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JAOO 2008 coverage continues with Independant Software Consultant and Ruby expert Glenn Vanderurg sits down with UX Architect Josh Holmes to discuss dynamic languages and the importance of unit testing. With dynamic typing you can imagine that creating solid unit tests is of prime importance (of course, this is the case for statically-typed language composition as well...). Why are unit tests so important in the context of writing applications with dynamic languages? Tune in. By the way, Josh actually records this interview for his podcast show while I film it for Channel 9. So, you get to watch an audio podcast in the making. Of course, being that I am me I do get a few questions in! Thanks Josh and Glenn for letting me crash (well, film) your party! Enjoy. Read More...
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Brian and Dan may have day jobs, but they are also doing a ton of work on PDC including running the Show Off contest . Show Off is a really cool experience, but it’s kinda hard to explain in writing so Brian and Dan give it to us in plain words and tell us how easy it is to get involved (and maybe win some big prizes). Plus, we hear all the PDC sessions are going to be online within 24 hours for FREE! Is that really true!? The guys confirm for us the dealio on the cool PDC virtual experience, and tell us what to expect. Read More...
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The Visual State Manager is on a very short list of features that exist on Silverlight today but do not exist on Desktop WPF. This short screencast introduces the Visual State Manager and illustrates the value it adds to the Silverlight platform. It shows how the Visual State Manager can be used in control templates as well as full application screens. John Gossman from the WPF team blogged that the Visual State Manager will be added to WPF in the future. He has not indicated when an officially supported WPF version will be available but he did supply a working sample that is compatible with its Silverlight 2 Beta 2 counterpart. Read More...
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Bill Hill - the man, the myth, the legend is back on Channel 9! Christian "LittleGuru" Liensberger and I got a chance to catch up with Bill on his latest work... While many people know Bill from his work on True Type and his passion for improving screen readability, Bill is now working on improving Web readability in Internet Explorer and how reading on the Web hasn't improved since the early days of browsing. In the interview, you'll hear about how Internet Explorer has included font embedding features for years that can give publishers much better readability or how Windows fonts actually include code that gets executed to dynamically adjust pixel-by-pixel based on font. To see Bill's site using font embedding and clean HTML/CSS with multi-page flow, go to http://www.billhillsite.com . Read More...
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We've spent a fair amount of time on Channel 9 discussing concurrency and parallelism with various people. In particular, the folks who are writing the Parallel Computing Platform. Everything we've talked about up to this point has been targeted at .NET developers. After watching all the videos on TPL, for example, you'd think that only .NET developers will get to benefit from Task-based concurrent programming. Of course, this is not the case. Native developers (C++) will be given an equivalent level of concurrent abstraction semantics via the Concurrency Runtime and associated libs. Here, native (C++ focused) Parallel Computing Platform team members Rick Malloy, Niklas Gustafsson, Don McCrady and Channel 9 veteran Stephen Toub join me in a conversation covering our concurrency platform tools and runtime specifically designed for C++ developers. Enjoy! Read More...
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Welcome back to the WCF screencast series! After a short vacation covering WF topics, we return to WCF for the latest video in the weekly WF/WCF Screencast series. In this short video, CSD MVP Aaron Skonnard from PluralSight guides the viewer through how to create your first WCF client application that consumes an existing WCF service (see the screencasts covering the creation of a WCF service and how to create endpoints for more details). We add the service to the client application using the WCF service's Metadata Exchange (MEX) endpoint - which generates the service definition and contract, which Aaron then writes the code to consume via code...and how to have VS2008 open up your client as the test client at F5 (debug) instead of the standard WCF test client when the service is launched. As he shows you how to write the client side code, he touches on how the service endpoint information is stored in the config files and storing the results back from the WCF service in local .NET object classes. For additional information on WCF, please check out the WCF Dev Center on MSDN and the .NET Endpoint team blog . For more information on classes offered by Aaron and the PluralSight folks, check out their catalog of instructor led courses and new online courses that cover a variety of Microsoft technologies, ranging from .NET v3.5 to WSS to BizTalk server. Read More...
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JAOO 2008 coverage continues with a discussion covering domain specific languages with the great Martin Fowler , Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks , Neil Ford , Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughWorks and PowerShell creator Jeffery Snover, Partner Architect at Microsoft. Martin is a world leader in the design and implementation of DSLs, which are highly specilaized languages aimed at solving particular sets of problems (unlike general purpose programming languages which are, well, general purpose in nature). PowerShell is a DSL. Or is it? Tune in. Enjoy! Read More...
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Would you like to add your own menu option to the context menu in Outlook? How about turning an email into a new meeting request without having to type in all the attendees or the body and subject? Well, in this screencast I'll show you how to add to the context menu and generate a meeting request that includes the email's recipients, subject and body in the meeting details. In the talk I reference the OutlookItem.cs class, details of which you can find here: http://tinyurl.com/4g7x64 Read More...
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In our third episode of Behind The Maps we go to Boulder Colorado, home to a large number of the scientists and engineers who create Virtual Earth. In this episode we meet David Simons and Tom Barclay who created the Processing Framework that manages all of our data and image processing pipelines. Some of you may recognize one of the people in this video. If you don't you'll probably recongize one of his creations that was a precursor of and laid the foundation for Virtual Earth today. I hope you enjoy. PS: What's the hippie doing at the end of this video? Read More...
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JavaScript is a language that appears to have a long lifespan given its ubiquity on the web. It pretty much powers the client-side in-page execution of hundreds of millions of web pages. As a language, well, it's cool and strange at the same time. It's not evolved much over the years and is the topic of hot debate in the halls of the web standards committee. At any rate, a few people who know a thing or two about dynamic languages joined me in a conversation to address JavaScript and dynamic languages for the web, generally. The great Dave Thomas and fundamentalist functional languages high priest Erik Meijer sit down with Microsoft JScript Program Manager Pratap Lakshman and myself to converse on JavaScript the language and virtual machine. Of course, as you can imagine, the conversation winds effortlesssly into various geeky tangents. This is the second year I've been lucky enough to take part in the cross-platform software engineering conference JAOO . Like last year , I was very fortunate to get to sit down with a few key players in the programming languages design field and watch several technical presentations that span the industry and problems we face as software developers. One of the truly great things about JAOO is that it is not a product-focused conference: it's about programming first and foremost and enables the sharing of perspectives and ideas among the world's best and brightest programming minds. As you can imagine, I, like many technical types here at Microsoft, am a huge fan of JAOO. Thank you Trifork !!! Enjoy! Read More...
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While in Redmond I managed to catch up with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community and Content Strategy team and talked to them about the great work they do for the various Dynamic CRM Communities including these: CRM Team Blog CRM Forums CRM Community Resource Center (external) CRM SDK Enjoy the show! John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist Microsoft Corporation http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell http://channel9.msdn.com/Wiki/DynamicsCRM/HomePage/ Read More...
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In this interview I talked with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Engineering for Enterprise team and their great work including performance testing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to 24k users! Enjoy the show! John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist Microsoft Corporation http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde Read More...
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This is the second year I've been lucky enough to take part in the cross-platform software engineering conference JAOO . Like last year , I was very fortunate to get to sit down with a few key players in the programming languages design field and watch several technical presentations that span the industry and problems we face as software developers. One of the truly great things about JAOO is that it is not a product-focused conference: it's about programming first and foremost and enables the sharing of perspectives and ideas among the world's best and brightest programming minds. As you can imagine, I, like many technical types here at Microsoft, am a huge fan of JAOO. Thank you Trifork !!! In this conversation Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Architect of C# Anders Hejlsberg sits down with programming language design legend and computer scientist Guy Steele (creator of Scheme and expert in several languages ranging from LISP to Java). I think Guy is one of the smartest people I've ever met. The topic of conversation is the elephant in the modern general purpose programmers living room: Concurrency. With today's widely-used general purpose languages like C++, Java, C#, VB, Ruby etc it's hard to express parallelism in productive ways. Anders et al are working on both language enhancements to C# and VB.NET and BCL support (Parallel Extensions to .NET for example). Today, Guy is working on a mathematical language (domain specific as opposed to general purpose) and runtime, Fortress, that is so concurrent it makes it hard for programmers to even write sequential code! Listen in to two of the programming industry's most successful thinkers and get a sense of their perspectives on the future of general purpose programming languages now that Concurrency and Parallelism are entering the development status quo. Enjoy. More JAOO coverage to come. Read More...
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What are the platform infrastructure details behind the Mesh technologies? Corporate Vice President of Live Platform Services, David Treadwell, will be spilling all the beans in his PDC keynote in just a few weeks, but in this Q&A he gives us a sneak peek. David explains how there’s so much more to Mesh than just the user experience, and how he and his team will be revealing the underlying particulars that fall below the line at PDC – the platform infrastructure that helps developers build stellar Software + Services apps. And did Tread mention bits that will be given out at the PDC? I think he did, but you gotta listen to find out more about what we affectionately call the goods . Read More...
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WPF 3.5 SP1 offers killer graphic capabilties that were demonstrated in the last video with David Teitlebaum . In this video, David has dropped by to help us announce the WPF Pixel Shader Effects Library . The library includes 23 Effects and 26 Transitions and is available with source code at http://codeplex.com/wpffx . After shooting the video, we realized we didn't show all of the effects and any of the transitions. To see the library in action check out the WPF Effects Library Demo video . Read More...
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