Nuno Filipe Godinho : Silverlight, .NET 4.0

Visual Studio Live Orlando

NunoGodinho — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:38:04 GMT

This is a very interesting 5-day event on Microsoft Technologies that will be held in Orlando, and has tons of great sessions and speakers around topics like, Windows Azure, SQL Server, WCF, WF, Server AppFabric, MEF, Silverlight, WPF, Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, ALM, VS11, HTML5, CSS3, ASP.NET MVC, Orchard, Windows Phone 7, JQuery and more.

Seems to be a really great event, that I’d recommend to anyone that wants a really powerful way to fast learn the topics, from beginners to advanced.

Check out more here.

BUILD WINDOWS CONFERENCE 2011 – Keynote 1

NunoGodinho — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:12:36 GMT

Steven Sinofsky’s - Windows Division President @ Microsoft

The World of Computing is changing

Form factor and User interaction models
Touch is important, and not only for small devices
Connectivity is very important

Windows 8

Makes Windows 7 even better. Everything that runs in Windows 7 runs in Windows 8
Reimagines Windows from chipset to experience
- Ex. SoC – System on a Chip – Support ARM
- Ex. Full new User Experience – New Touch first experiences
- How
  1. Windows 8 Experience
  2. Metro Style Platform and Tools
  3. Hardware
  4. Cloud-based services
Everything available on ARM and x86
Delivering fundamental performance gains

Windows 7 SP1– About 404 MB / 32 processes
Windows 8 today - About 281 / 29 processes

1. Windows 8 Experience (Julia Larson Green – Corporate Vice President @ Microsoft)

Metro Style Experience
Touch First
Start Screen similar to Windows Phone 7
- Composed by tiles that represent the applications
- Represents the unification of the project launching and notifications
- Customizable Start Screen
Internet Explorer 10 with Metro Style
Fast ad fluid
Immersive and full screen
- enables you to write apps that can get the most attention from the users
Touch first with full keyboard and mouse
Web Apps working together

2. Windows 8 Platform and tools

Windows 8 Platform
- App Development
  - XAML with C, C++, C#, VB.NET
  - HTML5 and JavaScript
- Windows Runtime APIs (WinRT APIs)
- Bases / Fundamentals of the operating system - Windows Kernel Services
Windows 8 Tools

Visual Studio 2011
- Support JavaScript, VB.NET, C#, C++
- Store Menu in Visual Studio
  - Creates a package and releases the app for the Windows Marketplace
    - Possibility to allow trial licenses and so on
Windows Marketplace will certify and validate the apps, similar to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace validation process, to validate your app.
- The requirements and tools to check the compliance will be available for developers to validate them prior to the marketplace validation
New App Package
WinRT APIs available to all languages
Blend
- Now support XAML and CSS and JavaScript
- Preview integrated in Blend
WinRT Controls available for the several languages and runtimes
Existing Win32 Apps will also be listed in the Windows Marketplace
Existing Silverlight Apps still work in Windows Marketplace
Migrating existing the Silverlight apps to Windows 8, are normally just:
- change Namespaces
- change the Networking API
- add App Launchers instead of Browser launch
- Everything else just works
Developer and Platform Tools

New APIs and tools to build Metro style apps
Rapid and scalable development of Metro Style apps
Choice of world class development tools and languages

XAML, C#, VB.NET, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, C, C++ both on ARM/x86/x64

Business Opportunity is the world of Windows 8 Customers

3. Hardware (Michael Angiulo – Corporate VP in Windows Planning and Ecosystems)

Windows 8 supports a hard range of systems for and hardware, from big servers to small pcs)
Booting in 8 seconds without any Boot Screen
Taken Defender and enhance it with Spyware, and so on, even in securing in booting from USB drives
New state called “Connected Standby session” that allows a better system power management, with using only the power when it’s needed and when shutting down it will give the system to save state and after that just drop to almost.
Big partnership with Intel for SoC and some low power hardware
Windows 8 is all built using hardware acceleration for graphics, and so every app that has “metro style” will be hardware accelerated.
Display resolutions

1024x600 to 1920x1080
if you have lower resolution you won’t be able to have the apps side by side.
Completely full windows experience with 1366x768 without no compromise

Sensors

Accelerometer
Gyro
Magnetometer
NOTE: Sensor Fusion API. Single API combines all the information from the 3 sensors in 3 lines of code. It’s part of the WinRT APIs so is shared by all languages.
NFC – Near field communications – for interacting with objects or other machines.

USSD it’s a protocol very important to avoid roaming but still have connectivity
Samsung Windows Developer Preview PC given
New Windows Task Manager

Apps can be suspended it they aren’t being seen, and so they don’t use CPU and enhance
New Performance tab with all information about the resource usage
App History
Startup
Users
DetailsView with all processes

Control Panel

New feature – Reset and Refresh

Refresh = Only the PC Settings will be reset not the files and apps
Reset = Take the system to the new state, and lose all the apps

Windows Assessment Console

Allows you to test the several tests to analyze your app to prepare it to be packaged

New Metro-Style Remote Desktop

Capability to use Touch even on a remote machine
Live Preview of the machines we are being remoted into

Hyper-V running on Windows 8

Enhanced Hyper-V manager
ability to grab and open a vhd or iso and mounted in Windows without any other software

New Windows Explorer Ribbon based
Ability to have 1 background that fully spans to several monitors
New options for Multiple Monitors

Possibility to have the same elements on both start bars
Possibility to have only the elements that are in a specific monitor appear in the monitor start bar

Full use of the Keyboard and mouse even on the Start Menu, with the full power of running commands
IE 10

Fullscreen and immersive, so no chrome on it.
All the keyboard shortcuts used in IE are available also in the IE in Windows 8 version

Magnifier was enhanced to support the Metro-style and even more accessible.
Includes Ink input

Not using only a pen and a stylus

Sync PC Settings

If you sign up with your liveid every settings that you have will be roamed. All powered by Windows Live

4. Cloud based services for Windows 8 (Chris Jones – Senior VP for Windows Live @ Microsoft)

every live app was redesigned for the new metro-style
Metro-Style mail that is built using HTML5 and JavaScript using the WinRT APIs

All my mail accounts managed in one single place and roamed using Windows Live

Metro-Style Calendar also using HTML5 and JavaScript using the WinRT APIs

All my calendars and all other calendars that were shared with me

Metro-Style People/Contacts Manager also using HTML5 and JavaScript using the WinRT APIs

Combining all my contacts like from Exchange, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on. (Just like in Windows Phone 7)

Metro-Style Photos also using HTML5 and JavaScript using the WinRT APIs

Combining all my photos from SkyDrive, Facebook, Flickr, …

Connect to devices through Windows Live
Access to other machines through Windows Live for sharing Files and access to other machine resources

All the apps presented were build by 17 teams of volunteers during the summer as interns.

Path to RTM

Windows 8 Developer Preview

Including Visual Studio 11 Express, Expression Blend 5, SDK, Apps Developer Pre-Release

Next milestone is Beta, Then RC. Then RTM. Then FA
Updates along the way
Learning more

blogs.msdn.com/B8
connect.microsoft.com and feedback tool
Customer Experience Improvement data

Still today it here http://dev.windows.com we’ll be able to Download Windows 8 Developer Preview for x86 and x64 bits version. 2 options that are with VS Express 11 or only with the samples apps. No Activation needed, and also no support.

From what I’ve seen Windows 8 appears very cool, and the development ecosystems sounds great both with XAML and C#/VB/C/C++ and HTML5 and JavaScript. Currently needing to watch some more sessions about the subject to really understand more the WinRT APIs, and their connection and integration with .NET.

From the Windows 8 business ecosystem view, also very interesting to view the Windows Marketplace/Store being created and making us able to better market our apps.

From the User Experience perspective, Windows 8 looks like being very interesting and fully touch focused, but still allowing us to use Keyboard and Mouse even on the more Touch focused areas, and after that having also the Desktop mode to when we’re developing have a better User Experience with our Keyboard, Mouse, and other devices.

Bottom line: Windows 8 appears really, really cool and opens up a huge opportunity for both developing apps and sharing them across several devices, and market those. So, good job Microsoft. Having said that, I still need to see more about those development aspects to be even more impressed.

Claims-based Identity and Silverlight 4.0 – Part 1 of N

NunoGodinho — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:50:56 GMT

A lot as been said about Claims-based Identity in the last years, and this is has became a lot more interesting since we’ve had several issues when developing Identity of an application. Problems like defining:

How will we do Authentication?
- Will we use Username and Password, Active Directory, Integrated Windows Authentication(Kerberos, NTLM), LiveId, OpenId, GoogleId, Twitter, Facebook? (some many options, which one is better?
- Do we really want to built another Identity Silo?
- Will we want Single-Sign-On (SSO)? How will we perform the Authentication this way? Are we going to make a replication of their Users in our platform? How will we sync that?
What about Authorization?
- Will we need to implement, yet another Authorization Silo or will we use something like Active Directory information for it?
- Who will manage the authorizations?

So there’s a lot of questions regarding this subject that come up when we start digging a little deeper, and Claims-based Identity really helps us do this.

There are great explanations about what is Claims-based Identity and how can we used it and some of those are:

An Introduction to Claims-Based Identity – A channel9 video from the Identity Developer Training Course where Vittorio Bertocci explains this.
Claims and Identity: On-Premise and Cloud Solutions is an article by Vittorio Bertocci that was published on “The Architect Journal from July 2008”
Claims-Based Authorization with WIF is an article by Michele Leroux Bustamante that was published on “MSDN Magazine from November 2009”
Claims based Identity & Access Control Guide from the Patterns & Practices Team
Claims-Based Identity for Windows – An article by David Chappell
Exploring Claims-Based Identity is an article by Keith Brown that was published on “MSDN Magazine from September 2007”
Claims-Based Identity Term Definitions
Claims-Based Identity Overview and Concepts

Those are very interesting resources that we can use in order to understand Claims-based Identity better, but what about implementing it?

What I’ll do in the next parts will be describe how can we take advantage of Claims-based Identity in Silverlight 4 Applications, using WIF – Windows Identity Foundation to accomplish that task.

If you’ve got something you’d like to see covered just leave a comment and I’ll ‘try’ to address that topic.

WebDay Portugal 2010

NunoGodinho — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:05:32 GMT

Microsoft Portugal is preparing for a very interesting event both in Lisbon and Oporto, that will be based in two parts. One is a seminar about Windows Phone 7 and the other is a event with two tracks called WebDay, that like last year should have several contents like Silverlight, WCF RIA Services and Windows Azure.

You can know more about this here:

Official Website : www.mswebday.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Microsoft-Webday-2010/110948092297050
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Webday2010

When?

Oporto
- October, 11 – Windows Phone 7 Seminar – Pre-Conference
- October, 12 – WebDay - Conference
Lisbon
- October, 14 – Windows Phone 7 Seminar – Pre-Conference
- October, 15 – WebDay – Conference

Hope to see you there.

VS Connections 2010 – Day One - Keynote

NunoGodinho — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:58:16 GMT

Bob Muglia – President of Server and Tools Business - Microsoft

Announcement: Release of Visual Studio 2010

“Get In the Zone”

Multi-monitoring
Box Selection
Extension Manager
JQuery Integration
HTML code snippets

“Get Current”

Windows Platform

Windows 7

Takes advantage of the Multi-Touch
Develops using the Ribbon
Native Support

Animation API
Native Ribbon Designer integrated into VS2010
MFC Class Wizard is Back
Multi-touch and Advanced Gesture Support

Sharepoint

Build Sharepoint Sites
Build WebParts
Features

Packaging Automation
Use Server Explorer for explore all the Sharepoint Site contents
Linq-to-Sharepoint
Real Debug Support

Silverlight
Windows Phone
Windows Server
Windows Azure

Windows Azure & Mobile Integration
WCF Sinks
EntityFramework support on Azure

SQL Server

A new Major release will be available in a few weeks

“Great Team Work”

Announcement: Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere

Works on Several platforms, IDEs, and OS
ALM tools

Dependency Graph
Sequence Diagram – UML 2.1 compliant
Microsoft Test Manager

Creates the notion of an Actionable Bug
Capability to see

replay of what was done when the bug was generated
the steps to replay the bug
replay the tests that were already done to see be sure the bug was solved

IntelliTrace

Gives the capability to debug application with the code that was working when the trace was made.

Integration with Sharepoint

Availability of Dashboards about Project Status reports

Virtualized Test Environment

Step up Program is available until the end of April

You buy a lower end subscription of MSDN and get the next level edition for free

PDC09 – Day Two - Keynote

NunoGodinho — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:04:10 GMT

Steven Sinofsky

Developing Windows 7

Learning

Solving Problems + Innovation
“Engineering 7” Blog made a very interesting Dialog even without having any code of the product, just about the decisions that were being made
Ecosystem Readiness
Developer Pre-Beta, Beta, RC rhythm
Telemetry

Telemetry

Seed Feedback Button
Hardware and Device Diagnostics
Reliability Analysis Component (RAC)
Software Quality Monitor (SQM)
Windows Error Reporting (WER or “Watson”)

Developing Internet Explorer

Learning

Responsible Engineering
Trustworthy computing
Real-world Interoperability
Innovative Technologies

Updates

Standards Progress

ACID
HTML 5

Performance Improvements

Javascript

Ecosystem Innovations

IE 9 with 3 weeks of development is looking interesting in terms of performance and interoperability
Using Direct2D and DirectWrite to provide better graphics rendering and Hardware Acceleration without any change of the current sites

Windows 7 Call to Action

Integrate with Windows 7 Desktop
Develop 64-bit
Focus on fundamentals in your code
Build on new APIs in Windows 7
Watch more videos today on Channel 9 about Internet Explorer 9

Scott Guthrie – Developer Division

Silverlight 4

Focus

Media

Web and and Microphones

gives you access to the raw access to the input and so you can make the changes you want on that stream, like using PixelShader with it

Multicast streaming

IIS Smooth Streaming

Silverlight Media Framework available today on CodePlex

Output protection
Offline DRM support

Business Applications

Printing

Print Preview Dialogs
Printing Configurations
This is a Print API that you can change however you want and not only a screenshot of the screen

Rich Text
Clipboard access

Local and Central clipboard support

Right Click
Mouse Wheel
Implicit Styles
Drag and Drop
Drop Targets support
Bidi & RTL
HTML

Hosting HTML inside Silverlight application
We can interact with the HTML contents as being a brush

Commanding and MVVM
Data & Networking

Sharing Assemblies across SL and .NET 4.0
Data Binding Improvements
UDP Multicast support
REST Enhancements
WCF Improvements

Main one is TCP channel support

WCF RIA Services

All the capabilities of RIA Services and with all the capabilities of WCF
Works well with OAuth

Visual Studio 2010

WYSIWYG Design Surface
XAML Intellisense
WF and POCO Support

Additional Control
Beyond the Browser

Windowing API
Notification Popups
HTML support
Drop Target support
Opening the Sandbox

Trusted Application

Custom Windows Chrome
Local File System
Cross-file Network
Keyboard support in Full Screen Mode
COM object support in Windows

using dynamic keyword of C#

Access to Several devices form the client machine

Silverlight Performance

Twice as fast

uses JIT like the normal .NET Application

30% faster startup
New Profiling support

Google Chrome will support SL4 also

Schedule

Beta

All the features seen today
VS2010 Tools
Expression Tools

RC
Final Release

First half of Next Year (MIX’10 ????)

Kurt DelBene – Office and Sharepoint 2010

Microsoft Business Productivity Infrastructure

Unified Business Platform

Unified Communications
Business Intelligence
Enterprise Content Management
Collaboration
Enterprise Search

Office and Sharepoint Development Platforms

User Experience

Based in Services and in a Object Model that can be extended in order to create better User Experience

Application Services

Expose all the capabilities in the Applications as services to be consumed without loosing any of the features that we have access inside the solution

Content and Data Management
Interoperability with LOB integration

possibility to more easily integrate the external LOB applications inside the products

Tools and Deployment Flexibility

New Tools for Sharepoint Development
Debug capabilities are currently in the Tools

Now Debug really works. Awesome.

Interesting capability to import a Sharepoint solution to start the project
Possibility to deploy the solution in a sandboxed solution. Interesting in terms of security
Deployment

Simply upload the package generated by Visual Studio 2010 into the sharepoint – Real All-in-One working for deployment also. Now it looks really good for Sharepoint Development.

Announcing the Office and Sharepoint 2010 Public Beta to download www.microsoft.com/2010

Office 2010
Sharepoint Server
Project Server 2010
Visio 2010
Mobile is also available today in the mobile marketplace

Sharepoint has a Silverlight WebPart out of the Box.
Sharepoint 2010 now has the Office Ribbon

Announcing Duet Enterprise for Microsoft Sharepoint and SAP

Consume and extend SAP from Microsoft Sharepoint 2010
Available on the Second-half of 2010

Announcing the Outlook Social Connector

Windows Live, Sharepoint Server, Linkedin
Has an Open SDK that can be used to develop new connectors for this connector

Microsoft Releases Roadmap

NunoGodinho — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:12:16 GMT

A lot is being announced this days regarding Microsoft Products and Technologies, and so this is a little summary of all those information's.