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

Windows Live Explodes

by Don Burnett

Wow it's been a wild week for new technology. Microsoft's Live initiatives is seeing some impressive results.. Let's get to these...

First look at this beautiful web browser, in of course the Apple iPhone... What's really cool about it is it's usability.. Content scrolls and zooms at your fingertips..

"42 Wallaby Way, Sidney.."

No it's not Finding Pixar/Disney's Nemo 2, but Microsoft Live Labs new Mobile web browser for Windows Mobile 5 and Above... DEEPFISH...

The nice thing about Windows Mobile based products is that you can just install new programs and upgrade your Windows Mobile's Installation. Unlike the Apple iPhone which Apple locks you out of installing new applications from third parties. Applications for the iPhone require web browser access at the moment for 3rd party content. Granted some Windows Mobile providers do the same thing, as a matter of security (which very few end users agree with) but the majority of Windows Mobile devices let you install new updates and 3rd party applications.

When the iPhone was released just about everyone agreed it has great web browser with scaling and zooming of web pages. Windows Mobile users felt left behind, until now.

Deepfish enhances existing mobile browsing technologies by displaying content in a view that is closer to the desktop experience. The zoom-able interface and cue map allow you to quickly access the information you care about over the web without ever losing track of where you are. Right now it's still in development, and they have been doing community technology previews, so keep an eye out for the next set of invites to betas if it interests you..

The scaling technology is pretty advanced and amazing. If you have looked at Microsoft's Photosynth you will see a familiar imaging engine, called SeaDragon. It also supports things like dynamic overlays, so you'll see some very exciting things in the future with content integration..

On10.net has some exclusive video if you are interested in seeing this cool new technology. Between this and Windows Mobile Live Search, my iPhone interest is beginning to wain. I will say I would think the design of the iPhone is cool, if they just supported more than AT&T as a carrier now and opened it truly up to 3rd party NON-WEB applications..

You say Taffy, I say Tafiti !

One of the coolest interfaces ever... Tafiti means "To Research.." Many other people have blogged about it here, but I am just going to say that this is the coolest interface to a search engine ever. It's done in Silverlight and gives you not only access to searching thru images, RSS feeds and the Web, as well as books and news. If you want to know what the web you work with will look like in the next few years, check out the richness of this application. I bet they have even Google salivating with such a great user experience.

Most search engines just display content and you have to capture the data yourself. With Tafiti everything is just like working with the physical content. You can pick up content (of any type) and drag and drop content on stacks while labeling it and storing it. The user experience value of this application is phenomenal and should revolutionize how we work with content when we research things on the web. The correlation between the User Interface and what you actually do when you research and organize that research is almost exactly one-to-one.. Another nice feature (but not sure how people will end up using it is a tree view). You can also store and return to individual searches as well as merging them.

This is a UI tour-de-force, and it's only a "demonstration"

Look up in the sky! It's Windows Live SkyDrive!

The competition for online storage of your files is heating up. Microsoft has a new release of Windows SkyDrive for online storage. If you use Windows Live for storage you'll find the great for situations where you want to share files over multiple computers.

SkyDrive is also giving Windows Live Writer an assist! There is a new plug-in that you can download to allow you to link content to your blogs/writing consumers to also access content saved to your SkyDrive folders inside of Windows Live Writer. Yeah file based content embedding finally! It even lets you put it in an iframe, just in case your provider doesn't like you linking up due to server restrictions.

Technorati tags: Windows Live, Silverlight, Rich Internet Application, Search, Google, Tafiti, SkyDrive, Web 2.0, iPhone, DeepFISH

File Sharing Online with Box.net

by Don Burnett

*WARNING* FIRST PARAGRAPH -A BIT OFF TOPIC

iPhone Support

Wow Box.net how great is this? This is a little bit off-topic, but a lot of people who are developing WPF and Silverlight applications, and Box.net is a very well liked company for more than a couple of reasons. So can we marry the two? They have won numerous awards for making it easy to store your files online and make them available in workgroup applications. They support accessing your files in a number of unexpected places including mobile devices, Facebook.com, and a number of other web 2.0 type platforms...

Their latest wonder is now connectivity support for the iPhone..

This allows you to access your online file storage at box.net right from your Apple iPhone.. The navigation is pretty simple, like a normal iPhone application. Seems to work flawlessly as well.. It's fast and efficient on the iPhone too.

Microsoft Expression Blend Meets Box (Introduction)

Box.Net provides a very open API for developers. You can access file sharing and Box's services directly from SOAP, XML POST, or REST API's. That means we can use them right from Expression Blend's XML data source giving Blend WPF and Silverlight instant access to online files and sharing. This opens up a whole new realm of functionality to Blend RIA developers..

First Steps (Please Note most of this is paraphrased in Box.NET's very COMPLETE developer documentation):

You'll need to sign up and obtain a Box.net API key, since you'll need to pass in your API key with every API call you make.

Box.net API authentication provides a secure way for users to authenticate with Box.net without having to share their Box.net user name or password with you. This provides a consistent, safe experience for users and makes things easier on you (since you don't have to store user credentials).
To obtain an authentication ticket, your application performs these steps:

• Obtain an authentication ticket by calling the get_ticket API method.
• Redirect the user to the Box.net API authentication page, passing the ticket you obtained from the get_ticket call as a query string parameter
• The user then authenticates by entering their user name and password on the authentication page

After the user has authenticated, the next step depends on whether you're writing a web application or a client application.
If you're writing a web application, Box.net redirects the user to a page called the callback page. This is a page that resides on your site (you should have designated this page when you set up your application). The authentication appends a ticket variable to the end of this URL

For client applications, the user is shown a message instructing them to return to the application after they've authenticated. The application then calls get_auth_token with the ticket parameter to retrieve the authorization token.
At this point, you'll probably either want to show the user the files in their Box or enable them to upload a file to their Box.

To show a complete list of the user's files and folders, use the get_account_tree call. This call retrieves an XML document describing the entire contents of the user's box, including files and folders. You can then databind this to a XAML treeview control in Blend. You could also pass the ID of a folder as a parameter to this call, enabling your application to retrieve a subset of the tree structure.

To upload a file, your application performs an HTTP POST using a URL of the form:

http://upload.box.net/api/upload/<auth_token>/<folder_id>

At the time you upload a file using HTTP POST, you can also specify whether you want the file to be publicly sharable (as described in the Upload and Download reference documentation). You can also share a file after it's been uploaded using the public_share API if you prefer.

It's that simple to work with.

This service was almost made for Blend users and is easy to implement thanks to it's support of XML and REST API's.

To Be Continued...

In an upcoming posting, I will do a walk through of creating a file sharing application using Box.Net using Expression Blend in both WPF and Silverlight that is both accessible online from the Silverlight plug-in and as full Windows WPF platform application.

Technorati tags: Box.net, iPhone, online file storage, online file sharing, workgroup sharing, web 2.0 api, REST, XML, Expression Web, Expression Blend, WPF, Silverlight

Apple iPhone Applications on your Windows Start Menu! How Cool...

by Donald Burnett

Big thanks to Jeff Sandquist for the tip-off on this one. One of the Microsoft guys has been at it again, you can now place "gadgets" in your Windows Start Menu, it's Called Start++ and it's thanks to one of the ultra-cool Microsoft employees Brandon Paddock. What are you waiting for you can download it right here.

Release 0.7x of Start++ not only lets you put gadgets, but now iPhone Applications, yes you heard that right, iPhone applications. Since Apple decided to keep the iPhone Web 2.0 friendly Brandon found a way to incorporate these right into Start++.. There are more all the time, if you want a big list and want to play with the iphone application manager check out the iPhone Apps manager by Matthew Peach. You will be surprised at how useful this whole thing is.

Here is the Scobelizer again Wiki Immortalized in the START menu..

One of the reasons I think Brandon is ultra-cool is he also thinks about others. He is actually involved in trying to save Aids Oprhans in Uganda.. The license for Start++ is careware and requires a donation: In the license it states:

"The software on this site is made available for free, however I ask that if you find it useful that you make a contribution of any size to Tusubira - the Uganda aid organization I helped start with four UW students last summer. I and 10 other volunteers be visiting Uganda with Tusubira at the end of this summer to work with the Ugandan organization "Save The Aids Orphans" (STAO). All advertising revenue on this site and BrandonLive.com is currently going to help cover travel expenses for students on the team.

If you choose to donate, your contribution will be used to help our current project, expanding the STAO orphanage in Mafubira, Uganda - or to purchase food for the orphans living there... Tusubira is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization, contributions are tax deductible. "

How cool is that, if you don't support his efforts well shame on you. This is a great thing he is doing, and it's a discrete way to save the world one person at a time.

If you are interested in how easy it is to set-up gadgets in Start++ please check out this interface, pretty easy huh?

Technorati tags: iphone, apple, windows vista, start menu, start++, iphone apps on your start menu, web 2.0

Why Microsoft is softening me to Windows Mobile Applications

by Don Burnett

I am predicting that this will be a huge year for Windows Mobile.. Why? Well some things have changed about the Windows Mobile platform that make this an exciting time.

Changes:

• Advent of Windows Live
• Silverlight Mobile Control
• Support for not just the latest Windows Mobile version.

I have been loyal to Windows CE since it's inception (before that Apple Newton) and down through it's various incarnations My first PDA had a grayscale screen. I think my favorite one was the version that looked like Windows 95 had a desktop explorer and a start menu..

I bought a Windows mobile phone over a year ago. It had Windows Mobile 2003 second edition. As soon as I did they came out with a new version. Through my four pocket PCs I kept being left behind. The products I bought have not been able to update to the latest version (including the HP IPAQ 2215 which I still have). I think that's been a MAJOR, MAJOR difficulty with the platform and keeping customer retention in the product line. I have complained about this before.

I like the Windows Mobile OS quite a bit, there are some great applications for it, and I can even myself develop for it.. I admit, I did get a little envious seeing all the hoopla over the new Apple iPhone. However I have seen the Silverlight plug-in for Windows Mobile so I know the level of graphics and overall coolness of Windows Mobile will see a big upgrade in the near future and I really think we are heading for .

 

 

On my Windows Mobile Phone I do have an SD card and I did find it really cool when I could sync a whole movie I recorded with Windows Media Center and sync it without having to think about it. I ended up using it to download and watch TV episodes of Smallville during the season a year ago, when I didn't have time to watch it. The screen was a bit small, but hey it fit in the pocket just fine. After a while the novelty wore off and the function was replaced by my brand new Sony PSP. 

I don't really load up my phone with software, it runs slower the more memory used. However, this decision on my part just changed today with software so useful that I'll probably never remove it from my phone.

That would be Windows Live Search..

Besides the typical search engine function, it displays news feeds from MSNBC, has a local search feature for landmarks, locations and businesses, gives you great maps and directions (using NAVTEQ like most commercial GPS systems use). The search function also uses an hierarchical menu system much like Apple's iPod device making navigation easy. I decided to try to simulate the Apple ad on television with it, I searched for seafood, got directions and called the actual place I got directions too.. All that without an iPhone, WOW!

The instant answers feature is quite nice too.. I could get stock quotes and find out information very easily..

This is all new features for my phone and wow they support not just the latest windows mobile but my windows mobile 2003 phone as well.. All I have to say is go Microsoft..This is the best new add-in for the phone since I got it. I am actually finding a justification for the purchase of my data plan. I think this addition should come standard on every Windows Mobile device. The utility of this software client it is unparalleled. It's available as a free download on all current Windows phones. If you have Windows Mobile you should run to download this right now. It made me feel my phone had new function and I was actually happy about my purchase as the one feature I found cool and a reason to buy one is now on the phone I have right now. I am also very happy my phone has real buttons, call me old fashioned but I am still big on real tactile feedback.

Windows Live Search is the first in a series of web connected applications from Windows Live. I am totally impressed by this application and the fact that they are addressing all the installed user base of Windows Mobile tells me that they are very serious about this market and bringing innovation. I would now call the Windows Mobile the best improved product that I have ever purchased.

So before you go out to get that Apple iPhone, check out Windows Live Search and the new Silverlight Mobile. It means a great mobile future ahead for Microsoft.

If this little video below is any indication (reminds me a lot of the Windows Media Center Interface) we are in for a great year..

 

 

 

Technorati tags: windows mobile, phone, iphone, calamari, mapping, google maps, windows live, Silverlight Mobile Plugin