Entries for glengo

geekSpeak Recording - Composite Application Development with David Kelley

glengo — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:55:00 GMT

In this geekSpeak, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) David Kelley discusses composite application development in Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). He covers the Silverlight Designer/Developer workflow, tooling, design patterns, anti-practices, and working with distributed teams. Your hosts for this geekSpeak are Glen Gordon and Mithun Dhar. Links and related resources mentioned in this episode can be found here.

The geekSpeak webcast series brings you industry experts in a "talk-radio" format hosted by developer evangelists from Microsoft. These experts share their knowledge and experience about a particular developer technology and are ready to answer your questions in real time during the webcast. To see upcoming live geekSpeaks, be sure to visit the geekSpeak blog.

Guest Info: David Kelley, Senior Software Architect, IdentityMine

David Kelley is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Silverlight, and he has been building Web-based, distributed applications for more than ten years. He is a Silverlight user experience architect at IdentityMine, and his passion is building user experiences that are elegant and easy to use. David's career highlights include a Silverlight demonstration with Bill Gates at TechEd 2008, and developing the "Entertainment Tonight" Web site for the Silverlight 1 launch and Emmy Awards. In his spare time, David is the executive officer of the Seattle Designer Developer Interaction Group.

geekSpeak Recording - Accessibility and WPF with Robert Altland

glengo — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:28:00 GMT

In this episode of geekSpeak, we explore how to write accessible applications using Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft Silverlight with Robert Altland, a principal consultant with Neudesic. Robert provides a quick review of UI automation, the new accessibility framework for WPF, and Silverlight application development. This geekSpeak is hosted by Lynn Langit and Mithun Dhar.

The geekSpeak webcast series brings you industry experts in a "talk-radio" format hosted by developer evangelists from Microsoft. These experts share their knowledge and experience about a particular developer technology and are ready to answer your questions in real time during the webcast. To ask a question in advance of the live webcast, or for post-show resources, be sure to visit the geekSpeak blog.

Guest Info: Robert Altland, Principal Consultant, Neudesic, LLC

Based in Irvine, California, Robert Altland is a principal consultant with Neudesic, a leading Microsoft .NET professional services firm and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Robert's career has spanned the spectrum from design to development, which gives him unique insight into Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft Silverlight application development. He has been developing enterprise Web and Windows-based applications using the.NET platform since its release, and Robert has been actively developing WPF and Silverlight applications for the past two years.

geekSpeak recording: The Mole Visualizer with Karl Shifflet

glengo — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:00:00 GMT

One of the things we like to do from time to time on geekSpeak is feature technology contributions that come out of the developer community. A very prominent contribution is the Mole project, a very popular and powerful visualizer for Visual Studio. Mole is a community project that’s been developed by several people, most notably Karl Shifflett, who is a Microsoft MVP for WPF .

In this geekSpeak, Karl runs through how to install Mole and gives some tips on how to use it with ASP.NET. Mole’s ability to drill down into your object trees and highlight what’s going on in there is indispensible when debugging your apps. I could list cool feature after cool feature of Mole, but it’s best to see them in action, so give this geekSpeak a viewing. Karl also gives some great tips for those of you who are feeling the urge to build your own visualizers. Karl totally deserves the Maverick reference we joke about during his introduction, he’s a top gun when it comes to Mole demos!

Since the time this geekSpeak was recorded, Karl has joined the team at Microsoft that builds the WPF designers (Cider) for Visual Studio. I’m sure we can look for continued WPF goodness from Karl in the future!

geekSpeak recording: Inside LINQ to XML with Paul Sheriff

glengo — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:07:26 GMT

In this geekSpeak, Paul Sheriff focuses on LINQ to XML and reveals lots of tips for getting up to speed with it. We loved seeing the new techniques for building XML documents using the XDocument type that are tremendous time savers. He helps us understand what is LINQ, what’s LINQ to XML, and what are the new XML handling capabilities of VB and C#. He shows a nice example of LINQ to SQL output with XML literals interleaved, as well as an actual LINQ to XML query that comes back with (surprise) XML.

Paul also addresses some of the why, where and when XML, which is something many of us face. He shows us how he uses XML for prototyping very quickly. Also Paul shares some simple yet great techniques he uses to keep his team members up to date on skills.

Other tips range from how to get Intellisense in XML in your project to working with aggregates to what the heck the SingleOrDefault method does. Are you an XPath guru? Watch Paul’s tips on incorporating XPath queries into LINQ to XML as a transitional approach.

Some fun moments on the show are Paul slipping in a COBOL .NET reference, and his explanation as to why he's glad he took an “anti-Glen” pill that morning. :)

Finally, Paul has a great freebie he’s making available for geekSpeak fans, so listen out for the URL he shares.

This geekSpeak was hosted by Glen Gordon and Lynn Langit.

About our guest: Paul Sheriff, President, PDSA, Inc.

Paul Sheriff is the president of PDSA, Inc., a Microsoft Certified Partner in Southern California. Paul acts as the Microsoft Regional Director for Southern California assisting the local Microsoft offices with several of their events each year and being an evangelist for them. He has authored several books, webcasts, videos, and articles on the Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft SQL Server, and Windows SharePoint Services. Paul can be reached via www.paulsheriffinnercircle.com.

geekSpeak recording: All About Team Build 2008 with Steven Borg

glengo — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:09:00 GMT

In this episode of geekSpeak, Steven Borg shares the merits of using Team Build 2008 to radically improve the quality of the code you write. Steven gives a great overview of how to set up automated builds and a build server, and the benefits of investing the time to do it right.

Steven also spends a bit of time talking about why he loves Test-Driven Development (TDD) - but pragmatically rather than zealously. Nonetheless, things like work items, build reports, logs and changesets available with Team Foundation Server can help developers zero in on bugs that "break the build". Breaking the build is bad, and we have a good chuckle about some of the stiff "penalties" that various development teams (even some within Microsoft) come up with for that infraction.

Also in this geekSpeak, get the scoop on what's on the horizon for setup and deployment projects, and hear about a great tool called WIX which makes building projects into MSI files super easy. Steven goes so far as to say that WIX actually changed the way he works, listen to him explain why.

Steven also gives tips on how many of you already have access to Team Foundation Server (and therefore, Team Build) and don't even know it. So it's easy to incorporate these tools into your software build process and, through the Continuous Integration they afford, drive up quality and enhance team involvement. As Steven says, it's like "a little bit of magic."

This geekSpeak was hosted by Lynn Langit and Mithun Dhar.

About our guest: Steven Borg

Steven Borg, a Northwest Cadence principal and the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) practice lead, works with corporations to improve their automated build process and overall software development process. In addition, Steven assists the Team System community as a Team System Most Valuable Professional (MVP), and was a founding member of the Seattle-based VSTS User Group. Northwest Cadence is a Microsoft Certified Partner and VSTS Inner Circle partner that focuses exclusively on helping companies improve their Application Lifecycle Management using Visual Studio Team System.

geekSpeak recording: LINQ Migration Strategies with Jim Wooley

glengo — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:23:46 GMT

Here's a very practical geekSpeak that's loaded with tips on how to incorporate LINQ into existing architectures and applications. Our guest Jim Wooley has a longtime background with databases, coming out of the Access and Foxpro world. He shares his insights about how the advent of LINQ brings with it a new paradigm for working with data. This geekSpeak will get you thinking about data access in different ways - about a functional approach that's less about iterative manipulation - plus how this type of data access will find its home in future technologies like Silverlight.

As for thoughts of any actual "migrations" you might have been entertaining, give some thought to Jim's tips in here and consider the business justification and trade-offs. Listen to Jim's points about maintainability and how you can use LINQ to enhance what you're already doing. It's compelling to think about getting some slick benefits from LINQ to SQL like cached query plans and precompiled optimizations, as well as free concurrency checking without having to rewrite your whole application.

Conceptually, you'll get a better sense of what's in LINQ versus what's in LINQ to SQL by considering things like the fact that CRUD operations are a part of LINQ to SQL, not LINQ. And that the CRUD equivalent in LINQ to XML for example is a save/load of the whole document.

Architecturally, Jim explains why passing DataContext objects across tiers is a bad idea, and what parts of your LINQ objects you should and shouldn't pass. He also touches on how ADO.NET Data Services (Project Astoria) will be able to expose anything that implements IQueryably to the outside world, and how it will be extended to allow updates as well.

Practically, Jim runs through how he updated the data access layer of the Personal Website Starter Kit (an ASP.NET 2.0 sample). You can do this yourself, and it's a great chance to learn about applying LINQ to an existing architecture. He also illustrates how (forgetting data access for a moment) LINQ can help you write better loops and finds, and gets you ready for parallelism in LINQ.

Also, for no good reason, Jim also shows a neat trick for writing a single VB statement on multiple lines by using XML literals.

About our guest: Jim Wooley

Jim is a Microsoft MVP and has been working with .Net since the initial PDC bits in 2000, releasing his first application 1 week before the .Net 1.0 go-live. He has been active evangelizing LINQ since it's announcement in 2005. Jim is actively involved in the Atlanta developer community and is a frequent speaker. He is a co-author of the recently released “LINQ in Action” http://www.manning.com/marguerie/. Jim's blog is http://www.thinqlinq.com

geekSpeak recording: Tame Your Software Dependencies with James Kovacs

glengo — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:20:47 GMT

For your viewing enjoyment, here is a very thought provoking geekSpeak episode. James Kovacs is the guest, and he really shows us the the shortcomings of tightly coupled architectures from the perspective of testing and maintenance.

James gives lots of guidance on how to avoid introducing dependencies that result in too-tightly-coupled a design. The decoupled approach makes a lot of sense once you see it, and you've probably been doing it to a lesser degree without even being aware of it.

There's also a lot of good discussion in here about Test Driven Development, and how tight coupling impacts the ability to create effective tests that are poor at isolating the errors you need to fix. James shows how using unit testing frameworks can reveal this coupling nicely.

James also introduces the concept of mock objects, and compares them to fake objects. He also shows off a couple of interesting tools.

Watch this geekSpeak to learn more about how you can create more nimble code bases and avoid ripple effects when code is changed. Also, see if you can figure out where Glen's audio got disconnected! Be sure to read the article James wrote for MSDN magazine to extend your learning.

More resources related to this geekSpeak can be found on our geekSpeak blog.

About our guest: James Kovacs

James is an independent architect, developer, trainer, and jack-of-all-trades, specializing in agile development using the Microsoft .NET Framework. He is passionate about helping developers create flexible software using test-driven development (TDD), unit testing, object-relational mapping, dependency injection, refactoring, continuous integration, and related techniques. He is a founding member of the Plumbers @ Work podcast, which is syndicated by MSDN Canada Community Radio. James is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - Solutions Architect and card-carrying member of ALT.NET, a group of software professionals continually looking for more effective ways to develop applications. He received his master's degree from Harvard University. James can be reached through his blog http://www.jameskovacs.com

geekSpeak recording: Building Animations in Silverlight with Cal Schrotenboer

glengo — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:19:44 GMT

Recorded on March 12th, 2008.

In this installment of geekSpeak, Cal Schrotenboer walks us through various ways of creating animations in Silverlight. In addition to the raw XAML, Cal shows us some interesting tips inside of Visual Studion and Expression Blend. There are some very effective techniques illustrated here, and can be viewed live in action by visiting the site Cal uses in the demonstrations - http://www.drinkmate.com. This show was hosted by Glen Gordon and Mithun Dhar

Guest information: Cal Schrotenboer

Cal is a Microsoft Visual C# developer with experience building Windows Forms application front ends for Microsoft SQL Server databases. He also teaches several programming classes at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, and Microsoft Network Administration (MCSE) classes at Mission College in Santa Clara. Recently Cal has been specializing in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). He has presented several MSDN webcasts on various WPF topics, and has spoken to user groups and code camps throughout California about WPF. Cal maintains a WPF blog at www.WPFLearningExperience.com. In his spare time, Cal enjoys travel and photography.

For upcoming geekSpeaks, visit the geekSpeak blog.

geekSpeak Recording: Extending SQL Server Integration Services with Reza Madani [geekSpeak Recording: Extending SQL Server Integration Services with Reza Madani]

glengo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:46:46 GMT

Recorded on February 13th, 2008.

In this installment of geekSpeak, Reza Madani shows you many useful tips for extending Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) with scripts. Highlights include learning the proper way to pass parameters to scripts, how to log effectively, and more. In addition to the numerous demos, Reza manages to answer quite a few questions from the audience. This show was hosted by Lynn Langit and Mithun Dhar

Guest information: Reza Madani, Principal, Harbor Objects

Reza Madani is a principal at his own Microsoft .NET Framework development company, Harbor Objects, where he architects and implements solutions on the .NET platform. Reza's firm specializes in Business Intelligence and Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies built on Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Reza is very active in the Southern California user group community, leading several local .NET developer groups that are based there.

For upcoming geekSpeaks, visit the geekSpeak blog.

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geekSpeak: MSDN geekSpeak Webcast: Problems and Solutions When Implementing a Windows CardSpace Iden [geekSpeak: MSDN geekSpeak Webcast: Problems and Solutions When Implementing a Windows CardSpace Iden]

glengo — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 22:10:21 GMT

This episode of geekSpeak (recorded February 6, 2008) features Barry Dorrans talking about problems and solutions when implementing a Windows CardSpace identity provider in the real world.

After giving some great explanations and analogies about identity management on the web, Barry dives into some details related to EV Certificates, identity providers, and more.

The hosts for this geekSpeak are be Mike Benkovich and Glen Gordon. For resources related to this geekSpeak, visit the geekSpeak blog.

Guest Information: Barry Dorrans, Author, Idunno.org.

Barry has been "playing" with computers since the days of the "dead flesh" keyboard on the ZX Spectrum. Graduating to .NET via RPG, QuickBasic, C, C++ and VB his time has been spent in various markets from banking through telecoms and even parts of the record industry. He specializes in .NET and Microsoft Technologies looking at "whatever takes his fancy" and running with it to see where it goes, with a passion for sharing the knowledge gathered during each of his code expeditions.

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geekSpeak: Security from a Public, Anonymous Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Site with Jim Wilt [geekSpeak: Security from a Public, Anonymous Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Site with Jim Wilt]

glengo — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:41:29 GMT

In this installment of MSDN geekSpeak, Jim Wilt covers a topic that is popping up in many of his current projects—the creation of secure, membership Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 sites that have a public-facing side with an input form that often requests sensitive information. Making a secure form for gathering sensitive, private information from an anonymous accessible site can be easily accomplished with a custom list using some creative features of Windows SharePoint Services. Jim fills in the details for you during this installment of geekSpeak.

Resources mentioned in this geekSpeak are available at http://blogs.msdn.com/geekspeak/archive/2008/02/04/resources-for-geekspeak-security-from-a-public-anonymous-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-site-with-jim-wilt.aspx

Guest Information: Jim Wilt, Chief Software Architect, Metrics Reporting, Inc.

In his principal role as chief software architect with Metrics Reporting, Inc., Jim Wilt focuses his deep experience and seasoned problem-solving skills toward helping his customers architect the best possible solutions for their thorniest problems with system design, collaboration, data integration, and business intelligence (BI). Having a passion for the advancement of higher education, Jim participates on an advisory board at Central Michigan University (CMU), serves on the Microsoft Certified Architect advisory council, and is a 2006 CMU Distinguished Alumni award winner.

For information on past and upcoming geekSpeaks visit the geekSpeak blog or the webcast site.

Recorded on January 30th, 2008.

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geekSpeak: The Web Client Software Factory with Paulo Morgado [geekSpeak: The Web Client Software Factory with Paulo Morgado]

glengo — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:33:41 GMT

This geekSpeak features Paulo Morgado (all the way from Portugal!) guiding us through some demonstrations of the Web Client Software Factory in action.

About our Guest

Paulo Morgado works at Espírito Santo Informá¡tica, ACE as a developer and software architect. He has a bachelor's degree in electronics and telecommunications (digital systems) from the Instituto Superior de Engenharia at Lisbon, a degree of licentiate in informatics from the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade Nova at Lisbon, and is also a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) for the Microsoft .NET Framework. Paulo contributes to Microsoft Portuguese newsgroups and the PontoNetPT community, answering posted questions about .NET Framework software development. His growing interest in software architecture also drives his participation in the Portuguese Group of Software Architecture (GASP). Paulo's contributions to the community have earned him a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award.

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geekSpeak Recording: LINQ to SharePoint with Bart De Smet [geekSpeak Recording: LINQ to SharePoint with Bart De Smet]

glengo — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 21:37:46 GMT

geekSpeaks are a great opportunity for some innovative members of the developer community to show off what they've been working on.

One such fellow is Bart De Smet. As of this recording, Bart had only been with Microsoft for 3 weeks. We arrange geekSpeaks a few months in advance, so technically Bart was still part of the community. :) Here's his bio:

A former Visual C# MVP, Bart De Smet now works at Microsoft Corporation on the WPF dev team in an SDE role. Prior to this new challenge, Bart was active in the Belgian community evangelizing various Microsoft technologies, most of the time focusing on CLR, language innovation and frameworks. In his evangelism role, he's been speaking at various events and attended several international conferences including TechEd Europe, IT Forum and the PDC. In 2005, Bart graduated as a Master of Informatics from Ghent University, Belgium. Two years later, Bart became a Master of Computer Science Software Engineering from the same university.

In this geekSpeak, Bart gives us a tour of a community project called LINQ to Sharepoint, which basically allows a developer to query lists and other things on a Sharepoint server as a data store, without having to resort to calling web services or mastering CAML.

I really love this project because it illustrates the power of LINQ and is a superb example of implemnting a custom LINQ to ... provider. It's also pretty cool to see Bart slip into some on-the-fly LINQ coding in response to the live questions.

So check out the video and be sure to try out LINQ to SharePoint and let Bart know what you think!

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geekSpeak Recording: Programming for High-Performance Computing Environments with Dariusz Parys and [geekSpeak Recording: Programming for High-Performance Computing Environments with Dariusz Parys and ]

glengo — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:22:37 GMT

We're always trying to dig up esoteric subjects for geekSpeak, and here's one that is intriguing - High Performance Computing. Once strictly the domain of universities and the like, HPC is quickly becoming a cornerstone of business analysis, engineering and number crunching in general.

This geekSpeak features several Microsoft folks from Germany, including Developer Evangelist Dariusz Parys, Platform Strategy Manager Christian Binder and infrastructure specialist Steffen Krause.

These fine gentlemen get us all familiar with key aspects of developing and managing applications for a high-performance computing environment. Steffen gives a great overview of a typical infrastructure layout, which includes Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. We get some great tips for handling multi-threading through the use of OpenMP, as well as an overview of using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to handle the communication to the cluster.

Steffen shares with us some information around using Excel services on Sharepoint actually installed on a cluster to provide some serious horsepower for server-based calculations. And we hear about a specific HPC scenario from Sorin Serban, with Visual Numerics, involving some amazingly complex algorithms.

All in all, a fascinating geekSpeak on the possiblities that high-performance computing offers.

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geekSpeak Recording: Custom Authentication Providers for SharePoint Server 2007 with Ron Rohlfs [geekSpeak Recording: Custom Authentication Providers for SharePoint Server 2007 with Ron Rohlfs]

glengo — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:33:05 GMT

This geekSpeak, hosted by Microsoft Developer Evangelists Glen Gordon and G. Andrew Duthie, features Ron Rohlfs, practice area lead with InterKnowlogy.

Ron spends a lot of time architecting Sharepoint solutions for customers. In this geekSpeak, Ron shares some insight into one approach to solving the enterprise problem of managing the sharing of information on your intranet, but also with customers and vendors outsider your organization. Here’s the problem space, in Ron’s words:

It is not uncommon for a business to deliver web based content to multiple groups of end users. For example, a business may wish to deliver content to both internal employees on its intranet, and external users such as clients or vendors on an extranet or a publicly accessible Internet site. In these cases, it is often desirable to use multiple means for authentication. Many businesses authenticate its internal employees against Active Directory. However, it may not be desirable to add extranet users to Active Directory. Extranet users, such as clients or vendors, tend to turn over more rapidly than employees, requiring continuous updating. Furthermore, exposing Active Directory over a publicly accessible site may be associated with an unacceptable level of security risk.

Specifically Ron shows how to have some users authenticated against Active Directory while some users are authenticated against a custom provider. Thanks to the tight integration between Sharepoint 2007 and ASP.NET this is now much more straightforward than in the past. We were fascinated to realize that you can tie Sharepoint right into the good ol’ provider model of Membership and Personalization in ASP.NET. Who’d have thought you’d be using the ASP.NET configuration tool to manage users for Sharepoint site?

Ron has some invaluable guidance for dealing with the Site Collection Administrator when switching membership providers. Ron also warns of a gotcha around membership provide, role provider and site administrator. Sprinkled into the conversation are some good tips on managing SQL Express connections string, web.config files, and more.

So if you can get through the technology experts fumbling around briefly in PowerPoint during the recording, you’ll be rewarded with some useful information. :)

Don't forget to visit our geekSpeak blog for information on upcoming live geekSpeaks where you can get your questions answered real-time.

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geekSpeak recording - VSTS with Anton Delsink [geekSpeak recording - VSTS with Anton Delsink]

glengo — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 21:06:34 GMT

This geekSpeak, recorded on Wednesday, August 8 (with host Lynn Langit and guest host Mithun Dhar), features Anton Delsink sharing a great overview of Visual Studio Team System. Anton, who is new to Microsoft, is based in Dubai. Prior to working for Microsoft he implemented VSTS solutions for customers.

Anton introduces us to VSTS and helps clear up any confusion over names and what tools are included in each edition. Anton enlightens us on the openness of VSTS for third party add-in tools.

Anton highlights how people in various roles in a project can use the system, from architects to devs, testers to project managers, and how they can work from their area of comfort, be it Visual Studio, Excel or even their browser. He also shows us how the reporting aspect is really SQL Server Reporting Services at heart, so you can report on quality indicators.

A lot of the conversation is centered around how using VSTS can help you support a software development process you've adopted, and how guidance for adopting an agile development approach with MSF is included. There's some good discussion here around how process is about behavior, and how VSTS helps you manage the behavior that you are trying to keep track of, and that things like work item tracking and reporting are very customizable.

We finish up the geekSpeak with some talk around offline usage of the source code management aspect of Team System, and Anton's top 5 tips for implementing VSTS in a production environment.

For the resources mentioned during the geekSpeak, visit the geekSpeak blog.

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geekSpeak recording - Real World SQL Server Integration Services with Matthew Roche [geekSpeak recording - Real World SQL Server Integration Services with Matthew Roche]

glengo — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 18:31:24 GMT

This geekSpeak is all about SQL Server 2005 Integration Services. We are lucky to have a real expert from the industry, Matthew Roche, to share his experiences with us.

Matthew shows us how SSIS is a real development studio, since it's an instance of Visual Studio 2005, with new designers. It's very familiar for folks who are moving from a traditional development environment. He gets us familiar with tools and techniques, solutions and projects, like the drag-and-drop approach to building packages, opportunities to include scripts, and develop your own components as .NET Assemblies.

Matthew answers some great questions around performance, programmability. He helps us understand the distinction between data flows and control flows, and how best to manage SSIS packages.

He offers some useful guidance on what scenarios merit what choices for moving data from one place to another - be it .NET app, SSIS, TSQL, BCP and so on.

But the most important reason to watch is to find out what Matthew would "chew off his own mouse finger" to avoid having to do. :D

Be sure to check the geekSpeak blog for upcoming geekSpeaks!

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geekSpeak recording: Speech Server with Michael Dunn [geekSpeak recording: Speech Server with Michael Dunn]

glengo — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 03:32:20 GMT

In this geekSpeak (or maybe we should say "geekSpeech") we explore Microsoft Speech Server technologies, focusing on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

After covering how Speech Server is now incorporated into OCS 2007, we talk about how it now supports industry standards for building IVR applications like SALT and VoiceXML. Michael shows a cool demo of creating a voice response workflow using the new designers based on Windows Workflow Foundation, which is incredibly easy to use.

It's pretty exciting to see how integrated this technology is with .NET so you can do things like utilize WCF, make web service calls, reuse a data access or business logic layer, program in C# or VB, etc.

Some great quesitons came through on the geekSpeak including using Speech Server with robotics as well as how to manage grammar, keywords, and concept answers. Michael also helps us understand considerations for design your voice UI around speech recognition versus DTMF (touch-tones).

We also touch on testing approaches as well as how to work with systems such as Skype and Vonage.

For more resources on Speech Server technologies, go to http://www.microsoft.com/speech as well as Michael's blog http://gotspeech.net/blogs/michaeldunn .

Let us know through here and the geekSpeak blog what you'd like to see geekSpeaks in the future cover.

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geekSpeak recording: Web Application Security with Keith Brown [geekSpeak recording: Web Application Security with Keith Brown]

glengo — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 03:20:38 GMT

In this installment of the geekSpeak webcast series, we spend an hour pummeling security guru Keith Brown with questions about how to make your sites more secure. We cover a lot of ground, with questions around things like SQL injection, code signing, strong names, Windows CardSpace, identities and impersonation and CAS.

We talk about the importance of knowledge sharing and overlap between site administrators and developers, as well as the approach of separating control channels from data channels. Keith also shares his insights around security testing like techniques and tools. And if you've ever wondered what a honey pot is, now you can find out.

Keith really boils the most common security issues down to their simplest form, showing how it's not that hard to think about security while you are designing and coding - not afterwards.

You can find links mentioned in this geekspeak here http://blogs.msdn.com/geekspeak/archive/2007/07/13/resources-for-geekspeak-web-application-security-with-keith-brown.aspx which points to Keith's input validation module screencasts, his blog, many good books, and more.

Let us know through here and the geekSpeak blog what you'd like to see geekSpeaks in the future cover.

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geekSpeak recording: Business Intelligence with Lynn Langit [geekSpeak recording: Business Intelligence with Lynn Langit]

glengo — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:25:11 GMT

This geekSpeak episode features Lynn Langit answering questions and demoing aspects of Business Intelligence in SQL Server 2005. It was recorded when Lynn had just joined the MSDN Events team as a Developer Evangelist (but before she became one of the current geekSpeak hosts). My previous co-host Susan Wisowaty and I realized that Lynn’s wealth of experience with Business Intelligence would make her a great guest for attendees to ask quesitons of. She’s architected lots of BI solutions and has recently completed a book on BI. There’s a lot of good info in here about considerations for which data store to use for BI, the new Data Mining component in SQL Server 2005, distinctions between data warehousing and data mining and how to find your way around the UI when working with cube. Plus, don’t miss what Lynn shows us you can do with Excel 2007 as a data mining front-end and integration tool.

The link to the resources mentioned in this geekSpeak is http://blogs.msdn.com/geekspeak/archive/2007/03/22/resources-from-bi-geekspeak.aspx

We’re going to post more recordings of geekSpeaks here for you to experience, and we hope you’ll join us on upcoming question-driven geekSpeaks, and bring your questions! You can see the schedule through posts we’ll make here on Channel 9 as well as on the geekSpeak blog

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