Microsoft Australia has a new programming competition, 200 hours (well, 160 hours as of writing this post) called DevSta. It's open to all Australians – professional programmer or not.
Competition Brief
In a nutshell, you have to make something that is is "old school/new cool", it confuses me somewhat. Read the full brief.
Prizes
First prize:
Return economy airfares to Las Vegas for two people (approx. $7,000 RRP- based on flights from your nearest capital city).
Five nights’ luxury accommodation, twin share at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino (valued at $3,190 RRP).
Two tickets to the MIX09 Developer Conference from 18-20 March 2009 ($3,000 RRP). MIX09 is an international conference for developers and business strategists. Hear from visionary keynote speakers, expand your technical knowledge at targeted sessions, and put it all to practice in hands-on labs and workshops.
One copy of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 Professional Edition with a 1 year MSDN Premium Subscription valued at $4,355 RRP.
An Xbox 360 Elite Console package - with Halo® 3, Gears of War® and Saint’s Row games valued at $865 RRP! This premier Xbox 360™ console package includes a huge 120GB hard drive, a high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) port, a high-definition cable, and a premium black finish. It also includes a black wireless controller and black Xbox Live® headset. It also has enough space for a whole library of Xbox Live Arcade games and downloadable high-definition TV shows, movies, music, and more - available from Xbox Live Marketplace.
Samsung Omnia mobile phone valued at $849 RRP.
Second prize:
One copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition with a 1 year MSDN Premium Subscription valued at $4,355 RRP.
An Xbox 360 Elite Console package - with Halo 3, Gears of War and Saints Row games valued at $865 RRP.
A Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 valued at $449.95 RRP. Including the ultimate rechargeable keyboard and mouse for Windows Vista and PC entertainment, this great package is designed to make it easier than ever to control PC media from your desk, your lap or even the comfort of your couch!
A Xbox Live 12-Month Premium Gold Pack valued at $99.95 RRP.
Third prize:
One copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition with a 1 year MSDN Premium Subscription valued at $4,355 RRP.
An Xbox 360 Elite Console package - with Halo 3, Gears of War and Saints Row games valued at $865 RRP .
Fourth prize:
An Xbox 360 Elite Console package - with Halo 3, Gears of War and Saints Row games valued at $865 RRP.
One user licensed copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition valued at $1,387 RRP.
Fifth prize:
One user licensed copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition valued at $1,387 RRP.
A Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 valued at $449.95 RRP. Including the ultimate rechargeable keyboard and mouse for Windows Vista and PC entertainment, this great package is designed to make it easier than ever to control PC media from your desk, your lap or even the comfort of your couch!
Best Windows Mobile application prize:
Two Samsung Omnia mobile phones valued at $849 RRP each.
A Samsung 40" series 6LCD TV valued at $3,099 RRP.
It looks interesting, but the site scares me with all the "bling"
With Remix over, I thought I'd sum up my thoughts on the event. Last year's Remix was my first Microsoft event, but now I have a few more under my belt. This year I hung around Stephen Price, whose Quokka cartoons were featured all over the Remix blog. Stephen's a very cool bloke, even if he gets lost too easily.
Keynote
While Mark Pesce's keynote speech was fantastic, I'm not sure how much relevance there was to most of Remix. The content of Remix's sessions were always going to be about about XAML (Silverlight/WPF), IE8/ASP.NET, and Expression Studio - that is technically focused, rather than the social implications. The Live Platform session (the third session) certainly did expand on "hyper-connectivity" (social) and the technological side of things, but the rest of the Remix "conversation" was perhaps a bit too focused on the technical or product side of things. That aside, I will repeat, it was a fantastic presentation. Get yourself on Twitternow!
If you weren't at Remix, watch the video above (text version)
Session 1 - What's New in Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5 and beyond
I quite like WPF, but I haven't really seen the need to move to .NET 3.5….until Joseph's presentation.
.NET 3.5 cool things are:
New (I think?) Addins space is in a secure isolate (separate app domains), and are able to have different security levels, such as (AddInSecurtyLevel.)Internet or FullTrust. For security purposes, Addins do not see a "parent" GUI object - they cannot "walk up the VisualTree".
Under .NET 3.5 SP1, ClickOnce and XBAPs supported in Firefox
Now possible to "brand"/customise the setup program (generated by the VisualStudio deploy wizard)
The WPF cool things are:
Interactive 2D on 3D is now "native", rather than a third party/unsupported library
WPF can make use of some DirectX stuff natively, rather than having to Interop/P/Invoke
Better debugging for WPF Databinding (this stuff is gold - will be making use of it for MahTweets!)
Formatting in DataTemplates/DataBinding (ie, <TextBlock Text="{Binding textField, StringFormat= - \{1\}}" /> will prepend " - " to the string) Nothing "wow", but so much more logical to do that on the presentation side of things, rather than needing to modify the business objects so that you can present the data correctly.
Recycling Virtualisation. Emphasis because this is particularly cool. In .NET 3.0, UI controls such as a ListBox would be virtualised, generating the ListBoxItems for the items that are visible at the time (+5 items above or below). When the ListBox is scrolled, and a new bunch of ListBoxItems is visible, the old ones are destroyed. Recycling Virtualisation in .NET 3.5 doesn't destroy the "old' ListBoxItems, but reuses them. This means memory usage while scrolling stays about the same and doesn't continuously grow the more you scroll!
Out of band releases for new controls, much better than having to wait for .NET vNext
ShaderEffects sort of replace BitmapEffects (both still exist, but no reason to use BitmapEffects now) implemented in hardware so performance is much much better, and scales properly. You can create your own ShaderEffects using HSHL/PS
Ugly things:
.NET 3.5 is 200MB in size, compared to 50B for 3.0, and ~20meg for v1/1.1/2.0. 3.5 does include both x64 and x86 binaries, which partially explains the size. In VS2008/.NET3.5 SP1, there will be a ".NET Client Only Framework" (compile option in VS2008 SP1) that is aiming for ~25MB download, but wont include all the .NET libraries (such as System.Web), but only the ones that are most commonly used in client applications.
This was a fairly run-of-the-mill "I have a new application, let me show you it" presentation, covering Expression Studio 2 (except Expression Encoder 2) as well as Deep Zoom Composer. Unfortunately, for any attendees of Remix 07 or Mix On Campus, this sort of stuff (albeit for xStudio1) was pretty much what the events were all about last time, and it felt like the audience knew a bit more (about their favourite specific application) than Tim did.
While the list of new features to xMedia2 are neat (RAW image handling, batch renaming, metadata browsing, voice annotations, gallery generation), I still don't really know what its purpose is in the Expression Studio suite. If it was a free app I could probably find a use for it, but for photo/image management Live Gallery is "good enough", and I manage all my music in Media Player…maybe its great for video management?
Contrasting with statements from Lee Brimelow from last year (that "everything you can do in Design, you can do in Blend, so I don't see the point of xDesign"), Tim showed off xDesign2 and some of the reasons why you'd use it over xBlend. Yes, you can probably do everything in xBlend, just like everything you can do in Photoshop can be done in Paint. Being a developer, I think I'll still be sticking to Blend, but I could see how the more artistic parts of XAML would be easier in xDesign.
Despite the improvements to xWeb2, as a developer and somebody who has been generated CSS/(X)HTML for years, I will not get any value out of xWeb2. VS2008 does all the stuff I need to do, or Notepad++ steps in when I need to go kung fu on my CSS. PHP IntelliSense/support has made it in, but this should have been a feature in xWeb2.
Session 3 - Windows Live Platform: Take the best of Windows Live and make it yours
I didn't really know what to expect from this session, the Live Platform session sounded like it would be pretty boring, but I wasn't overly interested in the other session which was upstairs, so the Live Platform session it was! I was pleasantly surprised, as this was a very cool session, possibly my favourite for the day! My laziness paid off!
The key things were how you can use Microsoft's Live Platform to create incredibly interactive websites by making use of the Live services such as Virtual Earth, Live Messenger (/Hotmail) contacts/presence, Spaces, Storage (FolderShare/SkyDrive), Notifications (via email, SMS for North America, or via WLM through the alerts service).
For a few projects I have in mind, the Live ID login system looks appealing, although I'm wondering if a service like OpenID is more 'acceptable' (by end users, since Microsoft is so evil and all, apparently). I'd be very interested in the Live Platform Team's view on OpenID vs LiveID, or if they can coexist.
Angus left Twhirl running while giving his presentation, so I managed to get a few tweets popping up on the screen!
Session 4 - Building an Immersive, Integrated Media Experience in Silverlight
This session showed off the new ABC Silverlight Store, which while cool, is all Silverlight v1 stuff. It just seemed to lack the "wow", going over very similar things that were covered at Remix 07, without the edge the original presentations on Silverlight v1 had because it wasn't new. I walked out (I needed a break/fresh air, not because I was bored) before it finished, so the last 15 minutes may have been awesome, its hard to tell.
The Silverlight Store also had a matching desktop client…written in Silverlight? I think (as a demonstration of the power of Silverlight and WPF), it would have been mucho cooler to do that in WPF. The technical reasons for not doing so are more than understandable - WPF weighs in at 20meg, and Silverlight at about 4meg. Both clients being Silverlight means just one framework download/install, which is much more friendly for the target audience.
The presentation was done using DeepZoom, zooming into each slide or diagram to show more detail, such as exploding a file overview into the actual code behind that file. That bit was cool.
Session 5 - Skipped
I skipped session five, not because of the content available, but because I ran into Long Zheng, and we got to chatting. Long has a new Zune ("Long Zhune"). He's a cool guy, with or without the Zune!
Session 6 - Using Microsoft Silverlight for Creating Rich Mobile User Experiences
I've been looking at creating a mobile version of MahTweets, using .NET CF. The three problems I have with .NET CF are limited controls available, it's all WinForms crap, and only available on Windows Mobile phones. Silverlight, however, will be on Windows Mobile phones and Nokia's S60 and S40 OS' phones, uses XAML solving both WinForms problem, and amount of controls available!
A good list of S60 phones can be found at the Nokia Gaming Blog - I think the cool thing is that it includes the popular E65, and all (I think) of the powerful N series phones! It is foreseeable that other phones (or browsers) will eventually be able to play Silverlight as well!
Shane talked about how Mobile is already big, but is already accelerating faster than PC/laptop markets, and the ways designs will have to change not just for the limited capability or screen real estate, but the way the mobile user "snacks" on content.
Michael demo'd Silverlight on a HTC WinMo phone, but unfortunately its "pre-pre-pre-beta", so we aren't able to play with anything yet. Apparently some of the other Remix events around the world pulled the Silverlight mobile content! The goal of the Silverlight mobile project is to use the exact same Silverlight tools, and allow all existing Silverlight stuff to just work - you wont have to compile to "Silverlight Mobile", ala .NET and .NET CF.
Imagine Cup
During Session 5, I had Long talk me through what his teams project was all about. It is very cool, but rather than fumbling around to describe what it is, he's already blogged about the team SOAK entry.
It was fantastic to see that some of the feedback from last year made the event change this year, such as including free wifi and 'recharge' stations. Unfortunately, the wifi/net connection weren't too stable up until ~3pm, and other suggestions such as including pens for the feedback forms didn't make it through, so Stephen and I pinched one of the vendor's pens.
I can't remember if I wrote down "better food", but this year had a lot less salmon and cold wedges! There were even TimTams! ('cause, you know, this it totally the most important part of the day).
This year the event was split across Melbourne and Sydney, and cut down to one day (each). This year's venue (Melbourne Town Hall) was both better and worse than last year. More room to move between sessions and chairs to sit on, but higher ceilings (which created echo's and "lost the vibe"), consistently bad lighting and uncomfortable chairs during the sessions all worked against the Town Hall. A few others agreed on the venue being 'so-so', and Ed Hooper suggested that the Melbourne Convention Centre, which is where Heroes Happened was held, would have been a better choice - which I agree with.
Remix is still in an infant state, its still learning about itself, but it is developing, experimenting and evolving. While not everything was perfect, I still will be attending next year because despite all my complaints it was still a great (albeit exhausting) day. Next year, however I think I'll just take my camera and a notepad, rather than laptop + camera, which is fairly weighty. I'll also sit a bit closer so that some more of my photos turn out. Argh!
Just like last year, Nick Hodge has a summary post of activity on the blogosphere about Remix.
My photo management tool of choice is Live Gallery (WLG): it's fast, free, and fairly featuresome.
One feature that is lacking however, is to upload to your own 'custom' gallery. Oh, sure, you can upload to Flickr, or Live Spaces, but honestly, who uses either of those services, pfft! Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a plugin API (yet?) for Live Gallery so it isn't possible to add your own image gallery service to upload - well, not as neatly as Flickr/Live Spaces.
Step 1: Add Your Gallery
To add your own custom gallery uploading to Live Gallery, we need to exploit the Online Printing functionality. Each printing service is actually defined in the registry, and the default "Print@Kodak" is a great starting point to seeing what data we need.
To add your own, it is as simple as creating your own key inside of DownloadedProviders, however either Windows or WLG seems to delete the registry key after closing WLG. Instead of inside DownloadedProviders, create a Providers key (inside InternetPhotoPrinting), and then create your own Provider key, with the same sorts of values (displayname, href, description and icon) as the Kodak Provider.
It should look something like this image when you're done
There is another benefit to doing it this way, under the printing menu, you will now have 'Print', 'Order prints', and'Order prints from foo'
Step 2: Prepare your gallery
While it is great we've thrown it a random URL, how do we know what data is actually being sent?
Thankfully Elmar Putz had figured out the XP Web Publishing Wizard (which is very, very similar), so that was most of the leg work done.
First, the page set in the Href in Registry. I'm going to cut to the chase and just list the HTML/Javascript, if you want more of an explanation, see Elmar's article (linked above). All you need to do is change the UploadURL and EndUrl
<html> <head> <script language="JavaScript"> var UploadURL = "http://mydomain/upload/"; var EndURL = "http://mydomain/aftertheupload.html"; function window.onload() { window.external.SetWizardButtons(0,1,0); }
function window.onback() { window.external.FinalBack(); }
function window.onnext() { var xml = window.external.Property("TransferManifest"); var files = xml.selectNodes("transfermanifest/filelist/file");
for (i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { var postTag = xml.createNode(1, "post", ""); postTag.setAttribute("href", UploadURL); postTag.setAttribute("name", "myfile");
If you're writing your own gallery, or simply just want a way to avoid having to FTP in to upload files, it may look as if you've lost the meta-data (specifically I mean tags) from your photos. Fear not, however, as there is a way!
All the tags are stored in 'XMP' format, which is essentially just embedded XML.
.NET 2.0 In .NET 2.0, there is no native way to read in XMP Information, so we need to use some XML parsing to get it. Microsoft blogger Omir Shahine, has a great post on accessing XMP data in .NET 2, including the code/general discussion on the matter.
.NET 3.x+ In .NET 3 and above, inside the Windows Imaging Component, there is the BitmapMetaClass. However this is both more and less complex than using regular expressions (above), in that you nave to use the proper 'paths' for accessing specific data. I won't cover it here, but WIC/BitmapMetaClass is what you should look into if you want the .NET 3+ method of accessing XMP/EXIF data.
PHP Like .NET 2, there is no native way to read in XMP information. The below code will return an array of XMP Tags.
<?php
function GetTags($filename)
{
$handle=fopen($filename,"r");
$image=fread($handle,filesize($filename));
fclose($handle);
preg_match("/LastKeywordXMP>([\w\W\t\f\s]*)LastKeywordXMP>/i",$image,$matches);
$tags=split("</rdf:li>",$matches[1]);
for ($i=0;$i<count($tags);$i++)
{
$tags[$i] =trim(strip_tags($tags[$i]));
}
return$tags;
}?>
Final Notes
Since there isn't an authentication option in the printing wizard, security is a concern, particularly in a multiuser environment. You could implement any/all of the following however
Since it is just HTML, there is absolutely no reason that you couldn't add in a HTML form for entering the username and password as the "first stage". The second page would be returned from the server, with the (javascript) settings to allow uploading. It is a hosted IE session, so it should store/access cookies - if they've logged in via IE, they should remain logged in!
create a 'secure private' hash and append that to the url, ie http://mygallery/upload.php?hash=DADGGSDGFS123 This would mean user would have a separate (auto-generated I'd assume…) REG file to import
IP based filtering (okay idea, sucks if your IP changes, or if you're on a public network)
If you haven't been lucky enough to have had access to Vista SP1 through Technet or MSDN, Microsoft have released SP1 to the general public today. Wondering why you'd bother upgrading? Apart from security roll ups and whatnot, APC discovered that Vista with SP1 is up to 86% faster in certain tasks than without SP1 (metrics via Nick Hodge) - very very cool.
This stufflooks pretty cool, Office Live Workspace and Exchange for Primary Schools right through to Universities (what, no kindergarten love?) for free. The Exchange stuff would be particularly cool. Maybe I can convince Live@Edu that I'm part of the "Aeoth University of Awesome"?
I'll never see it before I graduate, Monash are stuck in their days of overuse of Java and Blackboard - the system that doesn't let you open two tabs at once.
I'm not sure if xBlend 2.5 was announced recently, but I happened to see it in one of the slides from the Mix08 keynote, thanks to Long.
Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview supports Silverlight 2 Beta 1, and SL2B1 has a lot more WPF UI Elements in it. For me, this is really exciting, because I really didn't want to be creating buttons, list boxes, etc. If I'm going to create a control, it isn't going to be a 'fundamental' control. Before now, Silverlight 1.1/2 to me was awesome, but pointlessly tedious to develop.
Apart from that exciting news, Expression Studio 2 Beta has been released! The biggest thing that stands out for me is xWeb2 now has PHP Support! That's a huge step in the right direction, and seemed to be one of the biggest complaints at Remix last year.
The It's Not Cheating promotion is back again, and as I posted last year, Microsoft are offering to students, Office 2007 Ultimate for just $75. This time around, however, it is open to University AND TAFE students.
Just to recap, Office 2007 Ultimate edition contains Access, Accounting Express, Excel, InfoPath, Groove, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher and Word. According to StaticIce, the cheapest you can get it for is AUD$445 (academic license, otherwise it is about $750). Through the Its Not Cheating promotion, you can get it for $25 for one year, or $75 "for life". There is an additional cost if you want the DVD posted out ($17), but there is always the choice of downloading it.
To promote this, Microsoft has created a competition for us MSP's (and a few others), to win a smartphone or/and Xbox360 (with 3 games). I don't particularly need (although I certainly do want) either of those prizes, so I'd rather somebody more deserving gets them…and Long had the fantastic idea of opening the competition up to anybody who reads his blog, rather than entering it himself.
So, instead of competing against him, which would undoubtedly result in a Goliath (Long) vs David (Me) battle, if you want a chance to win the smartphone or Xbox360 I'm encouraging you to make your way over to Long's Its Not Cheating Competition blog post.
This 