides great Silverlight 2.0 tools support within Visual Studio 2008, and enables developers to easily build Silverlight applications using any .NET language. We will be supporting Silverlight development with both the Visual Studio 2008 Standard/Professional products, as well as with the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions.

I'm going to be starting a new blog tutorial series in a few weeks that discusses how to build Silverlight 2.0 applications, and show off the new features in more depth. Stay tuned for more details soon."

Technorati tags: ASP.NET 3.5 extensions release, Silverlight 2.0, Visual Studio 2008 tools add-ons

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Visual Studio 2008 Silverlight 1.1 Tools Ship!- No Love for Visual Studio Express 2008

by Don Burnett

Well just when you thought it might be safe to uninstall that beta 2 of Visual Studio. Microsoft has shipped Visual Studio 2008, including Standard, Pro, and Express editions. Microsoft also has shipped Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008..

It gives you the following functionality..

VB and C# project templates for Silverlight 1.1 development

Website item templates for Silverlight 1.0 development with javascript

XAML markup editing with colorization and intellisense

Intellisense against XAML elements in VB and C# code-behind files

Consumption of Silverlight 1.1 components inside Web Application and Website projects

Ability to create Web Services references in a VB and C# Silverlight component

Project compatibility with Expression Blend to enable developers and designers to collaborate on Silverlight projects

There is one caveat to this whole scenario though, if you are a beginning programmer and are using the Express Editions of Visual Studio 2008, then Microsoft is leaving you out in the cold for Silverlight development (well not quite! But close).. They have decided that the lowest version of Visual Studio that you can install Silverlight tools on to get some experience with doing Silverlight on is Visual Studio Standard edition. That means the Visual Studio Express SKU (visual web developer) doesn't include Silverlight projects in general.

I can't help but think personally that this is a huge mistake, when looking at the bigger picture of Silverlight adoption. Considering that you can do WPF projects on Visual C# Express, why they decided to leave Silverlight support out of the Express editions (Such as Visual Web Developer) is beyond me.. The ASP.NET futures controls for Silverlight, such as the Media Element and XAML controls should be there across the board.. Is there monetization issues behind leaving support for this out?

Bottom line, it's going to hurt adoption of Silverlight on a grand scale.. This also means I am going to have to do a whole series of articles on developing for Silverlight with Express, which you can still do, using the SDK instructions, it just isn't as easy or obvious as it will be with other versions of Visual Studio.

I am honestly left thinking why? Is Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot. They could have a whole generation of new .NET programmers turned onto Silverlight who probably won't make the investment in Visual Studio right away who want to get started with Silverlight. Why not make it easy for them? The professional programmers really don't need the tools (yes I can add my own Silverlight project in minutes to Visual Studio) like the extra controls etc. It's just a nicety for pro's who already know how to code without it, but beginners need those projects and extra controls in the toolbox. The fact is the first time most people see or use Visual Studio it's not with their MSDN subscription, it's with these Express versions. With the huge interest in Silverlight by many people including a lot of new to development people, it would make sense that Microsoft support Silverlight in Express.

When are they going to get this together and do some right brain thinking on this subject. Making the cost of getting into Silverlight development really low would be a SMART thing for Microsoft to do..

Someone whoever is in charge of this really isn't thinking this through. If you think I am right, you should help me start a write-in campaign to get Silverlight supported in all versions of Visual Studio including Express. It's just inexcusable that it's not there really..

Technorati tags: Visual Studio 2008, Silverlight Tools, Lights on No One is Home, No Visual Studio Express Support

Monday, November 26, 2007

Buyer Beware: NBC Direct Beta- Not a Happy User Experience

by Don Burnett

Today I restarted my computer, I had recently installed the NBC Direct Beta, and even though this uses what looks like WPF and Flash Video, after this I found my x64 Vista installation starting to LAG tremendously. I finally traced it down process by process, and this download unfortunately had installed a component it uses called the OpenCase Media Agent.. I had considered giving NBC Direct a really great write-up here because I really enjoy the application and most of it's implementation quite well..

GOOD RIAs and BAD RIA's...

While researching however I found my machine slowing down, mostly because of this process called MediaAgent.exe which was swallowing over 30 megabytes of RAM at one time and taking up way to much CPU time even when I wasn't even running the NBC Direct Beta.. The only way I could solve this problem and get my machine back to normal was to terminate the task and uninstall the NBC Direct Beta completely..

This is what ExtendMedia has to say about the agent on their pages:

"Maintaining a high quality service is all about a close relationship with the consumer. The OpenCASE Media Agent provides a client-resident application that helps you maintain this direct and persistent connection to your customers and their devices.

You control the end-user experience. The Media Agent does not have its own presentation layer, but instead exposes programming interfaces (.COM, .NET, ActiveX) for easy integration with existing players, web pages or other applications.

The Media Agent manages media downloads on the customer's device (PC and CE) by ensuring user authentication, delivering and revoking licenses, and providing intelligence on reporting. This intelligence - details on download progress, completed or cancelled videos, download device etc - help you trouble-shoot and improve your overall service offering.

Media Agent Key Benefits

Provides a direct and persistent connection to your end customer
Manages licenses, ensuring that users and devices are authorized
Facilitates PC implementations
Provides total control over the end-user experience "

Now I might be over-reacting here but I don't really like what I am reading here and I am really disappointed in NBC for implementing this in their product.. It sounds like a huge security risk, and I hate programs that keep open an internet connection on your machine to their system all the time.. Besides this it was sucking up nearly 30 Megs of RAM at a time and slowing down (humblingly so) my Vista x64 laptop with 2 gigs of RAM..

I am not the only one who has experience.. I looked around on the web and found I am not the only one..

There is a big example of this here..

http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/13/what-is-mediaagent.exe/

Quoting the article there:

"The only application that I did install the other day was NBC Direct. A quick check of the NBC Direct FAQ revealed that they were indeed using the OpenCASE Media Agent “that manages your video downloads and monitors for any updates and/or new content to be downloaded”.

This means that this thirty Megabyte process MediaAgent.exe is wasting RAM and CPU cycles for doing nothing most of the time. I can understand that this process is started when starting NBC Direct but not if NBC Direct is not running at all.

The OpenCase Media Agent is a service that is installed with NBC Direct in Windows that is automatically started when Windows starts. The option would be to either disable the service which would surely make NBC Direct stop working or uninstall both NBC Direct and the OpenCase Media Agent to get rid of it."

I wholeheartedly recommend if you install this application to monitor what is going on with your machine. I praise NBC for getting into the Rich Internet Application arena, but if they are going to include "payloads" like this that are invasive running as a service that swallow RAM and CPU (all the things a TROJAN or virus would do).

I personally won't install this application until they get with ExtendMedia and this component becomes less invasive..

My personal opinion on this, is that mediaagent.exe in the least needs a serious re-write. Either way NBC should dump this if they want to be successful, otherwise this beta is going to see a lot of people disappointed and uninstalling when they figure out what this is doing to their machines..

Stealing RAM and CPU cycles and installing a service without informing your users should be a serious NO-NO..

Technorati tags: RIA, NBC Direct, OpenCASE Media Agent, ExtendMedia

Posted by Don.NET at 12:57 PM 2 comments Links to this post

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Visual Studio 2008 Annoyances - Working with XML DataSources

by Don Burnett

Okay I sat down and started playing with Visual Studio Express 2008 sku's today. In general I am very impressed by the additions to the functionality.. But there is ONE simple thing that has annoyed me from even the last version of Visual Studio, that's of it's XML support and the consistency across products etc.. Now granted I am a designer/developer type. Which means I am more about design than I am development, but as a designer I have to occasionally dig into Visual Studio..

I have blogged about this before, but I don't think anyone read it..

Let's take a look here at a nice feature in Microsoft's own Expression Blend Product..

When you add an XML datasource, it will nicely handle just about any web service including a SIMPLE RSS data feed...

Meanwhile over in Visual Studio land with their designer, I still have to go in through code and parse the XML DATA... Or if I tried to add this as a web service or make a service reference, I get this..

Or using the XML datasource control with a URL (you can't without going to code).. (the URL typed into the data field below does not work)

It seems you still can't read in simply an RSS feed without code.. Now I admit I use blend more than I do Visual Studio, but honestly the Visual Studio team should be considering these kinds or things for consistency across the board. I know if I were a beginning developer and didn't know how to do this in code, I'd be in Blend almost immediately.. Simply put I think this is another misgiving that I have about Visual Studio and the Visual Studio development team at Microsoft. They seem to be ignoring how easy it is to do this kind of thing in even their other tools..

I think it would do the Visual Studio team some good to start talking with the Expression Blend team and making some of the tools they have in later Visual Studio versions a bit easier instead of ignoring the obvious. Things that would help people new to the Visual Studio IDE keeps getting ignored, even though they have added MANY new features and simplified development greatly..

I ask you your opinion, if you were working with XML data alone like an RSS Feed wouldn't you rather be doing this in BLEND? Come on, Visual Studio team you are ignoring some very obvious things that you could be improving how Visual Studio works, if you'd just be looking at how other products work even in your own organization..

I am preaching unification here because Visual Studio still doesn't seem to be seeing the improvements that I am personally hoping for. Come on guys, simple additions like adding URL support to Visual Studio 2008's XML data source would have been a really smart move.. Meanwhile I am glad we have Blend! It's not always about bloatware, it's rethinking what you have already got to make it better..

For those curious about using RSS with Visual Studio, there is an RSS screen saver code example (apparantly Windows APIs can read RSS they just didn't consider improving this functionality in Visual Studio itself.. But nevertheless, if you want to learn the Windows RSS API I suggest you look at this RSS screen saver example from the Coding4Fun dashboard application which you can download alongside the new Visual Studio Express editions or the C4F website itself.. Oh and that sound recorder Application that is below in the picture below the RSS example, doesn't work with the X64 edition, the program keeps coming back saying not a valid Win32 Application when you select "run app".. Yet another annoyance of mine, another team not writing for full 64-bit windows transparency.. There must have been an obvious hurry to get this stuff out..

Technorati tags: Visual Studio 2008, Expression Blend, Working with XML Data, Unification

Labels: Annoyances, Consistency, Express Edition, Visual Studio 2008, XML datasource

Monday, November 19, 2007

.Net Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 Ship!

by Don Burnett

In an early holiday gift to us all, we can all now have a great Thanksgiving holiday and be thankful that the .NET framework shipped today.. This new release along with Visual Studio 2008 brings uncompromising value and new capabilities to WPF and better development options for Silverlight. There are so many new features to talk about, it's probably beyond the scope of this article. For more information hop over to Soma Segar's Blog..

Technorati tags: WPF, Silverlight, Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5 framework

The New Asset Management and Version Control with Expression Studio

by Don Burnett

It's the age-old clash programmers versus designers. The arguments have been very clear over the years, the solutions have not been as clear though. Process ends up ruling the day in most scenarios.. Let's take a look a bit closer:

The Designer: "Boy this really messes me up, I hand-off a complete design to the developers and they carve it up like the Thanksgiving turkey. By the time their are done, all the integrity of the look and feel that I worked so hard on will be gone. They might as well had not hired me to do this in the first place if it was going to go down like this.."

The Developer: "Wow these designer folks, they come up with some cool looking stuff, but boy when I have to go through and engineer it, they get all stressed and upset, because I have to break it down into something I can use.. If after I have the design engineered, they go back in and break my code.. I really hate this process, the designers step all over my work and make me work twice as hard when I have to fix something. They go in to change or fix their design and break all my hard work. I like how things work when I am in charge of everything, after all programmers are the project leaders, nothing would get done if not for us..."

Why do we hear these complaints? Until now things like web projects and even desktop applications graphical assets and design and scripting have usually existed in the same page. This is most evident in a web project where you have HTML and scripting existing in the same place.. It's not only the designers that were unhappy with the process but the developers themselves. What has this done for the platform in general? Well hold things back mostly. Developers unsure of working with designers or unwilling to give them enough ownership in the project process to the designers have stifled the design process. This also means that the quality of the product that is produced many times has a bad design, or isn't functionally what it could be... Is there a solution?

Enter Expression Studio and XAML

XAML stands for eXtensible Application Markup Language and it is based on XML.. It allows you to build applications in simple declarative statements and can be used for any CLR object hierarchy (not just WPF) meaning that it can represents objects. It also allows you to separate the code completely from design. Code and content are separated so you can easily streamline collaboration between designers and developers. It's also easy for tools to consume and generate.

For instance here's a snippet of code to make a light green button appear on-screen in XAML..

<Button Width="100">OK

<Button.Background>

LightGreen

</Button.Background>

</Button

Besides XML based elements declared in the markup the XAML file is completely separate from the code behind file. Because XAML markup needs to be well formed XML, each element defined in your markup should also be named so that when the elements are created and instanced they can be used in code and are created there as well.

So how does this all change your workflow, since we can separate graphics designs as separate XAML pages from the code behind pages where we do various programming and scripting tasks we can work with them as separate the files. This allows us to check in the project files into version control using tools like Visual Studio Team Foundation server..

So how does this answer the designer's complaints? Well quite nicely actually.. Expression Studio doesn't have any built-in version control, but that's okay because we don't really need it at that stage of the game. The way a designer handles assets and design elements is very different than a developer. Fortunately with Expression Studio Microsoft gives you Expression Media which can allow you to catalog everything the designer is doing and working on including revisions of graphics.. This is usually separate from the version control that developers do with code projects, but is a completely separate part of the process the developer doesn't catalog or have something to do with..

How does this help the developer? Well let's examine the workflow from scratch...

Developer and Designer get together to spec out the project with the team.
1. Designer and developer arrive at a project format.
2. Designer arrives at final design in Blend which is stored in a Visual Studio Project file..
3. Finished design is handed off as a Visual Studio project to be checked into version control in visual studio.

Here is a finished project still in Blend. Notice the visual studio project icons and layout..

Here is the same project saved out of Expression Blend and re-opened in Visual Studio 2008. Note it's the same..

After you have checked this into version control in Visual Studio both artists and coders can check-in and out new and revised versions of the same software. As a developer at that point ownership of the project should be through the version control system you are using by the developer. If the artist needs to revise the design most likely only the XAML files will change, so if they get checked in only their designs will get updated, keeping the xaml separate from the code behind page. So any updating they do really won't effect the code. Code changes or additions usually don't effect the design because it's in a separate file.

Sure if you remove or replace or add elements, code is necessary to make events happen or something the developer will need to revise, but even if an element gets deleted from the XAML, the code should work as long as it's not referencing a deleted element which you would get a message about right away.

You might ask yourself well version control sounds like a good idea with graphics, and yes we aren't advocating you track your assets with them and why there isn't version control in expression studio itself. It's just that programmers and artists work differently so what you as a developer might want will still get tracked, but how a designer revises and keeps changed might be a totally different paradigm and how you track changes in the design revisions wouldn't be the same way you'd necessarily do in a programming project.

So why isn't there version control built into Expression products? It's all about the workflow, the project is handled by artists individually. A "final version" is then submitted to the visual studio project leader and version control manager to be checked in. If this is new, the project can then begin to be coded, otherwise if it's a revision (because it's already in the project and checked in), everyone should get copy of the new XAML and an updated project file when they check out the project on the team to work from.

That's the beauty of version control. It's appropriate to put the requirements for version control in Visual Studio over Blend because it's likely that a developer may never need to step foot in Expression Design or Expression Blend.. Also really the "developer" not the designer should have rights over the entire project implementation.

This makes designers then able to check in updates and new versions independently without having to worry about changes.

Will Expression get real version control client capabilities? Only time will tell, but it's not necessary to be effective if you are doing proper project management and version control with Visual Studio and using it as the basis for project management..

If you have a version of Visual Studio (not Express) that doesn't come with version control, you could also check out using Subversion with it. If you do have Team Foundation Server, you have excellent version control at your fingertips that will integrate well with your Visual Studio projects once you check them in, if they came from Blend of Visual Studio itself..

If you are smaller you might want to check out version control clients like subversion, but be aware they aren't as nicely integrated and your designer folks will not want to learn or touch these. They really shouldn't be asked to in the first place other than furnishing a design with an initial visual studio project from Blend that you can check in as a developer into Visual Studio's version control. You can probably count on the fact that later down the road if further integration with Expression Studio and Visual Studio happens, it will probably be more compatible with the Visual Studio product versus third products like Subversion..

Technorati tags: Version Control, Designers, Developers, Frustration, check--in assets, check-in code, check in projects.. Merging projects

Design Challenge Update

Need to keep up to date on PhizzPop and the upcoming design challenge? Click the banner above.

Have you registered yet? If not, click the 'go' button.. The seats are filling up fast...

Posted by Don.NET at 7:20 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Labels: Phizzpop, PhizzPop Design Challenge

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Intersoft Announces UI Components for Silverlight

by Don Burnett

Intersoft Solutions has announced a series of Web UI components for Silverlight. These look really slick and their expected release is mid-2007..

Features:

Silverlight 1.0 Enabled

Sirius is based on Silverlight 1.0 RTM to produce high performance and stable user experience. End users will only need to install the small Silverlight 1.0 runtime to use Sirius UI components.

Creates visually compelling Mac-style docking navigation

This new and breakthrough UI components deliver richer user experience, by allowing users to interactively navigate and find through the available items. The interactive behaviors and motion-sense are the perfect replica of MacOS X Dock Bar.

Stunning Visual Effects and Innovative Features

In addition to basic behaviors, the UI component is designed with Intersoft's own innovative features and visual effects, such as Spotlight and Reflection effect, Glowing as well as Flippering effect. All effects are highly customizable and combineable.

Hassles-free Docking

You can choose the Dock Bar to appear in either one of four screen sides. By simply setting the Dock property, the control will automatically calculate the required positioning, dimension, layout and every details at runtime. You don't need to do any extra efforts such as swapping the Width and Height manually.

Automatic Resizing and Positioning

"Sirius" UI components are not designed just to have great visual aspects and features. It also take care every little details that Web developer concerned. For instance, the control has full support for 100% width. When you resize the browser, the control will reposition itself according to the new position and dimension in realtime.

Extremely Customizable

You will feel amazed to find out how you can customize every little details and visual aspects of the UI components. Either you want to have a perfect replica of original Mac Dock Bar or the extended behaviors such as the one in Star Dock, or the one in Linux, or perhaps your own style - you can do it all.

Great Programmability

As of all Intersoft's components, the Sirius components would have comprehensive client side API using the same manner and approach that developers have familiar with. Although Sirius is based on the brand-new Silverlight technology, it doesn't limit Sirius components to offer great programmability. Some examples, you can change the Docking position at runtime. You can also change the button's text or its image, or just anything else you can imagine.

Strong XAML Support

You may have been asking how Sirius components related with the XAML concept introduced by Silverlight itself. In fact, Sirius introduces ability to incorporate custom XAML in many part of the control's functions. For instance, you can create a custom XAML for the background visual effect, then assign the XAML file in the BackgroundSetting's XamlUrl property. This enables the leverage of original XAML concept exposed by Silverlight and Expression-based product lines.

More UI components

The final version of "Sirius" will contain several more UI components, besides the one currently demonstrated.

Technorati tags: Intersoft, Silverlight, Components, WebUI

Sunday Night News

By Don Burnett

Hob Noble Gobbles!

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I wish you and your family all of the best. The holiday week is coming up, however there are some really cool and important events coming up that you should know about just after the holidays and I am not talking about "Black Friday" sales. It's going to be a December to remember in the design community, but more about that a little bit later. First onto XAML adoption..

Moonlight Madness (Surveying Open Source Blogs featuring XAML and the Moonlight Plug-in)

Bringing Silverlight to the Linux community is starting to bear some really cool results.. Over at Jackson's Activity Log it's noted back in September that they got the plug-in working to allow layers of html elements on top of a Moonlight control. That meant sites like tafiti.com now works within the Moonlight plugin.. Apparently this wasn't supportable until Firefox version 3.0 and that meant also that other plug-ins like Flash couldn't support it. Score one for IE flexibility..

Also at Jackson's Blog he has written a nice beginners guide to writing XAML by hand.. It's actually very useful for even Microsoft Silverlight developers and will talk about how to right XAML, well formedness, properties and collections. It's a good introduction if you have never looked at XAML before. He even explains how to define custom tags.

A December to Remember...

If you haven't heard about it, all next month the Phizzpop Design Challenge continues regionally, in Austin, Boston and New York, as well as Los Angeles and Chicago. What's so important about this event ? It will bring together the best of the best designers in a competition to see who can come up with the best design solution in the shortest amount of time. You will see some really skilled people attacking problem solving situations in real life. The winners will compete at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX. The regional competitions will be open to the public (you do have to register to attend) and space is limited and filling up fast, so please register soon. On top of this all Microsoft is also giving out some free beverages (woo hoo!). This sounds like a totally great time, seeing design professionals in action in a swanky "hotspots and free beverages, what more can anyone ask!

Regional Locations

New York
Hiro Ballroom
http://www.themaritimehotel.com/hiroBallroom.html
363 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
212-242-4300
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 11pm then club opens to public welcome to stay
Directions
Chicago
The Underground
http://www.theundergroundchicago.com/
56 West Illinois St.
Chicago, IL 60610
312-644-7600
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 10pm
Directions
Los Angeles
Elevate Lounge
http://www.takamisushi.com/
811 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 2100
Los Angeles, CA 90017
213-236-9600
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 12am
Directions
Boston
Saint
http://www.saintnitery.com/
90 Exeter Street
Boston, MA 02116
617-236-1134
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 10pm then club opens to public welcome to stay
Directions
Austin
J Black's Feel Good Lounge
Black's
710 W 6th St Ste B
Austin, TX 78701
512-433-6954
Doors Open: 6pm
End Time: 10pm
Directions

Technorati tags: Silverlight, Moonlight Plug-in, PhizzPop Design Challenge

Labels: Moonlight Plug-in, PhizzPop Design Challenge, Silverlight

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Local News Break

by Don Burnett

Tonight I am digressing a bit from the standard content here to talk about some things I have been watching that I find really very cool.

Michigan Flash Festival Wrap-up

Last weekend I had the honor and great pleasure to be asked to demonstrate Expression Studio, and WPF and Silverlight technologies at the Michigan Flash Festival. What really was exciting about the event is the incredible group of professionals this event brought together with the recognition that even using different companies technologies, we all share a basic common goal of creating great Rich client applications, on both the web and on the desktop as well.. I have been asked (as part of Michigan Interactive Designers) to help with next year's event.. It's nice working with these people and they are pretty dynamic. I look forward to more collaboration opportunities with everyone..

If you haven't been here check out these sites:

http://www.semafx.com
http://www.flashfocused.org
http://detmmug.com
http://www.organic.com
http://www.eprize.com

Thanks also to Chris Bernard of Microsoft for providing two prizes for the presentation two full retail release copies of Expression Studio (A $600 value each). I'd also like to thank Josh Holmes our regional evangelist for advice and help with focus in the presentation even though he wasn't going to be in town, he went out of his way to help us out.

Oredev 2007

As some of you know, I do work in design and training and do presentations on User Experience based design and workflow. I was very honored to be asked to present at Oredev 2007. Unfortunately because of problems getting a birth certificate and passport in the time needed to attend the conference I didn't get to go. However, my very capable colleague Ken Arbogast-Wilson was able to attend and present for the conference and provide a workshop. I'd also like to thank George Bolsch of Dotway.se and everyone involved with the conference for the opportunity to present. Ken and I are really committed to getting the message out and trying to make life better for both designers and developers and to help enhance their workflow with relevant tools and technologies to enhance that workflow such as WPF, Silverlight, and Expression Studio. We like to show companies how they can work better and faster together with these technologies and tools.

Michigan Interactive Designers November Meeting

Our meeting, though lightly attended because of the new day (moved due to the Thanksgiving Holiday) was still quite successful several contest winners were announced:

Electric Rain StandOut Design Contest winner: Greg Good - Greg submitted the winning design kit.

Microsoft Expression Studio Blend Contest winner: Shawn Heid

December Meeting Contest: Using Expression Blend with 3rd party components such as Identity Mine's Blendables

And now for something completely different...

As you know I am not a "fanboy", I like technologies that work and do what they are supposed to, nor am I platform religious. I reward and support companies that really offer enabling technologies and try to work on whatever I feel best gets the job done. Having said all of that, I didn't start life on Windows (though it's where I spend over 90% of my time these days) but on the Amiga. After Commodore died, I migrated to the Windows platform, although I also have done much work on the Apple Macintosh platform as well. I figured it was the last time I would see the Commodore-Amiga OS in any significant way. I was mostly right, yeah there is an Amiga Inc. out there, but there website seems mostly focused on selling PocketPC games for Windows Mobile.

Enter AROS.. The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer. It's an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.

This is a freely downloadable OS, that while doesn't offer binary compatibility takes a lot of the common "concepts" that made the Commodore-Amiga OS so popular and extends it now to Intel and PowerPC computing platforms. It also has a cute "mascot" I personally have a great interest in the x86 and x64 versions of this operating systems. I have watched this public project grow from something that barely boots up to a very functional operating system that is seeing some really great things happening. For instance over at the AROS Show Blog it was announced that a developer (Robert Norris) is working on a web browser based on WebKit, the browser that Apple's Safari and Linux's Konqueror is based on. This should do a lot to propel AROS forward as an operating system and AROS adoption by more Amiga community members, as there is much frustration in the existing Amiga community because there isn't a good up-to-date web browser for their platform and there has been much frustration over failed starts on a project to bring the "mozilla" browser to that platform.

If you haven't looked at AROS lately I'd suggest you download the latest build. Their new installer (besides AROS's recent support for networking (TCP/IP, and common ethernet card chipsets)) actually supports multiple partitions (System Partitions, Work Partitions, and Windows Partitions)..

The themed look is pretty cool too (you can set it up anyway you want) and the operating system doesn't require a fast state-of-the art PC to run effectively.Note the networking configuration preferences..

This operating system, while it probably will never be mainstream is turning into a great way for hobbyists to explore multimedia. This OS also gives you another alternative to Linux one that you might find more interesting because it's lightweight and has no where near the hardware requirements (yes it still could be put on a FLOPPY disk and booted from it) and it's easier to learn than a Unix style OS..

If you are curious about it's multimedia capabilities, you only have to look at programs like LunaPaint for AROS, to see the capabilities and the cool lineage from Amiga multimedia..As capabilities grow, this OS has the potential to be a heavy hitter.. It's reuniting the existing Amiga community (both PowerPC, 680x0, Intel Friendly derivatives) and runs on a number of machines including really cheap Intel machines (including the new $200 Everex Green PC at Walmart which I learned about over at Matt Cutts Blog) .

Technorati tags: AROS, Traveller Web Browser, WebKit, LunaPaint, Michigan Flash Festival, SemaFX, FlashFocused, Detroit Adobe User Group

Friday, November 16, 2007

Developer Express Launches DXperience

by Don Burnett

Developer Express sent me an announcement of some new products they are bringing out.. I usually don't talk about ASP.NET products here, but Developer Express usually does a great job with visual components and with a name like "DXperience" I couldn't resist mentioning it here. They are a great company with some great talent and a proven track record for high value component products. At least it's not an attempt at misusing the term "user experience" as so many other Visual Studio component marketers are today.. There products are both visual appealing and useful.

The Press Release:

Developer Express is proud to announce the immediate availability of DXperience v2007 vol 3 - Feature-complete visual components and IDE tools for Visual Studio .NET. Our technologies help you build your best, see complex software with greater clarity, increase your productivity and create stunning applications for Windows® and the Web in the shortest possible time. All of our products come with a 60 day unconditional money back guarantee and fully functional evaluation versions are available for download at devexpress.com.

With v2007 vol 3, ASP.NET product line has been extended with the availability of the ASPxScheduler Suite. Built and optimized for ASP.NET 2, the ASPxScheduler Suite includes all the tools you will need to create web based scheduling solutions that mimic the capabilities found in Microsoft Outlook.

In addition to the ASPxScheduler Suite, we've extended capabilities across our entire product line. Major new features include:

XtraGrid Suite

- New LayoutView – powered by features found in the XtraLayoutControl Suite, it allows you to present data to your end users in a variety of unique ways. You can freely customize field layout and thus use form space more effectively.

XtraEditors Library

- New Components: DropDownButton & DXValidationProvider

- Embeddable MarqueeProgressBar Сontrol

- GIF animation support in PictureEdit and ImageEdit

- Displaying RTF Data in Container Controls

XtraBars Suite:

- Standalone Toolbars

- A number of Ribbon enhancements: Ribbon Merging, Customizable Height for Embedded Editors, Displaying Bar Commands to the Right of Tab Headers, Transparent Background for In-place Editors, New Navigation Capabilities

XtraCharts Suite

- A number of new 3D Bar Views

- 2D and 3D Doughnut Views

- AJAX Callback Support

- Empty Point Representation

- Advanced Customization

XtraReports Suite

- A number of major ASP.NET improvements: Complete AJAX Callback Support, Medium Trust Support, Report Caching for Faster Navigation and Export Operations, Document Map Support (Bookmarks), The Ability to Build Custom Report Toolbars

- Cross-Band Controls (Line and Box)

- Built-in Data Filtering support

- Anchor Control Edges to Band Edges

ASPxGridView and Editors Suite

- Popup Edit Forms support

- Group Summary Footers

- Grouping Intervals support

- Custom Sorting

- Support for Sorting Data by Display Text

- A New Button Control

- A New Spin Editor Control

- A number of ASPxCalendar enhancements: Multi-Date Selection, Multi-Month View, Fast Navigation Panel, etc.

- A number of ASPxComboBox enhancements: Incremental Filtering (Auto-Complete), On-demand Item Loading, Keyboard support

- A number of general enhancements.

Common Enhancements across our ASP.NET Component Suites

- SEO-Friendly Paging

- Images for Selected and Hot-tracked Elements

- Enhanced Client-Side API

A good number of new other capabilities...

To learn more about this release and experience the Developer Express difference first hand, feel free to visit:

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/DXperience/WhatsNew2007v3/index.xml

and

http://www.devexpress.com/Support/WhatsNew/NET/7.3.2.xml

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Flotzam Brings Visual Appeal in a Mash-up Application

By Don Burnett

Flotzam is a cool new mash-up application by Karsten Januszewki and Tim Aidlin. It's a very cool RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Flicker and Digg. You can review content that you are subscribed to on each of the services. It can be run as a 1-click install application or a screen saver. This shows off the power of WPF and mixed datasource. After a few minutes you'll be entranced at the information passing you by... It's worth the download..

Technorati tags: Flotzam, Karsten Januszewki, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Mashup

Chizen Stepping down

by Don Burnett

According to an article in MacWorld, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen will step down from his post at the end of the month, the company said Monday. The article sights a number of reasons, the most shocking comment made in the article was a comment that he is attributed to having made was that "Chizen called dealing with the financial community “going to the dentist without Novocaine” and said the transparency of his life as CEO is “weird” and “awkward” because “everybody knows how much money I make and everybody thinks it’s too much.” Adobe is a leader in the market for providing development and design tools for building rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Technorati tags: Adobe Max, CEO, Adobe, Steps Down..

Silverlight Ink

by Don Burnett

In case you have missed it, Silverlight just isn't making strides as a cross platform media playback system, but one of it's least known and used features "INK" is making an impact on the world as well.. Ink works on Windows Tablet PCs and UMPC's, but it also works anywhere you have a PEN, including other platforms like the Mac. So what are people doing with this? Loren Heiny, has created a Google search application that uses Silverlight's ink functionality called SearchTIP. To get to the Google search app I have below you can click here..

Technorati tags: Silverlight, Ink, Google Search, SearchTIP

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Finally they are working on the Photoshop Upgrade that we all want..

by Don Burnett

Over at News.com, Stephen Shankland, has an article on the aspirations of the "in-planning" Photoshop overhaul. This is great news and something that I was hoping to see happen for a very long time. I was hoping it would happen during the CS3 timeframe release, but thank the powers-that-be that they are considering this (better late than never).

I have been hoping for a truly configurable Photoshop for a very long time, last time I mentioned this and how even a shareware program like Paint.NET was catching up to it, I was ridiculed by a hoard of Adobe pundits, who didn't at all agree with me that the program was becoming bloatware and showing much age. When you have a company flagship product it's very difficult to admit or even see when a product needs change and it has indeed in use grown way past the original intent of the program...

I wish them the best in their efforts, the industry could really use the changes described in the article.

Technorati tags: Adobe, Photoshop, Upgrade, Beyond CS3

Thursday, November 8, 2007

WPF Components Market: Consistency Needed!

by Don Burnett

Ryan Stewart has a nice article over at ZDNET about the component market for WPF heating up. It's true this is happening, and it's kind of exciting. I love components, they make programming a lot easier. I think my favorite components set for WPF so far is Identity Mine's Blendables which I have blogged about previously. Why do I like this so much? They get components for WPF. Their components are completely compatible with both Expression Blend and Visual Studio. Why? well, most of these components are designed to have some sort of UI elements included. Since most WPF components are supposed to be "look-less" so they can be styled by a designer. Visual Studio components are most UI type components anyway with some sort of data binding.

There are several Visual Studio component makers who have started creating WPF components for Visual Studio, but they aren't compatible with Expression Blend. It's not much extra work to make a component compatible with Blend. This also important because it expands the market for component products. I am working on compiling a list of components that don't like Expression Blend and plan to shine a huge light on those developers who haven't got there yet with supporting Expression Blend. It's sad to say however that some components in certain SDKs even from Microsoft don't support Expression Blend across the board, however I hear all that stuff might go away when those products see release. I'll be putting a list of compatible components up on MichiganInteractiveDesigners.org which is going through a complete site revamp this month.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Windows Live Goes Live!

By Don Burnett

Windows Live Installer Gets Redemption!

This is the much improved Windows Live Installer.. Have NO FEAR, it works great.. Well I was very critical of the first Windows Live installer and it's distaste for 64-bit systems. The final version however is FABULOUS and all those 64-bit woes are gone.. I must say I am very impressed.. I got a new versions of Windows Live Messenger, which has some great new features. It also installed Windows Live Mail which is a new mail client supports multiple accounts on different servers including web based Hotmail. The Windows Live Photo Gallery has many improvements over the Vista Photo Gallery including publishing photos to many services including Flickr, MSN SoapBox, and MSN Live Spaces. Another nice feature is you can open your photo in any installed imaging application you have and select from any of them.

Windows Live Writer is seeing some improvements too, in formatting, media insertion. My favorite feature and most bloggers will like is the Split Post option..Is this really worth your time to download? If you Blog you probably can't do without Windows Live Writer it's really a great lightweight performing application.
The new photo gallery makes sharing your pictures much easier and Windows Live Mail, well it's so nice I'd probably buy it alone, it makes the need for a business mail client like Outlook a lot less of a requirement.. As far as Windows Live Toolbar I am not so much a fan of toolbars (I kind of wish this was a ribbon not a toolbar, but maybe that's too much to ask for..).

Technorati tags: Windows Live, Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Toolbar, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger

A Unique Cross-Platform Silverlight Solution at University of Michigan- Ken Arbogast-Wilson The Interview

By Don Burnett

Ken Arbogast-Wilson was nice enough to sit down with me and let me interview him about the College of Architecture and Urban Planning new use of Microsoft Design Tools and software, as well as, Silverlight to solve a huge cross-platform content delivery dilemma. We plan a more in-depth look at this solution and how it was implemented in an upcoming video netcast..Thanks Mr. Arbogast-Wilson for allowing yourself to be interviewed... So here we go..

Question One:

So Ken what’s your relationship to the university and school etc..

Ken Arbogast-Wilson: I am the manager of media development and production at the University of Michigan College of Architecture + Urban Planning. I am essentially responsible for the college's web presence, as well as assisting in technology development used by our six programs. With over 600 students, 65 faculty, and 30 staff, we are constantly looking for new ways to leverage technology to help improve the educational environment and make our instruction more accessible.

Question Two:

I hear they are going to start using Silverlight for their Lectures?

Ken Arbogast-Wilson: The college turned 100 in 2006, and we had a year or high-profile events that necessitated web video, both on-demand and live streaming for several lectures and a three-day conference. In spite of settling on using windows media multiple bit rate streaming for these events, we also created quicktime versions for audience members with Macs. Lets just say we spent a lot of time encoding last year. I started dabbling in Silverlight video just recently, and by using Expression Encoder, I was able to create a cross-platform video with its own player that would execute right in the web page.

Question Three:

What kind of content?

Ken Arbogast-Wilson: We have a variety of content, but essentially public lectures by noted architects and planners. We also have some projects created by students as part of their coursework, and recruiting videos. A lot of our architecture students create 3-D animations of their work in 3D Studio Max, I could see making those more accessible through Silverlight too.

Question Four:
Why Silverlight?

Ken Arbogast-Wilson: Simplicity and power in one package. I like that I can encode my footage one time, have the player already configured, add a leader and trailer, and get everything I need to go live. With the possibility of up to 720p quality output, I can create work that would not only be usable on the web, but in a studio course, or for student reviews. What's more, I can customize the whole project in Expression Blend, adding even more functionality, and improving the user experience for our audiences.

Question Five:

How is it being received so far?

Ken Arbogast-Wilson: Our IT manager was stunned when I showed him. I expect we will receive very favorable reactions from visitors to our site when we release a series of lectures on diversity later this month.

Question Six:
How easy was it to do a Video Project in Silverlight?

Ken Arbogast-Wilson: It was very easy. I am a designer first, and tech guy second, and I was pretty excited that I could see my intention show through with very few compromises to the design aesthetic. Between Expression Encoder, Blend, and Design, I have a suite of pretty tightly integrated tools to accomplish nearly anything I can dream up.

Wow that's impressive. Thanks Ken for your time..We will be visiting Ken again soon, with a more in-depth look on our new netcast.

Technorati tags: College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Silverlight, Video Cross-Platform solution

Labels: College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Silverlight, University of Michigan

Look up in the Sky, it's a DLR, no it's a CLR, No it's DotNetBar....

By Don Burnett

Denis Basaric of DevComponents emailed me to let me know about some really cool new things going on over at DevComponents including their new DotNet Bar control for WPF. This includes a new high-performance Advanced Window control with Office 2007 style and custom styling support which allows you to style every single part of the window including title bar, border and system buttons.
Here is screen-shot of the custom style applied to Advanced Window:

You can find complete source code for this style in RibbonPad sample project included with new release.

DevComponents have also added Live Preview support to Ribbon buttons as well as better support for Windows Forms controls in Wpf-Dock control through DockSite.DockHintOverlay property. When set, it uses different overlay implementation so docking hints are displayed on top of windows forms controls.

Also included are fixes for issues that were discovered since last release. DotNetBar™ for WPF now includes Wpf-Ribbon and Wpf-Dock controls that were previously released to help you create professional WPF applications with ease. Wpf-Dock is fully featured Docking control with Auto-Hide functionality, Document Docking, Diamond Docking guides and much more. It is also first control of its kind in Office 2007 style with stock Blue, Silver and Black color schemes as well as custom color creation algorithm based on single color so you can create great looking color schemes by specifying only single color. You can read more about Wpf-Dock at: http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar-wpf/.

Make sure to check out the RibbonPad sample included with DotNeBar for WPF. It shows both Wpf-Ribbon and Wpf-Dock controls working together.

You can download fully functional trial version at http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar-wpf/

The license is only $249 and source code license is available. There are no run-time royalties you can distribute it freely with your applications. You can install it on your desktop, laptop and build machine without additional licenses. You also get 12 months of all and any updates, regardless whether they are minor or major.

Technorati tags: DotNetBar, WPF, Component, DevComponents

Posted by Don.NET at 10:17 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Labels: Components, DevComponents, DotNetBar, wpf

Monday, November 5, 2007

Sunday Night Safari

by Don Burnett

Warning this is an Off-Topic Post.. We will return to WPF and Silverlight News later this week...

The Mobile Web

The mobile web is improving by leaps and bounds thanks to the Apple iPhone, and iPod Touch which have built-in WiFi and web browsers, not to mention the stuff going on over on the Microsoft Windows Mobile platform with Windows live.. So I thought I'd take you through a tour of some of the best mobile web sites/and applications I have found to date..

Google Mobile

This rocks, not only does it do search, but Gmail, photos, docs, photos and an RSS reader..

Meebo.com

Instant messaging on any major messaging system anywhere, over the web.

YellowPages.com

Great phone number search application

Traffic Report

Traffic Reports by zipcode.

Hahlo.com

A great twitter client application, I prefer it...

CBSNEWS.COM

A great iphone version of CBS News..

MovieTickets.com-

Great mobile movie schedule site and movie review blogging all in a mobile format.

iRibbit.com

Ebay application (enough said)

TypePad.com

Blogging application

ESPN PodCenter

Sports and more sports..

iCOS

The latest releases in comics and action figures..

Enophi

RSS reader with social networking.

WeatherBug

Weather and your local forecast with Quicktime video streaming

This is just SOME of the useful mobile website's out there today..

UltraLingua Mobile

Language Translation software..

Facebook.com

Facebook is now mobile..

Posted by Don.NET at 3:02 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Announcing the New Webcast

by Don Burnett

Coming Soon to this Blog...

Conversation, "How-to's", special guests and what you really need to know about what's going on in the ever expanding .Net Designer Community..

There will be a bi-weekly pod-cast, with every month an alternating video-cast.

Technorati tags: Designing for .NET, webcast, podcast, videocast, wpf, silverlight, Expression Studio, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media, Expression Media Encoder, bi-weekly, monthly.

Labels: Expression Blend, Expression Media, Expression Studio, Expression Web, podcast, Silverlight, videocast, webcast, wpf

Friday, October 26, 2007

WPF Momentum and FREE TRAINING!

by Don Burnett

Over at the Universal Desktop Blog there is a whole bunch of talk about the newly released Vista Sales figures. I don't doubt these at all or find that they were "cherry picked" (as some commenters suggested). Office 2007 it's a big success. People find the new RIBBON and smart features easier to use. These figures are pretty amazing considering that Windows Server 2008 won't ship until early next year, when it's expected the enterprise folks will start heavy migrations to Vista in the office..

If you really want to see some great examples of more WPF enabled applications that are out there, I seriously suggest you take a look at the HI-RES version of the WPF Momentum Video.. It has quite a few WPF applications that you probably never knew about.. I talk about applications here as they are appropriate, but if you really want to get an idea of who's adopting WPF and why, this a is a great place to start. It's a big download but worth the bandwidth.

Or you can just watch it streamed here in Silverlight..

You also might find Tim Sneath's Slides on WPF very useful reading, as they point out some things about some of the great visualization applications in 3D that people are doing with WPF..

FREE WPF TRAINING AT MIX University- No Registration Required

Now if you just don't have the time to attend a class, Microsoft has put a very valuable resource online over at Mix University if you want to develop for WPF and it's FREE of Charge..

You can't beat this if you want to get your hands around developing for WPF, it's a great thing and should speed further adoption..

Here is an outline of the sessions (from the experts at Microsoft):

WPF Bootcamp

Keynote: Windows Presentation Foundation
Ian Ellison-Taylor

A Lap Around Windows Presentation Foundation
Rob Relyea

A Lap Around Microsoft Expression Blend
Pete Faraday

Building WPF Applications Part I
Ian Griffiths

Building WPF Applications Part II
Ian Griffiths

LAB: Building WPF Applications

LAB: Building WPF XAML Browser Applications

LAB: Interactive Fabrikam Catalog in Blend

Controls, Styles and Templates
Kevin Moore

LAB: Creating a Button with Expression Blend and Design

LAB: Creating a Glass Button in Blend

Data Binding with WPF
Beatriz de Oliveira Costa

WPF Partner Showcase
Tim Sneath

Documents, Text and the Reading Experience
Kevin Gjerstad

LAB: Using Data Binding in WPF

LAB: Reading Experience

Windows Forms Interoperability
Scott Morrison

Visual Studio Orcas Enhancements for WPF
Mark Wilson-Thomas, Mark Boulter

WPF Performance
Adam Smith

Animation and Media
Peter Blois

3D Graphics
David Teitlebaum, Kurt Berglund

LAB: Creating Rich 2D and 3D Content with Windows Presentation Foundation

LAB: 3D Graphics

Real World Experiences - Yahoo Messenger
Eric Burke

Real World Experiences - Scripps Healthcare
Adam Calderon

Real World Experiences - Vertigo Family Tree Explorer
Scott Stanfield

Real World Experiences - Dynamics Modeler
Jonathan Russ

Real World Experiences - North Face In-Store Explorer
Darren David

Technorati tags: WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, FREE WPF TRAINING

Labels: FREE WPF TRAINING, Mix University, wpf

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Designing with Silverlight, in of course Silverlight...

by Don Burnett

Over at Design with Silverlight, the guys have been very busy creating some great design tutorials. What's really exciting about this site is they really do believe in Silverlight, right down to the website itself designed totally in Silverlight. There are not only great samples here but great code as well.

They have included a great Silverlight "VR" sample that is reminiscent of Apple's QuickTime VR that's pretty cool as well. Check out the photo gallery wall app when you are there, it's all cool samples and they show you how to use it.

Technorati tags: Silverlight, Javascript, designwithsilverlight.com, XAML, CODE

Posted by Don.NET at 1:58 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Monday, October 22, 2007

New Meeting Place Time for Michigan Interactive Designers

by Don Burnett

We have an exciting meeting coming up for October, we will be doing a group project, with Electric Rain's StandOut.

MID October 2007 Meeting

Thursday October 25, 2007, from 7:00PM to 9:00PM at the Grand Traverse Pie Company Ann Arbor Location

Our next meeting will be held October 25, 2007. Time 7:00pm to 9:00pm at the Grand Traverse Pie Company. There is free parking in the front of the building. We will be discussing the following Topics. They have reserved the entire back room for our meeting space.

Electric Rain StandOut Presentation Solution- Creating design kits using Microsoft Expression Blend.
WPF in Action with Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 review
Usability Testing with TechSmith.com's Morae
LINQ and Silverlight, XML
ASP.NET, AJAX, & Silverlight
Creating a Video Player in WPF and Silverlight

Monthly Happenings

We are at a new location with great WIFI, easy to reach by I-94 Expressway...

Group Project for the Meeting:

Making your own animated presentation template for StandOut, using Expression Blend/WPF..

Requirements:
Bring your Laptop with .NET 3.0 or 3.5 installed
Electric Rain Standout beta 2 (a free download)
Expression Design Trial or Full copy
Expression Blend Trial or Full Copy
PowerPoint 2007 OPTIONAL

There will be a tutorial, followed by an opportunity to create your own template. At the end of the night we will vote as a group on the best three and they will be given a prize. So here's your chance to show everyone your design goodness and learn Standout.

Meeting Location:

Grand Traverse Pie Company

Thursday October 25th, 2007

Meeting Time: 7pm - 9pm

291 N. Zeeb Road

Ann Arbor, MI 48103

734-997-9702

annarbor@gtpie.com

2007 October Meeting
Please arrive after 6:00 pm to assure good seating. We have the backroom seating area reserved..
Bring your laptop computer to use the free Wi-Fi.
Presentations will be available on Windows Vista's Meeting Space
Meet and caucus with other Designers and Developers

SEE YOU THERE!

Technorati tags: StandOut, Michigan Interactive Designers, GTPIE

Labels: GTPIE, Michigan Interactive Designers, StandOut

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Cool WPF Twitter Messaging Application

by Don Burnett

Because of all of the time spent instant messaging, my favorite form of messaging is quickly becoming Twitter. All of my friends who I actually take time to correspond with are on it, and it has gotten a lot attention and there has been multiple clients for it. I think my favorite WPF twitter application is called Witty by Alan Le. I got to spend sometime with Alan at Mix 07 at the lunch table. He's very talented and an authority on WPF, he told us all about his experiences developing Vertigo's Family.Show Application, he is a developer with great insight and is very enjoyable to listen to..

Witty makes Twitter Wonderful..

Here's an example of the public timeline and the update function.. I recommend if you "TWEET" you check this one out.. If you don't know what a TWEET is, it's time you catch up! It's quickly become more than "jargon"..

If you wonder how this works you can look at the source code here... This is pretty much like the application I had started in Expression Blend a few months ago, but more supportable. So please check it out! Alan Le has done a wonderful job with the app, and it's a great example of WPF "R-I-A" coding. It's fast, and I like how it separates direct message replies.

Sure I could probably use something else, but I think it's cool looks smart and it is a Windows platform app and seems to be taking less of my system resources than other clients I have tried. I like Alan's work tremendously.

Tag.. Your It! ..More Goodness from Alan

If you have a data enabled WPF application, you might have a reason to create and TAG data in your application. Alan has not only created such a sample application but blogged about it and made the source code available for you to look at how it's done..

RichTextBox in WPF MIA?? No longer

To say that Alan Le is not a busy man is an understatement, in a really great article on his blog about Commands in WPF he has also released an enhanced RichTextBox based on the original WPF SDK sample and extended it nicely. It can be found here... If you are not subscribed to Alan's Blog you should be..

Technorati tags: Twitter, Vertigo, Alan Le, Witty, Rich Text Box, Tag Cloud, source code

Labels: Alan Le, Rich Text Box, source code, Tag Cloud, Twitter, Vertigo, Witty

Saturday, October 20, 2007

3D Collaboration in WPF

by Don Burnett

Have you ever had to work on a project with companies many miles from you or possibly not in the same hemisphere? Well remote collaboration leads to some extremely challenging situations. During every part of a project you may need to view progress, do sign-offs, update things quickly. The Internet makes that easy but if you are an architect, and engineer, or even an interior designer. Have you ever wanted better control and more discrete reviews or a design project?

Enter InterKnowlogy with 3D Collaborator..

If you are working on a team project you might need to annotate parts or portions, make changes, and do team reviews of work. The folks at InterKnowlogy understood this problem and when they saw WPF knew that it was perfect for a real time 3D collaboration tool. One that understand 2D and 3D AutoCAD files and would let you examine each detail of a drawing and make comments link to each individual piece, with information.. The tool allows for approvals and quick review with both 2D and 3D models.

As you can see above you get to see the Drawing sheet with Exterior Perspectives. The drawing is in real time so the speed is instantaneous. You can also dive into the structure panel to isolate individual parts of the image. Each gets a properties panel where you can make notes, link to URLs, create identification parts.

Here is another example this time in real time 3D the rendered file can be moved around with perspective and individual elements of the drawing can be selected and annotated. This is a very quality product. The annotation capabilities are quite flexible, and this application allows you to annotate on the surface of those AutoCAD© DWF drawings. The annotations are persisted in a file system, a SQL server Database or SharePoint 2007. With it's annotation capability it allows the user to attach annotations in the form of documents, SharePoint discussions or URLs to the exact selected spot on the AutoCAD© DWF drawing. In the SharePoint 2007 version, the application leverages the collaborative environment and provides data in the context of the project not in the context of its storage. It is a feature rich application that allows users to drag and drop data into the context of the project. The WPF application then handles the display annotations of the underlying storage.

This is a great example of a Rich Client application that does some great things for approvals and can be used in about every step of a design project.

They have a demo available for download as well.. It's a one-click install.. This is a great application and if you are a 3D designer you need to check out this application, it can help you through both your design, engineering, and approval processes. It's a Rich Client Application in real time 2D and 3D. You won't find this kind of 3D integration on other so-called "R-I-A" platforms at the moment at least..

Technorati tags: Autocad, Autodesk, Interknowlogy, 3D collaborator, WPF

Labels: 3D collaborator, Autocad, Autodesk, Interknowlogy, wpf

Friday, October 19, 2007

MORAE brings you More..

by Don Burnett

Usability test and user experience research can very time consuming in any design and development environment. Morae by TechSmith.com is software for usability testing and user experience research that helps you identify site and application design problems and share them with stakeholders.

Usability is such a big category these days, and even the government has gotten into the act with standards for this. If you are a developer either for platform applications or web applications you cannot afford to ignore this.

There are not many products that make this process easier to work through, when I say "usability" people confuse this "accessibility" which really isn't quite the same thing.. You need to find something that will be helpful at measuring these metrics. MORAE brings software that helps to automate this process in a good way.

What tools does Morae bring to the party?

You can instantly calculate and graph standard usability measurements, so you can focus on understanding results. This is important especially if you have a large project and the metrics come from a monumental set of data.

The graphing and visualization features are really very powerful. They allow your gathered data to be almost immediately understandable and meaningful. You can then take these to your team and help them to focus on areas of need of improvement.

But it's not all just graphing, the product comes with a video recorder option that lets you create custom studies, test cases, and record onscreen activity during test sessions. You can observe the interactivity also on other machines over a LAN, so you can keep the test environments separate, to keep the results as "scientific" as possible. The recorder option also allows notes and markers to be made during recordings, to mark events and user interactions and how the interface can respond.

This is a very well received application, with users such as the United States Air Force Academy and Stanford University. If you want to read more, they have a great white paper that you can read. I really recommend if you are interested in Usability that you check this program out, whether you develop for the web, platform applications this is a great place to start making your life easier and more productive for you team immediately.

Technorati tags: Morae, Usability, UI Design, User Experience Design process, TechSmith

Labels: MORAE, TechSmith, UI Design, usability, Useability testing, user data gathering, User Experience Design

Thursday, October 18, 2007

News of the Day

i3RDPARTY APPS

Over at Apple's news page they have announced an SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch that will allow third parties to create native applications to be developed that will be installable on the two devices. The SDK should be available in February. These new applications will require some form of security or application signing for the applications to be installed in these devices.

Day of Dot Net This Saturday

The Day of Dot Net Event returns to Ann Arbor's Washtenaw Community College this Saturday.. It's a great even for developers. It's sponsored by the following .NET user groups.

Great Lakes Area .NET User Group
http://www.migang.org/
Ann Arbor .NET Developer Group
http://www.aadnd.org/
Northwest Ohio .NET User Group
http://www.nwnug.com/
Greater Lansing User Group .net
http://portal.artemis-solutions.com/glugnet/
West Michigan .NET Users Group
http://www.grdotnet.org/

This is a great event if you are an integrator or a developer, it's kind of disappointing there are no design tracks. That kind of tells me developers regionally haven't realized that they need to embrace the designer community more. I believe there should be more interaction between designers and developers. Last year I held out hope that they might see the light on this, but if the fact that there is no designer track this year, it probably means that the developers probably haven't "embraced" the designer community who is doing Windows UI development as well.

There is one introduction to Expression Blend, so at least there is a mention. It's sad to think that beyond design there is no User Experience or User Centered design track with the design stuff here. The guy doing the track is a C# MVP with Microsoft and is well known in the C# community.

If you are a developer you should be there, it's worth the time. If you are a UI designer, interaction designer, etc. I still suggest you attend our MichiganInteractiveDesigners.org meetings. You will get great information on user centered UI development and Expression Studio, Expression Blend, etc.

DevCares Event for October (Friday the 19th, 2007 from 8:30am to 12:30pm) Southfield Microsoft office

Presented by: Microsoft DevCares Series

Visual Studio 2008 & LINQ

At the core of most applications developed is the data. Although programming languages have evolved over the years to include features that allow developers to easily utilize object-oriented programming techniques in order to represent complex models, accessing and integrating the information for these models into our applications remains a complex and daunting task. Traditionally, developers have used multiple tools for exploring, understanding, and accessing data, and yet another tool for writing code that integrates that data into the application.

With Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5, a general purpose query facility is being introduced to alleviate the complexities of integrating data in our applications, known as language-integrated query, or LINQ. Join us for this event as we provide you with an overview of this exciting new technology, and show you how you can take advantage of it to reduce the complexities of data integration and improve your productivity.

Session 1: LINQ Overview

In this session, we’ll introduce LINQ, and provide an overview of its concepts and fundamentals, and how it can help developers increase productivity when working with data sources. The overview is followed by demonstrations of utilizing LINQ to connect with a variety of data sources using LINQ to Objects, including LINQ to Object, LINQ to File System, LINQ to Event Log, and LINQ to Flickr.

Session 2: LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities

In this session, we’ll show how to use LINQ to connect with our existing enterprise data architecture. We’ll explore the use of the object mapping tools available for LINQ, including LINQ to SQL, allowing us to work with Microsoft SQL Server databases, and LINQ to Entities, allowing us to query data exposed as objects through the ADO.NET Entity Framework across SQL Server and various third party data stores.

Session 3: LINQ to XML

In this session, we’ll explore how LINQ can be used to help integrate XML-based data in our applications. After covering the basics of XML construction, we’ll dive into XML Axes, Querying, Caching Namespaces, as well as some advanced topics including Extensibility and Load / Save Options.

Why you should attend:

I recommend this training session because the LINQ to XML session and LINQ to entities (which I have spoke about before with the Astoria CTP) is very important to data exchange and databinding with Silverlight.

New WPF book by Manning Publishing

I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak at this book and I really recommend that you pre-order this book right away. The 20 or so chapters of this book is great.. It's the first book to focus on WPF with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5's new features. The examples provided in the book is what makes this book great, from a simple calculator to a top of the line business application. It tells you everything you need to know about development. I highly recommend this book. Get it early.

Personal Note of Thanks:

This blog is getting a lot of attention. I would like to thank George Bolsch, who is helping to organize the User Experience track at Øredev 2007, for inviting me to speak at their conference in Sweden. This is Sweden's largest developer conference and it's well known and attended by many development folks all over the European continent. Sweden is famously known for it's design influence and it sounds like a great place to visit.

Technorati tags: Oredev, 0redev, iTunes, iPhone, iPod Touch, Day of Dot Net

Posted by Don.NET at 11:09 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Labels: 0redev, Day of Dot Net, iPhone, iPod Touch, Michigan Interactive Designers, Oredev, Sweden, WPF in Action

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Office Applications on the Web with Silverlight?

Silverlight is making the web glow at a rate we haven't seen before. If you are a .NET programmer you probably have already read my post about Netika's GOA Winforms for Silverlight that lets you port winforms windows platform application projects to Silverlight 1.1 on the web..

Well, the company has come through with a new DEMONSTRATION of the power of their product. They have put together an entire PowerPoint style application and launched it on the Web as a demonstration of the power of the company's Winforms for Silverlight.. If you have Silverlight 1.1 installed you can view the application by CLICKING HERE.

This is really amazing to look at and play with it proves you could create web based versions of standard "Office" type applications very easily with GOA-Winforms if you are a .NET programmer. This really shows how ahead of the game for "R-I-A" applications that Silverlight 1.1 for .NET is. This really shows how far the .NET programmer is ahead of the game for development over other so-called "R-I-A" platforms (gasping for air anyone?). Before anyone says it, yes they have a version of the application that outputs to Flash runtimes, but the reality of it, is the GOA Winforms product is aimed squarely at the .NET programmer using Visual Studio as their development enviornment.

I have to say this company and product continues to impress me. Go over and play with the demo, you will be amazed right down to the online "collaboration" menu on this demonstration application. If you are developing real applications with Visual Studio and need to port them to the Web GOA Winforms for Silverlight. This puts "R-I-A" development on a whole new level which isn't possible in other RIA platforms, because of the sheer maturity of the windows platform controls. I'd love to see paint.net moved to this format, because it's very possible they could do this and in my opinion it would put other so-called "photo" retouching type applications for the web to shame, just because of what can already be done here..

This is a great development tool, and it's all available now..

Labels: GOA WinForms Pro, PowerPoint, RIA, Silverlight1.1

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Electric Rain StandOut Steps Up

by Don Burnett

Today Electric Rain introduced a public beta of their StandOut Presentation solution. StandOut lets you create very compelling and visually exciting presentations. Why am I talking about it here? Well it's a very new professional WPF application and it integrates with the Expression Studio line including Expression Blend. You can actually use Blend with it to produce presentation templates (Design Kits).

StandOut Presentation Solution consists of two software applications: StandOut Designer Edition. For business, StandOut Presenter Edition enables placement of messaging and content into design kits. The results you can achieve with this software is very cool. It allows you to mix design with content to deliver extremely high quality presentations. The user interface is first rate with a drag and drop design surface.

One of the most impressive features of the Designer is that it imports PowerPoint designs, so if you have a presentation in PowerPoint that you want to enhance it will import slides. You get the full power of WPF with this application and the quality of the output will put your presentations ahead of the game of anyone *JUST* using PowerPoint alone.

I will have a more in-depth walk through upcoming. The big advantage of this program is the change in the presentation design workflow, you can have a designer setup the presentation for you with the designer program. The presenter version doesn't even need to go back to design, to edit and change the presentation, if you have fluid changing information in your presentation this program can help you to make changes on the fly if necessary while keeping the integrity of the presentation.

Technorati tags: Electric Rain, StandOut, PowerPoint, Improve your Presentations, Windows Vista

f110d03b-6aa5-4b01-970b-1b7f7082685c|0|.0

Tags:

Comments (0) E-mail Kick it! DZone it! del.icio.us Permalink Post RSS

Twittering Around in Expression Blend (4-2007)by Donald Burnett (April 2007) (Editor’s Note: Were you even using Twitter in 2007?? I think I was ...January 2008 PostingsSunday, January 27, 2008 Zune: A year later (WOW! You have to take it seriously now.. It's very c...Just what is Windows 7 Virtual XP Mode ?? Okay I feel forced into writing this article because I hopped on ZDNET and read through the ...

Comments are closed

Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa	Su
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31	1	2	3	4

Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa	Su
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31	1	2	3	4

Expression Blend + Sketchflow, WPF & Silverlight

Monday, December 31, 2007

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Monday, December 10, 2007

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Friday, November 30, 2007

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Silverlight 2.0 Release

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Monday, November 26, 2007

Media Agent Key Benefits

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Monday, November 19, 2007

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Friday, November 16, 2007

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Monday, November 5, 2007

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Friday, October 26, 2007

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Monday, October 22, 2007

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Friday, October 19, 2007

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Presented by: Microsoft DevCares Series

Visual Studio 2008 & LINQ

Session 1: LINQ Overview

Session 2: LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities

Session 3: LINQ to XML

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Special Topics List

Calendar

Tag cloud

Blogroll

About Don Burnett

Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa	Su
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31	1	2	3	4