Carl Dickinson, March 16th, 2010
At MIX10 yesterday Microsoft officially announced the developer tools for Windows Phone Series 7 and the Release Candidate for Silverlight 4. In addition to the SL4 features in the beta, which I summarised in this blog, there are a number of additional enhancements with some real functional benefits:
- Rich text box control and printing enhancements > essential for modern business applications
- Official support of Google Chrome > all major browsers are now supported
- Silverlight apps (XAPs) can be digitally signed > give reassurance to users downloading your application
- Out of browser applications no longer need to have a windows border like Adobe AIR – customise the user experience
- Formal release of WCF RIA Services and MEF > the tools to easily integrate applications with existing databases / systems
The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP was also released and having downloaded it and played with it briefly any Silverlight developer will very quickly be able to develop applications for the WP7. I really like the standard controls that utilise the WP7 skin and the standard transitions for moving from screen to screen.
Mando Labs are going to be busy looking at the above and these releases were only from day 1 of MIX10!
No comments yet Filed under: Silverlight
Carl Dickinson, March 15th, 2010
The rumours were indicating a release date of June but on May 12th Microsoft will officially release Sharepoint 2010. We’ve been trialling the beta for a few months and are impressed by the improvements in usability and performance. Have a read of this article for details, from the ECM team, and in summary some of the features we like are:
- From a developers perspective we no longer need to develop with virtual machines to mimic Windows Server and can now run Sharepoint 2010 on Windows 7 which on it’s own is a huge benefit.
- The Client Object Model allows us to develop bespoke applications in Silverlight, WPF or WIndows Forms and interact with the Sharepoint API – this is an approach we’re currently using on a project we are developing with Microsoft and will release more details of this in the future.
- From a user’s perspective it’s clear that the user centric re-design on Windows Phone 7 has also been applied to Sharepoint 2010 with the streamlining of various tasks ie to create new pages, select from templates and edit pages.
- The inclusion of the Ribbon, which was introduced with Office 2007, provides a contextual method of implementing common tasks and changes dynamically based upon the task being executed – it’s not there just for eye candy but there’s a real benefit in its use.
- The admin interface now includes considerably more AJAX to provide immediate feedback and execute actions asynchronously and the addition of Silverlight controls provide rich media previewing for site administrators.
- Content deployment has received considerable investment (thankfully) and we’re looking forward to trialling it with a Sharepoint 2007 site that we had problems with.
- Developer dashboard which assists with diagnosing slow running pages – provides a SQL like profiler to analyse the queries being executed by pages
Sharepoint 2010 is aiming to compete directly with existing CMSs and move away from it’s internal only use for intranet and internal portals. The improvements introduced position it well from a user and technical perspective and only time will tell if from a financial perspective it can compete with other major players in the CMS market place.
One things for sure is that given our existing expertise in MOSS and all things .Net we’ll be welcoming it’s adoption and will be developing a number of case study demos over the next few months.
No comments yet Filed under: .Net, Sharepoint
Carl Dickinson, March 5th, 2010
Since the Windows Phone Series 7 was announced there’ve been numerous rumours about how developers would build applications and at last it’s official that Silverlight and XNA will be the preferred methods. For Mando Group this is great news given our adoption of Silverlight and the existing expertise within our programming team of the .Net platform.
I’m sure there’ll be some people complaining about the adoption of a closed technology choice but surely the same is true about Apple and having to use XCode and the iPhone SDK to develop native application for the iPhone.
If you haven’t already done so then have a quick look at the videos of the new Windows phone interface. It’s been very positively received and it’s a shame there’s no official release date other than the ‘Holidays 2010’ but it’s clear that Microsoft are joining the battle with Apple and Google to re-claim some of the mobile smartphone platform they had before the iPhone and Android variations showed what’s really possible. For those of you who’ve used a version 5, 6 or 6.5 Windows Mobile phone you’ll know the user interface is no where as intuitive as the iPhone so I was pleasantly surprised when watching the series 7 videos and thinking to myself the iPhone is starting to look a bit dated (and I use an iPhone). The series 7 uses a novel scrolling canvas approach and given it’s XBox live, Zune and Office suite integration Microsoft and the huge existing developer community they have a great opportunity to claw back their share of the smartphone market.
In just over a week at the MIX10 conference there’ll be a number of sessions demonstrating how to develop apps for the new series 7 together with additional details so keep watching this blog for updates and perhaps demos of how we can help you target the latest smartphone.
No comments yet Filed under: Silverlight
Matt Salmon, March 3rd, 2010
Doing some research this week to get myself up to speed on some of the new features in ASP.NET v4.0, I came across a white paper which gives a useful overview.
ASP.NET 4.0 and VS2010 are currently in Release Candidate (RC) status, with the expected release date (according to Wikipedia, at least) slated as 12th April. Highlights from the above article, for me, are…
- Object caching extends in-memory object caching capability beyond web apps
- Page properties for meta tags, no longer will we have to roll our own
- Improvements to routing for web forms
- Chart control out of the box, no more 3rd party controls required
- HTML and JScript snippets (and if this works with mootools too, my front-end colleagues across the studio may well be interested)
- Web.config transformation, making it a whole lot easier to control per-environment configuration
- Web packaging and database deployment, which is a whole topic of its own worth spending some time investigating I think.
No comments yet Filed under: .Net, Programming
sam.birch, January 14th, 2010
It’s amazing how a simple ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…’ statement shared with a collegue and a little bit of time can turn into a cool little app. That is the case with our latest little project: TweetSpace.
The idea was simple, being able to view your timeline in a 3D environment. The implementation of it not so! We started writting it in flash using AS2 as that is what we are most comfortable with. We thought that we could simply use the rss feed from our twitter homepage as our datasource and a 3D component that we’ve used before for the environment in flash.
As it turned out you need to authenticate in order to read that rss feed, so that meant we needed to look at the twitter Oauth API. Decided on a PHP implementation of Oauth as i don’t know .NET and it’s easier for me to get it up and working in PHP rather than appeal to the good nature of our programmers for someone to get it working in .NET, and then continually get hassled by me for ongoing tweaks that are inevitable on a project like this.
Anyway… we got that working and then when we thought we were close with just a few bugs to iron out, discovered that they were due to this 3rd party component that we couldn’t do anything about! Apart from rewrite the whole app in AS3. Which we did!
It was a good excuse to get into AS3 more and a chance to play with the native 3D features in Flash CS4. In the end it was fairly straight forward, only hurrdles really were learning the AS3 syntax.
So here it is, TweetSpace!
How do you use it?
Easily! (hopefully) – It’ll send you off to twitter to login, then we you come back and the app loads, you’ll see your timeline of all the tweets from the people you follow. Use the arrow keys to move forwards and backwards through the tweets, click on one to lift it from the stack and see any previous tweets from that user. (limited to the last week)
Leave it idol for about 10 seconds and it will try and get any new tweets and take you to the most recent tweet. You also have the ability to enter a search term and see those results in a 3D timeline.
Enjoy!
Feeling free to leave comments, or any feature requests.
This mandogroup labs project was brought to you by Samuel Birch (@samuelbirch) and Jim Savage (@jim_savage) and the letter T.
No comments yet Filed under: APIs, ActionScript, Flash, Frontend Development, Twitter
Carl Dickinson, January 13th, 2010
Having checked the latest www.riastats.com it’s surprising how quickly Silverlight has been adopted – in just over 2 years, according to that stats captured (and ok they only cover 83 sites worldwide) the adoption rate is just over 50% worldwide and over 54% in the UK.
I had the chance to ask the same of the Silverlight product manager at a recent Microsoft Silverlight event in Novemeber 2009 and he thought penetration was in the region of 45% in the UK so is adoption on the quick increase or is it just a variation due to the sampled sites?
It’s good to see that the bulk of RIA players installed are the latest version equally applying to Flash aswell as Silverlight.
Obviously what these stats don’t show is the adoption of Silverlight for the development of internal or secure applications which are more difficult to track and according to blogs and news articles an area being given increasingly more focus given the huge Microsoft developer base.
Looking forward to seeing how the stats change when Sivlerlight 4 is officially released (hopefully within the next 6 months)!
No comments yet Filed under: Silverlight
Carl Dickinson, December 15th, 2009
Just dialled into a webcast from Microsoft to find out more about Bing maps. Did you know Microsoft have provided mapping solutions since 1995 when they delivered MapPoint and exposed mapping web services since 2001? Over the years Microsoft have acquired a number of companies and work with a variety of specialist partners and the names of their solutions have been varied but given the recent rebranding will now be entitled Bing maps.
I asked about extending the Silverlight Bing maps control (see this blog for my previous article) and in early 2010 a new version will be released with enhancements including the birdseye view.
For now if you want to see what’s possible have a look at this demo and try the following:
1. get driving directions (ok I know this isn’t new but gives you a map to try the web apps with)
2. now given your map try the map apps (select the > at the bottom of the panel on the left to see them)
- the twitter maps
- photosynth
- travel webcams
- graffiti art (there’s only one in Liverpool)
As I mentioned in my previous post the API exposes a lot and with the recent announcement of Dallas should provide greater integration opportunities.
No comments yet Filed under: .Net, APIs, Frontend Development, Silverlight
sam.birch, December 1st, 2009
Have you ever used sIFR and struggled to stop the page/text “jumping” when the flash loads? or even doing some dom manipulation to reformat the page but still seeing a that old formatted content, if only for a brief moment? – Very anoying and not plesant viewing!
Well here is a very quick and easy solution that works a treat! What you basically do is hide the page until you have done the reformat or sIFR has loaded then show the page again. Easy! It just feels like the page is taking a second longer to load so you really don’t notice it, and it hides all the jumping. Hooray!
All you need to do is add an inline script right after the body that sets the visibility of the body to hidden:
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document.body).setStyle('visibility', 'hidden');
</script>
then when you done your thing set is back again:
<script type="text/javascript">
window.addEvent('domready', function(){
//do my reformatting here...
//initialize my sIFR here...
//show the page
$(document.body).setStyle('visibility', 'visible');
});
</script>
please note: i’m using mootools syntax here.
No comments yet Filed under: Frontend Development
Carl Dickinson, November 30th, 2009
Do you have a business that needs to show details on a map, need to find the nearest pizza, or simply plot where your business is located on a map then Microsoft’s latest release of the Bing map control for Silverlight allows you to do so and create a custom mapping application which you can install on you PC / Mac.
I downloaded the control over the weekend and had a play and was able to put together a demo which shows the basic features. Have a look at my MandoBingMaps app where you can:
- Find where the Liverpool Mando Group office is
- Get directions between 2 locations – just enter the postcodes and you’ll see the route and directions
- Search for pizza (well anything you want to search) – click on the circles to see details
So how did I create the demo and what’s possible?
Non-techies are safe reading this:
With the control we can embed dynamic maps into applications which both run in your website or can be installed on your PC or Mac. We can enable the standard navigation features and show road or aerial (satellite image) views and labels for key points of interest.
The map can be overlayed with pins, images, or more advanced features for instance if you had access to CCTV cameras then we could plot where they were and clicking a camera image could then display the web page with the streamed image.
On it’s own the map is cool but what really brings it life is using the standard Microsoft web service to lookup addresses, get directions and then search.
Businesses could offer their clients bespoke directions to offices, if shipping goods then determine the route, time and costs for delivery and these are just 2 basic example uses. Since its Silverlight then you can also install out-of-browser and effectively have a desktop application that you and clients can install.
Techies read on:
The Bing map control is a native Silverlight control so you’ll have full access to it’s features via XAML and C# (or language of choice). You can overlay the map with layers (XAML or C#) and then within the layers use the standard Silverlight controls to show images, buttons – well whatever you want and could show in a standard Silverlight application. You can hook up event handlers to react to the user using the map and control what’s shown.
The Geocode, Route and Search WCF services provide asynchronous methods of triggering location lookups, finding directions and searching for places of interest. You’ll need to apply for a Bing Map Application key but once you have one you’ll be up and running quickly (assuming you know how to follow the examples in the SDK).
I’ve only played with the control and services for a few hours and have a Webinar with Microsoft planned which will show off some extra features but it’s clear that the combination of the control and web services offer huge possibilities.
Let me know what you think and what ideas you have for extending the demo app.
3 comments Filed under: .Net, Programming, Silverlight
Jim Savage, November 27th, 2009
We’ve heard it a thousand times before, I’m sure any project manager here at Mando Group can testify to that. Sometimes it’s hard to explain that a font can look different in one browser when compared to another, surley Arial 17px (normal weight) is exactly that, so why does it look slightly bigger or bold in Safari?
Sample text in IE8 (PC)
Sample text in Safari (Mac)
Without explaining in detail the intricacies of system font rendering in each operating system, I came up with fontcompare an online font comparison tool. Something a client or developer can use to quickly test how a font will render in particular browsers.
Using a mixture of HTML, CSS and MooTools a user can select a font and edit it’s CSS properties via a form. As each parameter is adjusted a URL is created on the fly, use this URL to quickly build your font again in another browser for comparison. Quite a simple idea but a useful one at that.
Have a play, comments welcome.
Fontcompare:
http://labs.mandogroup.com/projects/fontcompare/
No comments yet Filed under: Frontend Development
