Month: February 2010

Albert Shum on Windows Phone 7

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 17, 2010
5 Comments on Albert Shum on Windows Phone 7

Whenever Microsoft needs to make a radical change in the way they do things, they bring in a hip Asian guy. That’s why they’ve got me shaking things up on Microsoft Canada’s Tech Evangelism Team, and it’s also why Albert Shum is redefining the way Microsoft does mobile phones in his role as the Director of Microsoft’s Mobile Experience Design Team. True to my earlier statement that Canadian techies have been punching well above their weight class since Alexander Graham Bell, Albert studied engineering and architecture at the University of Waterloo.

Here’s a video featuring Albert talking about the design philosophies behind the completely reworked from-the-ground-up Windows Phone 7. It’s featured in the Microsoft News Centre article Windows Phone Designer Seeks the Right Balance.

I like what he says at the end of the video:

What will our users see first? I think hopefully they’ll see themselves in the phone. I think that’s a really key part of how we designed it. It’s really focused on making this phone your phone. We took the idea of making it personal, so that when you look at the start experience, it’s about your content. It’s about your people, it’s your pictures, it’s your music, it’s presented way up there.

My phone is going to be different than your phone, and I think that’s a really key part: that personalized way of navigating the thing that you care about, the things that you want to share, the things you want to listen to, and those are the key moments where we first present that it’s your phone.

If you’re thinking up ideas for applications to write for Windows Phone, keep what Albert says in mind: it’s not about feature lists; it’s all about the user and the user experience.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags Albert Shum, Counting Down to Seven, Microsoft, mobile, Windows Phone

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Are You Going to MIX10?

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 16, 2010

Are you Canadian and going to the MIX10 Conference?

If you’re going to MIX10, let me know, either in the comments or via email. A number of us from Microsoft Canada will be there and we’d love to catch up with you!

Among the Canadian contingent going to Vegas are:

Gladstone Grant, Developer and Platform Evangelism Lead
Allan Hoffman, ISV Group Manager
Paul Laberge, Web Platform Evangelist
John Oxley, Director, Audience Marketing and my manager
Mark Relph, Senior Director, Windows Ecosystem (and former Developer and Platform Evangelism Lead)
Jamie Wakeam, ISV Architect Evangelist
Yours Truly, Joey deVilla, Developer Evangelist and guy with accordion

Hope to see you there!

What is MIX10?

MIX10 is the 2010 edition of MIX, Microsoft’s most “right-brained” conference. Its area of focus is on the web and other technologies that aren’t the desktop, which is traditionally where Microsoft “lives”, as well as on design, usability, information architecture and user experience. Silverlight made its first appearance here, under the less-wieldy name of WPF/E (“WPF Everywhere”), as have improved versions of Internet Explorer. Expect some interesting stuff at MIX this year!

Here’s a list of the topics that will be covered at MIX10:

MVC

WCF

Windows Azure Platform

Windows Phone

Workshop

The Full Monty on Windows Phone Development

Windows Phone 7 Series generic phone

Glaringly absent from yesterday’s Windows Phone 7 Series announcement made at Mobile World Conference in Barcelona was the “how”: that is, how do you develop apps for Windows Phone 7?

That question will be answered at MIX10 (March 15th – 17th in Las Vegas) in a number of ways.

If you go to MIX10, you will get the following:

Access to a track dedicated to Windows Phone 7 Series platform
An introduction to Windows Phone 7 Series’ development platform
Tutorials on how to work with the Windows Phone 7 Series’ development tools
A tour of the Windows Phone Marketplace
And last – but certainly not least — access to the Windows Phone 7 Series developer tools!

The Hallway Opportunity

I’ve always believed that one of the marks of a good conference is the hallway. By “hallway”, I’m talking about the opportunities to meet people in those times and places between and after sessions. There’s something to meeting people in person that you don’t get online; hence the often-used saying “you had to be there”. MIX promises to have good hallway, partly because of the Microsoft teams who’ll be presenting some interesting new stuff and partly because the crowd is going to be a mixed bag of developer types, designer types and the type of people who like to straddle both worlds (I like to think of myself in that category).

Go!

MIX10 takes place at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th. If you register before February 21st, you’ll get a $200 discount off the MIX10 admission fee. Do it now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags conferences, MIX10, Windows Phone

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Windows Phone 7 Series: Now That’s More Like It!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 15, 2010
4 Comments on Windows Phone 7 Series: Now That’s More Like It!

A New Windows for the Phone

Ever since joining The Empire, I’ve been saying that Windows Mobile needs to go back to the drawing board. While there was good technology lying in its innards – mobile versions of the .NET framework, SQL Server and Office – treating the mobile form factor as “the desktop, but much, much smaller”, was the wrong approach. In the meantime, the Esteemed Competition were doing the right thing: designing their phones’ OS features and interface from the ground up rather than attempting to force-fit the desktop UI into a pocket UI.

Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft previewed the latest in a series of steps forward – consider Xbox to Xbox 360, Windows Vista to Windows 7, Live Search to Bing – there’s now Windows Phone 7 Series.

(The name’s a bit long. Whoever does the naming at Microsoft corporate HQ must get paid by the syllable.)

A Quick Look at Windows Phone’s Experience

A good starting point is this video, which covers Windows Phone’s features in three minutes, thirty seconds:

You can take an interactive tour of the UI at the Windows Phone 7 Series site:

A Closer Look at the Windows Phone Experience

Over at Channel 9, Laura Foy has posted her interview with Joe Belfiore, VP Windows Phone 7 Program Management, who gave her a walkthrough of the goodies in Windows Phone (the video is 22 minutes, 18 seconds):

Some quick notes from the video:

There are three mandatory hardware buttons, which are context-sensitive:
- Back
- Windows (the “Start” button)
- Search
The screen is a capacitive touch-screen, capable of supporting multi-touch
The Start menu is built up of tiles: little block representing the information and features that you care most about
- You can add your own custom tiles; Joe shows a “me” tile linked to his Facebook profile
A browser with:
- Snappy performance
- Support for multitouch actions such as pinch zoom, double-tap to zoom and finger drag
- Very readable text, that to sub-pixel positioning in HTML
- Phone number recognition in HTML documents; touch them to dial them
- Street address recognition in HTML documents; touch them to get a map
- Multiple tabs
The “People Hub”
- Aggregates Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and other mail contacts
- Provides a live feed of your contacts
Context-sensitive search:
- Press the “Search” button while in the People Hub, and you search your people list
- Press the “Search” button while in the Start menu, and it runs a web search
  - Based on your query, it knows whether to give you a web search result or a local search result
  - In the demo, Joe does a search for pizza and gets a map and results for pizzerias near him, and a quick pan over to adjacent pages yield directions and reviews
  - A tap on “nearby” yield the locations of useful things like parking, ATMs and so on near the selected pizzeria
  - In another demo search, Joe does a search for “Avatar” and it returns a list of nearby theatres and times for the movie Avatar; a quick pan to an adjacent page yields the results for local business and places with “Avatar” in the name
Email:
- Easy pivoting between unread, flagged and urgent emails
- A caching system prevents you from seeing the dreaded “loading” screen
- Press “Search” within email and you perform a search of your email messages, by subject, text and so on
Rotation: you can operate the phone in “portrait” or “landscape” mode
Calendar:
- Support for both work and personal calendars
ActiveSync works in the background and keeps the phone synced with email, contacts and calendar
User-customizable UI colour schemes
The “Pictures Hub”
- Gallery: Lets you browse all the pictures on your phone
- Mosaic: Recent and favourite pictures
- What’s New: New photos from your social networks
- Camera roll: A folder for photos taken with your phone
- Support for photo albums from Facebook and Windows Live, which you browse as if they lived right on your phone
Music and Video
- History: Most recently played music and videos
- New: New music and videos added since the last sync
- Zune HD-style marketplace searching and support for Zune subscriptions with unlimited music plays
The “Me” tile
- Lets you update your status on places like Facebook
- Nice little typing features like auto-spelling-correction and a special soft keyboard for emoticons
The UI concept: Windows Phone is task-centric, not app-centric, with a hub associated with each: people, photos, media
There’s also a games hub, which ties into Xbox Live
Third-party applications and games? Wait…

Wait a Minute…What About Third-Party Apps and Games?

Can you wait a month?

Here’s the deal: the announcement at Mobile World Congress was about showing what Windows Phone can do. As for what’s possible on the developer front, it’ll all be announced at the MIX10 Conference, which takes place from March 15th through 17th in Las Vegas.

There will be a dozen sessions at MIX10 for Windows Phone, and they promise to be quite interesting. I’ll be at MIX10, and will blog what I learn from these sessions when they take place.

You can save $200 off the price of MIX10 registration if you register before February 21st, so if you want to get in on the ground floor with Windows Phone and save some money, register now!

What the Tech Press is Saying

Pretty good stuff, actually. Rather than bury you with links to a zillion blog entries filed from Mobile World Congress, I thought I’d pick two of the big tech blogs, Gizmodo and Engadget:

Here’s what Gizmodo has to say about the new Windows Phone:

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it’s gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There’s an incredible sense of joie de vivre that’s just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in.

Here are Engadget’s impressions, after having some hands-on time with Windows Phone:

The design and layout of 7 Series’ UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an "authentically digital" and "chromeless" experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn’t mean — no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it’s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that’s to its advantage. Admittedly, we could stand for a little more information available within single views, and we have yet to see how the phone will handle things like notifications, but the design of the interface is definitely in a class of its own.

(In another article, Engadget simply summed it up with “Microsoft is playing to win”.)

Watch this Space!

We’ll have more announcements about Windows Phone over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags Counting Down to Seven, mobile, search, touch, user experience, user interface, Windows Phone

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It’s a “Portal” Day Today

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 12, 2010

Today is all about virtual meetings; I’m spending most of it sitting at the home office with a headset microphone clamped to my head, bouncing from one online meeting to another, magically transporting my presence over great distances. My co-worker John Bristowe is in the same boat and quipped on Twitter: “I feel like I’m playing Live Meeting Portal”.

With that remark, and since it’s a Friday, I can’t help but post this amusing cat photo featuring Portal:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags animations, Live Meeting, Portal, virtual meetings

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The Life and Times of Internet Explorer 6

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 12, 2010

Over at the design-oriented Smashing Magazine site, you’ll find Brad Colbow’s comic, The Life and Times of Internet Explorer 6. It’s the browser we all love to hate, including we who collect a nice fortnightly deposit from Microsoft into our bank accounts. I got a great laugh at DemoCamp Toronto 21 when I said “If you got a cat when IE6 came out, it’s dead now.”

It wasn’t always this way, as the first section of the comic shows (you can click it to read the whole thing):

There’s a fair bit of history covered in the middle section of the comic, but I feel that the most important sections are the first (shown above), and the end, shown below:

That is the real question: “Can we stop supporting IE6 yet?”, followed by a real answer: You have to look at your audience. If you can drop IE6 support without ruining the experience for the majority your audience (you have to make the call on what constitutes a majority), then by all means, go for it.

Expecting people outside our industry to have as much interest in browser technology is about as fair as my insurance agent expecting me to have as much interest in the ins and outs of insurance as he does. I only care about the amount of coverage, the deductible, the slip of paper that goes into my glove compartment, and how much I have to pay a year. Everything else is just yappity-yap from some suit who’s interrupting my work day, trying to show me pages of boring legalese. That’s how we look to most end users.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags browsers, comics, IE6, Internet Explorer

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The “Ignite Your Coding” Podcast Series

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 10, 2010
10 Comments on The “Ignite Your Coding” Podcast Series

Every Thursday in March and April, my co-worker John Bristowe and I will host the Ignite Your Coding webcast series. Each hour-long webcast will feature a guest speaker selected from the bright lights in software development. John and I will start off by asking them about their views on the industry and how to thrive in an era of great technological, business and social change, and then it’ll be your turn to ask the questions.

The theme of the webcast series is “staying on top of change”. I can’t deny hat there’s a certain thrill to the changes in this still-very-new industry (remember, the formal definition of “computable” isn’t even a hundred years old, and some of the pioneers, like C.A.R. Hoare, are still alive). They can also be overwhelming. All the guests on the show have ideas about how to cope with the ongoing changes, how to make the most of your career and life as a developer and intriguing stories about their life “in the trenches”.

John and I started getting interviewees for the show by drafting a list of “dream guests” and then inviting them to speak. John’s pretty well-established in the .NET world, so he went after people that Microsoft developers would know well. I’ve spent more time in the world outside Microsoft development, so I was assigned to invite people often seen in those spheres. We ended up with a great and varied set of guests, some you might have expected and some who might surprise you. We think that you’ll enjoy the webcast and find it both entertaining and informative, whether you eat, breathe and sleep Visual Studio, dream in TextMate or stand on the front lines in the Emacs/vi holy war.

All you have to do to catch the live Ignite Your Coding webcasts is register for the ones you want (see below). We’ll record them all, so if you can’t catch the live shows, you can at least listen to them later.

Here are the guests and the dates:

Pragmatic Programming, Thinking and Learning (Andy Hunt)

Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he’s had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll talk with Andy about the ideas in his latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We’ll discuss why your brain is where software development really happens, how you can refactor your thinking and as he puts it, “just the plain old weirdness that is people”.

Thursday, March 4, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Composable Applications FTW (Glenn Block)

Glenn Block is an industry expert who has broad enterprise software development experience including architecture and system design. Typically, developers of client applications face a number of challenges. One of the more common challenges is to build applications in a way that allows its various parts & pieces to be interchanged quickly and seamlessly. In this conversation, Glenn Block will provide guidance on how to structure your applications in such a way that will facilitate this capability.

Thursday, March 11, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Essence versus Ceremony (Jeremy Miller)

Jeremy Miller is no stranger to the developer community of .NET. He is the author of StructureMap and the forthcoming StoryTeller, as well as being a major contributor to FubuMVC and Fluent NHibernate. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll discuss a wide range of topics; including how newer OSS efforts in the developer community of .NET are trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and much more!

Thursday, March 18, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Agile Techniques for Paying Back Technical Debt (David Laribee)

David Laribee is currently an Agile Coach at VersionOne. Technical debt refers to the costs associated with byzantine dependencies and sloppy code. Technical debt is a drag. It can kill productivity, making maintenance annoying, difficult, or, in some cases, impossible. In this one-hour webcast, David will provide us with some advice for “paying back technical debt” with agile techniques.

Thursday, March 25, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Scalability and Performance for All (Richard Campbell)

Richard Campbell knows a thing or two about scalability and performance, having designed and built applications for over 30 years with a number of leading North American organizations. He’s also taken that knowledge and applied it at his company Strangeloop, which builds an appliance that specializes in website acceleration. In this webcast, Richard will help us navigate the world of scalability and performance and how developers need to think differently when building applications for the future.

Thursday, April 8, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST, (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

State of the .NET Developer Nation (Scott Hanselman)

Scott Hanselman is a household name to nearly every developer of .NET worldwide. From his deeply-informative blog to his engaging podcast, Scott is well known for his expertise and insights that he shares willingly with the broader community of .NET. In this webcast, we’ll talk to Scott about the state of the developer nation of .NET; a “what’s hot and what’s not” with developers of .NET today. We’ll also chat with Scott about his role at Microsoft and tips on staying on top of your game as a developer in the industry today.

Thursday, April 15, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock (Jeff Atwood)

Jeff Atwood writes the popular developer blog Coding Horror, created and helps run the Stack Overflow and Server Fault and SuperUser community Q&A sites and co-hosts the Stack Overflow podcast with Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky. With a schedule like this and a one-year-old, he somehow stills finds the time to keep his Rock Band skills finely honed. Join us as we chat with Jeff in a one-hour webcast where we talk about the Stack Overflow phenomenon, how Coding Horror grew to become one of the most-read developer blogs and career strategies in the post-desktop age.

Thursday, April 22, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

A Chat with “Uncle Bob” Martin (Robert C. Martin)

His business card may say “Robert C. Martin”, founder and CEO of the Object Mentor consulting firm, but we know and love him as “Uncle Bob”. He’s been coding since the Beatles broke up, and in that four-decade span, he literally wrote the books on agile and extreme programming as well as the letters UML, OOP and C++. Throughout the industry, he’s known as a champion of proper design, test-driven development and just plain writing good code. We’ll chat with Uncle Bob in this one-hour webcast, where we’ll talk about software craftsmanship, why it takes work and why it matters.

Thursday, April 29, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

To find out more about the Ignite Your Coding webcast series, visit the Ignite Your Coding page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Congrats, “Mudge”, on Landing the DARPA Gig!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 10, 2010

I met Peter “Mudge” Zatko at the Cult of the Dead Cow’s hotel bungalow at DefCon 8, the 2000 edition of the notorious hacker conference. My coworker at OpenCola, Oxblood Ruffin, was a member of the the “cDc” and introduced me and the other OpenColans to him and the other nicknames in the group: “Sir Dystic”, “Dildog”, “Deth Veggie”, “Night Stalker”, “Grandmaster Ratte” and many other black-clad, charmingly oddball characters far more interesting than the characters in the movie Hackers. I think I learned more about security in the hour-long group conversation with him than I’ve learned from countless corporate security training videos and training courses. Later at the conference, the cDc would hand out more copies of Back Orifice 2000, a tool that would cause much heartburn to many people at the company where I now work.

He’s now got a big gig: Program Manager at the Strategic Technologies Office at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R&D office for the Department of Defense. His area of focus? Security, naturally.

Mudge was responsible for the early research into buffer overflow attacks and published one of the first papers on the topic. In 1998, he and others from L0pht Heavy Industries (a.k.a. “The L0pht”, a hacker think tank) testified before a Senate committee, saying that they could take the internet down in 30 minutes. L0pht was acquired by the security company @stake in 1999, and in 2000, the company where I worked, OpenCola, hired them to do some security consulting. He’s met with President Clinton to talk about DOS attacks and worked at BBN as a division scientist.

I’m curious to see what Mudge can do with government gear and a big budget. In the cnet article, he talks about actively responding to threats. "I don’t want people to be putting out virus signatures after a virus has come out," he says. "I want an active defense. I want to be at the sharp pointy end of the stick."

Do not mess with his pointy end! Congrats, Mudge!

Tags Cult of the Dead Cow, hackers, jobs, Mudge, Security