Partner Otaku

Day 2 at Mix2010 – IE9 Platform Preview is now available at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ the preview will be updated every 8 weeks. Some quick highlights.

• HTML 5
• SVG 1.1
• CSS 3
• DOM
• Ecmascript 262
• Graphics and fonts JPEG-XR TIFF ICC Colors

I’ve worked for Microsoft over 19 years.  I’ve been through 4 cars, 16 various luggable/notebook computers, 9 operating system (not including MS DOS 4-6), well several pocket PCs and a couple of Windows Mobile devices.  I’m a loyal guy. For the past several years, i’ve had to take good-natured ribbing from my friends that have bought iPhones.

I really did have device envy.  There’s no two ways about it. The iPhone is sexy. Great industrial design with well-integrated software to complement it.  Apple essentially built another platform when they realized that the PC “war” was over. During the past 2+ years i’ve struggled with this device. It’s a Motorola Q9m, Running Windows Mobile 6. The best thing about the phone was the Verizon Network.  It’s user interface and web browsing experience pretty much sucked. 

My friends referred to their iPhone as their “J phone”, even though they had less than stellar experiences with AT&T’s service.  Their love or some would say their obsession with their iPhone was almost like a metaphor to describe Golum’s attachment and need for his “precious”.  I called their phones the iPrecious.

Fast forward to the ZuneHD.  This is a very cool device.  Awesome form factor – check; Great software – check; Touch – check, Radio – check; Phone Stack – uh no…The one thing that this device REALLY needed was a phone stack. 

We’ve all heard that patience is a virtue .  It’s really difficult to believe that when you see all the competitors coming out with interesting devices.  I was told…wait…and you will see the light…I’ve waited so long, but feared disappointment. 

Well at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, my dream of dreams was confirmed. The Windows Phone 7 Series was announced. The first reactions have been excellent.

I have not seen one in the flesh, but am really looking forward to getting my hands on one.  I’ve been holding back on upgrading my phone.  Now I have to wait until the holiday season, but at least I can see the prize on the horizon.

Check out the video on the Windows 7 Series 7 Features.

Enjoy!

 Microsoft is about to embark upon a 6 week, 15 city tour to discuss the Windows Azure Platform. See the table below for more details.  The cloud means a whole of things to different people, but one thing is certain – the cloud implies scale. Here’s a few factoids: 

• 1 Billion: Windows Live ID authentication each day
• 3-4 Billion: emails filtered daily from >6 million mail boxes by Foreront
• 450 Million: Hotmail users
• 20 Million: Xbox Live users
• 700,000 Square Feet: Size of one our new data centers

The Windows Sensor and Location platform, enables your applications to adapt to their current environment. Sensors would include GPS devices, WWAN etc. — your applications and gadgets can know exactly where they are, enabling them to provide more locally relevant content and functionality.

Michael Scherotter, a Media Experience Evangelist at Microsoft created an easy way for Expression Blend users to design applications that use sensors. Please visit the Synergist for more information.

Link: http://bit.ly/cZBcug

February 26, 2010 at 1:00pm – 2:00pm EST

Title: How to Architect a Killer App for Windows 7

Abstract: Ever since its recent launch, Windows 7 has been enjoying rapid consumer adoption and glowing press reviews. This makes it a great platform to launch your next Killer App! In this session, we will explore how to architect an application to take advantage of several compelling Windows 7 features including multi-touch, integrated search and multi-processor improvements. We will review how others have exploited this growing "Windows 7 channel" to deliver applications ranging from enterprise line of business applications to consumer oriented, "mass appeal" applications (think Social Networking clients). As a bonus, we’ll demonstrate how to quickly build Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices and Accelerators to complement your Killer App and to provide new channels to extend your reach. If you’ve got a great idea for a Killer App, don’t miss this session. If you design, architect, and/or develop applications for fun/profit, then this fast-paced session is for you.

Event ID:  1032441748

Link to Register:  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032441748&Culture=en-US

Presenter BIO

Allan da Costa Pinto

Architect Evangelist, Microsoft

Allan da Costa Pinto recently celebrated 10 years with Microsoft. In that time he has worked in several roles ranging from software consulting to support to technical evangelism. He is currently an Architect Evangelist focused on jumpstarting software projects with Microsoft’s cutting edge technologies such as Windows 7, Windows Azure and Silverlight. He lives in Hartford CT with his amazing wife, 2 kids, and 1 cat.

Stay Connected:

Here’s a quick run down on the features.

• Monitor changes to a file (php.ini as an example). Will recycle FastCGI processes for the process pool.
• Real-time tuning of MaxInstances setting. Set by default now.
• STDERR stream handling.
• Sending a termination signal to FastCGI processes for cleaner shutdowns.
• _FCGI_X_PIPE_ environment variable for communication between the extension and FastCGI process.
• Relaxed enforcement of response headers syntax.
• Per-application FastCGI process pools. Allows for two different PHP version used for different applications within the same web site.
• Using UTF-8 encoding for server variable values.
• More descriptive error messages
• Changes in default values for configuration settings.

For more detailed information please visit Ruslan’s blog on this release: http://blogs.iis.net/ruslany/archive/2010/01/18/fastcgi-extension-1-5-for-iis-5-1-and-iis-6-0-rtw.aspx

If you have technical questions visit the IIS forum. http://forums.iis.net/t/1164235.aspx

In case you missed this information. Read the overview to get more detailed information about the Facebook SDK Toolkit.  The goal is to provide a Facebook Client Library that is similar to the Client Libraries provided for PHP and JavaScript. There are samples and tools for helping develop Facebook apps on the .NET platform (ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and winform).

Link to the Facebook SDK 3.0:

http://facebooktoolkit.codeplex.com/

Facebook Developer Wiki:

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Main_Page

How to Guides:

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/How-to_Guides

Yesterday was a big day for Automattic and Microsoft folks. Matt Mullenweg demonstrated WordPress hosted on Azure during Ray Ozzie’s keynote. I was pleasantly surprised to see support for MySQL.  Very cool imho. This will give Wordpress users/hosters access to Azure. I think Matt stated that he saw “Pigs” out of his office windows .  Additionally, icanhazcheezburger (lolcats, failblog etc.), the largest WordPress site, announced that their new property “Oddly Specific” is now hosted on Azure.

Today, Channel 9 launched two new training courses for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 created by developers for developers.  Channel 9 has always been about giving direct access to the engineers and future technologies from Microsoft, and now we’re extending this successful formula to bring you training that will allow developers to get started on learning about emerging technologies at their own pace.  Today you’ll find extensive instructor recordings from top MVPs on how to develop against both SharePoint and office 2010. We’ll also be publishing more content at the beginning of December that will include hands-on labs, source code, and much more! All of this free for you to consume or download at your own pace.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Training

See how SharePoint 2010 has evolved into a first-class developer platform. Also, learn how SharePoint 2010 provides the business collaboration platform for developers to rapidly build solutions using familiar tools such as Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 through this self-paced course.

Office 2010 Developer Training

Discover how Office 2010 Beta is a broadly extensible platform for building information worker productivity solutions and see how developing for Office with Visual Studio 2010 makes this easy. See online presentations with demos that will help you get started developing solutions from Add-ins to full featured Office Business Applications (OBAs) using Visual Studio 2010 with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 as the core platform.

We hope you enjoy this initial set of training videos and will check back with Channel 9 in the near future as we build the learning center out to support SharePoint and Office 2010 development.

In partnership with Marco Tabini and Associates (MTA) (php|architect; CodeWorks; php|tek), we are excited to announce the launch of The Great PHP on Windows contest. Do you have what it takes to win? Of course you do .

You are encouraged to leverage existing open-source libraries and applications, including blogs engines, forums, photo galleries and other platform/components as part of your submission.

For complete details visit http://phparch.com/win

The Quick Summary:

• Write a new application designed to run in PHP on Windows using IIS—or make a significant contribution to an existing open-source project along the same lines
• The best application, selected jointly by a panel of experts and by our readers, will win a grand prize
  which includes a 52″ Digital HD home entertainment system, as well as an all-expenses paid trip to php|tek 2010 in Chicago. Runner-up prizes include 2 XBox 360 Ultimate and subscriptions to php|architect.
• Not familiar with Windows? No worries—we have partnered with Applied Innovations to give you absolutely free hosting on a pre-configured virtual machine for the duration of the contest.
• Registration and submissions for the contest will be accepted October 19^th, 2009 through February 28^th, 2010 and with judging and public voting will occur March 1^st – 31^st.
• For the duration of the contest, Applied Innovations will provide free web hosting to all participants (shared) and a free VM to the first 60 participants who register.
• Contest is open to all U.S. residents excluding MTA, Applied Innovations, and Microsoft employees and affiliated individuals. (MTA is the official sponsor with AppliedI and Microsoft as promotion entities.)

The contest is open to residents of the United States only—but you can still win by voting, no matter where you are.

 Good Luck!