videos - Channel 9

This Week on C9: IE8 and Popfly Betas, WPF tools and apps, SP1 improvements and more

Dan — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:38:00 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian cover this week's news and videos including:

- Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 available for download - (0:00 - 4:15)
- Popfly Game Creator goes from alpha to beta (4:15 - 5:32)
- Free eBook: Data Structures and Algorithms by Granville Barnett and Luca del Tongo (5:32 - 6:32)
- Lester Lobo's XAMLPadX 4.0 released, via Alvin Ashcraft (6:32 - 7:17)
- Charles Petzold shows Curved ScrollBars using WPF 3D (7:17 - 8:04)
SP1 .NET Fx (8:04 - 9:25)
- Demo of Office Labs Chart Advisor (download) (9:25 - 11:03)
- Video clip of Charles Torre interviewing the Channel 8,9,10, and Edge team (11:03 - 13:11)
- Video clip of Adam Kinney with Matthew Allbee showing off Lawson Smart Office (13:11 - 14:44)
- Scott Hanselman - Windows Home Server saves his marriage (14:44 - 16:03)
- Video clip of Charles interviewing the Home Server team including the Niner-turned-'softire "dahat" (16:03 - 17:07)
- Visual Studio "Go To Definition" for WPF jumps to XAML in SP1, via Beth Massy (17:07 - 18:26)
- Zeep Mobile: Free (ad-supported) SMS Gateway for developers (18:26 - 20:01), via ReadWriteWeb
- Brian's Pick of the week: Microsoft Research Unwrap Mosaics let's you dynamically modify video with effects, including video clip (20:01 - 21:45)
- Dan's Pick of the week: Windows Live applications on Facebook, updating your Messenger status now can auto-update Facebook, Photozoom, and MapMate and Facebook hits 100 million users (21:45 - 23:33)

Countdown to PDC2008: By Developers, for Developers: Don Box and Chris Anderson

Dan — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:18:00 GMT

Clothing optional keynotes, comparisons to the pains of childbirth, the joys of sharing an office, how to give a 90 minute speech minus PowerPoint and only writing 130 lines of code, and why PDC is the most special developer conference on the planet . . . this is one amusing show starring PDC keynote speakers, and developers by day, Chris Anderson and Don Box. Not to mention, Mike introduces a new PDC Hard Hat Challenge!

PS: The brainteaser from last week remains unsolved – will you be the Mensa member who can finally crack the code??

Building Channel 9: Inside EvNet - Part 1

Charles — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:52:00 GMT

You asked. We deliver. Meet the developers behind Channel 9 (and 8, 10, Edge and MicrosoftPDC.com). Mike Samspon, Erik Porter, Duncan Mackenzie and Nathan Heskew are the super talented devs who built C9 V4. Unlike the older versions of Channel 9, V4 is a completely new codebase. Gone are the days of stitching together half-baked technologies (though, they did scale and Bryn and I deserve some credit for that! ).

EvNet, which is the codebase that powers all of our channels, was written from the ground up. How is the codebase designed? What's the architecure? What did each developer work on? What were some of the challenges? Who are these dev geniuses, anyway? This is part one of the great conversation with the folks who build and innovate Channel 9. Tune in.

Enjoy.

Part 2:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Building-Channel-9-Inside-EvNet-Part-2/

Lawson Smart Office brings WPF goodness to the enterprise

AdamKinney — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:52:00 GMT

Originally noticed as "a beautiful user experience in an enterprise application", Lawson Smart Office provides a distinctive personalized experience for someone managing their "information workplace". Matthew Allbee provides a walkthrough of Lawson's first WPF application and shows how they use the are really taking advantage of the platform.

IE 8: Dev Tools - An Introduction with John Hrvatin

Charles — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:20:00 GMT

IE 8 Beta 2 is now available!

John Hrvatin, Program Manager of Internet Explorer Developer Tools sits down with me to discuss at a high level the new additions to IE 8's developer tools (aka Dev Tools). These include JavaScript performance profiling, CSS profiling and formatting exploration. And, there's more. :)

This is a conversation that addresses more than what's new in dev tool world. We also tackle some harder questions and learn a bit about John. We will be doing some deep dives on some the new IE 8 dev tools enhancements in upcoming interviews with the developers who wrote them.

Tune in.

Windows Home Server: PDC 08, New Features, Meet some of the Team

Charles — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:36:00 GMT

Windows Home Server is evolving. To learn about how to take advantage of the new capabilities of Windows Home Server, we sit down with Program Manager MCJ Saretto, Product Manager Mark Pendergrast and Software Developer Brendan Grant, aka dahat on Channel 9. Yes! Another Niner joins the ranks of Microsoft! Brendan is well known for the great add-ins he's written for Windows Home Server and, equally as important, for the full size Channel 9 Guy costume he created a few years back. Welcome aboard, dahat! It's great to have another excellent developer join the Happy Death Star.

Tune in the learn a bit about the next release of Windows Home Server, what devs will get to program against and meet some of the people who passionately drive Windows Home Server evolution. As always, the conversation is non-linear with a splash of fun and an extra helping of humanity. Windows Home Server is a great product and these folks are part of the reason why.

Enjoy!

Links galore:

Channel 10 Interview (with a first look at new Windows Home Server hardware)

Windows Home Server team blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/

Windows Home Server dev center on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bb981194.aspx

SDK:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb425866.aspx

Product website:
www.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver

Community forums:
http://forums.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver/default.aspx?siteid=50

Our top Windows Home Server ‘enthusiast’ site:
www.wegotserved.co.uk (not affiliated with MSFT)

MultiTenant Data Access (MTDA) S+S Blueprint Released

Michael Lehman — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:47:00 GMT

In this video, Michael Lehman talks with Eugenio Pace about the new Multi-tenant Data Access Software + Services Blueprint.

The Multi Tenant Data Access (MTDA) Blueprint, part of the Software-plus-Services Blueprint program, provides guidance on writing a SQL Server based, single instance, multi-tenant data access layer similar to that used in LitwareHR sample application (SQL Server version).

If you have the S+S Blueprints Manager installed you can get this Blueprint by updating from the RSS feed.

If you want more information, you can visit the MTDA codeplex site: http://www.codeplex.com/mtda

IE 8: Privacy - It's about more than cookies

Charles — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:46:00 GMT

When you navigate your browser to website A is website A the only site you're visiting?

IE 8 Beta 2 is almost out of the oven. Given this, we of course want to find out all about it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Enter General Manager of Team Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, and Program Manager Andy Zeigler. The topic of this particular conversation (other IE8 interviews are in the pipeline) is a complex and important one: User Privacy and what IE 8 will do to inform users and protect their personal information when surfing the Internet.

Dean and the IE team are very passionate (and very serious about) user privacy. It’s a hard problem for a browser to solve, but a browser is the first line of defense and can therefore supply users with helpful information regarding what websites are involved with a particular session. Andy Zeigler is the Program Manager of the new Privacy features in IE 8. Dean and Andy shed light onto exactly what's been done in the realm of Privacy in IE 8 Beta 2. Two core new Privacy mechanisms are present in IE 8: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking (with InPrivate Subscriptions, a feed-based blocking service). We of course address more than the What, however, as you'd expect from Channel 9. Is true privacy on the Internet even achievable (is anonymity possible given the architecture and implementation of the Internet)? What role can a web browser play in protecting a user's personally identifiable data?

Tune in. This is a great conversation.

Create an Excel Shortcut Menu That Writes Selections to a Text File

HarryMiller — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:25:00 GMT

It doesn't take much code to add a command to a shortcut menu in Excel, but the menu objects have strange names so it's not intuitive, to me at least. The trickiest part is just sorting out how it's supposed to work, because it seems like it should be different from adding buttons to toolbars, but it really looks like that's what you're doing.

The code is all posted in this post on the VSTO team blog.

Thanks to McLean Schofield, programmer/writer and 3-star forum answer person, for this code example!

Countdown to PDC2008: Pick Your Sessions, Build Your Agenda and Win a Trip

Dan — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:32:00 GMT

In this week’s edition of the PDC Countdown (only 66 days to go), Mike and Jennifer host the marketing manager of the conference who talks about all of the great opportunities to win, win, win! Trips to LA, tickets to the Dodgers or Lakers, a movie premiere, or a trip down the red carpet at the Emmy’s could be yours. Or you could design the PDC t-shirt that will be handed out to thousands of attendees!! Wow, you could go down in PDC history if you’re the winner! Plus, I suppose we also need to talk about content and sessions . . . . so in a double whammy line-up, the creative director of the PDC appears on the show to discuss the new Agenda Builder and My Sessions user experience on the PDC web site. So much to talk about, so little time! And there’s also Mike’s Hard Hat Challenge – can you solve it in 6 hours or less? On your marks, get set, go!

http://www.microsoftpdc.com/

This Week on C9: Brian Keller returns, Photosynth, Olympics, EvNet source code, and more

Dan — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:46:00 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by Brian Keller who is back from his vacation in Patagonia to cover:

- His experiences in Patagonia
- Photosynth RTW's! Turn 2D photos into 3D
- Lutz Roeder: .NET Reflector moving over to Red Gate Software, via Alvin Ashcraft)
- What's the deal with Seinfeld singing the praises of Vista? (via Ars Technica)
- Charlie Calvert: Future Focus: Document Map Margin (Feedback link)
- Sara Ford: Visual Studio Tips book with 100% of author royalties going to create a scholarship fund for Waveland, Mississippi (via Greg Duncan)
- Building a simple Windows Media Center application (via Matt Hardman)
- EvNet Source code (engine that runs Channel 8/9/10/Edge release , C9 Coffeehouse to instantly branch and build a bajillion features (via Kent Sharkey)
- Silverlight Olympics stats: 250+ TB of data and 8MM installs a day (via Ars Technica)
- Video Clip with Adam Kinney where he asks follow up questions from Niners on NBCOlympics.com
- Jaime Rodriguez: Everything you ever wanted to know about the .NET Framework Client profile
- Brian's Pick of the week: Ade Miller - 100 days of Continuous Integration
- Dan's Pick of the week: Minh Channel 9 Deep Zoom (via the Coffeehouse)

Blaise Aguera y Arcas: The technology behind Photosynth

Dan — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:36:00 GMT

PhotoSynth is a technology that automatically combines 2D photos into an immersive 3D environment.

With the official release of Photosynth, we catch up with Blaise Aguera y Arcas, one of the Photosynth architects to talk about the technology and team that powers

More Photosynth love:
- Laura Foy's 3-minute overview on Photosynth
- Nic Fillingham's Photosynth Shutter Speed episode
- Max Zuckerman interviews Noah Snavely, who originally created the Photosynth project while a student at the University of Washington

Also, for an in depth look into the technologies addressed here, see the Photosynth Going Deep from 2006 with Blaise.

Synchronizing Data: Inside the Microsoft Sync Framework

Charles — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:16:00 GMT

The Microsoft Sync Framework is a comprehensive synchronization platform that enables collaboration and offline scenarios for applications, services and devices. It supports any kind of data type and any kind of data store. The framework was designed to be transfer protocol independent and to allow the developers to map any kind of network topology.

Here, Software Developers Aaron Greene, Andrei Maksimenka and Niner intern Christian "LittleGuru" Liensberger sit down with me to dig into the details of the Sync Framework and explore the complexities of sync, generally. As usual, the conversation winds down many roads and it's a great discussion (yes, it's a tad long, but find some time. It's worth it...). It's always a pleasure to chat with the folks who write the platforms and frameworks we depend on to get our algorithms written in efficient ways. The Sync Framework enables several interesting scenarios, most of which have yet to be thought up.Thanks guys!

Oh, and by the way, I hear that LittleGuru is doing a smashingly great job in his role as a PM for the Sync Framework team. Right on, LittleGuru! Go Niners! :)

Check out the Microsoft Sync Framework team blog. The team is very much engaged with developers who use our framework and monitor the forums very closely. Aaron and Andrei spend a good deal of time on the forums, just as many devs do in support of their products around the company.

NBCOlympics.com Update

AdamKinney — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:40:00 GMT

Eric Schmidt drops by to tell stories about the NBCOlympics.com site launch and answer a few questions from the viewers.

Why is it US Only?
Where is the FullScreen mode?
How does the streaming work?
Why choose to run on a beta?
Will we see the same coverage in upcoming Olympics?

Gabriel Aul: N-State Chaos and Windows Performance

Charles — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:09:00 GMT

Gabriel Aul is a 16 year Microsoft veteran who has always had his hand in the chaotic world of system performance and reliability, from technical product support and testing to being a leader on the Windows performance team. In fact, he was part of the team that developed the original Watson failure reporting tool. He's a dev at heart (once a dev, always a dev) and understands the complexities of Windows as a platform: Windows supports thousands of devices and the thousands of drivers that make them useful to users (devices sometimes have more than one driver, so add that to the complexity quotient...). How can so many devices (drivers) work together successfully (meaning not hosing the system) with so many supported configurations and possibilities for drivers to bring Windows to a screeching halt (think about task scheduling, resource allocation, background processing, foreground processing user mode code execution, kernel mode code execution and the sheer amount of concurrent running code, all over the place, all contending for Windows' attention...).

The world of Windows as platform is incredibly complex (n-state chaotic). It's amazing, actually, that the chaos doesn't lead to more performance and reliability issues. The Windows performance team has some really powerful tools (and an effort called Velocity) that can help ISVs find highly complex performance issues. Gabriel touches on this in this conversation and we address the continued need for more guidance and samples for developers.

One thing is for sure: The developers who write applications and drivers for Windows are great developers. You are craftsman, artists. Windows is a great platform in many ways because of the people who innovate on top of it. You know who you are. Yeah, you. Thank you.

This Week on C9: Christian "LittleGuru" Liensberger, VS 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Dan — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:08:00 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by Christian "LittleGuru" Liensberger where they cover:

- LittleGuru's first week of being a Microsoft intern
- Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 shipped
- Julia Lerman - Tips and tricks for installing VS 2008 SP1
- Scott Hanselman: Hidden Gems of .NET 3.5 SP1
- Dan and Christian share their favorite SP1 features
- Brad Abrams: Managed code can now be launched from a network share
- WPF Performance blog: Using WPF SP1 splash screens to improve precevied startup performance
Codeplex: Official WPF Codeplex project for DataGrid and other out-of-band enhancements
- Patrick Smacchia: NDepend on .NET 3.5 SP1 shows hundres of new namespaces, methods, types and more
- Lloyd Humph - Painting his office ceiling using the Channel 9 guy!
- frickinsweet: A tool to build custom Visual Studio Themes
- CodeProject: Adding wallpaper to Visual Studio
- NewScientistTech: Rat brained robots (video demo)
- Video clip of Charles Torre interviewing Vince Orgovan on Windows Vista error reporting
- Sync Framework for Windows Mobile devices CTP1
- Steve Clayton: Office Lab's PPT Plex, kind of like adding DeepZoom to PowerPoint (video demo)
- Charlie Calvert: Axialis IconWorkshop Lite Visual Studio addin available including free pre-built icon templates
- DotNetKicks: Add Windows Explorer directly into Visual Studio using free Mindscape addin.
- DevExpress releases 60 free Windows Forms and ASP.NET controls
- Steve Sinofsky launches Engineering Windows 7 blog
- Coding4Fun: Jerry Brunning's Stall Status Silverlight Sidebar gadget let's you check to if the bathroom is occupied using ZWave Home Automation.
- CodeProject: .NET wrapper for Intel's Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) library via Greg Duncan
- We learn that Christian's thesis uses OpenCV for image analysis of "adult" content
- Christian's pick of the week: Daily cartoon - Wulffmorgenthaler
- Dan's pick of the week: Rob Burke combines DeepZoom and LOL cats to build DeepLOL

Countdown to PDC2008: Poems, Pre-Conferences, Prosise and Petzold!

Dan — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:12:00 GMT

Not only does Mike issue his PDC Hard Hat Geek Challenge in the form of a poem this week (be the first to figure it out and win a limited edition PDC2008 shirt), but Jaime Rodriguez, who is driving the PDC pre-cons, talks about all of the awesome content you can get for just a mere 400 bucks! Pre-cons plus PDC = a can’t be missed bargain. Sign up today!

Not your grandmother's service pack!

wzack — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:01:00 GMT

Shanku Niyogi, Microsoft Product Unit Manager for the .NET Framework gave a presentation to the New York City .NET Developers Group on Visual Studio 2008/.NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. This presentation was streamed live to the Internet and also recorded for posting here.

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Silverlight

benriga — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:42:00 GMT

In yesterday’s video we talked about WPF and showed off some mind-altering 2D and 3D animations :). As we said then, WPF provides access to local data and resources as well as access to bare metal performance including 3D graphics acceleration. But you can’t take that sort of thing to the web. While WPF will run in a browser, that browser needs to be Internet Explorer running Windows.

Silverlight changes all that. Silverlight v1, which has been out for over a year, was primarily focused on media scenarios. Silverlight v2 goes much farther with numerous new features including a compact version of .NET. It’s now an ideal platform for building web-based line-of-business applications like the ones ISVs build today on the CRM platform. CRM and Silverlight 2: seems like a marriage made in heaven. If you’re looking for a way to light up your CRM applications, Silverlight is the way to go.

Silverlight runs in IE, Firefox or Safari across Windows and Mac. It will soon be on mobile devices (including Windows Mobile and Nokia). There’s even a project to get it working on Linux.

So bottom line; WPF is very rich, Silverlight is very reach. :)

As always, Girish delivers a demo that clearly demonstrates how Silverlight can take CRM farther. We continue the professional services scenario. In this case, a client has booked a new project and we need to figure out when it’ll fit into our schedule. That means we need to do some project and resource planning. Girish does that by dropping an iframe that includes a Silverlight control into CRM. When it loads it uses web service calls to pull in team member names and their project and schedule information.

The control displays that in an interesting way; showing transparent cylinders to designate the amount of available hours or capacity and then pours in the project schedule information to show which projects are currently scheduled to which team member. Adding all the team members makes for an interesting data visualization showing where we have time to add additional projects. Once you know that you can layer the new unallocated projects on to the graph. The power of Silverlight comes in when you start interacting with the data; moving unallocated projects around to ensure that we are optimizing staff resources while delivering projects on time.

Of course, the beauty of Silverlight and WPF is that they are so very similar. Learning one automatically gets you the other; giving you the ability to deliver both desktop and web applications as appropriate to your customer needs. User-experience design also becomes much easier as the workflow between designers (using Expression Studio) and developers (using Visual Studio) is well-thought out and seamless.

One interesting twist is that Silverlight 2 doesn’t currently support the CRM web services so it was a simple matter for Girish to add a WCF web service that bridges the two. Girish will be posting this code on his blog here. I know this because I have that promise on video. ;)

Олег Ованесян про PerformancePoint Server

mikcher — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:21:00 GMT

Олег Ованесян рассказывает про новый продукт Microsoft PerformancePoint Server и про то, почему он одет в костюм

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and WPF

benriga — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:05:00 GMT

In this episode The Dynamics Duo dive into the deep rich coolness that is WPF. We also spend some time talking about the offline data framework that Dynamics CRM provides developers.

In past sessions we built solutions on SharePoint and Office and those are great for the specific scenarios they were intended for. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) gives developers the ability to build rich interactive smart clients. You’ll have to admit that nothing beats the inherent coolness of a well written WPF app. I’ve worked on a few WPF projects (here and here) and it never ceases to amaze me the way you can reduce complexity and immerse users in the experience.

If your solution requires a desktop apps then WPF is absolutely the way to go. If you’re building web apps then Silverlight is the right way to go. When you’re not sure then you should think a little harder about your requirements. Things like access to local PC resources require WPF. Also if you’re doing heavy graphics that would require graphics acceleration then WPF is the right choice. Finally if your app needs to be both online and offline then WPF also would be a good choice.

In keeping with the series of demos for a professional services organization, Girish shows off an eye-popping jaw-dropping WPF app that radically improves the time sheet entry process. The scenario is an offline one. Dynamics CRM provides a great offline framework as part of both the end-user experience and the developer toolkit. By designating an entity in the system as available offline, the framework will automatically pull data from the CRM server and store it locally. In order to make the experience a natural one a local web server (Cassini) and database server (SQL Server Express) are used. In this demo we used the Microsoft Office Outlook client to take CRM offline. I even surprised Girish by yanking out the network cable. :)

Windows Vista - 64 bit in the Mainstream

Charles — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:46:00 GMT

Gary Schare and Bruce Burns sit down (well, sort of, Bruce stands, Gary leans) with us to talk about the sudden uptake of the latest Windows 64 bit client OS. It's very encouraging that Windows 64 is finding its way onto consumer client systems and into mainstream computing. This spike in uptake also poses some challenges for ISVs who are not 64 bit "ready". 32 bit Windows applications should just work on 64 bit Windows, right? Well, sort of. Tune in.

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Office Business Applications (OBA)

benriga — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:11:00 GMT

In the last episode we talked about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server; in this one we talk about Microsoft Office on the client side.

CRM actually integrates really really well with Microsoft Office Outlook right out of the box. That’s a natural as it’s the place where many people work day-in day-out (and especially those sales and marketing folks). But what about those people that need that data in Word or Excel? In this episode we talk about how easy it is to customize the integration of Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Office on the client side. This category of applications, often referred to as Office Business Applications (OBA), help to unlock the value of line-of-business (LOB) systems, such as the ones built on the Dynamics CRM platform, and turn document-based processes into real applications. There’s lots more info about these types of apps over at OBA Central.

In the demo Girish put together, we see how the app is surfaced with a custom ribbon. This in turn opens a Status Report template which has a custom task pane. That task pane pulls all the relevant information for my status report from the CRM server (in our case CRM Online). It authenticates and then grabs the project info. When I choose a Project it also pulls in the work items for that project. Just like with the SharePoint example, it’s trivial to open a CRM form right from within Word where I review more detailed info or even start an Office Communicator session with the owner of the work item.

I can then insert the work items along with descriptions and hours worked directly into the status report. Since you’ll want to share that status report with your customer, Girish built in the ability to publish it to Office Live Small Business. Office Live is the ideal place for sharing documents with customers or partners who won’t have access to SharePoint sites behind your firewall (and it’s free!).

The secret sauce that allows these kinds of apps to be developed so quickly is right in Visual Studio in the form of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). As you might expect, the same authentication code we used in the SharePoint example is used for authentication from with the OBA. Then it’s just a case of using the Dynamics CRM web services to pull info from CRM and post it into the Word doc. Nice!