The Generations Network runs one of the most popular genealogy websites in the world – ancestry.com.  One of the things they wanted to provide their users was a simplified way to browse and edit their family tree.  Even smaller trees can become a bit unwieldy and very large trees can become nearly impossible to navigate – particularly when you talk about using html based technologies.  The team at TGN decided to leverage a Rich Internet Application platform and after surveying the existing technologies decided that Silverlight was the best technology to use in this situation. Microsoft has produced a case study documenting their project which you can find here.

From the case study:

The Generations Network (TGN), through its flagship Ancestry.com Web site, is the world’s leading resource for online family history, providing services to millions of users worldwide. To enhance the appeal of its Web sites, TGN wanted to revamp its Family Tree Viewer application to provide a graphically rich experience and fast performance—a combination that was hard to deliver with its existing development tools. The company decided to become an early adopter of the Microsoft® Silverlight™ browser plug-in, which is based on development tools that TGN is already familiar with such as Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Suite and Microsoft Visual C#®. TGN used Silverlight to create a prototype of the application an estimated 30 percent faster than it would have taken using Adobe Flash. TGN expects the rich Internet application to keep the company ahead of its competitors.

One of the customers that I have worked with for quite some time is Archstone.  They are a top notch organization that have done a lot of interesting things with technology do set themselves apart in the apartment management space.  Recently they just completed a rollout of a kiosk based solution for prospective residents that is really impressive.  It was interesting enough that Microsoft put together a case study to highlight the details of the project.  You can check it out here.

A little bit from the case study:

Luxury apartment owner and operator Archstone wanted to create a better, faster, and more consistent way for its leasing agents to work with—and close leases with—prospective residents. The need was most acute when Archstone was leasing units in buildings under construction, which made on-site tours difficult. The company found a solution: self-service kiosks in sales offices that run a highly visual and interactive solution built with Microsoft® technologies including Visual Studio® Team System 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. The kiosks have improved the customer experience, reduced the time required to close, and contributed to an increase in occupancy upon opening for the company’s newest apartment development. Archstone developed the solution in half the time that it would have taken using other technologies, and the company anticipates extending the solution to the Web.

After I finished off my TechEd Interview with Scott Hanselman in May, I had to take him over for an interview for the MSDN Summer Bytes series.  This series is a fun an fairly humorous look at what technologies are getting people excited this summer.  It was conceived and executed by a couple of very sharp people in our marketing department (Erin Jacobs and Nora Kelly) and I really like what I have seen so far.  There are some fantastic people that were interviewed.  I recommend that you check it out and if you like it, subscribe to the RSS feed.

A few members of my team just completed a series of online webcasts this week which went very well. The topics were on Patterns for Moving to the Cloud, Patterns for Silverlight and WPF with Prism, and Patterns for Parallel Computing.  The slides and session recordings are available for anyone.  Click here to see more information.

A “First Look” at BizTalk Server 2009! – June 23, 2009

Enterprises across the world need to build applications that span their network and bring together services, systems, and people. The new BizTalk Server 2009 enables this connectivity while eliminating many of the cost and complexity challenges enterprises currently face.

Microsoft product specialists and experts from gold-certified partner Neudesic will give you a “first look” at BizTalk Sever 2009 and how they can help streamline and integrate business processes while reducing cost and complexity.

Microsoft Denver Office 8:30am – 11:30am

Click here to register

Invitation Key: B185E8

or call 877.673.8368 with

Event ID: 1032414999

Two weeks ago I attended TechEd in Los Angeles.  During the conference I had the chance to catch up with a number of old friends and record the videos for TechEd Online.  In particular, I did the following interviews…

• Scaling websites with Microsoft codename "Velocity" – Scott Hanselman and Joe Shirey
• How Proven Business Analysis Concepts Can Be Applied to Architectural Tasks – Matt Hessinger and Joe Shirey 
• How the Internet Services Bus Will Impact Architecture Decisions – Clemens Vasters and Joe Shirey
• Pragmatic Architecture and Code Reuse – Rocky Lothka and Joe Shirey

Enjoy.

EVENT OVERVIEW

“Cloud computing will supersede traditional IT”, “SOA will enable business agility”, “my way or the highway”, etc. We’ve all heard this type of proclamations before, as many look to the “next big things” in technology to exact sweeping changes and solve many issues; truth is, technologies and tools aren’t as instrumental in influencing progress, as the design and discipline in applying them to specific issues. When used appropriately, technologies and tools can be powerful enablers that bring about change.
One of the things we hear a lot working with the community is a desire for more guidance about how to use the technology instead of just talking about features and functions.  To address this, our team has put together a series of live webcasts on June 9th – 11th which will focus on guidance and patterns for some of today’s hottest topics.

SESSION DETAILS

DAY 1 - June 9, 2009 at Noon PST
Patterns for Moving to the Cloud
Larry Clarkin & Wade Wegner
Everything that you read these days seems to suggest that you should be moving to the cloud. But where do you start? Which applications and services should you be moving? How do you build the bridge between on-premises and the cloud? And more importantly, what should you be looking out for along the way? In this session, learn architectural patterns and factors for moving to the cloud. Based on real-world projects, the session explores building block services, patterns for exposing applications, and challenges involving identity, data federation, and management. This session provides the tools and knowledge to determine whether cloud computing is right for you, and where to start.

DAY 2 - June 10, 2009 at Noon PST
Building Silverlight & WPF Applications with Prism
David Hill
Prism provides guidance, via design patterns, to help you build robust, flexible and modular Silverlight and WPF applications. These patterns support unit testing, separation of concerns, loose coupling and the ability to share application logic between Silverlight and WPF applications. Prism includes source code for the library itself, extensive documentation, and a sample application that shows how the patterns work together in a real-world application. It also includes a Visual Studio add-in to help you easily share code between WPF and Silverlight. This session provides an overview of Prism, and shows how you can use Prism to design and build composite Silverlight applications.

DAY 3 - June 11, 2009 at Noon PST
Patterns for Parallel Computing
David Chou
With recent advances in cloud computing, service-oriented architectures, distributed computing, server virtualization, multi-core processors, etc., we are now seeing parallel computing techniques being implemented across the spectrum, and towards mainstream applications such as internet-scale web applications, massive data processing, graphics rendering, etc. But the myriad of choices also present a number of questions on when and how to utilize parallel computing. This session explores the architectural patterns and trade-offs between different forms of parallel computing, approaches for utilizing them to improve application performance and optimize use of existing infrastructure, and how concurrency can be applied towards day-to-day enterprise information processing needs.

WEBCAST AGENDA

• 11:45 AM (PST) - Open for Dial-in
• 12:00 PM (PST) - Day's Content
• 12:50 PM (PST) - Q&A
• 01:00 PM (PST) - Raffle and Close

REGISTRATION

To register, please click on the link below for each day:

• Day 1: 6/09/09 - Patterns for Moving to the Cloud
• Day 2: 6/10/09 - Building Silverlight & WPF Applications with Prism
• Day 3: 6/11/09 - Patterns for Parallel Computing

We will email you with the Live Meeting information and log-in details a few days before the actual event.  We will use the email address you provide in the registration. Thanks!

I usually don’t like to promote every little thing that Microsoft releases, but when I see something that is really worth downloading, I like to point it out.  Office 2007 Service Pack 2 is out and downloadable here.  If you are running Office 2007 I highly recommend installing this particular Service Pack.  The performance and reliability fixes for Outlook are very good.  I have been running a beta of this Service Pack for a bit and it fixed the “Your Outlook data file was not closed properly” issue.  I have also noticed that Outlook has been much more responsive and reliable.  Well worth the 260 MB download.

Rob Bagby is making the tour again with another series of MSDN Events in May. 

Registration Links

• Albuquerque, NM - May 4, 1:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M.
• Salt Lake City, UT - May 6, 8:00 A.M. - 12:00 noon or May 6, 1:00 p.M. - 5:00 P.M.
• Colorado Springs, CO - May 28, 1:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M.
• Denver, CO - May 26, 1:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M. or May 27, 8:00 A.M. - 12:00 noon
• Ft. Collins, CO - (date and registration tba)
• Phoenix, AZ - May 18, 2009 1:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M.

Agenda

What’s New in Silverlight 3?

Are you interested in building business-focused Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)?  Would you like to take advantage of 3D in the browser, but assume it is too hard?  Have you wanted to take a Silverlight application offline?  Then this session is for you.  We will explore and illustrate the new features of Silverlight 3, including the following:

• Support for perspective 3D
• Offline Support
• .NET RIA Services which simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms

Building Web Applications with Windows Azure

This session will begin with a brief overview of Azure and discuss some of the announcements made at MIX.  We will then illustrate through demo how to build a Windows Azure application from the ground up.  We will illustrate how to consume Azure Table Storage, how to host services, web pages and Silverlight components, as well as how to deploy your solution to the cloud.

MVC 1.0 vs ASP.Net Webforms

Have you heard about the new ASP.NET MVC  framework from Microsoft and wondered what it was all about? Are you curious whether this replaces ASP.Net WebForms?  Well in this session you will learn how to use the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to take advantage of your favorite .NET Framework language for writing business logic in a way that is de-coupled from the views of the data.  In addition, we will talk about the pros and cons of both MVC and Web Forms, how to determine the best choice for a specific project, various techniques and patterns used to build MVC applications vs. Web Forms applications, and the implications for using each approach.

Have you thought about starting a business or have started one in last three years?  If so, you need to know about BizSpark from Microsoft.  This program enables you to obtain software for free to help start your business.  I’m talking about full versions of Visual Studio Team Suite, SQL Server, SharePoint, Windows Server and just about everything you need to get up and running for free.  These are production licenses, not just development licenses.  The catch…you have to meet the following criteria:

• You must be a privately held company
• You must have been in business less than three years
• Your revenues must not exceed USD $1 million dollars

Read about how BizSpark works and if you are interested, please contact me and I will get you signed up.

During the Rocky Mountain Trifecta we discussed IE8 and what was coming.  If you are interested in finding out more information about IE8 and want to drill into details, I recommend the virtual IE8 Firestarter event on March 26th which is available both in person in Redmond and online.  To find out more information visit my teammate Mithun Dhar’s site at http://blogs.msdn.com/mithund/archive/2009/03/13/ie8-firestarter-update-and-registration-links-mar-26th-2009.aspx.

Can’t make it to your Architect Council in person?  We are also webcasting the San Diego version of the event on March 31st.  For more information please visit http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032408787&EventCategory=2&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US.  Please note that all times are Pacific.

I believe I created some confusion today about a couple of events that are coming up.  I have two Architect Council sessions on April 7th in the Microsoft office in Denver.  The content will be similar, but targeted toward two different audiences.

The morning session which runs from 8:30am – 12:00pm is for Microsoft partners.  Information and registration is located at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032404681&Culture=en-US.

The afternoon session which runs from 12:30am – 4:30pm is for customers.  Information and registration is located at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032404033&Culture=en-US.

Just a quick follow up for the folks that attended my session today.  The link to get more details and register for the Denver Partner Architect Council is located at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032404681&Culture=en-US.

Thanks to everyone that attended the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta last Saturday.  I know that I had a lot of fun and was very impressed with the work of David and Julie Yack.  I know that Julie put a lot of hard work and heart into this event and it really showed.  She did an amazing job of coordinating the logistics of the event and I know she worked tirelessly to get some great speakers here in Denver.

I had a lot of fun presenting on Internet Explorer 8 and there were some great questions from the audience.  I have posted my slide deck from the session here if you would like to review it.  I know 50 minutes is not very much time to discuss the topic, so I am posting some additional links here if you want to explore further.

• Download IE8
• There is a great series of short videos called Internet Explorer “How Do I”
• You could think about writing a an IE8 Accelerator
• Explore how to light up Web Slices for your web applications
• Dig deeper into the IE7/IE8 compatibility modes and the meta tag to force IE7 rendering
• You can learn more about the IE8 developer tools here and here
• Follow the IE8 team blog

Architect Council  | The Importance of the Client

Over the last couple of years, there has been a lot of innovation around of technologies that make it easier for the end user of an application to interact with systems.  This innovation has been a boon for the end user because it has provided them a more natural interface with systems that span the web, computer, and phone.  However, this has caused the complexity of systems architecture and development to increase.  The focus of this session will be on how to prepare and manage this complexity within your organization.

Facilitated by Microsoft, the premise of this event is to provide an open forum where architects can meet to discuss technologies with their peers.  This forum will provide first-hand experience and best practices that will enable its members to learn from each other and transfer knowledge. Please join us for this great opportunity to learn, share and network with your peers and other company leaders.

EVENT SUMMARY

The Value of the Client – In the past, the choice of how an end user interacts with an application has been dictated by IT and often without regards to the usage.  Recently, as the population has become more tech savvy and are experiencing interactions on the web, computer, and the phone their expectations have increased tremendously.  Many organizations now have to support multiple standards and technologies to accommodate their user base.  We will discuss the opportunities and challenges this presents.

The Changing Face of the Web – The web has changed from a static collection of data to an application platform.  In many cases, JavaScript and AJAX have enhanced the experience to enable more advance application scenarios.  In other cases, the Rich Internet Application using technologies such as Silverlight and Flash can bring the experience to a new level.  In this session we will discuss the web and in particular the investments Microsoft is making in this technology.

Creating Powerful Applications on Computers and Devices – The web has been a boon to application development and deployment, but it doesn’t always fit every scenario.  There are certain classes of applications which provide a better experience when running on a device and utilizing local hardware.  The ubiquity of the mobile device has also extended the expectations of users with anytime/anywhere access. 

The Future of the Client – The pace of change in client technologies over the past few years has been tremendous and is expected to continue to evolve.  From support of new device types such as tables and walls, to continued improvements in interactions on the web, client, and the phone the client will become more and more important from a technology perspective and more strategic to the organization.

AGENDA

12:15 PM  Arrival

12:30 PM  Lunch and announcements

01:00 PM  The Value of the Client

01:45 PM  The Changing Face of the Web

02:45 PM  Creating Powerful Applications on Computers and Devices

03:45 PM  The Future of the Client

04:15 PM  Raffle and close

SPEAKER BIO

Joe Shirey

Senior Architect, Developer & Platform Evangelism

Microsoft Corporation

http://www.joeshirey.com

Joe Shirey is a Senior Architect Evangelist for Microsoft based in the Denver area. In this role, Joe works closely with customers and the community to help them understand where Microsoft technologies fit into the architecture of their solutions. Prior to joining Microsoft, Joe was a Vice President at Interlink group where he was responsible for service and delivery for Interlink's Denver market. In the past, Joe was a Microsoft Regional Director, a member of the Microsoft Architect Advisory Board, and sat on the .NET Partner Advisory Council. Joe has more than eighteen years of hands-on technical and functional experience in project management, systems analysis, design, development, and implementation. Joe attained his Microsoft Certified Architect award in 2005.

Woody Pewitt

Technology Evangelist, Developer & Platform Evangelism

Microsoft Corporation

http://blog.pewitt.org/

Woody is a Technology Evangelist with Microsoft in Southern California. He gets to work with all kinds of people who are interested in Microsoft development technologies. He is an experienced teacher/trainer and is a part-time instructor at University of California San Diego.

Before joining Microsoft in 2005 he worked for as a Principal Engineer for a Microsoft partner, InterKnowlogy. He has been involved in software and system architecture, code, development and infrastructure reviews and analysis of several fortune 500 companies for salability, security, performance and standards & practices. He is also an accomplished author, having written Microsoft Official Curriculum and has authored several published magazine articles.

Locations

Click on the city name for details and to register

3/24/2009 – Bellevue, WA
3/25/2009 – Mountain View, CA
3/26/2009 – San Francisco, CA
3/31/2009 – San Diego, CA
4/1/2009 – Irvine, CA
4/2/2009 – Los Angeles, CA
4/7/2009 – Denver, CO

In my job I get to talk to a lot of developers about their tools they use – and many of them use some variant of Visual Studio (which isn’t surprising considering my job).  However, what does surprise me is the number of teams that I speak to that are not using the Database Edition of Team System.  There are some very powerful tools in the box that can really help out the DBA (or the developer that becomes the default DBA on many projects).  If you are using Visual Studio and do any database work, these are tools you should know about.

You may not realize it, but recently Microsoft made some changes to the licensing and now when you buy Team System Developer Edition, you also get Database Edition included (definitely an acknowledgement to the developer that is also the DBA). 

My team has recognized that there are many people who could benefit from understanding more about this functionality and has an event to help with this that they are running in Denver, Phoenix, LA, Irvine, and San Diego.  If you are already using Team System Database Edition today, you probably won’t get a ton out of this session, but if you are using Visual Studio Professional or Standard and do a lot with databases, you may want to check it out.  I know that it costs more, but if you can automate and avoid change control problems on a lot of your database tasks it may just pay for itself quite rapidly. 

For more information check out Steven Lange’s post on the event.

Thanks to a number of a really motivated folks in the Colorado community we have a fantastic event coming up in February – the Rocky Mountain Trifecta.  There will be tracks dedicated to .NET development, SQL Server, and Windows Server. 

There are some amazing speakers that will be coming – see Julie Yack’s post on the event.  Go register and pass along the information to your friends that might be interested.

My colleague, Rob Bagby, has announced the dates for his next series of MSDN Events this January.  This series of events focuses on a number of topics from the Professional Developer’s Conference which took place last October.  As I always tell people, Rob is one of the best presenters around and his sessions are always fun and informative.  He does a great job of walking through complex topics in a manner that anyone can understand.  In this series, Rob will be covering:

• What to expect with C# 4.0
• The Silverlight Control Toolkit
• REST with WCF and the WCF REST Starter Kit
• Overview of Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”) and Azure Services

The following is the schedule for these events (click on the city to register):

• 1/12: Albuquerque
• 1/15: Salt Lake City (morning), Salt Lake City (afternoon repeat)
• 1/26: Colorado Springs
• 1/27: Englewood
• 1/29: Fort Collins

Hope to see you at one of the events.

At TechEd US 2008, I hosted a panel discussion with Michael Stiefel, Denny Boynton, Miha Kralj, and Patrick Weikle.  We discussed what an architect is and how to develop the skills of an architect.  It ended up being a very lively discussion with some very fun banter about our different opinions on the topic.  You can check it out here on Channel 9.

My colleague Rob Bagby has an event coming up in November which looks to be very good.  If you have ever seen Rob speak, you know that he always puts on a great show in addition to having fantastic content.

Here are the details…

Build it better with MSDN Events.

Join MSDN Events for the latest tips, tools and technical information you need to build powerful applications and engaging user experiences. Topics include:

• What’s New in SQL Server 2008 for Developers
• Power up your Office applications with VSTO
• Build next generation applications with Silverlight 2

If you haven’t yet registered or for up-to-date event information, please visit: www.msdnevents.com

Grand Hyatt Denver Downtown

1750 Welton Street
Denver Colorado 80202
United States

Language(s):	English.
Product(s):	Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Security, Windows and Windows Vista.
Audience(s):	Architect, Developer, Education, Government and IT Professional.

Event Overview

MSDN Event
Join us for a 4 hour MSDN Event where we will cover 3 seperate sessions focusing on Silverlight 2.0, VSTO and SQL Server 2008.

Session #1: What’s New in SQL Server 2008 for Developers

SQL Server 2008 adds numerous new capabilities for developers – from support for Spatial Data types to a storage mechanism for SQL BLOB data using the NTFS file system, and much more. The new release also delivers several improvements to development-related areas, from T-SQL to SQLCLR to XML. This session will provide a technical dive into the latest and greatest features you’ll find in SQL Server 2008, while offering insight into how to effectively apply them to your upcoming development projects.

Session #2: Power up your Office applications with VSTO

In this session, we’ll focus on the power and productivity of Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO) – a .NET Smart Client technology. We’ll give you tips and tricks for designing and building smart client applications with VSTO, which allows you to create managed code applications with .NET languages including Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Visual C#. VSTO also makes it simple to manifest the functionality of those applications in the rich user interfaces of Microsoft Office Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, Outlook and others from the Office stack. VSTO addresses some of the biggest challenges that Office solution developers are facing today, including separation of data and view elements, server-side and offline scenarios, seamless integration with the Visual Studio tools, deployment and updating. Join us for this eye-opening session and learn just how easy it is to build and deploy powerful applications with VSTO.

Session #3: Build next generation applications with Silverlight 2.0

Silverlight provides a powerful platform for building the next generation of rich interactive applications on the Internet. In this session, we’ll take a look at the programming model and tools that developers and designers can leverage to build these true next generation experiences for consumers and business, and demonstrate how to build a rich interactive application (RIA) using Silverlight and Microsoft .NET. We’ll explore how to use Microsoft Visual Studio to create applications, and how to create UI using XAML markup and code, controls, and File I/O. We’ll also discuss networking, how to retrieve data from a Web service, and various other aspects of building Silverlight applications.

If you watch MSNBC, you probably have seen the Microsoft Surface application used by Chuck Todd to predict the electoral votes.  You can download this application to your home computer and play with it if you want to make your own predictions.  See more details here at John Pelak’s blog.  I know that I will be playing with it on election night to see how the models change.

A couple of years ago I ended up working with one of the brightest minds I had ever met – Peter Provost.  Not only did we work together, but we ended up becoming good friends.  Over time we both ended up at Microsoft and Peter became as a Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio team – in particular on the Visual Studio Team System for Architects team.  In talking with him, I realized that they were building out some cool things that were very useful from an architect’s perspective. 

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with Peter to discuss the upcoming release of Visual Studio and recorded it as a webcast that went up on ARCast.TV today.  Enjoy.

Thanks to everyone that turned out for my presentation on Monday night.  It was definitely a good time and I was impressed with the number of people that are either doing Office based development or are considering it.

A couple of notes from the presentation:

• Most of my demos and source code can be found from a blog posting I did a while back for the launch event in Denver/Phoenix.  If you want to get the code I would recommend reviewing this post.
• If you are interested in Server Side Generation of documents see this MSDN article which is excellent.
• I showed how to integrate SharePoint columns within the documents in that library and have posted about it in the past.
• At the end of the presentation I showed a little bit about how you can use the new Open XML SDK to read/write document in a much easier fashion.  If you have interest in the Open XML file formats you can see a lot of information at http://www.openxmldeveloper.org.
• At the beginning of the presentation, we talked briefly about Photosynth, Mesh, and Live Family Safety. 

Hope everyone had a good time and we will see you in the near future.

During TechEd in Orlando I had the privilege to spend some time with Mario Cardinal discussing layer module injection and why you would use it.  We recorded the session and it is now available on ARCast as of today. 

Layer Module Injection is a new pattern to enforce separation of concerns between domain logic and infrastructure services. Mario Cardinal and Joe Shirey will explain why to use abstract classes and interfaces as a means to reduce dependency surface. Mario and Joe will discuss the techniques of dependency injection and inversion of control to reduce the coupling between classes. In the same way, they will discuss benefits to modularize and decouple with layers using namespaces. The goal is to explain a new approach to simplify managing dependencies between the modules which compose a program. At the end of this discussion you will understand why architects worry so much about coupling, cohesion and separation of concerns.

 

Mario Cardinal is a senior consultant specialized in software architecture. He is a member of .NET Expertise, a network of independent expert consultants specializing in Microsoft .NET technologies. He has almost twenty years of experience in designing large-scale information systems.

 

He speaks regularly at international conferences, including TechEd, Agile2008, DevTeach, and others. He lead the architecture user group at the Montreal .Net Community and He is the architecture track tech chair for DevTeach Conference. He is also a member of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Advisory Council. Furthermore, since 2004, He has hosted the Visual Studio Talk Show, a podcast about software development with Microsoft .NET. Finally, for the fourth year in a row, He has received from Microsoft the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. MVP status is awarded to credible technology experts who are among the very best community members willing to share their experience to helping others realize their potential.

ARCast.TV - Mario Cardinal on Layer Module Injection

Thanks to all who attended the Denver VSTS Event.  Mickey has posted a debrief from session on his blog including links to his slides.  I have uploaded my slides here.

The latest MSDN Architecture Journal has been released with a focus on "The Role of an Architect".  I feel very strongly that being an architect is more than being a great technologist or understanding patterns.  People skills separate the ordinary from the very effective.  Because of that, I submitted a topic and wrote an article that appears this month about architect soft skills.  

While you are there, check out the excellent article by a peer of mine in Denver, Joseph Hofstader (it is great that we have two people in Denver contributing this month).  I enjoy any article that contains a Homer Simpson reference.

When I am working with customers there are a couple of topics that seem to always come up - methodology and tools to support development.  My team has collaborated with one of our partners, Neudesic, to put on an all day event that focuses on these topics.  In particular, there will be a focus on Visual Studio Team System. 

However, I will be delivering a session in Denver, Irvine, and Phoenix (I had a conflict with LA) with no product focus.  I intend to discuss best practices and lessons learned around adoption of process in the development lifecycle. I am excited about this presentation because while tools are important, I find that there are many other factors that are just as critical.

If you think the day will be valuable or know someone that would enjoy it, please pass along the appropriate link:

• May 5, 2008 - Microsoft Office in Los Angeles
• May 22, 2008 - Microsoft Office in Denver
• June 10, 2008 - Microsoft Office in Irvine
• June 12, 2008 - Microsoft Office in Phoenix

Hope to see you there.

I have a Blackjack II and have really liked the phone so far (although I really want a Sony Xperia X1 when it releases).  Recently I mentioned to a couple of friends how much I liked the BJII and they went out and purchased them.  They liked them also, but wanted a home screen with smaller icons so they could better maximize their real estate. 

Here is the Windows Default Layout (notice that the mail/messaging notifications are below and it is necessary to scroll down to get them).

Here is the layout after I changed the home screen around a little bit.  I changed to smaller icons and moved around a few of the items so my mail/messaging is above the profile.

I have posted the new home screen here.  If you want to try it out, save it to the XML file to your device in the Application Data\Home directory then go into your settings and change the home screen to "Default with Small Icons". 

Warning, I have not taken the time (nor do I have the ability) to internationalize the XML file so if you are using a different language than US English you should open the XML file and change the name to be appropriate for you. 

Also, if you want to move things around in the home screen, it is quite easy.  Just open the XML file and reorder the <plugin> elements to match your liking.

I wanted to thank everyone that showed up for my presentation on Office Development with Visual Studio in both Denver and Phoenix.  I wanted to put together a follow up with code samples if you are interested in digging into the topic further.

• The first demo that I did was a Word add-in that hooked into a set of web services.  I have a posting with a how to video about creating a Word add-in here (requires the Silverlight runtime).  The specific demo that I did in Denver wires up a Word Add-In to the Northwind database.  I have posted that code here - you will need to download and install the Northwind sample database and set the connection string to get it working.  The sample I used in Phoenix was slightly different and was dependent on services that were created in other sessions.  If you were in Phoenix and want to look at some working code go ahead and download the sample above.  It is pretty much the same as the demo I did in Phoenix but hooks into a database directly rather than consuming services.  I have posted the code I wrote in Phoenix here, but the code will not work without the services back end so it would be reference code only. I also showed how to lookup the Office Icons using the Office Developer Power Tools in Phoenix.
• In the second demo I created an Outlook add-in with some ribbon customizations and an Outlook form region.  Because the code I used in both Denver in Phoenix was dependent on the other sessions I don't have a working add-in to post.  However, I have posted the code here for you to download if you want to just see the code. 
• In my third demo I showed how you could use System.IO.Packaging to manipulate Word documents on the server without needing to actually run Word on the server.  In Denver I used a sample that is posted here and should just work because the data is encapsulated within the project.  I have also posted my demo from Phoenix here but again it is dependent on other services so the code would be for reference only.  If you are interested in this method of working with Office documents on the server, there is a good MSDN article about this.  I also use the Word Content Control Toolkit to show how arbitrary XML can be databound to Content Controls within Word.

Hopefully you enjoyed the session and found it worth your time.  If you found this session interesting, I would recommend exploring the Office Developer area of MSDN to drill into any of the topics we discussed during the session.

Pretty much since the time I left the Denver Launch until now I have been on the road (I am blogging this from DIA right now as I head to Seattle).  I will update this with a few more things when I get a minute to breathe, but for those of you who were interested in some of the code/topics from the Office Developer session you can check out my posting from here where I used a number of the same or similar demos.  Be early next week I will expand this posting so it maps more closely to the session.

Thanks for coming out and we will see you an another event soon.

Update: I finally have a few minutes this morning and have finally put together a more detailed post about the session.  I also wanted to publicly thank Stephen Smith from Starz for spending a few minutes with us during the developer keynote to tell us how Visual Studio 2008, WPF, WCF, and WF have been essential for their video encoding and distribution project.

Thanks to all of you who attended my presentation yesterday on Live Services and the Live API - hope you had as much fun as I did.  Here are my follow up links:

General

If you just want the presentation go here, but if you want to learn more about Windows Live development visit http://dev.live.com.  I showed off the the Windows Live Quick Apps (Contoso Bicycle Club, Cotoso University, Contoso ISV, and AdventureWorks Resort) can be found on CodePlex.  Also, if you are getting more serious about developing Live applications, you should consider taking a look at the Visual Studio Tools for Live.

Virtual Earth

If you want to learn more about Virtual Earth visit the developer center and in particular the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK.  A great example of the usage of Virtual Earth are the radar maps on http://www.weather.com.  I showed off integrating in some GeoRSS feeds from MIT into a map and also showed a demo of a modified Club Site Starter Kit.

Live ID

The Live ID discussion was very lively and interesting.  I showed you the sample from the Live ID Client SDK and the Live ID Web SDK.

Live Contacts and Photos

Although we didn't do much in the way of demo we also talked a bit about Live Contacts and Live Photos.  There is a great blog posting you should visit if you are interested in Live Contacts.

Live Search

We also discussed the ability to add search to your site including the AJAX based client control and the ability to use the Interactive SDK to handle queries programmatically.

Live Messenger and Live Agents

One of the more interesting discussions we had was around Live Messenger and Live Agents.  I showed how to create a control you could drop onto a web page to embed IM communication purely through HTML.  I also showed some example agents that were pretty interesting.  If you would like to add them to your Live Messenger, search for the contact smarterchild@hotmail.com and encarta@botmetro.net.  As part of that discussion we also talked about Live Alerts.

Silverlight Streaming

I also did a quick demo that showed off embedding Silverlight Streaming applications into your web page.  There are instructions for packaging up your application for Silverlight Streaming, but I also recommend looking at the Expression Media Encoder if you are specifically looking at media.  I also really like the <iframe> method of embedding the application in your Silverlight applications in about any web page.

My team and I have been putting together an event that should be a lot of fun.  From Tim Heuer's blog:

miss the days of devdays?  me too.  my team is trying to bring a little of that spark back!  joe shirey on my team has organized a full-day of developer and architect goodness.  we'll be hosting two events, one in the phoenix, arizona metro area and one in the denver, colorado metro area.  here's the gist:

 

keynote: microsoft patterns and practices is being shipped in to talk about what they've produced and the logic behind it!

 

developer track :

• exposing and consuming data using the microsoft stack ( rob bagby ): take a look at the ado.net entity framework, linq and the ado.net data services (project 'astoria').
• office as a developer platform (tim heuer): didn't know you could easily write office applications using managed code?  let me show you how easy it is and what visual studio 2008 has done to enable this and make it even easier.
• what is new in visual basic 9 ( beth massi ): that's right.  beth massi -- if you are a vb'er, you've no doubt heard the name from the vb team.  we convinced her that she needed to be a part of this and she agreed!  come learn from beth all the new goodness that is VB9: xml literals, object initializers, anonymous types, extension methods, lambda expressions and some wicked intellisense improvements!

architect track :

• why user experience matters: face it, developers are not good at defining user interfaces and thus it is often an aspect that is left out.  let's discuss the reason this needs to change and how attention to the user experience affects application adoption.
• agile development at microsoft: the team from patterns and practices will discuss how they have fully adopted agile methods in their development team and their learnings over the years.
• the Windows Live platform: think windows live is just virtual earth?  think again!  come hear about the services available to you as service-based building blocks that microsoft has exposed for your use!

this is going to be a great day and a must-see event.  it is completely free to attend.  come hang out with us.  we will also have a couple of surprises throughout the day and some fun stuff to show as well.

 

register for your event today:

 

PHOENIX 29 JAN REGISTER HERE

 

DENVER 31 JAN REGISTER HERE

 

do not miss out on this opportunity to hear from some locals as well as some people we are dragging out from redmond and the product teams!

Thanks to all of you who attended the Phoenix MSDN Power Series Event on 12/20.  The slides will be posted via MSDN Events and I will provide links to them once they are live.  A couple of other items for those of you that attended.

Office as a Platform Session

• If you want to know more about server side generation of documents, there is a good article on MSDN about it.  I have also posted the code I used in the demo here.  To get it to work, you will want to unzip the contents to a directory and open it using the "Open Web Site..." functionality in VS.NET.  This demo should work in both VS.NET 2005 and 2008 as long as you have installed .NET Fx 3.0.  I also had a question about what reference you need to add if you want to use System.IO.Packaging in your solutions - it is WindowsBase.
• If you are interested in the part of the talk where I modified Word 2007, you can check out my video on an earlier posting to see the walkthru.  I have also posted my demo code that wires up the UI to a database here.  If you download that code, you will need to have the Northwind sample database installed (it doesn't come with SQL 2005 samples) and you will need to modify the app.config file to point to the appropriate server.  Also, you will need Word 2007 and VS.NET 2008 since I used Linq to perform the database interactions.  The sample Word document is enclosed in the zip file.
• In both of my demos, I used Word Content Controls to bind the data to the document.  If you are interested in building out your own Word Documents with bound content controls, I recommend downloading and installing the Word Content Control Toolkit. This tool enables quick drag and drop to wire up your custom XML to your content controls in Word.

Software + Services

• If you want to know more about what Microsoft is doing in the Software + Services arena you can check out the website.
• Benny who did part of the presentation has a nice writeup here.

The Windows Live Platform

• As I mentioned in my presentation, you can find out just about anything about the Windows Live Platform from a developer perspective at http://dev.live.com.  If you are curious about the licensing model, select the topic you are interested in, and then select the Terms of Use.

I hope that you found at least one or two nuggets of information during the day and as always, please feel free to contact me if you want to provide me more detailed feedback.

Just a public thanks to Daren May of EMC for the fantastic presentation on Software Factories yesterday.  I thought Daren covered a lot of ground in a very short time but was able to convey why software factories are valuable and how to get started using them.  He also made me wish I had a British accent so I could sound more intelligent.  I will be posting his presentation here later today.

A couple of links of interest from the session.

• You should visit the Microsoft Patterns and Practices site if you are interested in adopting one of the Software Factories built by Microsoft or if you want to create your own factory.  You might also poke around and see some of the other guidance and application building blocks produced by Patterns and Practices while you are browsing their site. 
• If you want to play with the Live Mapping functionality you should try out the Interactive SDK.  The GeoRSS feeds that I used during the session were found on MIT's site.
• WebGuide is the "Slingbox" functionality for Windows Media Center/Vista Ultimate/Vista Home Premium/Windows Home Server that I showed.
• I also showed how to use Expression Media Encoder with the publishing add-in to publish my content directly to Silverlight Streaming and put on my blog using the iframe method.  The video on my blog was encoded with Windows Media Encoder using the screen capture functionality (note that you have to install the 32 bit version to get the screen capture functionality if you are using a 64 bit operating system). 
• Finally, I recommended you take a look at Windows Home Server.  Might be a nice gift for your spouse this holiday season.

Again, thanks to all that made it out yesterday for the session.

UPDATE:

• The Webguide website mentioned above was down the last couple of days - it appears to be up now.
• Daren passed along his materials from the presentation, the following links will take you to:
  • SmartClientDevelopmentSolution1.zip – this is the SCSF solution which has the tree in the left hand nav
  • EMC.Guidance.Data.zip – contains the guidance package that builds the enum from the database
  • EMC.Bugz.Server.zip – a Repository project and web service application that surfaces the bugs and projects for the bugz app
  • MSDNDemo.zip – the guidance package I created during the demo that includes the customized wizard.
  • Software Factories.zip – the presentation (with the fixed link)

If you are like me you spend much of your time in the Office suite of applications, but as a developer or architect I used to rarely think about incorporating Office into my solutions.  I guess I spent too much time debugging Excel macros or struggling with the plumbing when I first starting playing with the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO).  It seemed like more work that it was worth.  This was a shame because Office has some great advantages as a compliment to custom application development.

With the latest release of Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 the plumbing for extending the UI around Office applications has drastically improved.  I created the attached video (no audio on this one)  to show a quick example (7:34 to be exact) of how to create a Word add in.  In this example I take the following steps:

• Create a new Word Add-In project
• Add a Ribbon item to extend the Ribbon UI in Word
• Modify the custom ribbon to name things friendly and add a toggle button
• Add a User Control to hold my UI for my Task Pane
• Modify the Add-In code to attach the user control to Word and create methods to show and hide the custom task pane
• Write code behind the ribbon toggle button that calls the show and hide methods for the task pane
• Run the application to show the extended ribbon user interface and how clicking on the custom toggle button shows and hides my user control
• Adding some winforms controls to the user control and wiring them up to pull and push content from my user control to the document
• Running the application again to show the user control in action reading content from the document and writing content back to the document

This is a fairly simplistic example, but enough to get started.  I have written some other demos that hook up the user control to a SQL Server database to populate form letters from customer data.  If you are interested in learning more, I'd suggest checking out the VSTO on MSDN.  One other thing - VSTO used to be a separate product that you needed to purchase on top of Visual Studio.  With VS 2008 Professional, VSTO is included right in the box.

Double click the video once it starts to see it full screen.  You can double click again on the full screen to go back to regular view.  If you are reading this in an RSS reader, you most likely need to go to the site to see the video.

This video was published via Silverlight Streaming.