News and Links

• Windows Azure's expansion in Australia
• Visual Studio Live! event page
• Haishi's Blog - Get a discount code for Visual Studio Live!

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• [00:38] Microsoft unveils Xbox One: the ultimate all-in-one home entertainment system
• [02:10] Stay Connected with the Ch9 Events App
• [03:25] Putting the power of Unity in the hands of every mobile developer (David Helgason)
• [04:32] Channel 9 Highlight: Creating the Virtual Experiment Laboratory app with the Visual Studio 3D Starter Kit (Roberto Sonnino, Gokhan Sengun)
• [05:40] Step-by-Step – Making Windows 8 Pong for a complete beginner (Susan Ibach)
• [06:13] OData Apps in Update 2–Querying data from Stack Overflow (Matt Sampson)
• [07:34] Where else is NuGet used in Visual Studio? (Luan Nguyen)
• [09:04] Play with [NuGet] Packages, programmatically! (Ranjini Mathrubootham)

Picks of the Week!

• Mark's Pick of the Week:[09:50] Voice Commands (Mads Kristensen)
• Clint's Pick of the Week:[10:52] AGENT: The World's Smartest Watch (Secret Labs, House of Horology)

• [2:16] Demo: Start Screen background
• [6:33] Demo: Scheduled Maintenance
• [11:00] Demo: Power Options – Hibernate or Sleep

There’s never been a better time to build for Windows!  Join the App Builder Program and learn about the Windows ecosystem opportunity, design and monetization tips and partner development frameworks.

Resources:

• Download the Windows 8 Enterprise Evaluation
• Windows 8 Enterprise
• Windows 8 Licensing
• The Springboard Series Blog
• Windows 8 Resources for IT Pros on Springboard
• Resources for Developers to Build Windows 8 Apps
• Windows 8 resources for partners on Microsoft Partner Network

Old school ft. New school: Snake with a Lumia 920 controlling a 5110 LCD using a Netduino

This project definitely gave me a good helping of nostalgia, and I had more fun than any other project I’ve done.

The Objective was to remake the original snake game from 1997 that came with the monochrome Nokias, and display it on a Nokia 5110 LCD connected to a Netduino. Then have a Lumia 920 connected over Bluetooth as the controller.

A while back when looking around for display solutions for various projects I stumbled onto the 5110 LCD. I’m not sure *why* exactly they are so popular, but it turns out that you can find them easily online and they are dirt cheap! I bought a couple from DX recently and they work exactly how I expected, and are perfect for a lot of things. At the price, I highly doubt that the DX ones are real, but at less than $5 who’s going to complain?

...

What you need:

• Netduino (I recommend a Netduino 2)
• Bluetooth module
• A Windows Phone 8 (should be a Nokia for authenticity sakes)

Netduino:

A Netduino community member, Omar, wrote an awesome library for using this particular LCD, which you can grab here: http://wiki.netduino.com/Nokia-5110-LCD.ashx

On that wiki the labels for wiring were in a different order and had slightly different names to my LCD, so if you have one from DX follow my wiring below, or use the wiki instructions.

...

Windows Phone:

The Windows Phone side is really simple, and is mainly just stuff to make it “pretty”.

...

Pretty simple huh? A bunch of code wasn’t mentioned here, so make sure you download the source below:

Download the Netduino + WP8 Source Code (~1.6MB) [GD: Click through for the download link... don't want to leach his traffic...]

Looks like a fun project to play with over the weekend, doesn't it?

_________________

Abstract:
In Part 19 of his Windows Azure series, Jim O’Neil covers the networking features found in Windows Azure.  Tune in as he gives us an overview of Windows Azure Connect and Windows Azure Virtual Network by tackling a few common scenarios in which you may want to use it and then demos for us how to provision these options in the Windows Azure portal.

After watching this video, follow these next steps:

Step #1 – Try Windows Azure: No cost. No obligation. 90-Day FREE trial.
Step #2 – Download the Tools for Windows 8 App Development
Step #3 – Start building your own Apps for Windows 8

Subscribe to our podcast via iTunes or RSS

If you're interested in learning more about the products or solutions discussed in this episode, click on any of the below links for free, in-depth information:

Videos:

• (Part 1) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Azure Basics
• (Part 2) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – What to do with Blobs?
• (Part 3) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil–Why do we need Drives?
• (Part 4) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil–Using the Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• (Part 5) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil –Table Storage Overview
• (Part 6) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Windows Azure SQL Database
• (Part 7) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – SQL Database Federations
• (Part 8) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil –SQL Data Sync
• (Part 9) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Windows Azure Web Sites
• (Part 10) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Web Roles
• (Part 11) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Worker Roles
• (Part 12) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Caching
• (Part 13) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Windows Azure Queue Storage
• (Part 14) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Windows Azure Virtual Machines - Part 1
• (Part 15) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Windows Azure Virtual Machines – Part 2
• (Part 16) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Traffic Manager
• (Part 17) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Identity
• (Part 18) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Service Bus

Virtual Labs:

• MSDN Virtual Labs: Windows Azure

In this episode, Brady and Cory talk to Howard Dierking about the Katana Project. Katana, as Howard explains, is how developers can do OWIN hosting within ASP.NET. Already used by Web API and SignalR, OWIN is a new hosting framework that provides developers the ability to customize the entire pipeline and middleware in their ASP.NET applications. Howard explains OWIN, and how Katana provides the hosting functionality, and also demonstrates a few use cases to get you up and running with OWIN now. If you've been thinking of trying out OWIN, heard about Katana but were too afraid to ask about it, or you've already tried some stuff and want more guidance, don't miss this show.  

Show Links

• OWIN Specification
• OWIN Hosting Extensions
• Katana Project
• Samples

Follow Howard Dierking

Follow Brady Gaster

Follow Cory Fowler

MVVM is an enormous topic. In addition to this video, you should take a look at the following articles, videos and blog posts to learn more about the why and the how of MVVM.

These two posts are targeted at Windows Phone Mango (7.5) but all the code carries across to Windows Phone 8 as well.

Getting Started with MVVM in 10 minutes

Building a Reusable ICommand implementation for Windows Phone MVVM apps

Laurent Bugnion, who leads the fantastic MVVM Light Toolkit project, has a 4-article MSDN series on MVVM

IOC Containers and MVVM

Messenger and View Services in MVVM

Maximizing the Visual Designer's Usage with Design-Time Data

Commands, RelayCommands and EventToCommand

And finally, more videos:

Designing Awesome XAML apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 (Build 2012)

Create Cross-Platform Apps using Portable Class Libraries (Build 2012)

Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel pattern (MIX10)

Deep Dive MVVM (MIX 11)

More resources:

• Windows Azure Service Bus
• Latest Service Bus .NET client library on NuGet
• AMQP 1.0 support in Windows Azure Service Bus
• How to use AMQP 1.0 with the Service Bus .NET API
• Service Bus AMQP 1.0 Developer's Guide
• Apache Qpid AMQP 1.0 JMS library
• Apache Qpid Proton (Linux only; Windows coming soon)

SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR THE KINECT: Kinect speech media controller

The Kinect speech media controller turns your windows media player into a voice controlled media player. Forget remote controls. Forget waving your arms and hands around to control your media player. Control it purely by voice.

Not only that, but to make it a bit more interesting, you get to choose the words for the commands. While this is fun, I found this to be necessary. Kinect speech works great, but it has a few problems with some strong accents.

When working on the voice controlled maths game for Kin-educate the Kinect refused to recognise the word 'four' in a British accent. After trying to spell it different ways (fore, for) and having no luck I gave up. I just made sure the answers could never be four. Problem solved. But not really.

The real solution? We all speak differently and use different phrases, so why not choose what words and phrases you use to control the Kinect? Give your Kinect a unique name, and when you call it, the Kinect will activate and start listening for commands.

Try different phrases and words to see which work well for you, and have a bit of fun with it too. This way the Kinect will be more responsive to your particular way of speaking. You can change the volume, play / pause, rewind / fast-forward  open and close the media player and browse for files all through voice control.

This is a really simple demo that could be expanded in to much more. With a quick change to the code this can be used to control any windows based program. A whole range of other voice commands could be added.

...

After a few seconds of silence the Kinect will go into standby mode. It will stay like this until you call it by its name. When you are not using it call the 'hide' command to minimise the app to the task bar.

Check out this video of the app in action. As you can see it works pretty good. You could have a lot of fun changing the commands around.

I'll make the source code available to download next week. In the meantime remember to have a look at the speech recognition tutorial. ...

Project Information URL: http://kinectmediacontroller.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/speech-recognition-for-kinect-kinect.html

Project Source URL: Download here

Contact Information:

• Blog: http://www.michaelpalmerwebdesign.com/index.php

__________________________

Experience Microsoft's latest products with these FREE downloads!

Build Your Lab! Download  Windows Server 2012,  System Center 2012 SP1 and  Hyper-V Server 2012 and get the best virtualization platform and private cloud management solution on the market. Try it FREE now!

Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Try Windows Azure for free with no cost or obligations, and use any OS, language, database or tool. FREE Download

__________________________

Become an "Early Expert" at IT Pros ROCK!

The Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Challenge provides a FREE online study group with certification exam preparation materials for quickly learning about the latest version of Windows Server! The Challenge involves a series of Knowledge Quests - starting with the Apprentice Quest below - and each Quest ends with a special completion certificate for you to promote your new knowledge! To make it easy to participate, each Quest is developed in a modular format that you can complete based on your own schedule and availability.

If you're interested in learning more about the products or solutions discussed in this episode, click on any of the below links for free, in-depth information:

Websites & Blogs:

• Blain Barton’s Blog
• Tommy Patterson’s blog

Videos:

• TechNet Radio: IT Time - The Scripting Guy’s Top 5 PowerShell 3.0 Tips and Tricks
• TechNet Radio: IT Time - PowerShell 3.0 Step-by-Step with the Scripting Guy
• TechNet Radio: IT Time – Get Your Script on! Check out PowerShell Saturdays
• TechNet Radio: IT Time – PowerShell 3.0 Integrated Scripting Environment Overview
• TechNet Radio: IT Time - Automating and Managing tasks in Windows Azure with PowerShell
• TechNet Radio: Top 10 Reasons NOT to Fear PowerShell 3.0
• TechNet Radio: IT Time – PowerShell Summit and the 2013 Scripting Games
• TechNet Radio: IT Time–Get Certified! Why Microsoft Certification Matters

Virtual Labs:

• TechNet Virtual Labs: System Center 2012

Follow @technetradio
Become a Fan @ facebook.com/MicrosoftTechNetRadio
Subscribe to our podcast via iTunes, Stitcher, or RSS

Please add your suggestions for awesome Windows 8 apps in the comments section. This week we take a look at:

Star Trek App - ENTERTAINMENT

Box - PRODUCTIVITY

Fling Theory - GAMES

StumbleUpon - SOCIAL

wordBrush- ENTERTAINMENT

• Big thanks to all of our exhibitors (complete list HERE with booth numbers!)
• Extra big thanks to ALL of our sponsors (complete list HERE with booth numbers!)
• Special Shout Out to our friends at Splunk (booth 228) and Thycotic (booth 1903)

Get out there and interact Online:

• C9 TechEd Forums (NorthAmerica and Europe)
• Twitter: use the #msteched hashtag for NA, #TEE13 for Europe.
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Get out there and REGISTER if you haven't already!

Huge thanks to Garrett and the awesome NuGet team for bringing NuGet goodness to C++! 

Download NuGet 2.5 
Download the tools to build C++ packages

[00:00] GoingNative();// Charles and Ale construct the show. Sorry about missing last month! Milan update. NuGet.
[02:25] Charles interviews Garrett Serack about NuGet for C++
[39:04] ~GoingNative(); // Please send any and all feedback about NuGet for C++ to us!

More information:

NuGet Team blog post on NuGet for C++
VC++ Team blog post on NuGet for C++
Building Native Libraries for NuGet with CoApp's Powershell Tools (video)
Consuming Native NuGet Packages in Visual Studio (video)

We really want to hear from you, so please tweet feedback to @C9GoingNative (follow us!) and send your requests, ideas, complaints, praises, hate mail, and love letters to C9GoingNative@hotmail.com. We will read and respond to all messages! That's how we roll, brothers and sisters. If you are a Facebook user (who isn't these days?), then please join our C9::GoingNative Facebook group.

Social Media Dashboard Sample

The Social Media Dashboard sample (for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8) consumes various social feeds and displays them in your app. It is driven from a JSON configuration file so it is very easy to adapt this sample to your needs and have this as a starting point for your application. This sample also illustrates a number of key concepts such as Search, Share, dynamic UI, animations, sharing code between Windows 8 and Windows Phone.

Building the Sample

Make sure you have the basics installed. That includes:

• Windows 8.
• Visual Studio 2012.
• Windows Phone SDK.

Download the sample and double-click on the solution. The solution consists of three projects:

• SocialMediaDashboard.PCL, which is the Portable Class Library that contains code that is used in both the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 projects. To learn more about Portable Class Libraries, click here.
• SocialMediaDashboard.W8, which contains the code for the Windows 8 version of the app.
• SocialMediaDashboard.WP, which contains the code for the Windows Phone 8 version of the app.

There are dependencies on a number of external libraries, these are:

• Microsoft.Bcl.Async, which gives you access to async and await keywords in a Portable Class Library.
  • NuGet: Install-Package Microsoft.Bcl.Async –Pre
• NewtonSoft.JSON, which is the standard library for parsing JSON objects.
  • NuGet: Install-Package Newtonsoft.Json
• HtmlAgilityPack, for parsing and changing HTML documents.
  • NuGet: Install-Package HtmlAgilityPack
• Microsoft Player Framework, which is a framework for displaying video. No NuGet package exists, the code can be found here. A .VSIX file as included in the Project as well, for convenience.

Now, set your startup project to either Windows 8 or Windows Phone and press F5 to run the app. The sample app gives you information about Windows Phone development. I’m guessing you might be interested in something else, in that case you can look up The Config.json in the Assets folder. This is the definition of the content for this app. Play around with it. A later post will detail the format of this configuration file.

Description

This application demonstrates how to build a complete, configuration-driven application both for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. It illustrates many key concepts as Share, Search, Live Tiles, extended splash screen, showing video in a MediaElement and so forth.  

When you get the source, make sure you read Dependences section above (as being, me I didn't and fixed up the references manually... sigh, must remember to RTFP, Read The Fine Post...

Anyway, here's some snaps of it running on my system;

Here's a snap of the Solution. As you can see the common work is handled by the PCL (Portable Class Library) and the platform specific work done in the platform projects.

What's nice is that you can take this sample and easily configure it for your social world. Just edit the config.json files in the platform projects and go...

So how easy is this to tweak to make it yours?

Hacking the config.json file for about 3 minutes, I created a simple Coding4Fun app...

How cool is that!

• [1:28] What was the situation? Describe some of the challenges surrounding Microsoft.com and their need to scale
• [3:28] How did MSIT deploy Windows Server 2012 for MSCOM?
• [11:39] What were the results?
• [13:21] Can you share with us some deployment best practices?

__________________________

Experience Microsoft's latest products with these FREE downloads!

Build Your Lab! Download  Windows Server 2012,  System Center 2012 SP1 and  Hyper-V Server 2012 and get the best virtualization platform and private cloud management solution on the market. Try it FREE now!

Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Try Windows Azure for free with no cost or obligations, and use any OS, language, database or tool. FREE Download

__________________________

If you're interested in learning more about the products or solutions discussed in this episode, click on any of the below links for free, in-depth information:

Websites & Articles:

• Tommy Patterson’s blog
• Microsoft IT Showcase

Virtual Labs:

• TechNet Virtual Labs: System Center 2012

Follow @technetradio
Become a Fan @ facebook.com/MicrosoftTechNetRadio
Subscribe to our podcast via iTunes, Stitcher, or RSS

Browse all the content of the conference, follow your schedule, and stay connected throughout the event.

Download Ch9 Events for Windows 8 | Windows Phone | iOS | Android

After creating your account in the app, link it to your Channel 9 account to enable synchronization of your personalized schedule.

For additional support you can reach out to: support@eventboardmobile.com

Microsoft Solutions Experience (MSE): Bring your challenges, ideas, and questions and meet face-to-face with the Microsoft experts who built the products you use every day, and learn about the latest Microsoft technologies and solutions. Areas in the MSE cover Server-Cloud-Tools, Unified Communications, Microsoft Office, Windows Client, and Windows Phone.

Partner Solutions: The TechExpo brings together Microsoft Partners to showcase the latest technologies and solutions and provides a chance to talk directly with product experts about their offerings.  Explore the hall and meet with the TechEd Sponsors and Exhibitors—and don't miss the TechExpo Welcome Reception on Monday evening, a great networking opportunity.

Community Resource Zone: Meet some of the technical community's most noted influencers and active participants in the CRZ. Learn about available resources and how you can get involved in the Community.

Digital Wall: Find out about the latest event updates, meet and network with other attendees and learn what's happening at TechEd each day.

The TechExpo is a hub of activity at TechEd, with many opportunities to network, learn, and share information with your peers and industry experts. We look forward to seeing you there!

Mark your calendars for the Welcome Reception held in the TechExpo:

• Monday, June 3 6:00-8:00 PM in Halls CDEF at TechEd North America
• Tuesday, 25 June 18:00-20:30 in Hall 8 at TechEd Europe

Find out what's in store at the TechExpo at both TechEd North America and TechEd Europe.

Kinect For Windows Interactions Gallery

As the Kinect For Windows SDK has started to evolve, the team has been adding some nice little controls which are quite useful and also controls everyone was writing in one way or another to solve the same issues. I think it’s a really good step so we’re not all spending a bunch of time writing similar controls plus it means there should be some consistency going forward if people use the supplied controls. This will help users with the learning curve with many of the applications.

When you first look through the interactions gallery it’s a bit overwhelming as there’s a bunch of controls and the interaction stream to deal with all at once. For this reason I wanted to do a set of posts so we can concentrate on them one at a time.

• KinectSensorUI
• KinectRegion
• KinectUserViewer
• KinectTileButton
• KinectCirceButton
• KinectScrollViewer
• InteractionStream

Project Information URL: http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/Blog/tabid/73/EntryId/851/Kinect-For-Windows-Interactions-Gallery.aspx

Contact Information:

• Blog: http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/Blog/