Pure Blue » Microsoft

Internet Explorer 8 Released

Matthew — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:37:44 +0000

It must just be that time of year for software releases! Download from here. Just be aware that you will need to restart your computer as part of the install, which just goes to show how integrated the browser is in the O/S (although Windows 7 is set to change that).

Just what a web developer needs – another browser to support

Microsoft Blueprints

Matthew — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 05:05:51 +0000

I stumbled upon Microsoft Blueprints after looking at some sample code from Vertigo. Essentially it is a replacement for the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) from the patterns and practices group. GAX was an effort to allow architects to create templates and guidance for frameworks, components and patterns that may be used by a development team – Blueprints is the next stage in this development.

Using the Visual Studio plugin, you can use what are termed “Blueprints”. A Blueprint contains guidance for a particular task. For example, setting up authentication and authorization on a website could be contained within a blueprint. This could be as simple as a workflow document (termed a readable resource), or it could be that the Blueprint provides a custom tool or template for doing the task (termed an executable resource).

Why bother with this? Well, the main benefit is that you can create your own Blueprints (that can be distributed via RSS feeds). When you work through a few software projects, you start to see the same things needing to be done again and again. Building a Blueprint is not neccessarily trivial, but what you can do is to ‘harvest’ all of the common code between these projects.

Why not just create a common code library? That is a good idea no matter what else you do, but what Blueprints does is allow a delivery of the common code and the documentated guidance as well, all in the one package. A Blueprint can be composed of other Blueprints, so there is a lot of scope to create some complex, task-specific Blueprints quickly.

Is it any good? After high hopes for it, I am a little disappointed overrall. It is quite cumbersome to create your own Blueprints, and the documentation support is quite lacking, which leads to a pretty steep learning curve to get the most out of it. Also, the use of a Blueprint within your project is more intrusive than I would like … it just doesn’t feel friendly. Future versions of Visual Studio are set to include some incarnation of Blueprints, but I think it needs to improve a bit more first.

Christchurch Code Camp – Design with Paper Prototypes

Matthew — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:49:26 +0000

The recent Christchurch Code Camp was a huge success – but I could be biased

Here are the slides for the lightning talk I did entitled Design with Paper Prototypes. The Powerpoint has speaker notes attached so there should be a rough idea of what I was talking about.

Drop me an email or comment below with any feedback (especially if you were there on the day!).

Microsoft SyncToy 2.0

Matthew — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:25:47 +0000

At the recent Christchurch Codecamp 2008, Mat Veloso mentioned SyncToy as part of his session on “SQL2008 for developers”. It helps you copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers quickly and easily. This is great for backup and for the whole laptop/desktop worker scenarios.

It was originally developed for professional photographers to sync their photos in confidence. It is built using the Microsoft Synchronisation Framework, which in terms of SQL Server, has the same features as Merge Replication. However, what the framework does is to abstract those same features and allow them to be applied to ‘providers’ other than SQL Server. In this case, the provider is the file system! To get an idea how this was developed, take a look at the white paper “Introducing Microsoft Sync Framework: Sync Services for File Systems”.

Well worth a look! Download SyncToy 2.0 from here.

Microsoft Surface – Whiteboard (Touch Wall)

Matthew — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:46:55 +0000

Reading Nigel Parker’s blog, there is a link to a video of Bill Gates demonstrating Touch Wall. It’s an interesting adaptation of the original Surface concept from Microsoft, but this time everything is presented vertically (makes a lot of sense really). What I found interesting from the video was the use of Deep Zoom like technology to browse around a large ‘surface’ and then manipulate any objects available. I say ‘Deep Zoom like’ because I don’t think manipulating objects, like what’s demonstrated in the video, is officially supported by that technology or WPF … not yet anyway.

Catch the video here. It’s worth 5 minutes of your lunch break.

Where’s Blend Express?

Matthew — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:16:12 +0000

Microsoft is ramping up it’s push for Silverlight all the time. The new Microsoft Download Beta site, written with Silverlight, is an attempt to show off what it can do (it’s also a good way to get Silverlight installed on users machines!). Microsoft has the push at the moment of getting designers and developers to collaborate and have two great tools to do that, with Expression Blend (& Blend 2.5) for designers and VS2008 for developers. Realistically though, the designer and the developer are the same person in the majority of cases, at least for the initial phases of a project.

It’s a thought I’ve had for a while now. In the same way that the free Express versions of Visual Studio target the hobbyist developer, the same needs to be done with Blend. If you get the hobbyists onto Silverlight, you’ll start to see it everywhere! Hence, Blend Express!

To get Silverlight more competitive with Flash it’s going to take developer (not designer) acceptance. Silverlight is all about the UI, but it’s just hard work to do that at the moment!

LaunchWave08: Keep your eye on your postbox

Matthew — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 09:38:17 +0000

If you attended the recent LaunchWave08 sessions in NZ, you’ll likely remember that the Vista SP1 disk that was meant to be in your delegate pack, was missing. Microsoft said they would send them out to everyone once they had them … well, they’ve gone one step further and sent a copy of Vista Ultimate (with SP1 of course) instead.

Good on them. I would have preferred the promised version Windows 2008 (which delegates did get, but with a one year license!) … but I’m not complaining. This makes it the 3rd complementary version of Vista Ultimate I’ve been given!

ASP.NET Wiki

Matthew — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:44:54 +0000

Announced yesterday is a new ASP.NET Wiki launched on the Microsoft ASP.NET site (beta of course)

http://wiki.asp.net/

Most of the early content is from Scott Hanselman, but if the uptake is good, it promises to be a good focal point for those “how-to’s” that you often have to scour blogs to find.

Microsoft makes offer to buy Yahoo!

Matthew — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:07:59 +0000

At $31 a share, the deal would be $44.6 Billion in cash and shares. The reason behind the move is to tauted to be about gaining a greater share of the online search and advertising revenue, with the obvious focus being to compete more strongly with Google.

But it is not just advertising and search that Microsoft want to compete on. They are continuing their drive towards online software-as-a-service products. Steve Ballmer has said:

“The Windows user wants to be live. There will be a Windows Live. There will be an Office Live”

Yahoo! will provide an advantage in this area too due it’s recent development efforts and aquisition of Zimbra (online email and calendar product). Let’s see what happens if it goes ahead.

Expression available in MSDN Subscriptions

pureblue — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:41:06 +0000

It always seemed a little strange to me that the new Expression Web and Blend tools would not be available under a MSDN Subscription … after all, they are still development tools at heart.

Well Microsoft is, from now, adding these two tools to the MSDN Premium subscribtion, which was apparently inspired by customer feedback!

As announced on Somasegar’s WebLog:

“Expression Blend and Expression Web are intended to help creative professionals collaborate with developers to create rich user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista applications and beyond, which means we need to make sure both tools are readily available to our developer community.”

The offer excludes Expression Design and Expression Media as they “… are not directly intended for application development, we feel they fall outside the current scope of MSDN Subscriptions”. Fair enough.