Innovative Singapore

New SharePoint for Developers Track on MSDN Ramp Up

jocelyn — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:48:48 GMT

There’s been a lot of interest in SharePoint lately.Good news is, MSDN Ramp Up just released a new track for developers who want to learn SharePoint. As part of this module, you’ll learn about Web Parts, Data Lists, Event Handlers, Workflow and Silverlight Web Parts. If you’re looking for somewhere to start on SharePoint development, check out the ramp up track on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/dd221355.aspx

Pissed Off, Meshed Up!

jocelyn — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:32:14 GMT

I FINALLY got access to the Mesh SDK thanks to Chris I on my team who was lucky to go to PDC. (Highly encourage you guys to go next year… Attendees get all the good stuff!! and they get even more than the MS Folks that go!)

I just wanted to test out how to deploy an application onto Live Mesh and surprise, surprise, I picked my favorite application (it’s the only application i know how to build really… :p) and Meshed it up!

After all the logistics, I opened up my original solution for the Piss Off Silverlight application.

1. I added references to the dlls in the Live Framework SDK

2. I made some changes to the App.xaml.cs file:

What this code basically does is create a visual instance of the Silverlight Application once the Mesh Application finishes loading. I have yet to actually make use of the Mesh API in the app itself. I guess in order to do that, Piss Off will probably need a UI update. I’ll continue to explore and update this post when I do. Meanwhile, her'e’s what Piss Off looks like on my Live Desktop. So between me and Live Mesh, LIVE MESH WINS!

Read your VHD’s content in Windows 7

jocelyn — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:42:34 GMT

One of the “irks” I’ve had with VPCs is that sometimes I needed to urgently access content that’s inside a VPC, most of the cases, the VPCs aren’t mine as I always go native ;) So previously, I had to first install VPC or Virtual Server on my own machine (or find one that had it) boot up the VM and copy the files. Sometimes I even have trouble doing getting that to work :S. Which is why i’m extremely happy that in Windows 7, you can go into Disk Management and “Attach VHD”.

7 will then be able to see the drive as if it were any other drive attached on your machine. (Notice that your virtual hard drives appear in a bright bluish color so you can distinguish it from your ordinary drives) Also, in one of the Keynotes at PDC, I believe I remember hearing that you should be able to boot natively into a VHD that you’ve attached. I think that is just AWESOME.

Check out this video with Mark Russinovich on Channel 9

I’m SO looking forward to 7 Beta. :)

PDC SOTD: Building a Graphics-Intensive Application in Silverlight

jocelyn — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:28:57 GMT

There’s so much content on http://www.microsoftpdc.com and I’m trying to watch at least once a day. So my PDC Session of the Day is this Building a Graphics-Intensive Application in Silverlight by Seema Ramchandani

She highlights quite a number of things to bear in mind when you’re doing lots of animations, image & video rendering in your application. She also talks about a tool called XPerf which allows to “dissect” your CPU processes in order to analyze the performance of your applications. You can read more about this tool here

Professional Developer Conference 2008

jocelyn — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 06:11:53 GMT

For those of us who aren’t able to attend this year’s Professional Developer Conference, the good news is, all the content they’re delivering will be available online through the site http://www.microsoftpdc.com This feed (http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/pdc2008/RSS/?tag=videos) will give you all the sessions that have been recorded and posted on Channel 9 (it’s a lot of content!) I highly recommend watching the Keynotes, especially the Day 2 Keynote (Day Two #1 - Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell) where they showcase all the cool stuff that Microsoft is coming out with very soon. Very exciting stuff!

You just have to love technology. :)

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Supports Solutions!

jocelyn — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:00:56 GMT

With the goal of stressing out my new adopted baby, Brownie (yes I know it makes her sound like a dog but hey, what can I do, it’s brown and I wasn’t feeling very creative when I got her), I installed Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, because I figured that one day while sitting at a cafe, I would probably have the urge to code and will need to have some form of VS on this little one. (I’m already thinking about how I can possible expand this girl’s memory just a little bit). I was pleasantly surprised, when I started creating a new Silverlight project, to see that it actually now supported solutions! I remember before, that was probably the most evident limitation of the express editions from the non-free ones (:p). I also tried out opening a solution that was built through the Pro edition and it seemed to work fine too! I think this is great news for all the hobbyist developers out there who would just like to try their hand out or start learning how to build all sorts of cool .NET applications. What I’d really love to see though is allowing Express Editions build for WinMo hrmmm..

Preparing to Move to RTW

jocelyn — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:53:00 GMT

For those of you who have been working on the Silverlight RC0 bits getting yourself ready for the release, check out this blog post from Laurence Moroney where he talks about how to get your RC0 and Beta 2 bits deployed side by side so you don’t have to worry about when the clock strikes 12 and your users start upgrading their plugins to the RTW version. Party on! :)

I tried out the fix myself on http://www.technoeuphoria.com/pissoff and it seems to work for me! :)

nerdplusart

jocelyn — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 03:24:30 GMT

you guys HAVE to check this site out. The design is just AWESOME. Now I’m inspired to redesign my blog so it looks as cool as this. This will be on my sure to do list :)

They also have lots of cool demo code that you can download that cover Silverlight and WPF and stunts like animations, particle generation etc. Just -AWESOME.

Live Media GPS = Awesome!

jocelyn — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:40:08 GMT

I was browsing http://www.liveside.net last night and saw this article on a really killer Windows Mobile application called Live Media GPS. If some of you have heard of Qik, it’s the same concept. It has a software component that runs on your GPS enabled Windows Mobile phone and allows you to stream videos on the web. The portal is not as rich as Qik’s portal yet. What happens is when you choose to broadcast a video, it won’t allow you to select off the bat that you want to publish your video right away. The mobile client has SMS notification though I haven’t tried it out yet. I’ll update this post when I get to try it out. The output is streamed via a Silverlight player, and on the right hand side, you’ll find the GPS location plotted on Virtual Earth. COOLNESS!!

Live Media GPS is an addition to their already existing Live Media application (which gets installed when you install the client) that allows much more functionality like making the video public, viewing your “buddy cams”, viewing the public broadcasts. Apparently, aside from videos, you can also stream other media such as images, presentations etc. Will have to find a buddy to test this out with.

Live Media also comes with a desktop client which I unfortunately have not been able to try because they don’t currently have a version that supports 64-bit *sob*. I’ll probably try it out on one of the other machines here once I have the time.

“This is a test of the emergency broadcast system…”

If ever I get kidnapped, I’ll have a piece of software to help people find me.. provided they don’t keep me where the GPS & 3G don’t show :|

I was wondering why that “address bar per tab” looked so familiar…

jocelyn — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:59:58 GMT

Can anyone guess what browser this is?

Project Rosetta

jocelyn — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:47:54 GMT

Silverlight has definitely been picking up momentum in the past few weeks and we understand there are more and more people wanting to pick up Silverlight. There are some great resources available on http://www.silverlight.net but here’s a site that’s targetted specifically for developers already skilled in other technologies such as Flash. Check the site out at http://projectrosetta.com

Conversations with the Communications Sector : Control PowerPoint Slide Shows with Windows Mobile

jocelyn — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:21:02 GMT

YEY! One more reason to love my Windows Mobile phone! Check this blog post (Conversations with the Communications Sector : Control PowerPoint Slide Shows with Windows Mobile) out. It shows how you can turn your Windows Mobile phone into a Windows Sideshow device. Find out more about Windows SideShow at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/sideshow.aspx

And yes, you can develop your own SideShow gadgets too! Check out the other sideshow gadgets at http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?bt=8&pl=7

Developer resources on the Windows SideShow platform can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms744147.aspx

Agents in TechnoUtopia

jocelyn — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:09:16 GMT

Today, I had a huge craving for nachos, thanks to my friends at Jet Set Zero. I had read a blog post they had on their summer food highlights and the image of that glorious mountain of nachos had been haunting me since, today more than ever. So I did a search on Mexican food singapore and the name Harry’s Mexican Restaurant came on the top of the search results. So I looked up the address on gothere.sg as well as how to get there by bus and went on my way. The genius in me took note of which bus stop to get off at but forgot to take note of how exactly to walk there. So when I got off the bus, I was basically walking around in circles before I actually got to the place. It didn’t help that although I frequented Orchard Road, I cannot, for the life of me, remember all the names of the buildings down there. Long story short, after almost an hour of walking, I eventually got to Orchard Parade Hotel where the restaurant was supposed to be at, stomach demanding to gobble up what was hopefully the most authentic as nachos could get in this country. #01-13 was the unit number. #01-04, #01-05, walking, walking and more walking. #01-09, #01-10, more walking. #01-12, a dark grey curtain along the wall… #01-14. CRAP.

Super exhausted, I walked to the nearest cafe that looked like they would serve nachos, though I had high doubts that they would be any good (a validated fact a few minutes later). I ordered a Margherita pizza to console myself from the inevitable fact.

The whole afternoon, while reading Falling Man my mind was in TechnoUtopia, my fictitious world where technology has made life better for human kind.

In TechnoUtopia, there was a concept of Store Presence. All the establishments had a web presence that was easily accessible through everyone’s IM client.

It’s easy to see whether your favorite store or restaurant is Open (Online), Closed (Offline), Busy (self-explanatory) or Idle (also self explanatory). And because IM use is already also very popular on the mobile device, people have the same presence information available even when they're on the move

Of course, this presence is not the only information you can get out of their system.

Live Agents have become a hit in TechoUtopia. Ever since they announced the release of the Windows Live Agents SDK, developers have come up with the all sorts of intelligent solutions that deliver a whole new level of user experience to consumers across the different industries. In this particular solution, they’ve allowed the integration of a POS, Inventory and CRM systems and the Live Agents to give consumers a more convenient way to find information about their favorite restaurants and shops.

It was at this point that I woke up from my daydream. *sigh* All the technology to make this possible is already here! I’m sure someone will build something like this (or something even better) very soon. I can imagine a system like this would be pretty easy to build. Come on Devs, get your groove on. Check out the Live Agents SDK at http://agents.live.com

//I don’t mind if anyone takes this idea and runs with it. I would, however, really want to know when it goes live so I can make use of it!

SOLVED: Facebook Application showing as not found

jocelyn — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:08:02 GMT

I have been mulling over this problem for a few months now. For some reason, I experience getting this message

The page you requested was not found.
You may have clicked an expired link or mistyped the address. Some web addresses are case sensitive. I mentioned this in a few of my previous posts

whenever I try to access my Facebook applications when I am logged out. But when I log in to Facebook first THEN access the URL, I am able to resolve the application. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one experiencing the problem http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?pid=96845#p96845 First reported in January this year and until now this issue has not been closed.

THE FIX:

1. Edit the settings of your application –> Enable Developer Mode –> save

Wax On…

SAVE!

2. Edit the settings of your application –> Disable Developer Mode –> save

Wax Off…

SAVE!!

3. log out and try to access your Applications URL

This worked for all the apps I was having issues with so I hope it works for the rest of you guys too. A few people were reporting how the application would resolve in their dev sites but then would cease to work once they ported them over to their Test sites. Highly likely, once the developers have the application and deploy it into a test scenario, they don’t bother going into “Developer Mode” before spreading the application which is probably why they are experiencing this. I hope they fix this soon. I’m relieved that my apps work fine now…

Using the Facebook Developer Toolkit 2.0 for Canvas Based applications

jocelyn — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:03:45 GMT

I missed the release of the latest version of the Facebook Developer Toolkit from clarity consulting so I decided to play around with it after our Mix It Up event.

There have been much changes to the toolkit since the last time I looked into it. It took me a few minutes to try to figure out how to get a simple application out. The documentation posted here is a bit outdated so let me post my own little how-to. They’ve actually made it a lot easier but the new API needs a bit of getting used to I guess. It’s a bit confusing as the APIs for CanvasFBMLBasePage is different from CanvasIFrameBasePage. I hope they standardize soon though. Considering that this is supposedly an RC, it doesn’t seem like they’ve settled on a convention yet.

So again, assumption is:

1. You’re using C# as your language

2. You’re building an app with the CanvasFBMLBasePage (haven’t tried out the Master Page yet.. baby steps my friend)

1. Visit http://www.facebook.com/developers and Setup A New Application. Expand the optional fields and set up your application, making sure you have the following details filled in:

2. Once you have successfully set this up, take note of your API Key and Secret:

3. Fire up Visual Studio 2008 and set up a new ASP.NET Web Application

4. Open up Default.aspx and remove everything but the first line (which is the page directive that says tells .NET which is the CodeFile. Your default.aspx should look something like this:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
<asp:label ID="Content" runat="server" text="Label"></asp:label>

// For convenience, I added an asp.net label control where I would write out the FBML later on. If you’d rather use Response.Write() you could do that as well. Then you wouldn’t need to have the second line on Default.aspx

5. Before we dig into the CS files, we’ll need to add a reference to the facebook dlls that we can download from codeplex. Simply select to download bin.zip and it should give you the dlls necessary for you to build a Facebook app. Unzip this in a location you can easily find. Go to your Solution Explorer and right-click on your project –> Add Reference

Click on the Browse tab and navigate to where you extracted the binaries for the toolkit. You will want to add a reference to both facebook.dll and facebook.web.dll //yes, the non-caps irks me too.. wait till you see the classes *sigh*

When you finish adding these two necessaries, it’ll pull some other files along for the ride as well so don’t be surprised about that.

6. Now that’s finished, we can open up our .CS file and start by importing the necessary namespaces namely:

using facebook;
using facebook.web;

and then, make our class inherit from the CanvasFBMLBasePage class that is part of the toolkit. This base class should take care of all the nitty gritties of dealing with Facebook and making sure it knows who you are (or in this case, your application)

public partial class _Default : CanvasFBMLBasePage
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

    }
}

7. Before we proceed, lets add a snippet to our web.config file to set our APIKEY and secret. The base class will be looking at our web.config file for the values to use to authenticate with Facebook. All you need to do is find this section:

and replace it with something like:

<appSettings>
  <add key="APIKey" value ="8e38f5fc72b989b8146dc91ece7e9b6a"/>
  <add key="Secret" value ="d9a5bd957d3aa1c69316839f1543fce0"/>
</appSettings>

of course put in the APIKey and Secret that was provided to you by Facebook. Don’t go using my key, it won’t work with your URL anyway :) Make sure you SAVE!

8. Going back to Default.aspx.cs, we can now proceed to add logic to our application.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    base.Page_Init(sender, e); // this is the code that will call the base

                               // methods that deal with authenticating

                               // with facebook and all that mumbo jumbo

if(!IsPostBack)    {
    stringuid = base.API.uid.ToString(); // this is the code to retrieve

                                          // the userid of the logged in user

                                          //(the person accessing your application

   Content.Text = "<fb:profile-pic uid='" + uid + "'/>";               // You can also do something

   Content.Text+= "hello, <fb:name uid='"+ uid + "' useyou='false'/>"; // like Response.Write(

                                                                       // "<fb:profile-pic uid='" +

                                                                       // uid + "'/>"); for this part

   Content.Text += " you have "+ base.API.friends.get().Count + " friends so far ";

   //anything you need to know about your user, you will find from base.API – all your base are belong to us

}}

9. Once that’s done, we can now go and publish our application by right-clicking on the project in solution explore and selecting publish

Make sure you are publishing to the Callback URL you specified when you applied for the Application Key and Secret.

10. When you’re done publishing and you try to access the application, you should see something like this:

and when you click allow, you’ll get:

Some issues I noticed though is that when I try to access the application URL when I am logged out, Facebook tells me that the page cannot be found. But when I access it when I’m already logged in, it’ll prompt me to allow the application to access my information if i have not yet added the app. I’m checking with the forum on codeplex to see whether this is a Facebook issue or whether it’s the Tool'kit’s

Congratulations! You have now built your first FBML based Facebook application! Will let you know how far I go with this new framework.

It seems to be cleaner code right now, but I guess I’ll need to fool around with this to find out more.

Hope this helps!

Photosynth is out!

jocelyn — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:52:02 GMT

If some of you have seen Photosynth at its technical preview over at the live labs and have been ACHING to start making synths of your own, now you can! The project has gone live so you can head down now to http://photosynth.net and start uploading a batch of photos and start synthing. It’s a portal where you can also start viewing synths created by other users as well. Congratulations to the team. I personally can’t wait for the weekend to come so I can take my camera out for a trip to try it out!

Also, check out the Photosynth blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/photosynth/

Hosting Day Session – August 20, 2008

jocelyn — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:08:25 GMT

I did a session on Silverlight for Web Hosters yesterday, August 21, 2008 and have uploaded my here:

Content courtesy of Michael Scherotter. For those of you who are interested in the topic but missed the session, you can find his web cast at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032373321&culture=en-US. Most interesting for me was his discussion on how web analytics can easily be enabled in Silverlight and how the Silverlight programming model makes A/B testing on User Interfaces a lot easier because of its separation of UI and application logic. Highly recommended web cast. :)

SingTel Heart Race Test!

jocelyn — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:52:56 GMT

I had the great opportunity to help Crayon Digital get enabled on Silverlight for one of the projects they had to deliver for the SingTel Singapore Grand Prix and I have to say, they’ve come up with some pretty sleek stuff and I’m sure you GUYS will agree :) Check out the Heart Race Test which the team has very impressively built in less than a month, including time taken to build the concept, assets as well as honing Silverlight development skills!

Loads of videos on the Grid Girls but my favorite is how they used Deep Zoom. Check the site out!

Yet another deep zoom application

jocelyn — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:25:30 GMT

Came across another really awesome Silverlight Application that makes use of Deep Zoom done by Kelly Blue Book which I believe they call The Perfect Car Finder. Tim Heuer talks about it more in his blog post. Building deep zoom applications can actually be pretty straightforward. All you need to do is make use of the Deep Zoom Composer to stitch and compose your source image, and it will automatically generate the .xap (Silverlight package) as well as a default html test page for you. Now if you want to take Deep Zoom a step further, here’s a post by KIRUPA.CHINNATHAMBI that shows how you can implement a deep zoom application that allows you to filter by tag (code included). Cool stuff!

Mix for Students: facebook development with .NET

jocelyn — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 12:53:10 GMT

I did a session on facebook development using the facebook developer toolkit where I also showed how I integrated my Piss Off Silverlight application into a facebook app, which I now call PissBook. ~~I’ve registered the pissbook url but have yet to point it to my app as it seems that facebook isn’t allowing me to save it as “addable” on facebook :(~~ I forgot to put in the post add URL ^_^

What I did was take this silverlight app:

And showed how you can make it work with data from facebook (or any other datasource for that matter). If you are using the default page generated by the Silverlight project, you would have something like:

on the Page_Load event, you should then be able to add values from your Request variable, in this case the logged in user name, and the friend’s name which i picked up from facebook’s friend-selector component, and pass these as InitParameters to my Silverlight Application.

I then needed to do a bit of tweaking in my App.xaml file on the Application_Startup method where I parsed the initialization Parameters and passed it to the constructor on my Page user control, which is basically my Silverlight application.

I then created a new constructor for my Page.xaml, which is more or less the same as the original one, except this accepts some parameters and assigns them to the textboxes in my application:

A simple application but it basically shows you how you can integrate your Silverlight applications with dynamic datasources through its InitParams property.

Code and slides are here:

* NOTE: for some reason, when you’re not logged in, facebook gives a 404 when i try to access the app directly from http://apps.facebook.com/facebooksession I’ll update this as soon as I find out a resolution.

this is apparently a 6-month old bug :( http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1406 still unresolved.

Win a Trip to Macau!

jocelyn — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:37:51 GMT

Send in your submissions now!

//These are one of those moments when I wish I DON’T work at Microsoft hehe

Embed a font

jocelyn — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:07:02 GMT

If you want to embed a font into your Silverlight applications, add the font into your project:

Set the Build Action file property to embedded resource:

Use the following code snippet to use the font as a font source for your components:

Assembly ass = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
Stream stream = ass.GetManifestResourceStream("EmbeddedResource.Font.pricedow.ttf");
this.test.FontSource = new FontSource(stream);
this.test.FontFamily = new FontFamily("Pricedown");

XAML looking something like:

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
    <Canvas>
        <TextBlock x:Name="test" FontFamily="annifont.ttf#Annifont" Text="grand theft auto IV" FontSize="30"/>    
    </Canvas>
    
</Grid>

And the result:

Bored to death

jocelyn — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:06:00 GMT

It was raining and I was a bit lazy to go home early so I decided to look for something to do. I wanted to try out some of the basic networking stuff with Silverlight and remembered googlefight

I thought it was a simple enough concept to implement so I figured I’d give it a try. I had some time to kill before my 11:00pm conference call. So I came up with “Piss Off!”.

// I have a feeling this won’t be up here for long as it might offend some people :)

This was an exercise for me to try out the Live Search API. Code is found here:

SharePoint and Silverlight

jocelyn — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:12:00 GMT

3I did a session for the SharePoint forum held July 1, 2008 and for those who are interested to try out the S+S BluePrints for SharePoint, the samples have so far not been updated to work with Beta 2 yet. So while that’s on the way, and you want to give a hack at trying to get it working yourselves:

1. Follow the steps detailed on this blog on how to configure your server to be able to serve out Silverlight applications. The last step tells you how to add a mime type, but instead of using application/x-silverlight-2-b1, change it to application/x-silverlight-2-b2 instead

2. I haven’t had time to convert the rest of the applications but 3 of them, I’ve managed to convert and upload on my Sky Drive folder

One of the first things you need to do is have the breaking changes document on hand :) This blog post has the link to the breaking changes document as well as some additions and corrections on the document.

You will also need to make an update to the web part project.

There is a line where you’re supposed to specify the Silverlight version in your web part class. The property used to be “.Version”. This was updated to MinumumVersion, which you should then set to “2.0.30523” as below:

silverlightControl.MinimumVersion = "2.0.30523";

Some cool Silverilght Demos

jocelyn — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:49:40 GMT

http://hsn.tv

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/trailers/vegas/default.htm

Of course there is the NBC Olympics player which you can now try out at http://www.nbcolympics.com/video