Channel 9

This Week C9: Speech Recognition, Army of 1, TweetCraft and more

Dan Fernandez — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:26:00 GMT

This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian discuss the week's top developer news, including:

- Joel Bennett - Control your PC with your voice and PowerShell, via Alvin Ashcraft
- Frank La Vigne - Speech Recognition in WPF
- Dan Waters - Great 4-part series on Audio Programming
- Andrew Woodward - Doing Agile in a Team of One
- Leah Budley - UX Team of One, via Frank La Vigne
- Aaron Marten - Visual Studio 2010 User Interface Guidelines
- Corey Schuman - YouTube video in Silverlight 3, via Alvin Ashcraft
- Tina Wood - The History of Microsoft 1995
- Jaime Rodriguez - Best questions/answers in the WPF Discussions email alias
- MySpace Releases MSFast, a browser plugin for measuring CPU, memory, screenshost, HTML rendering, and more (download)
- Registering Preview Pane types using PreviewConfig, via Greg Duncan
- Alois Kraus - The differences between Logging and Tracing

Picks of the week
Brian's pick of the week: Habib Heydarian - Debugging a Unit Test Failure with the Historical Debugger
Dan's pick of the week: TweetCraft an in-game World of Warcraft Twitter client, including a gratuitous video trailer

PS - Happy fourth of July to our American viewers

TweetCraft - A World of Warcraft Twitter Client

Dan Fernandez — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:43:00 GMT

A gratuitious trailer for TweetCraft, a World of Warcraft Twitter client.

Twitter is open source and includes:
- A Windows client written in C# and Windows Presentation Foundation
- A Warcraft AddOn written in FrameXML and Lua using AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft

Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle Template

Larry Larsen — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:45:00 GMT

The Microsoft SDL Process Template is a new process template for Visual Studio Team System intended to ease adoption of the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle. The template integrates the SDL directly into your software development environment, provides auditable security requirements and status, and demonstrates security return on investment.

I stopped by the Microsoft Security group and spoke with Jeremy Dallman about the SDL, and what it means for developers. The Process Template is free and can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/SDL/.

Expert to Expert: Harry Shum - General Purpose Search, Decision Engines and Bing

Charles — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:44:00 GMT

Harry Shum is the VP of Engineering for Bing, Microsoft's latest search engine offering (well, it's more than a search engine - it's a so-called Decision Engine, but what does that mean, precisely?). Harry has a long history in the world of complex algorithm design and implementation. Before joining the Bing team (at Bill Gates' request), Harry was a reseacher in MSR specializing in computer vision, which is an algorithm instensive discipline rife with machine learning principles, statistics and in some sense artificial "intelligence" in terms of autonomous pattern recognition capability. At any rate, Harry is a developer and scientist through and through. We're very fortunate to have him running our search engineering efforts. General purpose search is an incredibly fascinating area with a great deal of potential, challenges and opportunities.

Erik Meijer, programming language designer, knight of the lamda calculus and Expert to Expert host, sits down with Harry to learn, at a high level (though deep in context), how Bing works, what, exactly, a decision engine is, what really happens when you Bing something and various topics related to the computation behind both general purpose search and accurately interpreting user intention. Of course, being an E2E, we take the conversation in many directions and Harry was a real sport. Thank you, Harry!

If you want to know the past, present and a little bit of the future of Bing technology, well, tune in and meet Harry Shum; a computer scientist, software developer and vice president.

Enjoy!

Visual Studio Learning Pack for you to download

Max — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:46:00 GMT

What started out as an initiative to help middle school students learn about programming concepts has ballooned out into a great tool for all beginner programmers. It’s the Visual Studio Learning pack… and it’s ready for you to download.

This pack allows you to interactively step through concepts like sorting where you can visually represent the steps taken to algorithmically perform a sort. Pretty cool stuff.

My favorite part was the ability to have complicated arrays automatically constructed for me with the proper syntax with just a few clicks. This is a great teaching tool for instructors or for private use. Even experts may want that around just in case :P.

Absolute Software - Theft Recovery, Data Protection, Secure Asset Tracking

Charles — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:26:00 GMT

Absolute Software, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, is the industry leader in Computer Theft Recovery, Data Protection, and Secure Asset Tracking solutions. The company provides individuals and organizations of all types and sizes with solutions to manage regulatory compliance, data protection, and theft recovery. The organization has 300 employees, including a team of 50 former law enforcement experts and private investigators. Absolute Software is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a launch partner for Windows 7

The Future of Channel 9

Jeff Sandquist — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:07:00 GMT

Last week on this week on Channel 9 we announced a project that we’ll use to improve the user experience of Channel 9. This work along with improvements to our content strategy will enable us to bring Channels 8 and 10 content back into Channel 9.

We call this project Revolution 9 and when released it will consolidate Channels 8, 10 and Coding4Fun into Channel 9. The community aspects of Channel 8, will move into Microsoft.com/Student creating one place for students and Microsoft moving forward. TechNet Edge and Mix Online will stay exactly as they are, with no changes.

To find more information on why we’re making the changes on last week's This Week On Channel 9. It does a good job of walking through it in great detail. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll walk you through the experience and our progress towards launch.

Thanks again everyone who visits Channel 9 and our communities. We’re excited about what we have in store for the future and look forward to evolving Channel 9 together.

-Jeff

P.S. There is only one space after each period in this post.

Ping 18: Ballmer apologizes, Paul Allens latest move, Surface fun, Security Beta

Laura Foy — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:34:00 GMT

The boys took over this week and it's clear we have a bro-mance in the making. If you've ever wondered what guys talk about when they're alone...now you know:

Paul Allen makes it big!
Ballmer makes a boo boo
Surface gets even cooler...
Real DaVinci footage
Security Beta

The History of Microsoft - 1995

tina10 — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:51:00 GMT

For Microsoft, 1995 was filled with Windows. On January 7, 1995, during his first keynote at the consumer electronics show in Vegas, Bill Gates announces Microsoft "Bob" for Windows. Microsoft and Dreamworks SKG announce that they have signed a joint-venture agreement to form a new software company and we announce internet explorer 1.0 for Windows 95.

Previous Episodes:

1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994

1995 Revenue/Headcount

The 1995 fiscal year-end sales total $5,940,000,000. The 1995 fiscal Year employee headcount totals 17,801 people.

Official Subsidiaries Launched: Microsoft d.o.o., Ljubljana (Slovenia), Microsoft Hungary,Microsoft Philippines, Inc., Microsoft Slovakia s.r.o. (Slovak Republic), Microsoft De Panama, S.A., Microsoft De Guatemala, S.A, Microsoft Corporation (The People’s Republic of China) ,Microsoft Uruguay S.A. ,PT Microsoft Indonesia

In the World:

· The Internet and World Wide Web explode in popularity and content, sparking heated debate of issues such as accessibility, censorship, privacy, and regulation.

· IBM pays $3.5 billion for Lotus Development Corporation.

· After tabulating 100 million votes, Mars, Inc., announces that blue is the overwhelming color of choice for the new M&M, winning over purple and pink.

· Cal Ripkin of the Baltimore Orioles sets a new record in baseball history by playing 2,131 consecutive games. (p.s. that’s the one time I’ve ever seen my husband cry watching TV)

· Oklahoma City: The Oklahoma City federal building is destroyed by a bomb blast, killing 168. Far-right militia member Timothy McVeigh is quickly arrested and convicted of the crime.

· Reeve: Actor Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down in a horse-riding accident.

· Internet: Amazon.com makes its online debut.

· Earthquake: A 7.2 magnitude earthquake hits Kobe, Japan, killing over 5,000 and causing $200 billion worth of damage.

· OJ: O.J. Simpson is acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and her friend after a controversial 10-month trial.

· Comics: The last new Calvin and Hobbes comic strip is published.

· TV: “E.R.,” “Seinfeld,” and “Friends” are among the top television programs. “The Drew Carey Show” and “JAG” premiere.

· Balkans: The Dayton Accords end the three-year war in the former Yugoslavia and establish the independent nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

· Israel: Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by a right-wing Israeli extremist.

· Ebola: An outbreak of Ebola virus kills 244 in Zaire.

· Computing: Sun unveils the Java programming language.

· New Networks: The UPN and WB networks go on the air.

· Trade: The World Trade Organization (WTO) is established, superseding GATT.

· Terrorism: Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo releases Sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 and sickening over 5,000.

· March: Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakahn promotes a Million Man March of African-Americans in Washington, D.C.

· Movies: Top grossing movies of the year include Apollo 13, Babe, Toy Story, and Twelve Monkeys. Braveheart nets Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director (Mel Gibson), while Susan Sarandon wins Best Actress for Dead Man Walking, and Nicolas Cage takes Best Actor for Leaving Las Vegas.

Moving Code Around in Visual Studio

Habib Heydarian — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:58:00 GMT

As a developer, one of the common tasks that you do is move code around. In this video, I'll demonstrate how using the Outlining Expansion feature in Visual Studio makes it a whole lot easier to copy and paste entire methods or classes. The trick is using the CTRL+M, CTRL+M shortcut key to collapse bodies of code first. Enjoy the video!

Alex Weinert on Forefront Identity Manager 2010

Vittorio Bertocci — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:31:00 GMT

In this episode Alex Weinert, Group Program Manager, provides an in-depth interview around Identity Management in the enterprise. He begins with an overview of the current identity synchronization technologies on the Microsoft platform, MIIS and ILM 2007, and then pushes into a whiteboard session on the architecture and capabilities being built into the new Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) 2010 product (formerly known as Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) “2”). Built on .NET 3.5 technologies, FIM 2010 web services APIs provide the means for broad extensibility for the enterprise developer and ISV alike. And for the IT Pro, there’s rich codeless extensibility built into the product as well. You can download FIM 2010 RC0 from here for evaluation.

URL references:
Forefront Identity Manager 2010
The Identity key topic on Channel 9

This Week C9: Revolution 9 - The Future of Channel 9

Dan Fernandez — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:08:00 GMT

On a very special episode of This Week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by Jeff, Duncan, and Nishant to talk about the recent survey results, and the Revolution 9 project

- (0:00 - 1:00) Jeff Sandquist, Duncan Mackenzie, and Nishant Kothary
- (1:00 - 1:57) Survey results request by Minh
- (1:57 - 2:47) How we're working on being more transparent including content and our dev team and helping other organizations be more transparent
- (2:47 - 7:20) Jeff discusses the history of Channel 9
- (7:20 - 10:55) Survey Results - The Good
    - High satisfaction with Microsoft
    - Most Important site features: Video interviews, screencasts/podcasts
    - 50% visit daily, 75% visit at least weekly
    - 66% will try a new technology
    - 91% gave verbatim feedback
- (10:55 - 12:23) Channel 9 Traffic
    - 131 Terabytes/Monthly
    - 2.8 Million Minutes/Month
- (12:23 - 15:17) Survey Results - The Bad
    - Site reliability
    - Finding content through search/tags
    - Site organization
    - Satisfaction for non-developers was lower than developer satisfaction
- (15:17 - 16:48) Survey Results - Importance and Usage Graph
- (16:48 - 17:18) RossJ Coffeehouse comment on artificial classification of devs, students, and consumers
- (17:18 - 17:50) Long Zheng blog comment on Evangelism Network and the "dilemma of choosing a community"
- (17:50 - 19:20) Current State of the World - Channel 8, 9, 10, Coding4Fun, Edge, and MIX Online
- (19:20 - 24:00) Future State of the World
    - Channel 10 and Coding4Fun content will now be on Channel 9
    - Existing Channel 8 content moves to Channel 9, while the Microsoft Student site becomes the portal for students
    - Edge and MIX sites stay unchanged
- (24:00 - 25:28) The origins of the Revolution 9 name based on Jamie's PDC artwork and coming full circle to our roots
- (25:28 - 26:10) Revolution 9 is three things - Content, User Experience, and site reliability + features
- (26:10 - 29:00) Content - Common theme is more - Erik Meijer, Silverlight, real world examples, how-to training, Scoble/Rory style interviews, more history of Microsoft
- (29:00 - 40:10) Adding new content, not taking away existing, not one size fits all, different topics, formats, styles, length, continuous evolution.
   - New stuff
   - Learn - Going Deep, 10-4, MSR/Coding4Fun Projects
   - Opinions - Erik Meijer, Anders Hejlsberg, favorite Windows 7 apps
    - Culture - Old-school C9 videos, history of Microsoft
    - Community - Channel 9 Live - Live streaming town halls with leaders at Microsoft, online "bootcamp" for different technologies
    - Grow # of C9 authors
- (40:10 - 54:54) Nishant on User Experience
    - Jeff talks about the Bruce Williams podcast
    - Nishant's dog and how he is on Twitter (@yoweim)
    - How Channel 9 played a huge part in him joining the company
    - Discoverability - Can we help you find content you're searching for or content you find interesting that you weren't searching for. It's too hard to browse through through 1,300+ tags
    - Readability - How consumable is the content, both text and video, ensure the content is pleasing to look at
    - Interactivity - Don't over-complicate interaction model
    - Visual Design - Let the content shine through, design only begins when you launch, it will continue to evolve
- (54:54 - 58:38) Duncan on site reliability
    - Duncan's request for comments
    - SQL Performance Tuning and de-normalization
    - Replacement of Editor control
    - Cross-Browser Compatibility with Chrome/Safari
- (58:38 - 1:05) Duncan on new features
    - Improve video - Windows Media profile, smooth streaming, video bookmarks/chapters
    - Channel 9 Live - Live chat stream in some way (Twitter, uStream-style)
    - Misc - Anonymous comments, spam filtering, star-rating system so more people will use ratings (content recommendations like Netflix)
- (1:05 - 1:07) Recap
- Thank you for being members of the Channel 9 community

Silverlight Geek - An interview with Jesse Liberty

Adam Kinney — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:26:00 GMT

Jesse Liberty is the official Silverlight Geek. What does that mean? Why should you care? And what does he think about Expression Blend? In this interview Jesse attempts to answer those stories while remaining luminous.

Show: Episode #3 It's All About The Tools TV Show

Russell Fustino — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:35:00 GMT

Got popcorn? Expression Blend 3 SketchFlow and a ton of “GOT TO KNOW ABOUT IT” content is all packed in just 1 hour of Episode 3. Try something different tonight and take an hour break from coding. You know you deserve it. Grab your favorite beverage and pizza and enjoy this entertaining, enlightening and educational Episode 3. If not, you can wait for the Tool Shed Tooltips of clips from the show over the next few days and weeks. Either way ... tune in. All content is current along with sneak peeks at future tools. It will feel like you are at a live event, but in the comfort of your home or office.

In this video, you will find tools to help solve these common developer challenges…

Finding a XAML Editor for your web page
Prototyping tool for great design of your web site
Need authentication on the web?
Some of the pages on my web site load really slowly - how do I figure out what's going on?
Have you ever eyeballed every record in your table to find an abnormality?

Tool Shed Theme Song
Introduction
Demo 1 - Expression Blend 2 , video and animation intro
Demo 2 - Expression Blend 3 SketchFlow ProtoTyping
Demo 3 - Live Services - Live ID
Demo 4 - IE 8 Developer Tools
Demo 5 - SSIS Data profiling by Guest Speaker Microsoft MVP, Jessica Moss
Developer Community Update by Microsoft MVP, Don Demsak

You will love our guest speakers, Microsoft MVP Jessica Moss and Don Demsak ... Jessica amazes us on Data profiling and Don does and incredible job with the latest happenings in Developer Community.

Special thanks to co-host Stan Schultes, recent co-author on his book on DotNetNuke 5, Jessica Moss, Don Demsak, Carl Franklin, Pensacola Junior College, Main Campus, and the SQL Saturday Pensacola 2009 Team, especially Karla Remail, the live studio audience, and the many volunteers who made this show a reality!

I have reposted all of the Tool Shed Tooltips and Episode One and Episode Two with Hi Def default views, so the code and PowerPoint slides are crystal clear. Feel free to comment or http://channel9.msdn.com/toolshed including a link to all Episode PowerPoint’s, demo code and demo scripts! Yes, demos scripts, how often do you see that? So if you are a teacher or student or want to do presentations to co-workers, or at seminars, or just use them as labs to learn, check out this resource at http://code.msdn.com/toolshed . Each release corresponds to an Episode.

Here are some of useful links from the speakers we have had on the shows and more:
Russ Fustino: www.russtoolshed.net
Stan Schultes: www.vbnetexpert.com
Joe Healy: www.devfish.net
Brian Johnson: http://bufferoverrun.net
Jeff Barnes: http://blogs.msdn.com/jbarnes/
Don Demsak: http://donxml.com
Jessica Moss: http://www.jessicammoss.com
Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi: http://www.sedodream.com/
Jason Beres:  http://blogs.infragistics.com/blogs/jason_beres/default.aspx

Stan and I are planning on are filming a live studio audience Episode 4 at the Tampa .NET User group  (signed release form required) on Wednesday, July 22, 2009, at the Tampa Microsoft Office at 6:15PM along with guest speaker Microsoft MVP, Bill Reiss. If you are attending, I can use some volunteers, like camera operators, a sound engineer and door control. I'll teach you at the event, everything to run the camera or sound, if you don't have much experience. Drop me an email if interested at channel9 viewing, many different formats are available for download besides viewing in the default player; everything from Zune to WMV High Quality. Simply locate the dropdown menu below the embedded player on this page for your desired download selection. If the default view stops to buffer often, then I recommend trying to download WMV High Quality. You can clearly see code, all video and PowerPoint’s in High Def (HD) at full screen. It only takes about 15 to 20 minutes to download this episode at average home speed connections. The high def WMV file is a little over 200 Meg.

Remember, you have to know the code to get into the shed. KNOW THE CODE. Get some popcorn and enjoy the show! Russ

10-4 Episode 25: Fixing PIA Pains with Type Equivalence

Jason Olson — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:14:00 GMT

In this episode of 10-4, we take a look at a new feature in CLR4 called "Type Equivalence" and how it helps address the pain points normally associated with Primary Interop Assemblies and COM Interop.

There have been several videos as of late here on Channel 9 covering Type Equivalence. For a more "behind the scenes" look, make sure to check out the following videos:

For more 10-4 episodes, be sure to visit:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4

10-4! Over and out!

Margaret Burnett: Gender and Software

Charles — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:49:00 GMT

Meet Dr. Margaret Burnett, a Professor of Computer Science at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. She is exploring hypotheses correlating and differentiating (or unifying) both the design and usage patterns of software by gender. Dr. Burnett has spent the last three months as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. Great fodder for the latest edition of WM_IN, we thought, and we were lucky enough to catch up with Dr. Burnett during her last week at MSR to talk about her focus of study, which is the fascinating topic of gender differences and human-computer interaction that exist in the ways people solve problems when they use software.

Dr. Burnett's current research focuses on end-user programming, end-user software engineering, information foraging theory as applied to programming, and gender issues in those contexts. She is also the principal architect of the Forms/3 and the FAR visual programming languages, plus the WYSIWYT testing methodology for end-user programmers. Watch, learn and enjoy!

Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) in Windows 7

Nic Fillingham — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:27:00 GMT

(Previously Posted on Channel 10)

Setting up and connecting to wireless networks will be a much simpler task in Windows 7. And for those of you with shiny new wireless routers with WPS - Wi-Fi Protected Setup - the process will be even easier.

Gabe Frost and Yatharth Gupta from the Windows 7 team join me in the studio to talk about Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) in Windows 7 and what to look for when buying your next Wi-Fi device.

More info:
http://www.wi-fi.org/wifi-protected-setup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Setup
http://www.microsoft.com/rally

Introducing Microsoft Hohm - Save Energy & Money

Nic Fillingham — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft announced Microsoft Hohm. That's Hohm as in H + OHM, the unit of measurement for electrical impedance.

Microsoft Hohm is a free web based application (running on the Windows Azure platform) that enables consumers to better understand their energy usage by utilizing advanced analytics licensed from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy to provide home owners with personalized energy-saving recommendations.

The beta is now available to all residents in the United States with plans to roll out internationally over the next year and beyond.

Troy Batterberry joined me in the studio to walkthrough Microsoft Hohm and explain how the service can help you reduce your energy consumption, lower your carbon footprint and save some real money.

Sign up & more info: www.microsofthohm.com

Expert to Expert: Web Programming, JavaScript with Types and Flapjax

Charles — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:21:00 GMT

Flapjax is a new programming language designed around the demands of modern, client-based Web applications. Its principal features include:

Event-driven, reactive evaluation
An event-stream abstraction for communicating with web services
Interfaces to external web services

Flapjax is easy to learn: it is just a JavaScript framework. Furthermore, because Flapjax is built entirely atop JavaScript, it runs on traditional Web browsers without the need for plug-ins or other downloads. It integrates seamlessly with existing JavaScript code and other frameworks. [Source = http://www.flapjax-lang.org/]

Shriram Krishnamurthi is one of the authors of Flapjax and was in town recently giving a series of lectures to fellow programming language researchers in MSR. Shriram is a professor of computer science at Brown University. Expert to Expert host and programming language designer Erik Meijer is also doing some interesting things with event driven reactivity (you'll learn all about this soon...) so the two language guys just had to chat and we had to film it. Tune in to see what happened in Erik's office over the course of an hour or so. A fair amount of time is spent discussing the reasoning behind and benefits of adding types to a language like JavaScript. It's an interesting idea, but what does it mean for web developers (who, potentially, adopted JavaScript for its wide open and highly dynamic characteristics in the first place).

As usual, there's no editing here. It's as though you just came along and watched the magic unfold. Much thanks to Shriram for taking the time to chat with us. Flapjax is impressive. Do give it a try, Niners.

Ben Livshits and Emre Kiciman - AjaxView, Performance Profiling of AJAX web sites

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:34:00 GMT

Ben Livshits and Emre Kiciman talk about the Ajax Profiling Extensions (also known as AjaxView), a tool that allows to profile web sites using Ajax. The tool lets you investigate the performance of the client side javascript! Ben and Emre explain how the profiling works, i.e. how they instrument the javascript on the fly, collect execution traces, and so forth. They also show a really cool demo of the tool where they turn on profiling for a couple web pages, then analyze the performance directly in Visual Studio.

Ajax Profiling Extensions @msdn: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/AjaxView
AjaxView @MSR: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ajaxview/

(We have a new jingle for the RiSE videos thanks the musical talent of Tom Ball. The full track of "San Juan Strut" can be found at www.themiddlethird.org)

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Ping 17: Microsoft sues over ClickFraud, Soapbox scales down, Project Natal & Bing on Fallon

Laura Foy — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:05:00 GMT

The shorter guy with the dark hair who has been accused of being a Zune fanboy returned this week- and while he was out exploring the world he picked up a few juicy Microsoft stories to bring back and share with us. Voila:

You don't want to be sued by Microsoft
Microsoft gets in the Reality Biz
Soapbox evolves...
Jimmy Fallon is a Microsoft FANBOY!!
Happy Birthday Dear Live Messenger...

Plus some viewer pics and a failed attempt to injure Max...good times!

Using claims for driving web sites... without writing any code

Vittorio Bertocci — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:28:00 GMT

Claims-based identity allows you to externalize authentication and authorization code, moving it out of your applications, so that you can focus on the functionalities you want to implement rather than worrying about plumbing details.
In this first IdElement screencast Vittorio shows you exactly that. We walk a mile in the shoes of a developer while is creating a web page: thanks to the Geneva Framework and a small sample ASP.NET control, the developer will be able to leverage identity information for driving the behavior of his page... without writing a single line of code and practicallywithout knowing anything about identity management ! You can try this yourself on your own machine by downloading the sample code on Code Gallery.

In the next screencasts we will go in more details and, walking you through the labs in the Identity Developer Training Kit, we will learn what happens under the hood: for today’s opening episode we wanted a scenario that shows what can be accomplished with claims, also to whom may not be familiar with identity management terminology.

URL References

ClaimsDrivenModifierControl sample
Identity Developer Training Kit
“Geneva” Forum on MSDN
"Geneva" Team Blog
Microsoft code name "Geneva"
The Identity key topic on Channel 9

10-4 Episode 24: Monitoring Workflow Services

rojacobs — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:28:00 GMT

One of the great advantages to building services with WCF and Windows Workflow 4 is that the environment is instrumented with loads of events that allow you to track what exactly is happening. This is useful for health monitoring, troubleshooting and other scenarios like auditing and compliance. In this episode I’ll take you through the monitoring lab from the Visual Studio 2010 training kit and show you how you can take advantage of these powerful capabilities.

Hanselminutes on 9 - Storyteller with Jeremy Miller

Glucose — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:46:00 GMT

Scott's in Norway, hanging out in the speaker room. Today he bumped into Jeremy Miller, author of StructureMap and generally smart dude. He sidled into a talk about "Acceptance Test Driven Development." Since the conference began with "imagine a world," it was definitely time to turn on the camera.

This week on C9: Get paid for open source, Azure for dating, debugging and naming lore

Dan Fernandez — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:41:00 GMT

This week on Channel 9, Brian and Dan discuss the top developer news, including:

- Microsoft Security Essentials (previously code-named Morro)
- Peli de Halleux - New Release of CHESS with data race detection (video)
- Quan To - How to deploy a toolbox control using VSIX for Visual Studio 2010
- Codeplex Updates - Project owners option to receive advertising revenue (details), Code snippet support, more wiki formatting options
- Habib Heydarian - Import/Export Breakpoints in Visual Studio 2010
- Tess Ferandez - Debugging .NET 4.0 dumps in Visual Studio 2010
- Microsoft Product Naming Lore (courtesy of Jason Zander)
- Visual Basic 1.0 was codenamed "Thunder"
- The CLR Team was codenamed "Lightning"
- The NTSD extension to bootstrap v1.0 was called "Strike"
- The WinDBG extension for managed code was named "Son of Strike" but known to customers as SOS
- Gunnar Piepman - Visual Studio 2010 Web.Config transforms to change based on your environment (Dev vs Production)
- Will Tschumy - Photobucket Visual Search Launches (try it)
- Jeff Atwood, CodingHorror - Busting the Digg.com Frame and other site framers
- Clint Rutkas - Transferring Photoshop to XAML
- W3bbo - C9 Coffeehouse - Volunteers for fully managed 7-Zip C# Library
- TeamDevCentral provides free trial hosting for Team Foundation Server 2008

Picks of the week
- Dan's pick of the week: Brandon Bloom - XBOX LIVE Avatar Punch-out
- Brian's pick of the week: Steve Marx - Azure application, the CIA pickup (video), helping you get a date