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James Wren is Senior Consultant with Microsoft Services and has designed custom software for a variety of clients including the New York City Police Department, Department of Defense, and the Predator Unmanned Air Vehicle Program.  He is a strong advocate for building testable, modular software and has lectured within Microsoft and at the University of Maryland.

In this interview with Vlad Vinogradsky, several members of the EastBanc Technologies team - Wolf Ruzicka (CEO), Evgeny Popov (Microsoft Practice Lead), and Vadim  Zagorodniy (Project Lead) – told the story behind the project, explained the reasons for hosting the solution in the Windows Azure, described solution architecture, and showed a few awesome applications (including a free Windows Phone 7application) for commuters they have developed using the data provided by the solution.

For additional information about the project see the official case study “Firm Uses Cloud Services to Unify Data from Transit Systems, Improve Access to Schedules”.

In this interview, Tanagram Partners explore a real-world approach to building a NUI, starting with a detailed storyboard for a real-world app. This video is technology agnostic, but really paints the possibilities of what “natural” really means in Natural User Interfaces.

Go to http://tanagrampartners.com/ to learn more about Tanagram Partners.

Specifically, the Industry Mobility Infrastructure Logistics Business Unit is the world leader in mail processing solutions, including innovations in optical character recognition and postal logistics. The company is represented on all continents with production facilities, sales and service organizations, representatives and service centers.

Of the many projects and products created by the Siemens engineers, the two discussed here are ARTread™ and DPR™.  ARTread is the next generation OCR Reading technology optimized to process mailipece images in order to gather all the details from the envelope face for a wide variety of mailpiece types.  The product uses some of the latest Microsoft technology to produce a configurable and flexible GUI for the user experience.  DPR is a product that is being produced to work in conjunction with other Siemens address readers to enhance the accept rate and lower the error rate of address interpretation.  It performs this through a collection of specialized “agents” that are optimized to process specific components of an address, and then working in conjunction, produce a result with a very high degree of accuracy.

The new system was built from the ground up as a web-based solution which will significantly reduce the need for citizens to transact in person, and instead they can now do most of the required building related transactions online via a browser. The system was built using a modern architecture involving ASP.NET, MVC, Entity Framework, LINQ, and SQL Server 2008 to mention a few. Through this project the City of Miami was also able to implement a full end to end Application Lifecycle Management process by adopting Team Foundation Server technology.  

The city can now afford envisioning new solutions to address other critical business leveraging this new architecture.

The goal of this project is to simplify building common touch scenarios when using WPF 3.5 SP1 or Silverlight 3/4 by using Expression Blend Behaviors to provide a consistent way to implement these scenarios across WPF & Silverlight. Expression Blend Behaviors can be used within Visual Studio without a dependency on Expression Blend by downloading the Expression Blend 3 SDK. You can also find more Expression Blend Behaviors athttp://expressionblend.codeplex.com/ and http://tinyurl.com/ExpressionGalleryBehaviors. 

Go to http://touch.codeplex.com/ to learn more about this project.  Go to http://tanagrampartners.com/ to learn more about Tanagram Partners.

The system offers significant benefits to the city and its citizens: Expediency, Low Cost, and Enhanced Citizen Services. Miami is making this solution available to other jurisdictions to enable then to derive the same benefits.

The system was built in collaboration with ISC; a Microsoft gold partner.

Joshua Blake from InfoStrat decided to tackle this problem by creating SurfaceCube. SurfaceCube is a simple 3-D puzzle game for Microsoft Surface which he designed to illustrate as many as the Surface Interaction Guidelines as possible. I had the opportunity to sit down with Joshua and discuss SurfaceCube and the thinking behind some really interesting design decisions that makes it stand out as a natural user interface.

We also briefly discuss Joshua’s upcoming book about natural user interfaces and multi-touch development, Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight, due Fall 2010 (since recording this interview, the book titled was updated). As a special offer to Channel 9 readers, you can use the following coupon to order the book through the Manning Early Access Program and read the chapters as Josh writes them. Coupon code channel9y is good for 35% off Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight when ordered through manning.com, and expires on April 24, 2010.

Interview covers some of their thought-process, architecture best practices and demo of both the applications.  You could directly jump to 12:25 (minutes:seconds) in case you wish to simply check out the demo of the applications.

Government customers (or partners working with government customers) can check out the blog article here and consider subscribing to the public sector blog.

Thanks,
Microsoft US Public Sector DPE Team