A Glance into Gesture Based Interactions

I've been invited by the Costa Rican Human Computer Interaction Group, to do a session tonight on Gesture Based Interactions.

Lots is going on in the field of alternative interactivity and gesture and touch is probably the one in its vogue.

If you happen to be in Costa Rica and have a couple of hours free come and join me... it's going to be fun!

Remember to get back here after the session is ended for resources and links to further resources.

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Technorati Tags: Adobe,Microsoft,Microsoft Surface,iPhone,Windows 7,Multi-touch,Gestures,Interaction,Interaction Design

Welcome to the Singularity

So it is public now, and hence I am allow to blog about it.

Singularity is here!

Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world, and you can be part of it.

This year, over 100 of the most influent minds on the web will be discussing and modeling what the future of the web will be like... of course after this year's MIX and MAX.

This conference is planned to take place in the cloud between October 24th and the 25th - so you won't have to go thru all the pains of booking flights, hotels, nor submitting expense reports, which makes it not only great, but greener.

The conference is being organized by multitasking Aral Balkan, which most of you people will know him for his work in the Flash Community, and his talking bunny.

The world as we know it is more interconnected now than ever before, twitter has become essential part of it and we even feel lonely when its service is down - well not everyone, but yes! there are people; and having a web conference on the web, and by the people from the web, will really set the roots for the kind of world we are all working to make reality.

Aral is still picking up on presenters, although there is already a list of really compelling people making in the elite. If you think you have what it gets to get people talking about the future or a service that can revolutionize the way we convey our life in the matrix, go ahead and mail them your idea - who knows you might end up being one of the stars on one of this year's best conference.

More info here.

Later.

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Technorati Tags: Conferences,MIX,MAX,Singularity,Web,Web2.0,Aral,Design,Development,RIA,RIE,Events

Silverlight 1.1 is now Silverlight 2.0 and more to come...

Today will be moved to history as the day Silverlight 2.0 feature set was made public along with the road map of what Microsoft feels like is the future of ASP.NET 3.5.

Just a week after Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 were released to manufacturing, ScottGu's team keeps working fearlessly in the next round of features that will mark ASP.NET and Silverlight as big contesters for the future of both the Web and the RIA world.

Silverlight 1.1 moves to be Silverlight 2.0 and will go into Beta on Q1'08; such release will ship with a GoLive license allowing companies to build upon it and move applications to production.

ASP.NET will see itself upgraded with an Extension Release that will sport a set of Framework Extension excelling manageability in the way we build applications and improvements to current technologies like AJAX, Silverlight integration, and Dynamic Data consumption.

Last but not least important, IIS 7.0 will present a new deployment strategy for applications residing both in single or over web farms that will allow version, deployment and roll back of features both from the command prompt or thru the management shell; all of this as part of the release of Windows Server 2008.

A lot of traction has gone into twitter during the last half an hour and I guess this are great news that we all welcome. Let's keep our eyes open to the future and how it all behaves.

Microsoft, and specifically the Visual Studio team has been doing a great job during this decade, sometimes even pushing the boundaries of the technology itself towards the developer community and the digital world itself. Keep up the good work!

For more info I encourage you go check ScottGu's blog post here.

Cheers!

G.

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Technorati Tags: Silverlight,.NET,Microsoft Expression,RIA,RIE,Microsoft,Visual Studio,Orcas,WPF,ASP.NET,XAML,IIS,Windows Server 2008

IronRuby is in the wild as a pre-alpha with its own source code freely available

It's been some busy and interesting days for me lately as I am on board learning a new wave of tools, languages and architectures.

One of this newly -for me at least- dynamic architectures surrounds is Python; and as I'm opening my mind to the "think dynamic" I found ScottGu cheering up for a different, yet quite impressive, dynamic language making it to the .NET family: IronRuby.

Just as there is a current heavy-duty wave of applications being surfaced in LAMP-like environments, powered by Python, Ruby and tens of RAD Frameworks being built in top of them, Microsoft has not stop playing and hence has brought its own flavors of dynamic seeds with one subtle difference, this seeds are supported by the strong power of the .NET CLR and its API.

As ScottGu states on his post

Today's IronRuby drop is still a very early version, and several language features and most libraries aren't implemented yet (that is why we are calling it a "pre-alpha" release). It does, though, have much of the core language support implemented, and can also now use standard .NET types and APIs.

...

The end result will be a compatible, fast, and flexible Ruby implementation on top of .NET that anyone can use for free.

Part of the samples being made available on the web with this release is a WPF hello world application written in IronRuby showing the strength of what would be enabled once it gets feature complete.

If you want to start playing along with this set of bits John Lam has a post showing you how to download and build your this preliminary release.

Also, if you are interested in what the world of ASP.NET dynamics looks like check out this video on ASP.NET Futures (May 2007) showing IronPython in action with Dynamic Data Controls.

Enjoy guys!

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Technorati Tags: IronPython, IronRuby, ScottGu, ASP.NET, .NET3.0, .NET3.5, WPF, Microsoft, Visual Studio, Web2.0, WinFx, Ajax, Dynamic Languages, DLR, CLR

Channel 8: A new member to Microsoft Channel Family

A couple of days ago Microsoft launched to the public a new technology channel targeted to college students around the world. With this new channel, called Channel 8, Microsoft complements the technology-driven channel triad joining the already known Channel 9 and on10.

As part of the content that will fill up this new on-line channel, there will be information regarding the Imagine Cup, which is a world wide coding tournament targeted to College Students, swapping places around different cities across the globe every year, this year it is time for Seoul-Korea to host the event.

If you want to know more about this new channel and its future go on and watch this video where Joe Wilson introduces everybody to the new concept and what to expect from its different sections.

And to keep an eye on them here are the RSS feed and Video Podcast that you can easily add to your iTunes and sync your iPhone or iPod Video for offline watching.

Enjoy!

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Technorati Tags: Channel 8, Channel 10, Channel 9, Microsoft, Channel, Video, Video Player, Education, Imagine Cup, College, Computer Science, Programming

No Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 nor Windows Server 2008 this year

Today and as part of the Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference @ Denver, Microsoft unveiled the official dates for the joined lunch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

From the press release:

In anticipation for the most significant Microsoft enterprise event in the next year, Turner announced that Windows Server^® 2008, Visual Studio^® 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008, kicking off hundreds of launch events around the world.

From this, Microsoft expects to grow its revenue base out of Windows Vista during the 2008 fiscal year, given the slow adoption from the corporate and public sector who still keeps ordering Windows XP computers.

So here you go guys... let's keep waiting and playing along with CTP's and Beta bits, anyone for a Beta 2 or even 3 of all of theses products? Or should we follow AS3/Flex3/AIR in the mean time?

Full press release here.

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Technorati tags: Microsoft, Visual Studio 2008, Orcas, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Vista, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5

Creating an Outlook look-alike with WPF and C#

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on Microsoft Educational Resources available on the web, this post in intended to recompile educational resources associated to Microsoft technologies, so that it will help jump start on some of its new stuff.

As part of this post I pointed to this hands-on lab, that Tim Sneath had previously posted, demonstrating how to create an outlook look-alike application using WPF and C#.

Since then I've seen people coming to this site looking for it and somehow Google have not done a perfect job indexing it, that's why I am giving it its own post now, so it will facilitate people getting here.

Link to the hands-on lab is here and files needed are here.

Enjoy!

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Technorati Tags: Microsoft, .NET3.0, WPF, Outlook, Orcas, WinFx, C#, RIA, RIE

Visual Studio Orcas June CTP has bee out there for a bit more than a month... sleeping

As I am getting my home win-dev-machine back on track after a month or so of been asleep at a friend's house, I found out today that a refresh to the SDK that shipped with Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 has been out for a bit more than a month and there was not that much said about it in blogs; I even went back to ScottGu's blog to see if I missed the news anywhere but somehow it wasn't that important of a preview given the lack of coverage.

As part of this new SDK release, an update to the .Net Framework 3.5 has been put out there as well as a refresh for the for ADO.NET Entity Framework, both sporting the June CTP postfix, even though their release mark is on July 2nd.

I'm getting the 3 of them installed right now; what has changed or improved in each of the installed base are as follow:

Orcas SDK June CTP:

The Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” SDK June 2007 CTP targets Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" Beta 1. The Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” SDK June 2007 CTP is intended to let customers work with “Orcas” Beta 1 extensibility features.

This CTP adds and updates the following features:

1. Run As Normal User (RANU) - when the Visual Studio SDK is already installed on a computer, a user with non-administrator permissions now can create a package by using the wizard, and then press F5 to open the new package in the experimental hive. 
2. Changes to DSL Tools include new path editing. In DSL Tools, paths are used in a DSL definition to specify diagram element maps and explorer behavior. This CTP adds richer path editing to the DSL Designer, in the form of a drop-down tree control. You can now either type the path syntax, or you can display a tree view of all the valid paths from the current starting point. 
3. Release month, for example 2007.04, is removed from the SDK folder structure and “Microsoft” was added to the VS SDK shortcut and root folder name.

.Net Framework 3.5 June CTP:

According to the release notes, the June CTP features several enhancements including:

1. Increased integration of Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
2. Improved ASP.NET AJAX support
3. New web protocol support for creating Windows Communication Foundation services (AJAX, JSON, REST, POX, RSS, ATOM, and other web service standards)
4. Full tooling support for the Windows Communication Foundation and the Windows Presentation Foundation
5. New base class library classes

ASP.NET Entity Framework June CTP:

This CTP contains updates to the ADO.NET Entity Framework since the Visual Studio Codename "Orcas" Beta 1 release, including changes in Object Services, Query, Entity Client, and the Entity Data Model Wizard in Visual Studio. Some of the new features include IPOCO, detaching from long-running ObjectContext instances, multiple entity sets per type, support for referential integrity constraints, span support, transactions, serialization, no more default constructors in code-generated classes, improvements to stored procedure support, access to the underlying store connection, directory macros in the entity connection string to support hosted scenarios, native SQL read-only views, UNICODE support in Entity SQL, query plan caching, and canonical functions in Entity SQL.

Now the links:

• ADO.NET Entity Framework June 2007 CTP, here
• Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" SDK June 2007 CTP, here
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 June 2007, here

Enjoy and happy upgrading!

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Technorati Tags: Microsoft, WinFx, Silverlight, .NET, .NET 3.5, Orcas, Visual Studio, ASP.NET

Microsoft Educational Resources for the Future

So I've been with not that much to do during the last couple of days and so I started to reach around the different Educational Resources I've seen lately around the web for Microsoft Technologies, specifically WinFx and Silverlight related stuff.

Update: I will try to maintain this bit as updated as possible.

First in the list is the Lynda.com set of tutorials available free for Blend and Design. The Blend set was taught by Lee Brimelow from thewpfblog.com and the Design one was done by Ted LoCascio. Between these two you guys you will find over 10 hours of video tutorials.

Next, Tim Sneath posted today about this Hands On Lab that will guide you on creating an Outlook-look-alike application based on WPF. With this lab you will go thru a bit more than 90 pages and by the end of this tutorial you will have a resemble of Outlook plus a vast experience in putting together a fairly complex application yourself using this new presentation framework.

- BTW Files needed will be found here.

Moving towards books, a few weeks ago I saw Chris Anderson published a new book on WPF called Essential Windows Presentation Foundation. From that book SearchVB.com is hosting Chapter 1 which I think serves as a really good introduction to this new way of building user experiences, I think this will go handy before the Hands-on 90-page-thing.

Anyway, I went also yesterday thru the Quickstart for Silverlight 1.0 (currently in Beta), I found it really nice and easy and holding a good structure as to guide you thru what the possibilities are with this first approach to building Rich Interactive Experiences on the web, with all its limitations and bugs, moreover I think it serves as a good ground base moving forward to the more powerful Silverlight 1.1 Quickstart (currently in public Alpha), which will be the more natural approach to all of us C# coders.

Celso Gomes, an interactive designer @ Microsoft, has also made available his website nibbles, which on his own words, it is a series of snack tutorials for hungry designers. Here you will find a good set of tutorials for creating both WPF and Silverlight applications using Expression Blend.

I also found this post from Tim Sneath on a series of training for Microsoft technologies going over this summer across the states, so if you happen to live near by any of this stops (they are quite a lot) then you might have the opportunity to attend one or more of those.

So here you have, a good set of resources to entertain yourself for a few days and get some new stuff in your Microsoft box of knowledge,

Cheers!

Apollo is a new AIR

Just as I reported back on Saturday, Adobe had some new releases under its sleeve and today it came out playing drums for what it is a big set of announcements in the Rich Media world, first one to get it was Adobe's Ryan Stewart here.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is the official name for what we have come to know as Apollo. A new beta release has been made public today along with integration plug-ins for both Adobe's Dreamweaver and the Aptana IDE, for those of you who want to start kicking the HTML on AIR approach.

Following along with this release another beta made its debut today, as providing greater support for AIR, Flex3 is becoming the first iteration release since Flex was made Open Source earlier this year.

To end this morning of great news a refresh was announced for the Flash 9 Runtime providing hardware acceleration to video playing when in full screen, boosting the capabilities of the client... as to date this is the first time Adobe adds any kind of support for Hardware acceleration to one of its Flash based product... so great things are up to expect out this new approach.

Following links will provide you with the meat of this great morning:

• Adobe AIR SDK and Runtime
• Adobe Flex3 Builder Beta
• Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver
• Developing AIR with Flex3 and Flash

An apple has born between windows!!

A few weeks ago I posted about my intension to get a Mac and well I am happy to report I finally did. I have been using my new white MacBook for over a week now and, although I used to play with Linux-based systems when I was in college, it is been kind of funny the transition towards the Tiger.

At the office I'm still using Vista and at home I have Windows XP SP2 running on my desktop: which pretty much makes for my primary development box and will remain as such for the foreseen future. Although, during this past evenings I've been trying to find my way on my newborn MacBook, and have to confess it has been great!

So far I've been able to do pretty much everything I'm used to do on my Wintel box regarding office and creative stuff, though I haven't been able to find a replacement for Project (I think OmniPlan might work out but I haven't got a chance to try it out)... any suggestions?

On the client development side I've got installed the trial version for Flex Builder 2.0.1 and just finished up setting Apache 2.2.

For server side programming I will get ColdFusion Scorpio installed tomorrow and will set up both Dreamweaver CS3 and the CFEclipse plug-in for Eclipse and give them a try together... I need to get to know this 2 guys for a project I am involved in right now, so I thought of trying them out both and choose the best for onward development... I will keep u posted on how this goes!

Looking forward, given this new addition to my family of gadgets, I will add some new coverage to Mac stuff on my blog, so remember to keep track of the new Mac section as u might find interesting stuff as I explore more of this new friend of mine!

Cheers u mates!

P.S. Following this post I'm putting a couple of references to the installation of Apache and PHP 5 on a Mac as I think they deserve its own space alone...