Relief Central includes the CIA World Factbook, the USAID Field Operations Guide, MEDLINE Journals, and RSS feeds from the CDC, Red Cross, United Nations, and FEMA. More Info...

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”.

"Code coverage is a measure used in software testing. It describes the degree to which the source code of a program has been tested."

In this screencast, you will learn how to get code coverage for your Silverlight and/or Windows Phone ViewModels through unit testing.  You can learn more about code coverage in Visual Studio 2010 from:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd537628.aspx

In this interview with Zhiming Xue “Z”, several members of the recovery.gov project at Synteractive –  CEO Evan Burfield, director of technology Diane Johnson, solution architects Michael Mendelson and Jason Turim, and creative director Heather Waterman – discussed the challenges they faced on the project, from assembling a comprehensive proposal with loosely defined requirements and competing with major contractors to building a highly scalable, secure online solution under an aggressive timeline.  The project team passionately shared their experience in building such a large-scale web solution using Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and a mix of other interoperable web technologies and services such as Microsoft Fast and Bing search, Amazon Web Services, Google Translate, ESRI’s GIS mapping technology, JackBe’s Enterprise Mashups and open source tools. They also shared their experience in building several specific features and areas for the web solution such as interactive user interface, data and content management, search integration and multilingual support.

In this interview with Zhiming Xue “Z”, Mick Herres, VP of Technology, Joe Herres, VP of Product, and Lisa Ruff, business development manager, discussed what they had done to extend SharePoint capabilities to the mobile platform beyond what SharePoint 2007 and 2010 provide out of the box. Using the SharePoint’s solution framework, they created custom APIs and browser-based applications for smart phones and packaged them into a deployable and customizable solution called “Mobile Entrée”. As a result, users can experience rich and interactive SharePoint capabilities such as document management, tasks and lists, and Excel Services on their smart phones including the newly released Windows Phone 7 devices. And developers can use their licensed APIs to further customize or create browser-based applications for supported smart phones.

In this interview with Zhiming Xue "Z", Rakesh Gupta and Dale Tuttle at PPC shared their insights on building online document management and collaboration solutions --  or in their terms, "collaborative web-based document composition solutions" --  that are based on open standards such as Microsoft OpenXML, or OpenDocument (ODF). They defined and demonstrated seven characteristics of document composition:

1.       Document being aware of its environment
2.       Document as user interface
3.       Document as data structure or template
4.       Rich online editing experience
5.       Document management capability
6.       Real-time online collaboration
7.       Online and offline editing capability

Check out the video to see what they mean by document composition and how they put the concepts into action in a real world Request for Proposal (RFP) application.

During the interview with Zhiming Xue “Z”, Kevin Lenane and Derek Tiffany at PointAbout talked about their development efforts in porting a AppMaker that was originally created for iPhone and Android to the new Microsoft mobile platform -- Windows Phone.  With ease of use and simplicity, this standalone desktop configuration tool (a web version will soon be released) enables non-developers to create Windows Phone 7 applications using RSS feeds, images and other data elements which can then be published to the Microsoft marketplace. For enterprise customers, the application also enables users to submit real-time and location aware data and rich media contents to a backend database for further integration and analysis. Check out the video to find out their passion on creating Windows Phone 7 applications and a quick demo of the tool. (An extended demo is available here.)

At TechEd 2010, Joel Oleson, Sr. Product Manager and SharePoint Evangelist at Quest Software, shared with Zhiming Xue “Z” his insights in designing and deploying SharePoint solutions for a global audience. During this interview, he discussed common scenarios and challenges for SharePoint global deployment, improved experience SharePoint 2010 has brought into the deployment process in several key areas such as SharePoint workspace (aka Groove), service applications, federated search, and multi-lingual user interface. Joel also discussed the pros and cons of the two common SharePoint, including the built-in MySite, deployment options -- centralized deployment vs. regionalized deployment. Throughout the discussion Joel emphasized the importance of planning for SharePoint deployment and working with your IT teams. Check out the interview and find out what Joel has to share with you and why he thinks you can help with the SharePoint community.

• Search for legislators by last name, 2-letter state code, and last name.
• Call a legislator or visit their website.
• Read aggregated news about a legislator.
• Read a legislator's tweets.
• Watch a legislator's YouTube videos.

Be sure to follow on the US Public Sector Developer & Platform Evangelism Team Blog for more information and videos about how this application was developed, architected, and designed. Also, the code for this application is available as Open Source as a SunLight labs community development project!