MIX10 - Live from MIX day 3 (official day 2)

Today the quick update turned into a group discussion with Lance Larson, Travis Feirtag and Aaron Hoffman about what we all saw and heard at MIX10.

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Show Notes

Keynote

Today's show includes several guests.  Many thanks to Lance Larson, Travis Feirtag and Aaron Hoffman for joining us in what was going to be a quick recap of the day but turned into a really interesting conversation about what we all got out of the day at MIX10.

The keynote this morning was awesome again, quite a few presentations and demos around things to come and some that are already here. 

Internet Explorer 9 (a current work in progress) - you can install the testdrive version now. Following HTML5 standards was the first point.  The ultimate goal is to display the same output across all browsers. Performance demonstrations were also shown and very impressive.

Scott Guthrie highlighted several new features in Visual Studio 2010

OData - Open Data Protocol which is a standard way to provide data feeds that open up huge possibilities of using web/intranet data

Because of the taste of OData, we went to a few specific sessions.  The first was "OData: There's a Feed for That" (Pablo Castro) and he talked about where the OData protocol evolved from and their goals.  After that he showed how to access the data through the feeds.  Good discussion for consumers of web data and how OData improves the capabilities.

After getting a taste of that we needed to know how to publish so we went to OData: How to Create a Feed for That by Mike Flasko.  He demonstrated how to publish OData feeds in a .NET service environment.

There's a lot more in here.  Too much to list.

Resources

• Internet Explorer 9 - Testdrive
• OData.org - tools, SDK, articles, examples
• Open Data Protocol Visualizer
• PowerPivot
• Project Gustov - if you are a digital artist, take a look at this
• OData Example: http://api.visitmix.com/odata.svc/Sessions

MIX10 - Live from MIX day 2 (official day 1)

Today we got to hear an amazing keynote at MIX10 about Silverlight 4.0 and Windows Phone 7 Series. Saw some really impressive demos of applications for the phone that were created in only 3 weeks. Then, went to some sessions talking about the phone, MVVM, app development and more.

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Show Notes

Notes from some sessions we saw today:

From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform - Scott Hanselman

Scott used the NerdDinner.com site and code to demonstrate some conveniences that you can build into your web site to promote social activities.  You've seen this done on a lot of web sites and Scott pointed out some specific ideas.

• Use Geo-Location to do things like display information relative to the user's current location.  So using services you can use the client IP address and find where the user is "calling from".  With that you can show maps, do more contextual lookups, etc.
• Implement hooks into social connections like Twitter and Facebook.  Though user click permission, post what the user is currently doing, or planning or reading about, etc.
• Use approaches like Open Search to create more standardized search results within your site
• Use MicroFormats which is additional markup attributes to provide metadata for information displayed in your site pages to promote better searching, crawling, etc.
• Provide flexibility in the way users are authenticated through multiple login services (OpenID, YahooID, etc.) possibly in addition to standard forms authentication
• Provide for RSS feeds on your content

Overview of Windows Phone 7 Series Application Platform - Charlie Kindle

This session was packed! Charlie showed the concepts and goals that went into the development of the application platform for WP7 and demonstrated how all of it became a reality.

• Integrated Experience - "Hubs" and the "3 Screens" (People, Office, Pictures, Music/Video, Marketplace and Games)
• Hardware
  • Consistent capabilities across all phones
  • 1 resolution at launch (800x480)
  • 2nd added later (480x320)
  • Same touch capabilities
  • Consistent CPU
  • Consistent RAM
  • Optional physical keyboard
• Experience = People + Standards + Server Code + Client Code (Demo: MIX Scheduler on the phone)
• Users need to be able to customize the phone
• Developers need the ability to be profitable
• Enable all this through the cloud
• 2 types of applications
  • "Apps" - Silverlight
  • Games - XNA
• Useable sandbox
• Service-based application deployment
• Emulator has to be realistic (Phone OS compiled for x86 in a VM)

Build Your Own MVVM Framework - Rob Eisenberg

He is the creator of Caliburn which is a very popular MVVM framework.  In this session he showed a Caliburn influenced very lightweight MVVM framework.

Resources

• Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP
• NerdDinner.com
• NerdDinner.Codeplex.com
• OpenSearch
• MicroFormats
• OpenID

MIX10 - Live from MIX day 1

Today is the pre-conference sessions and we talk about the new Silverlight 4.0 capabilities and a little about ASP.Net MVC 2.0.

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Show Notes

Silverlight 4, New Features

This is a non-comprehensive but still big list of new features coming with Silverlight 4

• Out of browser:  Version 3 provides this capability BUT you were in a very restricted sandbox.  In V4 you now have access to much more of the system resources which means you are in an elevated trust mode.
  • Native Integration: means you can do COM interops.  For example, from Silverlight, you could launch Excel, control it, pass data into it and retrieve data from it.
  • Full Keyboard in full screen mode: Useful in kiosk applications
  • File Access: Read/write to the file system
  • Full File Path on Open/Save dialogs
  • Cross Domain Capable: For example, if you want to interact with
    Twitter.  In the past, you would have to do work arounds like creating intermediate services that you would interact with.  Now you can go directly to Twitter and call the API's.
• Enhanced bound data validation:  You can declaratively set up individual field validations as well as cross-field validations.  There's a new ValidatesOnDataErrors property within a bound data entity that tells the framework to initiate a notify event when there's a validation error.
• More out of the box controls - too many to list here
• More out of the box media capabilities
• Socket-level programming
  • UDP Multicasting
  • TCP Streaming Sockets
  • TCP WCF Capability using net.tcp protocol giving you WCF programming model and great performance
• Right-click: you can program against the right-mouse down and right-mouse up events so you can do things like context-menus instead of just getting the Silverlight configuration dialog
• Drop targets: you can build a Silverlight app to be a drop target so drag pictures from your file system into the app is possible
• MEF integration: You will be able to compose applications at runtime with the Managed Extensibility Framework

There's more but even this list has a lot of great stuff.

ASP.Net MVC 2.0

As mentioned previously, ASP.Net MVC 2.0 has been RTM'd.  So, you can go get it from the official web site here.  I sat in on a boot-camp session today but had to leave.  The presenter was just not hitting on all cylinders and it got a little painful to watch.  I came away with a couple tips before I had to bail though:

• Go download and install the RTM release.  You can get it here.
• The old ASP.Net syntax of <%= Html.Encode(item.Title) %> has been deprecated.  The new syntax is <%: item.Title %>.  Not a huge change but definitely simpler.
• Use ViewModel's to interact with the data rather than straight up with the models themselves.  This lets you provide only what is necessary to the view.
• Especially when working with VS2010/.NET 4.0 and interacting with databases, use Entity Framework to create the models.  EF 4.0 is a definite improvement and works well with MVC (that includes working through ViewModels from the point above).

If you want to use ASP.Net MVC 2.0 and need some training, there are several tutorials/videos out on the site.

Resources:

• Silverlight.net
• Silverlight.tv
• John Papa's web site (Silverlight)
• Mike Taulty's blog (Silverlight)
• ASP.Net MVC 2.0

Musing #17 on DeveloperSmackdown.com Mark and I talked about a few techniques \ thoughts on how we handle conferences like Mix. We’re not pro’s, but over the years they seem to at least work for us.

Conferences are a great place to network with all kinds of people.  I usually try to plan on both formal and informal visits with people.  I like to start planning “formal like visits” as much as three months out.  Now of course, that all depends on what type of event your going to.  At this years MVP summit, I knew I would be going 3+ months out and since it was at the mother ship it was a great opportunity to meet with different members of the product groups.

As for this trip to Mix, I have the following lined up:

• 7 podcasts
• 1 tentative podcast
• 1 formal party
• 1 tentative dinner event
• Pre-Conference day long training event

I guarantee this will change the minute I get off the plane.  You have to be flexible at any event because things are always changing.

Ironically, I don’t pay to much attention to the conference sessions until about a week out.  Honestly like everyone else, I have to many other things going on to try and worry about it.  Things change so why waste the time. In fact things can change up to the minute. Given that about a week out I start to make my plan my schedule.  I always plan 2 to 3 session per track.   A session might end up to full or hell even miss leading.  If you get in and it’s not what you want, CUT BAIT and LEAVE.

So what do my days look like ( FWIW my session picks are not stack ranked )?

Sunday – Travel and Pre-Conference

I am taking the first flight out.  I have family matters to take care of on Saturday so I will be rushing to get out to Vegas.  Once I land I will get checked in and head to my pre-conference session.  I will be spending the entire day doing a little training. Things will end around dinner.  At which point I am sure I hook up with a number of guys for dinner and drinks.

Monday – Conference Kick Off

Session 1

• Robots at MySpace: Massive Scaling a .NET Website with the Microsoft Robotic Studio
• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview: What's in Store for Silverlight 4?
• Changing our Game – an Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Series

Session 2

• Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel Pattern
• Authoring for Microsoft Silverlight 4 with Microsoft Expression Blend
• Overview of the Windows Phone 7 Series Application Platform

Session 3

• 10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning
• Copyright: A Cloudy Subject
• Build Your Own MVVM Framework
• Lap around the Windows Azure Platform
• Windows Phone UI and Design Language

Tuesday – Sessions

Session 1

• Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks and Architectural Experiences
• OData: There's a Feed for That
• Six Things Every jQuery Developer Must Know
• An Introduction to Developing Applications for Microsoft Silverlight

Session 2

• The HaaHa Show: Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Security with Haack and Hanselman
• Unit Testing Silverlight and Windows Phone Applications
• Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight, Part 1

Session 3

• Implementing OData: How to Create a Feed for That
• Microsoft Silverlight Optimization and Extensibility with MEF
• Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight, Part 2

Session 4

• Windows Phone Application Platform Architecture
• Improving the Usability and Security of OpenID
• An Hour With Bill Buxton
• Modern Web Form Design
• How jQuery Makes Hard Things Simple

Wednesday – Sessions and Conference End

Session 1

• Advanced Web Debugging with Fiddler
• Development and Debugging Tools for Building XNA Games for Windows Phone

Session 2

• Building Innovative Windows Client Software
• Developing Natural User Interfaces with Microsoft Silverlight and WPF 4 Touch
• Dynamic Layout and Transitions for Microsoft Silverlight 4 with Microsoft Expression Blend

Session 3

• Building Windows Phone Games
• Accessing Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight
• Prototyping Rich Microsoft Silverlight 4 Applications with Microsoft Expression SketchFlow
• IronRuby for the .NET Developer
• Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong
• Search Engine Optimization for Microsoft Silverlight

Session 4

• Deep Dive into Orchard Extensibility for CMS Developers

Session 5

• Improving Software Quality for the Modern Web
• Building a Next-Generation Web Application with Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2 and jQuery

Thursday – Travel Date

Basically a travel day.  Once home I will try to spend a few minutes gathering my thoughts while things are fresh in my head.  Then I will try to build out a plan of the stuff I either want to re-review or plan to see at some point.

Oh man, it’s going to be a busy week. I hope to see you at Mix

Mix10 Smackdown – Were kicking off things.

In this musing Clark and Mark kick off their trip to the Microsoft Mix 2010 Conference in Vega$.  We will explore some of the different techniques they use to navigate such a conference.

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Show Notes:

DeveloperSmackdown.com got stickers.  We would love to give you one.  If yo

u see us, feel free to ask.  If you’re not in the area just email the show and we will figure out how to get you one.

ASP.NET MVC2 Released!!! Now that makes us really happy!!

Some great Mix10 links:

• VisitMix Site
• Tommy Lee’s Devils Guide to Mix10
• Orchard Project
• Mike Swanson’s All about Mix10

Want to see Clark on This Week in Channel 9 show 98?

Have you missed the buzz that is Windows Phone 7 Series?  I am sorry if you have.  Make sure you check out both Mix and Charlie Kindel’s Blog for a ton of great information.

This week we announced Chicago Code Camp 2.  While the site isn’t anything special yet, we are working on it.  We would love to see you there, so go register at the Chicago Code Camp site.

Tips and Tricks:

Symbolic Links Defined per msdn.com

“A symbolic link is a file-system object that points to another file system object. The object being pointed to is called the target.”

Useful links

• Hanselman
• MSDN Symbolic Links
• Junfeng Zhang's blog

Rocket Dock.  What is Rocket Dock, well this following was taken directly from RocketDock.com:

“RocketDock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock.

Now with added Taskbar support your minimized windows can appear as icons on the dock. This allows for better productivity and accessibility.”

Bamboozled in the Office

It's the first show of the new year and decade. Mark and Clark talk about, well, nothing that they planned on. The show gets bamboozled right from the start and the discussion turns toward where most development is done and that's in your office at home. We talk about what went into the design and what makes the office work from two similar but still different points of view.

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Show Notes

Design thoughts for your home office

• Isolation - Use every opportunity to separate your office from the world (insulation, doors, walls, etc.)  It will help you create a space where you can think.
• Design the desk - sketch out the space on paper and figure out how much desk you can fit into the space
  • How will you use the desk space - keyboard, mouse, monitors, laptops, writing area.  Space == Goodness
  • Get those monitors off the desk with monitor support arms.  You gain not only desk space but also flexibility in positioning.
• Make sure you have plenty of power.  Don't just plug in a surge protector in a surge protector to get more outlets.  More outlets doesn't equate to more power.  Get an electrician to help if you can.
• Same thing goes for networking.  You'll never have enough.  Wireless is great for general internet/network access but if you are going to run servers or push a lot of media (audio/video) around the house then go gigabit!  With that you need Cat5E or Cat6 cabling EVERYWHERE.  The first cable that isn't rated high enough will slow the network down.  Also, plan your network to get the most speed and flexibility - use switches not hubs!
• Make sure there's plenty of light
• Audio and video - from just listening to your Zune for music and Smackdown podcasts to watching UTube, DVD's or training videos.  Make the space enjoyable.
• If you're a book whore like the two of us (Clark is way more than me by the way), plan on lots of shelf and cabinet space.  Cables and boards and DVD drives and mice and keyboards have to go somewhere.

Resources:

• IKEA - Great place for inexpensive but highly effective office furniture
• Workspaces.com - More expensive but more customized office solutions
• Software KVM's Clark is using and has tested
  • Multiplicity
  • MaxiVista
  • KaVoom
• IOGear - Hardware KVM that Mark is using

Tips and Tricks

Clark's Tip #1 - Workspaces.com - he recommends them HIGHLY and for good reason.  His "command center" desk is something to envy.

Mark's Tip #1 - NewEgg.com - Great prices for all things technical very quick response.  Awesome place to shop.

Mark's Tip #2 - In Visual Studio, use "Control -" (Ctrl and the minus key) to walk or navigate yourself back from things like "Go To Definition".  Each time you hit it, it will step you back one jump.

Clark's Tip #2 - In Visual Studio, use "Control ." (Ctrl and period) to resolve references and insert the using statement or the full type qualifiers in your code.

Martin Woodward talks about Teamprise

In this version of The Smackdown Mark and Clark have the awesome opportunity to spend some time with Martin Woodward. Martin recently joined Microsoft as a result of the Microsoft Teamprise acquisition joining the Visual Studio ALM Suite of tools. Martin tells us all about getting his Microsoft chip installed as well as some Teamprise stuff too.

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Show Notes

Martin Woodward blogs at http://woodwardweb.com and is one of the hosts of RadioTfs.  RadioTfs is a podcast focused on everything Team Foundation Server. 

What is Teamprise?

Teamprise offers a suite of client applications for accessing Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server from outside the Visual Studio environment (IDE).

Teamprise enables software development teams to use the source control, work item tracking, build, and reporting features of Team Foundation Server from other platforms, including Macintosh and UNIX systems, and from within Eclipse-based IDEs.

During the show Martin referenced the Teamprise Build Extensions.  You can find that and many other utilities on their labs page.

The beta “Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 codename “Eaglestone” release can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/03/04/microsoft-visual-studio-team-explorer-2010.aspx

Remember those 3270 screens you loved so much?  Check out Teamprise on the mainframe.

We did talk about fun “build” related software check out:

• Brian the Build Bunny
• TfsAlert

Clark talked about starting to get into the ZWave world.  Here are a number of good starting places:

• .NET SDK ControlThink
• mControl
• SmartHome Forum
• Smart Home Products

Tips and Tricks

Unfortunately there were no tips and tricks for this show.

Is Your Robot Looking At My Hinie?

Mark and Clark talk about doing home automation using Z-Wave and MS Robotics Studio. Clark wants to turn his house into a robot and they talk about how to get started with home automation. Tips and tricks include quickly changing editor font size in Visual Studio 08 - great support for code demos. Woopra web site analytics are also discussed.

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Show Notes

Episode 14 - Home Automation

Clark has been researching home automation and wireless control.  The 3 technologies we talk about are:

1. X-10
2. Instinion
3. Z-Wave
   1. Most Expensive
   2. Newest of the 3
   3. Uses a control stick to transmit to the peer to peer Z-Wave network
   4. Managed Z-wave .NET SDK available through ControlThink

Mark has had some experience with Microsoft Robotics Studio so we talked about the possibility of using it to turn your house into a robot (home automation).

There are two main components that everything else is built upon. The CCR (Concurrency and Control Runtime) and the DSS (Decentralized Software Services). The CCR provides the base multi-threaded messaging system and the DSS manages the creation and communication of the services.

Example Robots/Controllers that I've played around with that can use the Robotics Studio:

• Lego NXT
• Robotics Connection
• Tons of other possibilities

Z-Wave Resources

• CocoonTech.com - Active Z-Wave Forum
• ControlThink.com - Managed Library for creating .NET Z-Wave applications, USB Dongles,
• ThinkEssentials (Z-Wave device control client - if you don't want to write your own software)
• Leviton - Owns ControlThink, lighting controls, Forum
• SmartHome.com - wide array of smarthome products
• ASIHome.com - Z-Wave Products

Random Thoughts

Hopefully, there's a new and improved web site in the near future. One possibility is Oxite which runs VisitMIX and MicrosoftPDC.com web sites.

Tips and Tricks

Use simple key combinations to increase or decrease the font size in the Visual Studio 2008 editor.

This is useful when giving demonstrations where you need to get down and dirty in the code. When you display your code, and need to quickly increase the font size for easier viewing then do these steps to set things up ahead of time:

In the menu, go to "Tools/Options.", then "Environment/Keyboard". In the "Show Commands Containing" textbox type in "FontSize" and you should see three entries in a selection box.

"DecreaseTextEditorFontSize" and "IncreaseTextEditorFontSize" are pretty obvious what they will do whereas "UpdateTextEditorFontSizeToMatchDisplayProperties" is a little obscure but it will reset the font size to its normal setting.

Click in the "Press shortcut keys:" textbox - you can then enter key combinations and assign them to the selected commands. For example, select/click on "IncreaseTextEditorFontSize", then click in the "Press shortcut keys:" textbox and type the Ctrl+Shift+UpArrow keys. Then when you click the "Assign" button it will save that combo. Do the same with "Decrease" and Ctrl+Shift+DownArrow. And then do the same with "Update.ToMatch" and Ctrl+Shift+RightArrow - or any combination you decide makes sense.

You will then be able to talk and quickly and easily increase/decrease the font size.

Woopra - Website Analytics being used for CSell.net, MarkNic.net and DeveloperSmackdown.com. Woopra offers a level of free tracking and analysis for web sites and web services.

Hey, let us know what you're thinking.  Ideas, experiences, examples, questions, whatever!  ping us at: webmaster@developersmackdown.com