Channel 9

Silverlight TV 43: Applying Animations and States to Your Application

John Papa — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:00:00 GMT

On this episode, John Stockton demonstrates how to create animations for Silverlight using Storyboards in Expression Blend. He explores the roles that the storyboards, visual states, behaviors, keyframes, transforms, and easings play in animations. This is a great demonstration of how to add a realistic and natural feel to animations.

Relevant links:

John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)

Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv/

Are you developing with Windows Phone 7? You can pre-order Learning Windows Phone Programming today, by Jaime Rodriguez, Yochay Kiriaty and John Papa! Or check out the book's web site.

First Look at Arc Touch Mouse

Larry Larsen — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:59:00 GMT

I stopped by the hardware team to take a first look at the new Arc Touch Mouse, and shot this short video. The Touch folds flat, to about the same size as an HTC Touch phone. Where the old Arc Mouse fit well in a front pocket, the Arc Touch will do well in a back pocket. The folding portion of the mouse has 90 articulated pieces and snaps to a very solid feeling and natural arc.

Between the bottons, a touch strip allows you to scroll or flick through your Windows, or touch the top or bottom of the strip to Page Up/Down. This refresh includes haptics, so you can actually feel (and hear) the page scrolling and BlueTrack so the Arc will track on almost any surface. The dongle for the Arc Touch is the very slim profile dongle as was used on the Arc Keyboard.

If you'd like to see some of what goes in to developing a mouse, see this video on the design of the original Arc.

Web Camps TV #2 - OData Overview with Jonathan Carter

James Senior — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:10:00 GMT

This week on Web Camps TV James Senior talks to Jonathan Carter about the new craze sweeping the world of services - OData - the new web protocol for querying and updating data. Jonathan describes how OData (short for Open Data protocol) is great for companies who are hosting services and allows developers to build cool apps on their API with zero ramp-up time because they are familiar with the standards-based approach. We explore the way to consume a typical service OData service and the different ways to query an API.

Learn more about OData at our free Web Camps events - sign up today!

Accelerometer Helper for Windows Phone 7

Laura Foy — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:58:00 GMT

In this deep dive, Sean McKenna from Windows Phone and Greg Hodgal discuss how to program for Windows Phone 7 using the accelerometer.
An accelerometer is a sensor that measures acceleration forces such as gravity or the forces caused by moving the sensor. All Windows Phones have at least one accelerometer sensor that, when accessed by the managed Accelerometer API, can be used to provide input to Windows Phone applications including both Silverlight for Windows Phone and XNA for Windows Phone applications.

endpoint.tv - Workflow Services as a Batch Job

Ron Jacobs — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:34:00 GMT

Sometimes you have work that you want to schedule for off-peak times or have happen on a recurring schedule, such as every 3 hours. While there are many ways to do this, Workflow Services are an interesting option. In this episode, I'll show you how you can create a service that accepts start, stop, and query messages, and supports scheduling.

    WF4 Batch Job Example (MSDN Code Gallery)

Ron Jacobs
blog        http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs
twitter    @ronljacobs

C9 Lectures: Dr. Ralf Lämmel - Advanced Functional Programming - Evolution of an Interpreter

Charles — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:01:00 GMT

In part 3 of the Advanced Functional Programming lecture series, Dr. Lämmel focuses on the domain of language interpretation as a method of understanding some important functional programming techniques. As a side effect, some basics of programming language theory are also informally presented.

More specifically, this lecture develops an interpreter for a simple functional programming language that contains Booleans, natural numbers, lambdas, and recursive lets. The interpreter is actually developed in a stepwise manner, which is why the lecture is called "Evolution of an Interpreter."

In each step, another construct is added and the impact of the extension onto the interpreter is analyzed. In this manner, several interesting programming techniques are exercised. For instance, the Maybe type constructor is pervasively used for dealing with partiality, and Haskell's fixed point combinator is used to model the semantics (i.e., interpretation) of recursive bindings.

This lecture also prepares us for some more advanced subjects. For instance, the next lecture in this series will cover the intriguing subject of monads while using interpretation as the application scenario. Soon, generalized folds (or bananas, according to Erik Meijer) will also be discussed (the folds will traverse abstract syntax trees as opposed to lists).

Enjoy. Learn.

Thanks to Ralf for providing another excellent lecture!

Earlier lectures here.

Slides: https://developers.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/developers/repository/ralfs-channel9-lectures/decks/interpretation.pdf

Windows Identity Foundation with Vittorio Bertocci

Robert Hess — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:46:00 GMT

One of the thorns in the sides of all Internet users is the plethora of accounts they need to keep track of for the various websites they use throughout the day. Most of the folks running these sites don’t particularly want to create an account management system, but they need to just so they can provide their users with a personalized experience. On the other end of the spectrum, there are enterprise developers who need to constantly keep up with new protocols and credential types for securing their applications. Windows Identity Foundation might just be a solution to both of these problems, removing the need for applications to host their own authentication system, as well as reducing the number of logins a user needs to remember.

In this episode of The Knowledge Chamber, I meet with Vittorio Bertocci (who just finished a new book, Programming Windows Identity Foundation) to learn more about the basic features and capabilities of Windows Identity Foundation and see how easy it is for websites and applications to get out of the credential management game and “outsource” their authentication to another provider.

When used in conjunction with services such as the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service, Windows Identity Foundation makes it possible to log in via LiveID, Yahoo, Google, and existing Active Directory instances equipped with ADFS2, as well as by using a variety of other providers, while maintaining the exact same codebase.

If you’d like to order a copy of Vittorio’s book, you can find it here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735627185

To find out more about Windows Identity Foundation, you should start here:
http://www.Microsoft.com/WIF

You can find Vittorio’s blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/

And you can find more videos on Channel 9 about Windows Identity Foundation here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Windows+Identity+Foundation/

Ping 72: Open Source love, Exchange Active Sync, Yahoo! by Bing, Silverlight

Laura Foy — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:51:00 GMT

Paul and Laura spent their entire week finding all these hot stories for this episode of Ping!

We LOVE open source
Yahoo!—powered by Bing!
Miss Silverlight
Exchange ActiveSync on Hotmail
Free software for students!

Countdown to PDC10: A Tour of Building 33

Larry Larsen — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:05:00 GMT

First, congratulations to Jarem Archer for winning the free pass to PDC! We loved the inventiveness and creativity of his SketchFlow comic listing the 7 reasons why he should attend PDC10. Well done, @unt1tled! Then we’re off and running on a very quick excursion through the Microsoft Conference Center where PDC will be held this year. Sometimes it’s dark, sometimes the audio isn’t that great, sometimes it’s a little jiggly, but hopefully this jaunt through the facility gives you a good idea of the space and venue that will be our home this year. http://www.microsoftpdc.com/

TWC9: LightSwitch available, Windows Phone, OData, HTML 5 File API

Dan Fernandez — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 05:54:00 GMT

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

MSDN - LightSwitch Beta 1 now available
Dallas Blog - 3rd CTP of "Dallas" now available, includes basic auth, OData, and new content providers, via littleguru
Laura Foy - Brandon Watson discusses Windows Phone Developer Tools shipping Sept 16
David Anson - Easy fade animation when changing orientation on Windows Phone 7
XNA Creators Club - Getting Started with XNA for Windows Phone 7
CodePlex - Official Windows Phone 7 Patterns & Practices now available
Visual Studio ALM Rangers - Visual Studio Database Guide now available
Scott Guthrie - Debugging tips with Visual Studio 2010
Robert Nyman - Multi-file upload is easy with HTML 5 File API, via Alvin Ashcraft
Maarten Balliauw - Building an Azure application that exposes OData through a Service Bus
James Senior - Web Camps TV Launches
Code Project - Building a reporting dashboard for Log4Net, ELMAH, NLog, and more
Brian Harry - Update on the TFS Upgrade Fix now available for MSDN Subscribers
Anton Afanasyev - CodePlex ClickOnce Publishing Plugin automates publishing ClickOnce apps to CodePlex, via Greg Duncan

Picks of the week!

Brian's pick: Microsoft’s first entry into the Red Bull FlugTag competition with Project Phoenix
Dan's pick: Coding4Fun - Arian Kulp shows how to use the Sensor and Location API and how to graph accelerometer sensor readings.

Wes Dyer and Jeffrey Van Gogh: Rx Virtual Time

Charles — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:00:00 GMT

The latest release of Rx includes new tools for testing reactive programs as well as virtual scheduling. In this video, Jeffrey and Wes discuss virtual time and virtual schedulers and how they can be used to write tests and query historical data.

What is virtual time, exactly? What purpose does it serve and how is it related to reality? Wait a century-second. What time is it? When?

As usual, Wes and Jeff go deep. Dive in with us. This is heady stuff and also really useful for practical programming with Rx. It's always great to spend some time with Wes and Jeff at the whiteboard and at the computer (they demo this for us towards the end of the session).

Enjoy!

New: Windows Azure Storage Helper for WebMatrix

James Senior — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:09:00 GMT

Hot on the heels of the OData Helper for WebMatrix, today we are pushing a new helper out into the community. The Windows Azure Storage Helper makes it ridiculously easy to use Windows Azure Storage (both blob and table) when building your apps. If you’re not familiar with “cloud storage,” I recommend you take a look at this video where my pal Ryan explains what it’s all about. In a nutshell, it provides infinitely simple yet scalable storage, which is great if you are a website with lots of user generated content and you need your storage to grow auto-magically with the success of your apps. Tables aren’t your normal relational databases—but they are great for simple data structures and they are super fast.

Read more about the helper on my blog.

Cloud Cover Episode 23 - AppFabric Service Bus

Ryan Dunn — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:19:00 GMT

Join Ryan and Steve each week as they cover the Microsoft cloud. You can follow and interact with the show at @cloudcovershow

In this episode:

Wade Wegner joins us as we talk about what the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus is and how to use it.
Discover the different patterns and bindings you can use with the AppFabric Service Bus.
Learn a tip on how to effectively host your Service Bus services in IIS.

Show Links:

SQL Azure Support for Database Copy
Perfmon Friendly Viewer for Windows Azure MMC
Infographic: IPs, Protocols, & Token Flavours in the August Labs release of ACS
Wade's Funky Fresh Beat
AutoStart WCF Services to Expose them as Service Bus Endpoints
Host WCF Services in IIS with Service Bus Endpoints

Silverlight TV 42: Apply and Customize the New Silverlight Themes

John Papa — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:48:00 GMT

Tsitsi Gora, UX Designer at Microsoft, appears on the show to announce the new Silverlight themes that her team has been working on. Tsitsi demonstrates the new themes available for download and explains the scenarios they had in mind when they created the themes. The new themes include:

Jet Pack
Cosmopolitan
Windows 7
AccentColor

She also takes a deep look at the cosmopolitan theme and shows how you can customize it, if need be. Tsitsi wraps up by demonstrating some tips you can use to maintain design consistency in your application, including how to apply a simple behavior to your TextBox and content presenters. Tsitsi drops a ton of great design tips throughout this episode—you don't want to miss it.

Relevant links:

John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)
Tsitsi's blog post

Are you developing with Windows Phone 7? You can pre-order Learning Windows Phone Programming, by Jaime Rodriguez, Yochay Kiriaty, and John Papa, today! Or, check out the book's web site.

Web Camps TV #1 - ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 and Razor Tips with Phil Haack

James Senior — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:44:00 GMT

It's the first episode of Web Camps TV—the show that gets you inside the Microsoft Web Platform!

In this episode, James Senior talks to Phil Haack, Senior PM on the ASP.NET MVC team, about ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1. Phil shows off his demo skills as he takes us on a tour of the new Razor syntax and highlights some tips and tricks on how to use it. He also talks about his favorite new features in ASP.NET MVC 3, including Dependency Injection, .NET 4 Data Annotation support, and the custom view engine dialog!

For more information check out the following links:

NEWS FLASH: Phil and James will be down in Los Angeles on September 10th for the Web Camp! Make sure you sign up fast because tickets will be selling out soon!

Sign up for Web Camp here: www.webcamps.ms

Steve Anonsen and John Rivard: Inside LightSwitch

Charles — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:08:00 GMT

"Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool aimed at easily building data-driven applications, such as an inventory system or a basic customer relationship management system."

Typically, when making difficult things easy, the price is solving a set of very difficult technical problems. In this case, the LightSwitch engineering team needed to remove the necessity for non-programmer domain experts to think about application tiers (e.g., client, web server, and database) when constructing data-bound applications for use in their daily business lives. LightSwitch is designed for non-programmers, but it also offers the ability to customize and extend it, which will most likely be done by experienced developers (see Beth Massi's Beyond the Basics interview to learn about some of the more advanced capabilities).

This conversation isn't really about how to use LightSwitch (or how to extend it to meet your specific needs)—that's already been covered. Rather, in this video we meet the architects behind LightSwitch, Steve Anonsen and John Rivard, focusing on how LightSwitch is designed and what problems it actually solves as a consequence of the design. Most of the time is spent at the whiteboard, discussing architecture and solutions to some hard technical problems. This is Going Deep, so we will open LightSwitch's hood and dive into the rabbit hole.

Enjoy!

For more information on LightSwitch, please see:

Visual Studio LightSwitch Developer Center

Visual Studio LightSwitch Team Blog

Visual Studio LightSwitch Forums

Microsoft FlugTag takes Flight (Project Phoenix)

Laura Foy — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:47:00 GMT

This past weekend, a team of Microsoft Employees - many from Windows - participated in the Red Bull Flugtag, a competition where teams from all over the world build human-powered flying machines, push them off a 30’ high dock, and see who can fly the farthest. The event was tons of fun and our Microsoft team worked their collective butts off building an amazing craft, putting in more than 1500 total hours in design, fabrication, construction, event planning, marketing and promotion. Check out this video to see if their craft actually took to flight!

Ping 71: Windows Phone 7 & Xbox LIVE, Flight Sim, Facebook, Messenger, MENLO

Laura Foy — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:58:00 GMT

It's a blast from the past this week as Max Zuckerman joins us in the Ping studio. Max may be a Stanford scholar these days, but he still can't hide the fact that he's a 'Softie through and through. Here's the top news:

Menlo: Digital Bread Crumbs
Windows Live Messenger & Facebook
Xbox LIVE and Windows Phone 7
Return of Flight Sim!

And just for fun...

The Twitter Movie trailer

Windows Phone 7: News for Developers

Laura Foy — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:34:00 GMT

Brandon Watson, Director for Windows Phone 7, is making some announcements for developers today so we stopped by his office to get the highlights. Plus, we got the official word that on September 16th the final Windows Phone Developer Tools will be available. Here's an overview of what Brandon talks about:

XNA Creators Club
Updated Windows Phone 7 Dev Training Kit
Windows Phone 7 Jump Start
Updated Marketplace Policies

Also in the September 16^th final release, the panorama, pivot and Bing maps controls will all be available to drop into applications.

TWC9: Windows Phone videos, MVC for HTML 5, CoApp, Lab Management RTM

Dan Fernandez — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:06:00 GMT

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

Rob Miles & Andy Wigley - 12 Part Windows Phone 7 Jump Start series
Jaime Rodriguez - Windows Phone Design Day Recordings
Jeremy Alles - How to build a XAML Trigger to play a sound using XNA
Peter Torr - Virtualizing Data in Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Applications
Dean Hume - ASP.NET MVC HTML 5 Toolkit, via Gunnar Peipman
Wes Hutchins - Patch available for growing Find and Replace dialog, via Alvin Ashcraft
Charles Torre - Garrett Serack, The CoApp Project - a package management system to simplify configuring Windows projects
Brian Peek - Think Gear wrapper to build applications using brain waves
jQuery Mobile - Touch Optimized Web Framework
3-Part PowerShell Getting Started Guide

Picks of the week!

Brian's pick: Somasegar - Visual Studio Lab Management now available
Dan's pick: Karsten Januszewski - How the architecture of the Archivist evolved over time

King of Bing Maps: Winners Announced!

Laura Foy — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:48:00 GMT

As you may recall, Bing recently held a contest asking for developers to submit their applications using the Bing Maps SDK- called the King of Bing Maps. They received tons of entries but there can only be ONE winner. Today, we announce that winner, show you some of the top runners and also let you check out a new map type Bing Maps in now offering. As usual, this is all brought to you by our homeboy, Chris Pendleton.

Silverlight TV 41: Top Tips for WCF RIA Services

John Papa — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:00:00 GMT

On this episode, Dinesh Kulkarni shares his top tips for creating streamlined and performant WCF RIA Services applications. He walks through some key decision points while creating domain services (server side) for a Silverlight and RIA Services application. Among the tips Dinesh discusses are some of the benefits of creating the minimal number of entities, operations, and amount of data required for your application. He also discusses how to connect RIA Services to:

Entity Framework
LINQ to SQL
nHibernate
Your own custom business objects

Other topics Dinesh walks step-by-step through include:

hooking RIA Services up to your own POCO classes
adding role-based authorization
how to determine what objects will be exposed by RIA Services to the client
adding validation
identifying keys and associations for entities
indicating when to return object graphs
how to use the Composite attribute to bundle objects graphs

This is a great deep dive by one of the masterminds behind WCF RIA Services.

Relevant links:

John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)
Nhibernate and RIA Services sample
PDC 2009 talk using same nhibernate sample: Mastering WCF RIA Services
Dinesh's blog and on Twitter (@di_Ku)

Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

Are you developing with Windows Phone 7? You can pre-order Learning Windows Phone Programming today, by Jaime Rodriguez, Yochay Kiriaty and John Papa! Or check out the book's web site.

The Office Show: Microsoft Word

tina10 — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:59:00 GMT

Do you often work with really long Word documents? Do you sometimes collaborate with others on the creation of these really long documents? Check out the latest episode of the Office Show for a quick tour of some of the new features in Microsoft Word 2010 that could make your life just a little bit easier.

We’ll show you the new Navigation Pane in Word. It makes it easy to find your way around long, complicated documents.

If you’re upgrading from Word 2003, the new fluent user interface will be new to you. Menus and toolbars have been replaced by the ribbon. The ribbon was introduced with Word 2007, and it’s made doing things like applying styles really easy.

You are using styles in Word aren’t you? No? Well, we’ll not only show you how to apply styles, we’ll show you how to create your own custom styles.

Collaborating on documents in Word has been made easy with the new coauthoring feature. We’ll show you how you can work with others in the same document without the worry of multiple versions sprouting up in email.

Yes, all this and a gratuitous reference to pirates and parrots!

For more action packed tips, techniques, and ideas for making life a little better using Word 2010, click on the links below for great content from Office.com and Channel 9.

If you have ideas and tips you want to share about how Word works in your world, write a comment and let everyone know. And we’d love to hear what you think of the show. The team at Office.com created this video in partnership with our friends at Microsoft's Channel 9, where you can find more videos about Office.

-- Ron O.

Garrett Serack - Open Source on Windows and the CoApp Project

Charles — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:46:00 GMT

In this screencast, Garrett Serack from the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center talks about his new project, the Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform (CoApp). CoApp aims to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven package management system, along with tools to enable developers to take advantage of features of the Windows platform. Discover the project wiki at http://coapp.org/, the Launchpad project site at https://launchpad.net/coapp, and the mailing list at https://launchpad.net/~coapp-developers.

DirectCompute Lecture Series 250: Integration with the Graphics Pipeline

Gus Class — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:00:00 GMT

Join James Fung from Nvidia as he shows you how to make use of vertex, pixel, and geometry shaders to add visualization to their DirectCompute applications. The following topics will be covered:

A Quick explanation of the Direct3D graphics pipeline
Vertex and geometry shader overview
Binding resources and views for use by graphics stages
Visualizing 2D array data
Visualizing particle data (geometry shader)
Visualizing other data (histogram, waveform, and so on)
Example of Particle Simulation Compute with Rendering
Example of Ocean Simulation Rendering using FFT for Compute

The demos used in this lecture are available from NVIDIA's DirectCompute SDK Code Samples page.

For more information on DirectCompute, download the PDC 2009 DirectCompute HOL, watch the DirectCompute Roundtable discussion, see the full DirectCompute lecture series, and download the slides for this lecture.