February 2008 - Posts

Microsoft Gets ATOM

Windows Live Platform News: Microsoft Standardizes on AtomPub for Web Services and Other Stories

At last Microsoft gets ATOM

Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds.

I know this only matters to the 5% of web surfers who actually use a Feed Reader, but maybe now with a Standard in place more people will discover the usefulness of reading Feeds.
posted Friday, February 29, 2008 7:43 AM by paul with 1 Comments

Think Like a Tester

Alan Page from the test group in Microsoft's Engineering Excellence team came to New York City for Future Test and I asked him how a developer can think like a Tester and recorded a video of his answer.

To learn more visit the Tester Center.
posted Thursday, February 28, 2008 9:50 AM by paul with 0 Comments

.NET Debugging Demos

Lab 1: Hang
Lab 2: Crash
Lab 3: Memory
Lab 4: High CPU Hang
posted Wednesday, February 27, 2008 6:37 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Go Yahoo!

An Open Approach to Search

Google has taught us that search is social, so finally Yahoo is following along by asking us to contribute. If more people own a piece of Yahoo Search then more people will use it. Right now the only audience that matters is Yahoo Shareholders and Jerry and David have about 20 days to dazzle them into believing that they can keep the value of the stock above $30.00, or else they will be assimilated.

Yahoo today also announced Buzz, a user generated news aggregation section on the Yahoo home page. Everybody is already comparing it with Digg, but Digg represents the opinions of mainly 16 year old boys, maybe Yahoo's more mature audience will produce something of greater value. If they fail to generate considerable buzz in the next few weeks they will be assimilated.
posted Tuesday, February 26, 2008 9:51 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Air Data

Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web

This mornings NYTimes has a nice story about Kevin Lynch and his dream of a Kevincloud. I still have Kevin's business card from Micromedia, but now he's the chief technology officer of Adobe on the verge of launching his dream now called Air.

Keven is realizing the dream we had a few years ago for Smart Clients. Billy Hollis at conference after conference would preach the value of the Smart Client running on your desktop and connecting with the web when more data was required. Two years ago I thought we were going to get Smart Client adoption from Amazon and eBay because it would be more secure to use a Client rather then a browser.

So we're still viewing the web through a browser and now it's XAML living in the Smart Client Namespace and Siiverlight almost ready for prime time. Congrats Kevin on shipping your dream.
posted Monday, February 25, 2008 9:38 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Microsoft at GDC

StevieB and KevJ didn't make it to San Francisco for the GDC, but their Yahoo takeover effected attendance at all the Microsoft Games, XBOX 360 and XNA events. Yahoo Games not long ago the leader in on-line gaming has lost a large share of their players to the new kid in town, Facebook. I had a good look at what game developers are doing with and for the Facebook community and you can see where Yahoo dropped the ball.

I attended the Keynote and four XNA sessions, this is an exciting time to be writing games and hooking-up with people to play.

Announcing: Xbox LIVE community games
XNA Creators Club Game Launcher download time extended
Announcing: XNA Game Studio 3.0 and Zune
posted Sunday, February 24, 2008 3:02 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Big Finish For the GDC

The last day of the GDC was the best for me with an early morning Agile Retrospective with Clinton Keith and Agile Development - Is it the Silver Bullet? The Good Bad and Ugly - led by Rich Vogel and great input from most of the participants in this round table forum.

In the afternoon it was Getting from 0 to 60hz with XNA development from the zany Liverpudlian Kevin Gee. Damian Isla closed the show with his presentition of Building a Better Battle: HALO 3 AI Objectives, to a packed house long after you'd expect everyone would have left the building. We had a great look at the tools and methodology behind Halo 3 and it was fascinating.
posted Friday, February 22, 2008 8:39 PM by paul with 0 Comments

SkyDrive 5GB

Welcome to a bigger, better, faster SkyDrive!

The cloud just got bigger, we now have five times the space we had before — that’s 5GB of free online storage for documents, pictures, and other files.
Upload to SkyDrive
posted Thursday, February 21, 2008 3:59 PM by paul with 0 Comments

XBOX Live Community Games

Xbox 360 Becomes First Video Game Console Ever to Invite the World to Create Original Games and Share Online With Millions

It's the network effect, XBOX Live is enlisting the community of game developers to add content. So when will we be able to earn money from XBOX Live?
posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 3:34 PM by paul with 0 Comments

PC Gaming Alliance

Welcome to PC Gaming Alliance

This evening represenitives from Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Dell/Alienware, Nvidia, Acer, Activision, Epic and Razer held a joint Press conference at the W Hotel in San Francisco  to announce the PC Gaming Alliance.

PC Gaming is back, the consoles have had a good run over the past several years, but now thanks to advances in graphics and microprocessors PC performance is exceeding all expectations. The GDC is on this week and most of the developers here are writing for the PC platform.

The Games publishers in attendance were bemoaning about all the billions of dollars of revenue taken by Pirates every year, so I asked them when will we see the end of shrink-wrapped games? They went on about how BestBuy and Wal-Mart bring them tones of money, so shrink-wrapped games will continue. So I asked him; you have heard of the Internet? If Games publishers offered us downloads on their sites and charged half as much for a game they could conceivably sell three times as many. He didn't do the math.....

PC Gaming Alliance will also provide guidelines to simplify hardware specifications and speed the introduction of new technologies, as well as improve Consumer PC Gaming Experience by working with developers and publishers and PCGA members to maximize the PC gaming experience in all ways possible.

posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 12:09 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Graffiti 1.0 Launch

Graffiti 1.0 Now Available!

Download Now

Telligent just announced the Launch of Graffiti, a lightweight, simple content publishing system you can use to quickly and easily publish a blog or an entire web site. It blends together traditional CMS tools like revision history and workflow with more modern blog-style publishing.

Check-out Graffiti Marketplace where you can download themes and soon maybe Widgets... Hopefully this will evolve to a place where developers can earn money by supporting the Graffiti community.
posted Tuesday, February 19, 2008 3:05 PM by paul with 0 Comments

IIS7 Runs PHP

Of All the Hurdles to a Merger, View on Technology Is the Highest

Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 will easily be able to host all of Yahoo's software and services, after all the care and feeding John Markoff has received from Microsoft PR I'm surprised he doesn't know this.

Jerry and David built Yahoo from one server and a little attitude into the number one destination on the Web, their personal fortunes are in the billions, yet the're motivated to come to work everyday.

The real problem with this shot gun marriage is for Microsoft to retain Yahoo's audience. I believe one third of Yahoo users like me also use MSN and Windows Live services. Another third disdain everything Microsoft does and they discovered Google back in the day when it was Yahoo's search provider. As for the the last third, three years from now when you tell them Microsoft owns Yahoo they'll look at you dumbfounded.
posted Monday, February 18, 2008 9:30 AM by paul with 0 Comments

SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard

Introducing the SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard

Chris O'Brien has created a tool that helps us move content around in SharePoint. It provides a wizard-like approach to deploying content between SharePoint sites. The selected content is exported using the Content Migration API PRIME, giving a .cmp file Content Migration Package which can be copied to other servers.
posted Sunday, February 17, 2008 7:17 AM by paul with 0 Comments

HD DVD Obit

Taps for HD DVD as Wal-Mart Backs Blu-ray

HD DVD, the beloved format of Toshiba and three Hollywood studios, died Friday after a brief illness. The cause of death was determined to be the decision by Wal-Mart to stock only high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format.

Who won the BataMax - VHS war? The DVD. So who will be the ultimate winner of the HD DVD - Blue-Ray war? Download Now.
posted Saturday, February 16, 2008 12:05 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Software + Services

The future is a combination of local software and Internet services interacting with one another. Software makes services better and services make software better. And by bringing together the best of both worlds, we maximize choice, flexibility and capabilities for our customers. We describe this evolutionary path in our industry as Software + Services.

In this web site, MSDN will be looking at the architectural impact of building, running, consuming and monetizing S+S solutions.
posted Friday, February 15, 2008 9:50 AM by paul with 0 Comments

3D Game in XNA

Building a 3D Game in XNA From Scratch - Free Video Tutorial Series Now Available!

Dan Waters has make available a massive collection of video tutorials for creating a 3D game in XNA from the ground up, without skipping steps, for you, the enthusiast, student, or developer!

The 3D game we build together is called GuitarMatey and it uses a regular Guitar Hero style controller. Are you ready to learn XNA Game development?

posted Thursday, February 14, 2008 11:16 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Windows Live Developer

Windows Live Developer Program for Mobile announced

The Windows Live team has announced a structured mobile developer program that provides access to live services so we can build interactive connected applications on the Windows Live platform. 

Join today!   Download the PowerPoint slides

posted Wednesday, February 13, 2008 1:41 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Behavior Driven Development

Tonight's N3UG Meeting Introducing Behavior Driven Development

It's been said that Behavior-Driven Development BDD is Test-Driven Development TDD done right. In this survey talk we'll dig into this statement by crafting proper user stories with acceptance criteria and contrasting TDD tests with BDD specifications. After covering the fundamentals, we'll discuss techniques (such as mock and stub objects) and demonstrate tools for easing the BDD approach. We'll end the session by questioning how the BDD method fits into the larger context of Agile software development.

Speaker: David Laribee is President of Xclaim Software, an ISV offering document, claim, and policy management software for the commercial property and casualty insurance industry. He has 10+ years experience designing, developing, and architecting enterprise applications with Microsoft technologies.

Edit: Tonight's meeting is canceled due to Snow, so we'll do it next month.

posted Tuesday, February 12, 2008 10:51 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Microsoft Office Live Developer

As Yahoo and Microsoft were exchanging messages, Bill Gates went to silicon valley yesterday for the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference. You can now see the video from his Keynote.

Bill also talked to Dan from Channel9 backstage at the ODC, but there were no corporate raider questions.

Bill talked about the Microsoft Office Live Small Business Designer Developer Community.

Join the community and you’ll receive valuable leads and a free Microsoft Office Live Developer account.

posted Tuesday, February 12, 2008 7:16 AM by paul with 2 Comments

Windows Vista SP1 Update

Windows Vista SP1 availability for technical customers

The Windows Vista Team is going to make SP1 available to customers in stages to make sure we delivered a great experience.

Beta Testers have had a number of driver issues....We are working with the manufacturers of these devices to get the drivers and their install programs updated, and also working on other solutions we can use to ensure a smooth customer experience when updating to SP1 over Windows Update.- Mike Nash

posted Monday, February 11, 2008 2:54 PM by paul with 0 Comments