Archives for posts with tag: Dan
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

TWC9: MIX Wrapup, Visual Studio 2010, Windows Phone 7 Tutorials

March 27, 10 //
Comments Off

This week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by guest host Clint Rutkas to discuss the week’s top developer news, including:

  • This week on Channel 9 is now on iTunes
  • Mike Swanson – MIX10 Wrap Up
    • Interesting because: Lots of fun facts about MIX10 including the on-demand traffic spike, miles of cabling, Red Bull bottles
  • Larry Larsen – Dungeons & Dragons on Microsoft Surface 
    • Interesting because: Playing D&D on Surface is the coolest+geekiest thing you can do 
  • Charles Torre – JavaScript – Project JSMeter
    • Interesting because: JSMeter analyzes JavaScript from the top Web sites to profile real-world JS performance and it’s used for IE9 
  • Brian Keller – Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Virtual Machines with Sample Data and Hands-On Labs
    • Interesting because: If you’re looking to get started with TFS, this ready-to-run VM includes sample data and hands on labs  
  • Sara Ford - Visual Studio Color Theme Editor
    • Interesting because: You can change the Visual Studio chrome colors (aka remove purple) 
  • Simone Chiaretta - Delete Visual Studio artifact folders & SVN folders, via Alvin Ashcraft
    • Interesting because: You can right click in Windows Explorer and clean your project up
  • Christian Schormann – Using Paths in a ListBox in Silverlight 4
    • Interesting because: It’s a step-by-step tutorial for building a circular path for a ListBox
  • Robby Ingebretsen - 10 Favorite Open source fonts you can embed in WPF or Silverlight
    • Interesting because: Free and beautiful fonts 
  • Steve Clayton - I <3 Windows Phone Desktop Wallpapers
    • Interesting because: Everyone loves the iconic I <3 Windows Phone 
  • Channel 9 - Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Course
    • Interesting because: Great resource for building your first Windows Phone applications using Silverlight or XNA 
  • Scott Guthrie – Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application in Silverlight
    • Interesting because: It’s a step-by-step tutorial for building the Twitter application Scott built in the MIX keynote 
  • Jeff Wilcox – Reusing the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone
    • Interesting because: Jeff walks through his testing of specific parts of the Silverlight Toolkit that work and don’t work on Windows Phone 
  • Daniel Vaughan – CodeProject – Building a Windows Phone 7 Puzzle Game
    • Interesting because: Tutorial on building a Silverlight game for Windows Phone 
  • Andy Beaulieu - Physics Helper Deluxe Running on Windows Phone
    • Interesting because: Physics Helper is a great library that you can easily reuse for building physics games

Picks of the week:

Techfest: NUI Movement

March 18, 10 //
Comments Off

At TechFest this year I met with Desney Tan and Dan Morris who showed me several very interesting systems, each of which allows your body to become the input device for hardware. Granted, this hardware was literally put together with tape and exposed wires (that just increases the cool, IMHO), but this proof of concept worked incredibly well considering its fragility. Also, Desney really could use a metronome and some time spent practicing Guitar Hero. :)

Dan showed us how we might interact with devices by using our body as a control device. By tapping in a specific area on your arm you are able to navigate, read email, or play games.

TWC9: 100th Episode! WPF, VS2010 RC tips, Bonus Footage

March 6, 10 //
Comments Off

This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian discuss the week’s top developer news, including:

Second patch for IntelliSense crashes in the Visual Studio 2010 RC
·Interesting because: The RC is the last public build prior to RTM. It’s pretty rock solid, but users of touch displays, tablet PCs, screen reader software, and potentially some others as well may need these patches.

Enabling Silverlight 4 with the Visual Studio 2010 RC (NOTE: This is an unsupported hack.)
·Interesting because: The RC of Visual Studio 2010 did not support Silverlight 4. This support is “coming” but no timeline yet. In the meantime, you can try this hack.

Getting Silverlight 3 to build with Team Build 2010 by Martin Hinshelwood
·Interesting because: If your projects use Silverlight 3 and you use Team Build on a 64-bit server, you’ll need this. But it’s also a good look at debugging a Team Build 2010 workflow.

What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 (ALM | The rest)
·Interesting because: There is a LOT of new stuff in this release. Blink and you’ll miss something. These documents do a pretty thorough job of documenting the goodness.

Beta of FireFox testing package for Visual Studio 2010 is now available
·Interesting because: Visual Studio 2010’s testing framework is extensible and will provide support for additional target platforms via add-ins from Microsoft and 3rd parties.

Optimizing Visual Studio 2010 and WPF applications for Remote Desktop via Greg Duncan.
·Interesting because: The Visual Studio 2010 IDE makes heavy use of WPF. If you RDP into a development workstation, or build applications in WPF, this post is a must-read.

Configuring VS2010 with SourceGear’s diffmerge
·Interesting because: The diff / merge tool that ships with Visual Studio is fairly dated, but it’s easy to swap in your favorite tool in its place. This one is free, and comes highly recommended.

Expression Studio 3.0 Tutorials from Paolo Barone
·Interesting because: Free hands-on tutorials featuring Silverlight, DeepZoom, SketchFlow, and more…

Roundup of WPF Documentation Samples
·Interesting because: One-stop shopping for all of your WPF sample needs.

4 free open-source WPF utilities
·Interesting because: Some good stuff in here; Snoop = “Firebug for WPF”, Inkscape = vector graphics editor…

Write code to enter the NASA Pathfinder Innovation Challenge
·Interesting because: There are dozens of coding competitions out there at any given time, but we thought this one was really cool – you can either build a “mechanical Turk” game or an image recognition application. And c’mon… it’s Mars! That should be reason enough.

Picks of the week!

Dan’s pick: Some (not all) MSR TechFest 2010 content is public and online

Brian’s pick: Telling the Visual Studio 2010 testing story with DeepZoom, and SpeakFlow as a new non-linear presentation medium based on DeepZoom.

And after the credits… special 100th episode bonus materials…

TWC9: MIX10, Tweevo, Silverlight Augmented Reality, testing

February 27, 10 //
Comments Off

This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian discuss the week’s top developer news, including:

  • Mike Swanson – MIX 10 Recap
    • Interesting because: MIX10 is going to be BIG this year and Mike discusses everything going on with the event 
  • Coding4Fun – Brian Peek – Tweevo (download) – A free, open source application to have your Tivo Tweet what you’re recording
    • Interesting because: This is cool if you’re a Tivo user and want to know what your Tivo is doing while you’re busy at work :)
  • Ayende Rahien – LINQ to SQL Profiler released, enables you to see which LINQ statement created a query
    • Interesting because: It shows the SQL being generated by your LINQ queries
  • Mike Taulty – Silverlight 4 TCP Sockets video
    •  Interesting because: Mike has an 8 part series on networking with Silverlight
  • Somasegar - Key Software Development Trends
    • Interesting because: Brian makes the point that testing is now a 1st class citizen 
  • Adam Kinney - Ryan Lee creates Gesturecons, a set of free icons to describe touch gestures
    •  Interesting because: For touch interaction, a picture is worth a thousand words, and they look cool
  • System.Net team – FAQ on System.Uri, via Greg Duncan
    • Interesting because: You should really use System.Uri instead of strings where you can
  • Code Project – How to automate software using WPF UI Automation
    • Interesting because: It’s an underused, yet incredibly handy feature that lets you automate manual tests of an application  
  • Mercurial Integration with Visual Studio on CodePlex, via DotNetKicks
    • Interesting because: It’s a visual step-by-step tutorial on how to use CodePlex’s Mercurial integration inside of Visual Studio
  • Automated Tester: How to use Selenium and NUnit together
    • Interesting because: Selenium is a good, free option for Web testing and Brian compares it to Visual Studio’s Web testing tools
  • Web Distortion – 60 .NET libraries every developer should know
    • Interesting because: It’s always interesting to find new and useful APIs

Picks of the week!

  • Dan’s pick – Rene Schulte’s Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit (SLAR) is now available on CodePlex, via Alvin Ashcraft
  • Brian’s pick Robocode .NET Beta – A Terrarium-esque programming game where you build a tank and battle against other tanks programmed in C# of Java, perfect for C# versus J# 

    • This Week on C9: VS2010 RC, Winter Olympics, Valentine’s Day

    February 14, 10 //
    Comments Off

    This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian discuss the week’s top developer news, including:

    • Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC is now available for everyone to download
      • Interesting because: The RC Editor performance is much improved over Beta 2
    • Charles Torre – Charles interviews Jason Zander on Visual Studio 2010 RC release
      • Interesting because: Jason talks about the performance improvements and even how he and Scott Guthrie went and bought low-end PCs for testing Visual Studio 2010
    • Jason Zander – Q&A on what’s included in VS 2010 RC
      • Interesting because: Answers questions like which Silverlight versions are supported (3 is, 4 isn’t), that the bits expire June 30, 2010, and that no Express Editions will be released
    • Kirill Osenkov – Stress testing VS 2010 RC
      • Interesting because: Kirill talks about being part of the Perf SWAT team and how they ran stress tests of Visual Studio running 8 hours a day for 5 days
    • Scott Guthrie - ASP.NET MVC 2 (RC2) Available
      • Interesting because: RC2 includes some API changes and this version works with VS 2008 and VS 2010 (see Phil’s post for installing with VS 2010) 
    • Scott Hanselman – Setting up IIS 7 Smooth Streaming and Silverlight
      • Interesting because: It’s a great walkthrough for everything you’ll need to setup smooth streaming
    • Code Project - Wiimote as a Windows 7 Sensor Driver, via Greg Duncan
      • Interesting because: This shows how to build a driver for the sensor and location platform
    • Jeremiah Morrill – Silverlight 4 hack to use native desktop CLR without COM
      • Interesting because: This (potentially evil) hack enables you to inject a native DLL into the Silverlight out-of-browser process
    • Jason Haley - Azure Table Query Project (on CodePlex)
      • Interesting because: It’s a simple, easy-to-use tool for seeing your Azure table data
    • Roger Doherty - SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Training Kit
      • Interesting because: Includes hands-on labs and videos for SQL developers including T-SQL, Filestream, PowerPivot, and StreamInsight
    • Saluse MediaKit for Silverlight - Silverlight based decoder for MP3 files, via Coding4Fun
      • Interesting because: It’s a Silverlight MP3 decoder so you can add things like audio effects or use an equalizer  
    • LiveSide Bing Maps for the Winter Games
      • Interesting because: This includes the medal count, Tweets, event information as it’s happening, and more  
    • LiveSide - NBCOlympics.com to provide Silverlight streaming including HD quality and DVR-style controls, 1,000+ hours of video, and more
      • Interesting because: If you’re in the US and Canada (NBC doesn’t have a worldwide content license), this is a great way to watch the Olympics

    Picks of the week
    - Dan’s pick: Laura Foy’s Channel 9 Valentine’s Day video
    - Brian’s pick: Brian’s recap post on all things Visual Studio 2010

    Happy Valentine’s Day from Channel 9

    February 12, 10 //
    Comments Off

    Is Valentine’s Day stressful for you? Do you not really know the right way to celebrate it? Well, this is Dan’s story…and he knows NOW how to spend a Valentine’s Day with his true love. Enjoy- and Happy Valentine’s Day!

    TWC9: Sara Ford, recognize touch gestures, make Windows 7 into a hotspot

    February 6, 10 //
    Comments Off

    This week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by special guest host Sara Ford to discuss the week’s top developer news, including:

    • Sara’s leaving the CodePlex team to work as a Developer Evangelist
    • Nitin Bharti – 7-Part video series on using Microsoft Expression Blend, via Alvin Ashcraft
      • Interesting because: It’s a free set of videos that cover the essentials of using Blend, including controls, data-binding, animation, and more
    • John Papa – Creating Custom Pre-loaders/splash screens in Silverlight
      • Interesting because: There are certain things you can and can’t do in Silverlight’s splash screen
    • Channel 9 Team – Simplifying how to share content on Channel 9
      • Interesting because: Most people didn’t discover the share feature on C9 and those who did used primarily used Twitter and Facebook
    • Don Syme - Introduction to F# Lecture Series
      • Interesting because: It’s a three part series with Don Syme who created the F# language
    • Greg Duncan – The Complete Windows 7 Shortcuts
      • Interesting because: This is arguably the most comprehensive list of Windows 7 shortcuts
    • Code Project – Manoj Kumar – Gesture recognition for Touch Devices
      • Interesting because:  This library helps take raw multitouch data from Windows 7 and interpret specific touch gestures
    • Chris Pietschmann – Turn your Windows 7 PC into a Wifi hotspot
      • Interesting because: It’s a free, open source 100% C# app that enables you to make your PC a wireless hotspot (great for travel)
    • Jason Zander – Visualizing Dependency Graphs using Visual Studio 2010
      • Interesting because: Jason walks through how to use the Dependency graphing tools and discusses DGML (Dependency Graph Markup Language) an XML representation of dependency graphs that Visual Studio extensions could use to visualize dependencies  
    • Wes Hutchins – Visual Studio Gallery Beta 2 extensions to be unpublished
      • Interesting because: If you use or have created an extension in the visualstudiogallery, realize that all beta 2 extensions will be removed
    • Windows Azure Team - Windows Azure Drive and beta SDK available
      • Interesting because: Azure Drive enables you to mount Azure as a drive  

    Picks of the week:

    TWC9 – Silverlight 4, Win 7 Driving, Editable MVC Routes, F# Missile Launcher

    January 30, 10 //
    Comments Off

    This week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian discuss the week’s top developer news, including:

    • Silverlight team – Silverlight 4 for Facebook
      • Interesting because: It’s a beautiful app that shows off Silverlight 4 features, including Out-of-browser support
    • CodePlex team – CodePlex now supports native Mercurial
      • Interesting because: Mercurial is a popular distributed version control system (DVCS) and Brian Harry who runs the TFS team said that “I fully expect that we will be adding distributed version control to TFS”
    • Nic Fillingham – Help Desk with Chris Pirillo pilot aired on Channel 9
      • Interesting because: The feedback from the show was mostly positive and Chris plus some Windows gurus worked well.
    • Bertrand Le Roy – Server-side resizing with WPF
      • Interesting because: If you need to dynamically create images on the server-side in ASP.NET, you should use WPF instead of GDI+ 
    • Pete Brown – Win 7 Driving using the Windows Sensor and Location API and WPF 4
      • Interesting because: Pete built a demo that plots his GPS coordinates on a x-y grid (vehicular etch-a-sketch) and Pete discusses changes in the location API for the RTM of .NET Framework 4.
    • Tina Wood – 157 PowerPoint Templates
      • Interesting because: Chances are you’re not the best PowerPoint designer so being able to look through a series of reusable nicely design slides will make your life easier.
    • Walter Ferrari – Excel file viewer in Silverlight 4
      • Interesting because: You can visualize Excel data in Silverlight and it’s a working example of how to read xlsx files.
    • Justin Angel – What you can do with Silverlight 4 COM+ support, via Lester Lobo
      • Interesting because: It’s the best summary of what you can do, including read/write to any file, run an exe, add to startup, execute SQL, use Text-to-Speech, and more
    • Scott Guthrie – Extensible Output Caching with ASP.NET
      • Interesting because: Output caching now supports extensibility so you can create your own output-cache provider.
    • Phil Haack – Two ways to do Editable routes – FileSystemWatcher (full trust) and App_Code
      • Interesting because: The filesystemwatch method enables you to not have to restart your app domain to add/edit routes and the comments provide good alternatives to different ways to have editable routes.
    • Jason Haley – How to query Azure log tables with LINQPad
      • Interesting Because: Using LINQ on data tables makes it easy to sort and filter your log file data
    • Eric Lippert – The difference between a destructor and a finalizer
      • Interesting because: A destructor is deterministic (you know when memory is collected) a finalizer is non-deterministic (the garbage collector decides when to clean up), and the C# spec incorrectly uses the term destructor while the CLI spec correctly uses the term finalizer.
    • VB Team – What didn’t get into VB10 – A future wish list
      • Interesting because: The VB team wants your feedback on which features are the most important and why.  
    • Coding4Fun – Louis Ingenthron – Making an Ocean with XNA
      • Interesting because: Walks through how to simulate an ocean in XNA including using high-level shader language (HLSL) 

    Picks of the week

    TWC9 – Hack Powerwheels, APIs for Wikipedia, Smooth Streaming, Arduinos and more

    January 23, 10 //
    Comments Off

    This Week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian are back together to discuss the week’s top developer news, including:

    • MIX10 – Windows Phone at MIX10
      • Interesting because: There will be sessions on developing applications and games for the next generation of Windows Phone.
    • MIX 10K Smart Coding Challenge - Build a cool app in under 10K lines of code using HTML 5, Silverlight or WPF.
      • Interesting because: Users get to play and vote for their favorite entries and and the grand prize is a trip to MIX10 including hotel and $1,000 gift card for travel expenses.
    • Scott Hanselman – How many PCs have the .NET Framework installed?
      • Interesting because: Over 90% of PC have some version of .NET installed and over 65% have .NET 3.5 SP1.
    • Tim Higgings – Coding4Fun - Wifi Warthogs – How to article on how to hack a Barbie Powerwheels using a Windows 7 Netbook and a Phidgets microntroller.
      • Interesting because: You can hack your kids Powerwheels and drive them remotely via an Xbox 360 controller.
    • Brian Jepson - Windows 7 driver for Arduino sensors, via Coding4Fun
      • Interesting because: It makes it much easier to use popular Arduino microcontrollers in Windows 7
    • MultiPoint Mouse SDK - Using one PC, you can have multiple mice input
    • Daniel Crenna – A .NET wrapper for Postmark, a service for email delivery for Web apps.
      • Interesting because: It can be a pain (or impossible depending on your hoster) to use and track emails sent through SMTP
      • Note: Service is still in private beta
    • Michael Ballhaus – LinqToWikipedia - use LINQ to query Wikipedia results (live demo, source code), via Greg Duncan
      • Interesting because: It makes it easy to search Wikipedia in .NET and because Michael is following up with a how-to article on building your own LINQ provider
    • IIS team - Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit now available
      • Interesting because: It makes it easier to build a media player, it includes an already built sample player as well as tools to simulate live encoding for test purposes
    • John Papa - Silverlight TV show launches on Channel 9, including MultiTouch, Flash and Silverlight, Out-of-browser apps
      • Interesting because: John’s a Silverlight guru, it’s developer-to-developer content that shows off cool demos and samples and he gets great guests including Mike Downey (former Adobe evangelist), David Kelly (Silverlight MVP), and Keith Smith from the Silverlight team. 
    • MSDN – New Windows Azure How Do I videos
      • Interesting because: Useful topics like  migrating a database to SQL Azure, managing Azure Services using PowerShell, etc
    • Jonathan Carter – New release of Tailspin Travel
      • Interesting because: Tailspin Travel is an open source sample travel booking Web site using ASP.NET MVC 2 and it now works with VS 2008
    • Intuit – Build Software-as-a-Service applications with QuickBooks data using Windows Azure 
      • Interesting because: Microsoft partenered with Intuit and it’s an opportunity for developers to build value-add services for Intuit’s platform
    • Help Desk with Chris Pirillo - January 27th at 2PM PST, send questions to @ch9live on twitter or ch9live [at] microsoft [dot] com.
      • Interesting because:  Chris became well-known on TechTV’s Call for Help & Screensavers so having him on Channel 9 taking live questions via Twitter will great 
    • Cache My Work - Open source app that re-opens your applications after your PC reboots, via Greg Duncan
      • Interesting because: If you have “automatically apply updates” on, chances are you’re PC has rebooted and you’ve lost what applications were open.

    Pics of the week
    - Dan’s pick: Bill Gates joins Twitter and he’s following the Channel 9 user account! Check out TheGatesNotes for Bill’s recommendations on learning content
    - Brian’s pick: – Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Virtual Machines available so you don’t have to configure VS 2010 or Team Foundation Server.

    TWC9 – Clint Rutkas, Photoshop results, MVC 2 resources galore

    January 16, 10 //
    Comments Off

    This week on Channel 9, Dan is joined by Clint Rutkas from Coding4Fun to discuss the week’s top developer news, including:

    - Results from the Dan and Brian Photoshop contest (email Dan at dan.fernandez@no-spam.microsoft.com
    - Larry Larsen – Bill Buxton on Natural User Interfaces
    - Larry Lasen – Ray Kurzweil – Blio WPF reading application (Blio home page)
    - James Clark – David Sayed’s Step-by-step: How to publish videos on Windows Azure, via Alvin Ashcraft
     - Pete Brown - Scanning documents in WPF using Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)
    - Scott Guthrie – Overview of ASP.NET MVC 2
    - Scott Guthrie – MVC 2 Strongly Typed Helper Methods
    - David Ebbo – MVC User Control Rendering Helpers
    - Mike Ormond – 3-part video series on using the SparkView engine with the NerdDinner sample
    - Jonathan Carter – 10-4 - Leveraging Model Data and Validation in MVC 2

    Picks of the week
    - Dan’s pick: Adam Kinney’s Torn Photo Maker Silverlight application using WriteableBitmapEx
    - Clint’s pick: Vote for Barbie to be a Computer Engineer

    « Older Entries
    Newer Entries »