Roeland Jimenez « Wortell weblog

Roeland Jimenez

Als developer bij Wortell houd ik me voornamelijk bezig met de laatste Microsoft technologieën zoals Surface, Silverlight, AZURE , OCS en ….

Posts by Roeland Jimenez

Pivot for Silverlight is now available!

29 06 2010

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Silverlight | 1 Comment

The last few months Wortell has been playing with the Silverlight bits for Pivot.
Today the Pivot team has released the PivotViewer Control for public download.

For more information on Pivot, have a look at the Pivot website at http://getpivot.com

On the Silverlight portal you can find more information on the PivotViewer Contol at http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/

Danny wrote a post on the Pivot desktop version a little while back. In his article he show you the FIFA World Cup matches. We will make this soon available in Silverlight.

I will also soon write an article on getting you pivot collections in to the cloud using Azure.

Go and play, it’s powerful stuff

Tags: Pivot, Silverlight

Windows Azure at No Charge

28 01 2010

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Uncategorized | No Comments

Starting from February Microsoft is billing for Windows Azure. For those of us that have not been able to play / test with Windows Azure, Microsoft created three offers free of charge:

Open to Everyone: Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special Offer.

For Microsoft Partners: Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special Offer for Microsoft Partner Network members.

For MSDN Subscribers: Windows Azure Platform MSDN Premium Offer for MSDN Premium Subscribers.

You can read more in the Windows Azure Team Blog

Have fun!

Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework v1.1 Released

21 01 2010

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Silverlight | 1 Comment

In November of last year, Microsoft release SFM, Silverlight Media Framework PDC Release.
We have been using IIS Smooth Streaming en different projects at Wortell.
On my current project for education we are using Silverlight Media Framework as well, where we are building exiting tooling around the SMF player for teachers and students.

With the SFM 1.1 release, progressive download is now fully supported making the SFM a fantastic framework to build on for any kind of video playing.

Updates in version 1.1 release

Progressive Download is now fully supported.
Integration with the SmoothStreamingMediaElement Beta 2 Release

You can download SFM 1.1 on codeplex.

On silverlight.net you can find how to videos on SMF to get you up to speed:

Embedding The Video Player
Styling And Templating The Video Player
Extending The Video Player
Out Of Stream Data Access
Using Application Settings
Creating Custom Timeline Markers
Building A Custom Bitrate Meter
Using SMF Logging
Live Mode vs. VOD
Hosting VOD using IIS Media Services

and / or download code samples

Tags: IIS Smooth Streaming, Silverlight, Silverlight Streaming

Public Release Candidate of VS 2010 and .NET 4

18 12 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in .NET Framework | No Comments

Today Microsoft announced an extra Release Candidate of VS 2010 and .NET 4. This release will be available in February 2010 for public download and will have the “go live”label.

The downside is that the final release date will be moved back a few weeks.

Create bootable VHD’s in Windows 7

8 12 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Virtualisation, Windows 7 | No Comments

In Windows 7 you can easily create bootable VHD’s. As a developer I think this is great especially now after PDC with so many beta releases. With a bootable VHD you can make full use of your hardware and keep a clean production machine. In this post I’ll show you the steps to create a bootable VHD that has been created in Windows Virtual PC.

The steps that we need to take are as follows:

Create a virtual machine using Windows Virtual PC (If you already have one, go to step 2)
Open you virtual machine in Windows Virtual PC
Run sysprep
Make it bootable

First you need a virtual machine. You can create a new one or use an existing one.
Open the virtual machine using Windows Virtual PC. When the virtual machine is loaded and you have logged in, run sysprep.
Open the command prompt as administrator. In the command prompt type:

c:\windows\system32\sysprep\ sysprep /generalize /shutdown

This will open the System Preparation Tool. Be sure to select the Generalize checkbox.

Wortell blog - Create bootable VHD’s in Windows 7

The next step is to add the VHD to the boot menu.
On your main system open the command prompt as administrator and type:

C:\>bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Beta System VHD"

This will great a GUID for your new entry. Copy this and use it in the line below:

C:\>bcdedit /set {98684a74-c96a-11de-a111-002170eb3c93} device vhd=[c:]\VHD\BetaSystem.vhd
C:\>bcdedit /set {98684a74-c96a-11de-a111-002170eb3c93} osdevice vhd=[c:]\VHD\BetaSystem.vhd
C:\>bcdedit /set {98684a74-c96a-11de-a111-002170eb3c93} detecthal on

Note: point the vhd= to your VHD on you file system.

That’s it. If you reboot your system, you will see you new VHD in the boot menu.

You can also create an VHD using the Disk Manager. Aviraj Ajgekar’s writes a great article on his blog “Windows 7: Boot from VHD First Impression”.

I hope this helps you having a clean production system.
Happy programming,

A special thanks to Volkert for testing this with me!

Silverlight website shows Wortell as showcase.

8 12 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Office Communications Server 2007R2, Silverlight, Unified Communications | 1 Comment

Silverlight.net is the official Silverlight community website from Microsoft. I am excited to see that they have added the Wortell website to their showcases.

Silverlight plays a large role in our website. We created a fun integration with Microsoft Unified Communications Server. Deep Zoom and IIS Smooth Streaming are used throughout the website. In our references page we use Silverlight for filtering.

Go have a look http://www.silverlight.net/showcase/ add done forget to give your rating!

Tags: Deep Zoom, IIS Smooth Streaming, OCS, Office Communications Server 2007R2, Silverlight, Silverlight Streaming, Unified Communications

First book for Microsoft Surface development is out.

3 12 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Surface | No Comments

Dr Neil has been giving Surface training for Microsoft since Surface came on the market. I had the pleasure of attending his training at the Microsoft Tech Center in Munich. I remember asking him if / when he would deliver a book… thanks Neil!

“Developing for Microsoft Surface”
The first comprehensive Microsoft Surface book is written for developers, designers and ‘C’ level personnel who are looking to explore and exploit this new paradigm in computing hardware. Developing for Microsoft Surface explains the potential of the digital platform that is Microsoft Surface, and how to utilize its immensely empowering features.

Tags: Microsoft Surface, Surface

A preview of what is to come with Office Communicator 14 development

24 11 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Office Communicator, Silverlight, Unified Communications | 2 Comments

One of my favorite Microsoft products is OCS. I don’t know why but I can get very excited about this product. One of my last projects was the “Our people” on the Wortell website. Here we used OCS to show the presence status of our colleagues in Silverlight. (This reminds me that I still have to write a post on how it was build.)

At PDC last week the OCS team had two session on their next release:

In this post I’ll try to give you a shore summary of what’s to come.

OCS 14 Managed API
A new fully managed API adopting standard .NET. What we can see from the demo’s is that there will be less code writing.

Support common applications
Support for Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2008 and up, Blend 3 and up, .NET 3.5 and up, IE 7 & 8

WPF and Silverlight controls
Drag and drop controls for WPF and Silverlight. Seems like there will be controls for all the features:

Search controls: Search input and search results
Browse contacts
View contacts
Contact details as contact & hover cards
Presence

Docking OCS windows in WPF and WinForms
Conversation window can be docked in your own applications

Conversation Contextual Information
You can send and receive contextual information for you custom application to the Communicator window. Contextual information is data that send to you calling party to quickly bring them into the same context as the context that you are in. An example is that you receive an email and you click on the sender presence symbol to start a conversation. The sender gets an OCS message. In this message a link is show to the email from where you started the conversation. When the calling party clicks this like the same email will be opened. You could do the same for you custom applications.

Menu extensions
You can add you own applications to the Communicator menu. Menu items can be added to right click main window and to the Contact Card overflow window.

Shell execution
You can shell execute your custom application and pass SIP URI’s

Conversation Window extension
A window can be attached to the conversation window. This is much like the Windows Live Messenger activities. This window has access to the conversation data. A very nice feature is, unlike now, that the conversation window stays open after the conversation has ended. This gives the user to do something with the conversation data afterwards. Seems like the OCS team does listen to their users. And best of all, native Silverlight hosting. (so we only develop an application once J)

Extend communications to role specific kiosks
Meaning that your custom application can start a conversation without being a contact itself. This is great for hospitality like applications!

It looks like great improvements and I’m getting all excited again. In January the Merto will start, I can’t wait to get my hands on the bits and start playing.

Keep you posted, happy programming

Tags: OCS 14, Silverlight, WPF

XNA Game Studio 3.0 support on Surface

24 11 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Surface | 2 Comments

The Microsoft Surface team announces XMA Game Studio 3.0 (and above) support on Surface SDK 1.0 SP1. It actually has since the release of SP1. Like myself, not all of us knew .

You should install XNA Game Studio before installing the Surface SDK. If the Surface SDK is already installed, you should install XNA Game Studio and the run the Surface SDK repair. After this software is installed, a new template “Surface Application (XNA Game Studio 3.0) is available in Visual Studio.

Resources:

Tags: Surface, XNA

Monsters in Microsoft Surface

20 11 2009