Daily Archives: May 1, 2007

In the hallways at MIX

Just Rambling

I was happy today to bump into a few people I haven’t seen in a while. Don Box is at MIX to give a talk tomorrow with Steve Maine on “Navigating the Programmable Web” .

RSS. ATOM. JSON. POX. REST. WS-*. What are all these terms, and how do they impact the daily life of a developer trying to navigate today’s programmable Web? Join us as we explore how to consume and create Web services using a variety of different formats and protocols. Using popular services (Flickr, GData, and Amazon S3) as case studies, we look at what it takes to program against these services using the Microsoft platform today and how that will change in the future.
 
It was fun catching up with Don for a few minutes. It sounds like he continues to perform his wizardry at Microsoft, dreaming up new approaches and concepts for software development.
 
I also was very happy to see Susan Warren who I haven’t seen since PDC05 where she showed me her latest project, Digital Locker, which has since become a big success. Susan has been working at Vertigo Software with Scott Stanfield for about 4 years now and clearly loves it. She even brought her twin sister, Anne, in to work for the company. I guess that makes Scott twice as lucky.
 
The Vertigo team was here in full force to show off their latest big project, Family Show.
 
A little later I bumped into Jim Bonnie, a guy from the New England .NEt community that I know through the Code Camps. Jim is a contractor  who has been doing some crazy data acrobatics for a project for Verizon. I’m sure he’ll leave MIX exploding with new ideas!
 
I heard rumors of Rory Blyth being around. That’s another face I haven’t seen in ages!

The Super Secret Session at MIX

Just Rambling

Danny Thorpe blogs about a MIX session about a windows Live technology that is SO secret that the sesison title and abstract are not in the MIX session list.

the buzz is building about the “secret session” that isn’t listed on any of the printed schedules, nor on the billboard at the room entrance.  We unequivocally cannot confirm or deny that it may or may not be scheduled at 11:45 in room Lando 4204, entitled “Windows Live Data services” and presented by the devlive team’s king of privacy paranoia, Yaron Goland.  We deny any involvement in annotating the room signage with a sharpie of unknown origin. 

The session is real, but it was withheld from the printed matter to avoid showing our hand too early.  It is actually listed in the online schedule.  I can’t tell you about it (yet), but it should be a knockout session.  Maybe not quite as sexy as spinning video cube Silverlight eye candy, but I’m sure it’ll get a rise out of the true data diehards who manage to actually find this session.

his post is also a fun read on hanging out in the speaker lounge with Anders Hejlsberg, and chatting with folks like John Lam and Miguel de Icaza. He refers to them as power hitters. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that he’s considered one of them! 😉

Ink Support in Silverlight

Tablet

Silverlight does INK! Yay. I’ve been asking about it for a while thinking it was the next natural step. I actually have played with it a bit and have a little app that I wrote that I need to deploy with the GoLive license. This is with the 1.0 version of Silverlight so it is all javascript against the InkPresenter XAML object. This also means that it is very different than coding against the Tablet PC API. However with the .NET runtime support for Silverlight that will change.

The InkPresenter has a StrokeCollection, just like we are familiar with in the Ink API. And then you drill into each individual stroke and even stylus points. With the stylus point data not only can you redisplay the ink in XAML, but you can redraw it and you can do so in real time (eg at the same speed that it was originally drawn in.

The way you interact with the user drawing ink via the javascript is by responding to mousedown, mousemove and mouseup events. Billy Hollis recognized this as how he worked with ink before we had the Ink APIs. It’s a little frustrating to have to work at this low level but it’s very interesting and i have a lot of flexibility. However, I do look forward to the .NET runtime implementation!

As always, my key interest is in persisting the ink. This can be done in XAML (you have to iterate through the ink structure and create the XAML, a function which can be encapsulated of course) and the CreateFromXAML javascript function will deserialize the XAML back into the inkdata that can be fed into the InkPresenter.

This is a pretty high level description and I’ll explain more of the guts of what I have done in a later post as well as have a screencast available while I deal with getting the golive version on the web.

In the meantime, check out Gavin Gear’s blog – he is a Program Manager on the tablet team and has done some amazing work with ink in Silverlight. Along with Sam George, he gets to show off a very cool demo tomorrow that they wrote. There are some live examples in the Silverlight gallery as well.

From Gavin’s blog

Want to check out a Silverlight Ink sample? Check out “Ink Tattoo Studio” and “Page Turn” here:
http://silverlight.net/community/communitygallery.aspx

Also, I know that Loren Heiny , who has always been a great innovator with tablet pc development, is playing with this stuff too. So keep an eye on his blog as well.

Pablo’s got a brand new blog

Data Access

In Pablo Castro’s session today, I noticed a link on the resource page to his own blog. I have never known that Pablo (tech lead on the ADO.NET team) had a blog and couldn’t believe that I could have missed such a thing. Luckily there is wireless available at the conference so I immediately browsed to the blog and lo and behold, he had made his first post just today! It is on the Astoria Web Data Services.

http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/