Als developer bij Wortell houd ik me voornamelijk bezig met de laatste Microsoft technologieën zoals Surface, Silverlight, Azure, Windows Phone 7, Lync, HTML5, Kinect. Daarnaast heb ik ook kennis van andere mobile systemen zoals IOS.

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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!

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.

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:

• Microsoft Unified Communications: Developer Platform Futures
• Integrating and Extending the Microsoft Office Communicator Experience with Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight

 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

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:

• Microsoft Surface SDK 1.0 SP1 Workstation Edition
• Surface SDK Documentation in the MSDN Library
• Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.1
• XNA Game Studio 3.1 Documentation in the MSDN Library

Here is a fantastic sample of creative minds that use the unique features as object recognition in Microsoft surface.

Enjoy!

[youtube width="560" height="340"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi8cUoGNvaU[/youtube]