The Unauthorised Autobiography of Marc Holmes

November 23, 2009

PDC Sessions on Windows Azure (et al)

Here's a handy list for you to get your fill of Azure related content from PDC.

Getting Started

Windows Azure

Codename "Dallas"

Enrich your Applications with Data from Microsoft Project Code Name "Dallas"

SQL Azure

Identity

Plenty of content. If that's not enough then there are also Channel 9 Learning Centers for Azure and for Identity, and you can download training kits for Azure and Identity here.

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November 20, 2009

GalaxyZoo

Before they headed off to PDC, Mike and Paul headed to Oxford (almost the same weather - takes about the same time to get there too given the ring road) to talk to Chris Lintott and Arfon Smith about the GalaxyZoo.org project which is a "Citizen Science" project inviting users to classify galaxies using specialist skills not available to computers (eyes and intuition mainly).

The video is now up on Channel 9.

Chris talks about the Galaxy Zoo and Citizen Science, followed by Arfon talking about the platform behind the project, and it's migration from Rails/MySQL on Amazon to Windows Azure/SQL Azure.

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November 20, 2009

EyeOnEarth - Environmental Azure App

Just when you think you've escaped the Unified Communications net (THEY CAN ALWAYS FIND YOU!) for five minutes to have a look at Facebook, up pops another buddy - Stu McCarthy - to tell me he's just finished work on EyeOnEarth.eu. Seems like a bunch of MCS chums are involved so well done all.

The official press announcement is here, but in a nutshell you can scan around Europe courtesy of Bing Maps, Silverlight and Azure (hey - the coherent development strategy) and take a look at air and water quality monitors. Cool.

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November 20, 2009

Office 2010 Beta

Also in the PDC excitement, we announced the availability of Office 2010 Beta which you can find here.

Aside from the main client itself (I've been using a version of that for a couple of months - Sparklines FTW!), there are some other things that are wrapped up in this.

Office Web Apps - coming soon you know...
Outlook Social Connector, a new feature that brings communications history and social networking feeds into the Outlook experience.
Office Mobile 2010, which includes mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 and is available on the Windows Mobile marketplace for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.
Project 2010 - available here.
Visio 2010 - available here.

Keep on eye on Viral's blog for discussion on Office and SharePoint.

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November 20, 2009

Coherent Development Strategy (from PDC)

I loved the keynotes at PDC this year - although as I was trying to edit the Day 1 keynote from 2.25 hours to 30 mins for the #MWord event I wasn't loving it so much. That said, the thing about editing is that you really have to listen and get behind the words being spoken.

I recommend the whole of the keynotes for you - particularly Day 1 with Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia.

For me, most interestingly from Ray Ozzie's keynote was the discussion of "3 screens and a cloud". You've seen this before probably (maybe from @Stevecla), but here Ray said we were delivering on a "single coherent development strategy" in order to develop for that paradigm(watch from about 15 minutes in - oh, and enjoy the "instant seek" of the smooth streaming experience).

In this he defines the components of that strategy as being:

Tools: Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression
Runtimes: Internet Explorer and Silverlight
Platform: Windows 7 and Azure

Of course there's a lot of detail in this - particularly as Bob began to drill down into the detail of the announcements. I'm still getting my head around the whole thing. (I know there's a lot, because I was given a 72-page FAQ doc - and that was just for Day 1).

If you're thinking about how to get across the PDC topic areas at a reasonable level then these are maybe the things to think about to begin with:

Get your hands on the tools: Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Studio
Have a look at some of the commentary on the work we're doing towards Internet Explorer 9.
Update yourself on Silverlight 4 via this post from Tim, or if you're a detail fan, then head to Mike's blog for 26 blog posts on the new features.
All of the Azure stuff can be found from the main site, but also the delivery of AppFabric - the realisation of the Dublin, Velocity (and Sydney) projects really takes some time to digest.

Sooo much stuff to do. Hope this helps.

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November 17, 2009

Quick Links from #PDC09 Keynote Day 1

If you didn't catch the keynote from PDC 09 today then you can see the on-demand stream here shortly. This year the keynote was streamed with Silverlight Smooth Streaming: my experience was very good - didn't miss a beat in two hours - and there seemed to be positive tweets from others on the subject too.

Essentially the keynote today was Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia - aided by a few others - talking about the delivery of some aspects of the Azure platform, and pointing the way to the future. You can see the official press releases here. A few links:

Azure will be going into production from 1st January 2010 which is a huge milestone. You can see pricing details here.
Pinpoint is updated: an online marketplace for Microsoft partners to market and sell their applications.
Codename "Dallas" is a new data service, based on Azure and available through Pinpoint which enables developers to access premium datasets and content such as NAVTEQ, AP and Data.gov. An interesting innovation in the exposure of these kinds of datasets.
Beyond the services themselves, Bob concentrated on the tooling - via VS2010 and AppFabric. AppFabric is a set of services "that enable deployment and management" of scalable applications across server and cloud. This is a realisation of a few projects: Dublin, Velocity and Oslo alongside the .NET Services. The demo here was very impressive and will take a while for me to get my head around. Meantime, you can take a look at the learning centre for more background and - very shortly - downloads of the beta.
ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta was released and you can see Phil Haack's post here.

A starter for 10. There'll be a load more tomorrow, so get reading!

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November 17, 2009

Creating Casual Games in Silverlight 3

What an awesome set of 12 tutorials!

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November 17, 2009

More Media Center: Dual Hauppauge 4000 DVB-S2 Cards

In the latest - and hopefully final - part of the Media Center saga, I've also pushed a second Hauppauge WinTV-HVR4000 card into the machine so I get the multi-channel recording from the satellite channels I can receive (a la Sky+).

Phew - just in time for Sky Player to become available in Media Center. What? Gah...

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November 17, 2009

Asus EEE 1101HA

I bought a replacement netbook recently: my old MSI Wind didn't really have the battery life I wanted but it worked fine otherwise.

Picking a netbook should be fairly straightforward as the specs are all the same but I was particularly attracted to the EEE 1101HA because of the advertised battery life and 1366x768 (11.6") resolution. The resolution makes Outlook (and some other apps) that bit more usable.

So I picked one up. Nice machine - and it indeed has a great battery life. The 'seashell' design means it's perfect for carrying around. But it runs a Z series Atom processor so it's a bit underpowered and sluggish at times.

I read somewhere (can't find it since) that the Z series can only recognise 1GB of RAM so I was a bit peeved, but turns out it can take 2GB.

So, happy to report that this piece of Crucial RAM has saved the day, and turned the 1101HA into a lovely little machine.

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November 12, 2009

Dolly Talks IE8

Tremendous video from Dolly Parton (that's some website by the way) in which she talks about the virtues of IE8 and gives us a technical backgrounder in web slices.

"Hell - I didn't even know there was a one through seven"

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