The new create experiences include BLINK, Collage, Picotale and Video Party and will allow people to experiment with the future of social experiences, expressed through collages, videos, memes and dynamic media. Socl's four create experiences will continue to expand over time, enabling the Socl community to reimagine researching, learning and sharing in their everyday lives.

The team is especially excited to partner with MSR's Interactive Visual Media Group to offer a way for users to share their BLINKs. BLINK apps (BLINK and BLINK Cliplets) are also available today on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 devices. As part of the Socl create experience, BLINK is blurring the borders between video and photography, and BLINK and BLINK Cliplets provide ways to capture, create and share live personal moments via short, dynamic media. Both BLINK apps are free from the respective Windows Store.

As usual, this is a conversation. We cover a fair amount of ground and take turns into interesting rabbit holes when they present themselves. It's always great to talk with Anders, Steve and Luke; great folks.

Learn more here:

TypeScript Team blog
Soma's blog

Timeline:
[00:30] - xperf -on PROC_THREAD+LOADER+DISK_IO+DISK_IO_INIT -stackwalk DiskReadInit+DiskWriteInit+DiskFlushInit
[02:00] - WPA
[03:22] - System Configuration
[04:30] - Disk Queue Length - need to use xPerfView
[06:32] - Disk Controllers, Disk Drives and RAID
[11:08] - * The 2nd thing is AHCI which does I/O reordering (forgot to mention it)
[15:45] - xPerfView - Disk I/O "Detail Graph"
[18:30] - WPA - IO Time & Disk Service Time
[22:45] - xPerfView - Disk Queue Length
[25:00] - Summary

Example: "xperf - Collect DiskIO.cmd"

@echo off
echo Press a key when ready to start...
pause

echo .
echo ...Capturing...
echo .

xperf -on PROC_THREAD+LOADER+DISK_IO+DISK_IO_INIT -stackwalk DiskReadInit+DiskWriteInit+DiskFlushInit -BufferSize 1024 -MinBuffers 256 -MaxBuffers 256 -MaxFile 256 -FileMode Circular

echo Press a key when you want to stop...
pause
echo .
echo ...Stopping...
echo .

xperf -stop -d diskio.etl

• NBA Jam
• Contre Jour
• SynthPling!
• AppBundle
• Talking Tom Cat

Please leave suggestions for hot apps that should be featured in the comments section, thanks!

"...CodePlex project I just published called TouchProxy (touchproxy.codeplex.com). It's a Windows 8 touch injection client I wrote using TUIO, OSC, TouchInjection API, WPF/XAML, etc. I originally hacked it together for myself as a tool for testing multitouch gestures on Windows 8 running on a standard-issue laptop (no touch screen hardware) using available TUIO client apps for iPhone and Android. I spent a little time refining it by adding in edge calibration (to help pick up screen edge gestures in Windows 8) and integrated Wi-Fi hosting. I have Windows Phone and Windows RT/8 TUIO tracker apps in the works to complement TouchProxy and match the existing iOS and Android apps available. Those should be released..."

You had me at "hacked it together for myself..." and "codeplex".

TouchProxy (for Windows 8)

A remote touch injection client for Windows 8 using standard TUIO+OSC protocols, variable input calibration, and integrated hosted Wi-Fi networking for devices.

Features

• Works with any standard TUIO tracker app or service as a remote multitouch input panel. Apps are currently available for:
  • iOS
  • Android
  • Windows Phone (coming soon from frog eXPeriMeNTaL)
  • Windows RT (coming soon from frog eXPeriMeNTaL)
  • Windows 8 (coming soon from frog eXPeriMeNTaL)
  • Many other platforms and environments
• Uses the native TouchInjection API for Windows 8 as a proxy for multitouch input hardware
• Provides integrated hosted Wi-Fi networking services using the native WlanHostedNetwork API for faster performance between devices or when a local shared network is unavailable
• Offers direct and indirect contact modes for both manipulation and/or presentation overlay
• Provides detailed calibration of touch inputs to compensate for differences in remote hardware input panels (i.e.: variations in smartphone bezels, digitizer boundaries, etc.)
• Allows targeting of primary or virtual display bounds for touch interaction across single or multiple screen resolutions and layouts
• Emulates the Windows key and hardware button events using the native Keyboard Input API with configurable touch patterns
• Uses updated TUIO and OSC protocol libraries optimized for .NET 4.5 and offers full diagnostic tracing of inbound message streams

from Vimeo.

(Note the Kinect in the background? I knew I liked Robert for a reason...

Here's a snap of the Solution;

So if you have a Windows 8 device, but one without touch support, yet have another device that does, I think you might find this project interesting...

• [00:29] TechEd NA 2013 is on Channel 9
• [01:05] TechEd Europe 2013
• [01:45] Visual Studio 2013 Announcement (Brian Harry),Team Foundation Service Updates for TechEd 2013, Windows Azure: Announcing Major Improvements for Dev/Test in the Cloud (ScottGu), Visual Studio 2013, ALM, and DevOps (Soma)
• [03:35] Modern Application Lifecycle Management TechEd Session (Brian Harry, Brian Keller)
• [04:21] VS 2013 round tripping (Brian Harry)
• [04:59] Windows Azure: Major Updates for Mobile Backend Development (Scott Guthrie)
• [06:32] CodePlex learns to talk to other services! [Rick Marron]
• [08:25] Coding4Fun Toolkit v2.0.6, Coding4Fun Toolkit: Introducing LockScreenPreview, Coding4Fun Toolkit: Introducing SuperImage (Clint Rutkas, Scott Lovegrove)
• [09:49] Remote HTML5 debugging on Windows Phone with weinre (Oren Freiberg)
• [10:48] Tutorial series: learning how to write a 3D soft engine from scratch in C#, TypeScript or JavaScript (David Rousset)

Picks of the Week!

• Brian's Pick of the Week:[12:18] Flexible Source Control with Team Foundation Service and Git (Martin Woodward)
• Dan's Pick of the Week:[13:44] Brain-controlled aircraft Students control a helicopter in flight using only brain waves (Richard Boyhan)

Well, now I've created a video; a "cartoon" if you will, of the blog post which explains crypto in animated form. You should walk away with a good understanding of how public/private key works and why things like digital signatures, certificates, hashing, CAs, PKI and so on end up as part of the crypto conversation. Maybe if you find it very intriguing, you might want to watch it then read the article at your own pace.

Hope you enjoy the video.

You want more? How about some nice doc's?

More? Physics. Speech. SQL. Azure....

Even More? The source for it all is available too! See, I told you this was cool...

SticKart

SticKart is a 2D side-scrolling platformer which I created as my major final year college project. It utilizes the Kinect sensor for input and the target platform is Windows 7. All player actions control the actions of a stick man running through a mine. The player must run jump and crouch their way across platforms and past obstacles. They can also travel in a mine cart to give their legs a rest. The objective of the game is to set the high score on each level and the player can create their own levels once the game is complete.

...

The main features of the game are:

1. Motion control using a gesture managment system which automatically recalibrates to suit each individual player's body dimensions.
2. A bespoke player tracking system which filters the active player from the recognised skeletons.
3. Voice control.
4. A fully fledged NUI level editor.
5. A bespoke NUI friendly menu system.
6. A thread safe notification manager
7. Local and online leaderboards (Online leaderboards are no longer active as my Azure subscription ran out).

The project is built using the following technologies:

1. XNA
2. Farseer Physics
3. Kinect for Windows SDK v1.6
4. Microsoft Speech platform
5. Windows Communication Foundation
6. Windows Azure
7. IIS
8. SQL

...

Project Information URL: https://github.com/K-Cully/SticKart/ & http://www.keithcully.com/files/Journal.docx

Project Download URL: Download

Project Source URL: https://github.com/K-Cully/SticKart/

In this video we cover

1. The basics of location and mapping
2. The power of Windows Phone location and mapping APIs including simple ways to do distance calculations, reverse geocoding (get an address from a latitude/longitude), mapping routes (both walking and driving) and how to point users to download offline maps to drive a powerful mapping experience available worldwide even in the absence of network connectivity.

All code from this video is available here.

Getting started with location in Windows Phone takes about 5 minutes.

Windows Phone Location and Mapping in 5 Minutes

Minute 1: Enable your app for mapping and location tracking.

Open up a new Windows Phone 8 project. Double-click on the WMAppManifest.xml file

Go to the Capabilities tab and check the ID_CAP_LOCATION and ID_CAP_MAP capabilities.

This gives you application permission to use the location APIs and the Map control.

Minute 2:  Add a map control.

Open up your MainPage.xaml in either Visual Studio or Blend. Go to the Toolbox in Visual Studio or the Assets pane in Blend and type "Map" in the search box. Double click or click-and-drag to add it to your XAML control.

In Visual Studio 2012:

In Blend for VS 2012

Minute 3: Get your location

Open up MainPage.xaml.cs (also known as your code-behind). Add a Geolocator variable and initialize it in your constructor. You will need to add Windows.Devices.Geolocation as a reference.

Geolocator locator;  

public MainPage()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    locator = new Geolocator();
    this.Loaded += MainPage_Loaded;
}

Change your MainPage_Loaded to enable await operations by adding "async" before "void" and add the following code:

async void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    try
    {
        Geoposition myLocation = await locator.GetGeopositionAsync();
        GeoCoordinate geoCord = new GeoCoordinate(myLocation.Coordinate.Latitude, myLocation.Coordinate.Longitude);
    }
    catch (Exception exception)
    {
    }            
}

We want to wrap our attempt to get the Geoposition in a try-catch so that if it fails we don't crash our app. This could fail if the user turns off the ability of the app to get a location or if no location is available due to lack of connectivity and GPS access.

Minute 4: Update the map to your location

Give your map control a name so that we can reference it in our code-behind

<maps:Map x:Name="MyFirstMap" Grid.Row="1"/>

And set the GeoCoordinate that we created in minute 3 to the Map.Center property. To help us orient a little better, let's also set the zoom level to 14.

async void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    try
    {
        Geoposition myLocation = await locator.GetGeopositionAsync();
        GeoCoordinate geoCord = new GeoCoordinate(myLocation.Coordinate.Latitude, myLocation.Coordinate.Longitude);
        MyFirstMap.Center = geoCord;
        MyFirstMap.ZoomLevel = 16;

    }
// And so on...

Minute 5: Update your location as it changes

Finally, let's set the movement threshold on our Geolocator to 50 meters (the locator object will only raise a position changed event when the device moves more than 50 meters from the last location) and start listening for when the position changes.

locator.DesiredAccuracy = PositionAccuracy.High;
locator.MovementThreshold = 50;
locator.PositionChanged += locator_PositionChanged;
Geoposition myLocation = await locator.GetGeopositionAsync();
// etc...

In the event handler, we'll look at our new position and re-center our map accordingly. One thing we need to remember is that, for performance reasons, this event handler reports on a background thread. In order to update our Map control UI, we need to move to the UI thread using Dispatcher.BeginInvoke.

void locator_PositionChanged(Geolocator sender, PositionChangedEventArgs args)
{
    Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
    {
        GeoCoordinate newGeoCoord = new GeoCoordinate(
            args.Position.Coordinate.Latitude, 
            args.Position.Coordinate.Longitude);
        MyFirstMap.Center = newGeoCoord;
    });
}

Bonus Minute: Emulate location updates

And now we have an app that tracks our location and displays it on a map. To update the location and watch those updates track in your app, open the additional tools using the button indicated below.

Under the location tab, just click or tap on the map and the updated location will be indicated in your app. You can even load up a file of pre-defined GeoCoordinates (up to 99) and play them in the emulator so you can test constantly changing coordinates in your app. The file we used is a set of coordinates emulating a jog around the Microsoft campus.

You can download that file here.  Load the file by clicking on the Load button under "Recorded Data" in the Location emulator tab. For the best fake running experience have the emulator fire a new point every 5 seconds and hit the play button. For easy access, place the file in the "...My Documents/WindowsPhoneEmulator/Location" folder.

Other Things That Are Easy

The second demonstration app we showed the following features from the Windows Phone API. We don't want to overload this post with too much, so these are available as individual posts.

Calculating Distance Between 2 GeoCoordinates

Reverse Geocoding

Mapping Walking and Driving Routes

Offline Mapping

One of the cool new capabilities we're included with Windows Server 2012 R2 is something called "Work Folders" for the enterprise. To explain this concept and show off how simple it is to set it up - Rick is joined by Nir Ben Zvi, Program Manager on the Windows Server Team. Allows users to have their work data distributed across all their machines while IT Admins maintain control of the data.

News:

• Get the Preview Bits for all the R2 and 8.1 products when they become available by subscribing to http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter
• Windows 8.1 will be a free update. Preview will be available in the Store.
• Windows Azure per minute billing and no charge for stopped virtual machines.
• Joey does magic at [07:04]

Connect with the Edge Team:

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Follow @JoeySnow

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