dan

Celso Gomes: Styling a Silverlight based Twitter application with Expression Blend 2

Dan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:44:00 GMT

This video shows how a designer can have a large impact on the look and feel of an application without having to write a lot of code or interfering with the core logic of the application. To highlight this, Celso Gomes will re-style a basic Twitter application built in Silverlight using only his design skills and the power of Expression Blend 2.

WOMENBUILD : Inspiring Career Paths In Technology

Laura10 — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:04:00 GMT

While capturing some of the show floor buzz last week at PDC - I made it a point to save some time for the WomenBuild Networking Event. The workshop invited attendees (both men AND women) to collaborate ideas and formulate solutions using Lego Bricks. Clearly, they're not just for kids anymore! As brains melded, ideas flowed and great conversation ensued- there was also another goal of the event and that was to inspire people from all walks of life to get excited by technology and realize the multiple different career paths one can take in the technical field. Asli Bilgin was the lead on this event so I spoke with her and several key players to bring you total coverage. Check it out and learn how to participate HERE.

Coding4Fun with Clint Rutkas: The Segway Skateboard

Dan — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:54:00 GMT

Clint Rutkas, our Coding4Fun Content Strategist and Academic Developer Evangelist shows off how he built a self-balancing Segway Skateboard in C#, and with all mad scientist projects, hilarity ensues.

David Pallmann & Mickey Williams: How Cloud Computing will Affect Every Developer

Dan — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:50:00 GMT

At PDC, we caught up with David Pallmann and Mickey Williams to share their thoughts on the impact that Cloud computing will have on the different development communities. Whether you're a backend developer or working in an enterprise, you'll hear the different ways that Cloud Computing will affect you in the future.

Starting up a company? Microsoft BizSpark can help

artificialignorance — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:14:00 GMT

Dan'l Lewin, Corporate Vice President of the Strategic and Emerging Business Team, talks about Microsoft BizSpark - a new program for startups that provides software, support and visibility. Lewin is at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco where the announcement was made.

Visit http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark for more information.

Windows 7: Find and Organize Part 2 - Building Federated Search applications

Dan — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:50:00 GMT

In Part 1, you saw the user experience of finding and organizing your files in Windows 7.

In Part 2, David Washington and Brandon Paddock show how developers can build federated search applications that enable you to easily search your organization's intranet or the Web and integrate those search results directly into Windows Explorer.

The best part is that instead of needing to install software on Windows 7 to get new search providers, you simply run an XML configuration file to add a search provider to your machine!

- Watch their PDC session here too

More PDC Fun with Laura

maxzuck — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:49:00 GMT

If you didn't get enough in Part I, here's more attendee shenanigans for you with Laura.

Soma on Visual Studio for Windows Azure, Concurrency, and Windows 7

Dan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:53:00 GMT

S. Somasegar (better known as Soma) is the Senior Vice President in charge of the Developer Division which makes everything from Visual Studio, the Expression suite, and application runtimes including the .NET Framework, Silverlight, and more.

In this video, we talk to Soma about the key announcements for PDC and how his team is building tools for Windows Azure, tools to simplify building concurrent applications and tools to take advantage of new features in Windows 7.

C9 Bytes: Don and Chris explain Oslo in 5 minutes

Dan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:52:00 GMT

In this Channel 9 video, Don Box and Chris Anderson explain exactly what Oslo is and what it's used for.

Lucian Wischik and Lisa Feigenbaum: What's new in Visual Basic 10

Dan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:54:00 GMT

In this demo-heavy video, Lucian shows off a number of new features in Visual Basic 10 including Collection Initializers, better Office integration, inline functions, parallel LINQ, simpler type handling, auto properties, and lots more.

Windows 7: Find and Organize Part 1 - The User Experience

Dan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:02:00 GMT

David Washington and Paul Gusmorino demonstrate the key enhancements in Windows 7 to finding and organizing your files. David and Paul show off the ways that the team has simplified the Windows Explorer, the new libraries feature, which is a virtual collection of your music, photos, and video, wherever they may be, including on multiple machines. You'll also see how to use the Library pane to easily find and filter your data.

You'll also see the new advanced search filter that provides a visual way to filter your files based on the files metadata.

- Watch Part 2
- Watch their PDC session

PDC Keynote video and live blog

Dan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:40:00 GMT

Watch the PDC keynote streamed live over the Web on MicrosoftPDC.com.

Cogwheel: Building World of Warcraft Addons

Dan — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:38:00 GMT

At Blizzcon, we got a chance to interview Matthew Orlando aka "Cogwheel". Matthew is one of the best known AddOn and Macro developers (and a Wow MVP) in World of Warcraft and he's also the co-author of World of Warcraft Programming.

In this interview we discuss some of the upcoming changes in the new expansion for Wrath of the Lich King, how developers can get started building addons, and more.

Bill Hill: The Future of Reading on the Web, Part 2

Dan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:35:00 GMT

This is the second part of the interview that Dan and Christian did with Bill Hill. (See Part 1 here).

While many people know Bill from his work on True Type and his passion for improving screen readability, Bill is now working on improving Web readability in Internet Explorer and how reading on the Web hasn't improved since the early days of browsing.

In this part of the interview we continue with the discussion on font embedding. But this time Bill Hill tells us also about readability in general, shows us his website and thoughts that he had during designing the reading and layout experience for it. In one of the various side stories he explains to us how and why the letters in our alphabet evolved as they did. By the end of the interview Bill Hill shares some personal stories that includes also how he started to learn reading animal tracks.

To see Bill's site using font embedding and clean HTML/CSS with multi-page flow, go to http://www.billhillsite.com.

Joe Marini: Microsoft's direction with Visual Studio Extensibility

Dan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:57:00 GMT

In this interview, you'll hear from Joe Marini, Director of the Development Tools and Ecosystem team as he discusses what he sees are the opportunities for ISVs extending Visual Studio, competing against Eclipse, and some of the cool Visual Studio extensions the community is building from auto-generating mock objects for Sharepoint to building custom games. To see SharpLudus, the Domain-specific language for building games, visit the SharpLudus home page

This Week on C9: Windows 7, Silverlight 2 ships, and PDC attendee fun

Dan — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:10:00 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Brian and Dan talk about this week's developer news, including:

- Windows 7 is the official name of the next release of Windows

- Silverlight 2 RTWs (demo video), via Scott Guthrie's blog

- Photosynth wins breakthrough award from Popular Mechanics, via LiveSide

- Deep Zoom Image Composer updated for Silverlight 2

- 2 Part series on Building Facebook Applications with Silverlight 2 RTW, via Alvin Ashcraft

- Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) enables you to dynamically build files in Visual Studio projects more at Oleg Sych and Scott Hanselman's blog

- Nikhil Kothari's Silverlight Fx Library updated

- Scott Hanselman gives a shout out to This Week on C9 Hooligans and actually implements Silverlight +networking support to BabySmash for PDC!

- Wiirtual Earth - A WPF Virtual Earth 3D Experiment via Brian Peek

- Larry Osterman - Engineering 7: A view from the bottom

- Windows Vista Bridge samples are .NET callable wrappers for new Vista APIs via Greg Duncan

- XAML to PNG Converter library

- Codeproject article on Codeproject article scraping

- 15 ways to track Web site popularity

- Going Deep 100th Episode!: Erik Meijer and Bart de Smet

- Coding4Fun projects at PDC - Unreal Tournament AI bots, a free robot a day, Segway skateboard project, and Virtual World Simulator

- Show Off contest at PDC, Monday 8:30pm - 10pm

- The Underground at PDC, Wednesday 6pm - 2am

- Codeplex meet at PDC at Channel 9 lounge, Wednesday 1:30pm

- Brian's pick of the week: Scott Hanselman's PDC talk will show BabySmash on Silverlight 2 with networking support

- Dan's pick of the week: Coding4Fun session at PDC - iTunes, YouTube, Wiimote, BabySmash, and Twitter, Tuesday at 12:45pm

Scott Guthrie: Building a Silverlight 2 application

Dan — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:49:00 GMT

Note: Due to the screen resolution, we recommend you watch this in full screen mode or download the video.

Now that Silverlight 2 has released to the Web, we sat down with Scott Guthrie as he walks us through handcoding a basic Silverlight 2 application.

You'll see the Silverlight eventing model, controls and control databinding, how to reuse classes and C# 3.0 features, and how to call WCF Web services directly from Silveright.

For more information, visit www.silverlight.net

This Week on C9 – Hell No! Countdown to PDC2008 Ambush Dan and Brian, Taking Over their Show for 10 Groovy Minutes

Dan — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:32:00 GMT

Brian and Dan may have day jobs, but they are also doing a ton of work on PDC including running the Show Off contest. Show Off is a really cool experience, but it’s kinda hard to explain in writing so Brian and Dan give it to us in plain words and tell us how easy it is to get involved (and maybe win some big prizes). Plus, we hear all the PDC sessions are going to be online within 24 hours for FREE! Is that really true!? The guys confirm for us the dealio on the cool PDC virtual experience, and tell us what to expect.

Bill Hill: The Future of Reading on the Web, Part 1

Dan — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Bill Hill - the man, the myth, the legend is back on Channel 9! Christian "LittleGuru" Liensberger and I got a chance to catch up with Bill on his latest work...

While many people know Bill from his work on True Type and his passion for improving screen readability, Bill is now working on improving Web readability in Internet Explorer and how reading on the Web hasn't improved since the early days of browsing.

In the interview, you'll hear about how Internet Explorer has included font embedding features for years that can give publishers much better readability or how Windows fonts actually include code that gets executed to dynamically adjust pixel-by-pixel based on font.

To see Bill's site using font embedding and clean HTML/CSS with multi-page flow, go to http://www.billhillsite.com.

Countdown to PDC2008: What the heck are Microsoft’s Live Platform Services? Treadwell Tells All!

Dan — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:24:00 GMT

What are the platform infrastructure details behind the Mesh technologies? Corporate Vice President of Live Platform Services, David Treadwell, will be spilling all the beans in his PDC keynote in just a few weeks, but in this Q&A he gives us a sneak peek. David explains how there’s so much more to Mesh than just the user experience, and how he and his team will be revealing the underlying particulars that fall below the line at PDC – the platform infrastructure that helps developers build stellar Software + Services apps. And did Tread mention bits that will be given out at the PDC? I think he did, but you gotta listen to find out more about what we affectionately call the goods.

Countdown to PDC2008: King of the Geeks, Scott Guthrie, Previews PDC Keynote

Dan — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:06:00 GMT

As Corporate Vice President of the .NET Developer Division, Scott will be giving a talk on client development covering both Silverlight and WPF at the PDC. What else does the 6’4” Dev Div chief chat about in this quickie interview? Silverlight 2, jQuery, and so much more. Plus Scott reminisces about his favorite PDC, and answers the question about whether he still gets nervous when he gives a big speech. Does he? You’ll just have to watch the video to find out!

PDC 2008 is coming… and I can’t wait!

Dan — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:29:00 GMT

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference 2008 is hitting the Los Angeles scene late October (27-30) and we got our best ad-agency guys and gals together to figure out how best to get the word out.

Why? Well, PDC is the place where Developers and Architects can network with their peers, get their questions answered by the Microsofties who are writing the code during Ask-The-Experts and take home all the bits on a 160 GB hard drive-including pre-Beta Windows 7!

Yeah, that’s PDC.

This is an inside look at one of our early brainstorming sessions… let’s just say things got a little out of hand.

But hey, make sure you don’t let it pass you by, register for PDC… NOW!

Get Hired @ Microsoft, Episode 2: Partner with your Recruiter

Dan — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:04:00 GMT

After sending us your killer resume, a recruiter contacts you about a job at Microsoft. What’s next? In part two of “Get Hired at Microsoft,” Staffing Consultant Theresa de la Osa and Server & Tools Program Manager (and new employee) Tharika Chandrasekhar share what to expect, how to prepare, and why your recruiter may become your new best friend.

Countdown to PDC2008: Parallel Computing and Getting Your Head in the Cloud

Dan — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:26:00 GMT

The chair of the PDC Symposia joins Mike and Jennifer this week to talk about the detailed workshops that will be offered on the last day of the conference. Parallel Computing – A Detailed Look at How Multi-Core Architectures will Unleash Computing Power and Enable Innovation , and Head in the Cloud, Feet on the Ground – A Practical Look at Architectural Challenges and Opportunities with Identity, Management, Data and Interoperability in the Cloud. Together, the two PDC symposia will help developers, architects, and technical managers to better prepare for the challenges and opportunities that will come with increasingly more multi-core processing power coupled with powerful cloud-based services and platforms.

Plus yet again, Mike issues another new Hard Hat Challenge. Who has more fun, Mike coming up with the puzzles or solving them? You be the judge!

Norman Guadagno: Announcing Visual Studio Team System 2010

Dan — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:57:00 GMT

Norman Guadagno, the Director of Product Management for Visual Studio Team System shares the key enhancements coming in the next version of Visual Studio, officially named Visual Studio 2010. In this video, you'll hear Norman discuss new features in Team Architect including new visual designers and UML support, new software quality features including historical debugging, how the Database Edition is being rolled rolled into the Team Developer edition and lots more.

Want more? For more information on Visual Studio Team System 2010 including exclusive product team interviews pay attention to Channel 9 from September 30 - October 3rd. Every day we'll be bringing a brand new batch of Visual Studio Team System 2010 videos to you at http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio.