Categories
Uncategorized

Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code: Downtown Toronto, Thursday, August 12th

Icons: Coffee plus Windows PhoneInterested in finding out more about Windows Phone 7 development and the opportunities that come with it? Want to see both the Samsung and LG Windows Phone 7 prototypes up close and personal? Want to take a break and have coffee with us?

Samsung "Taylor" Windows Phone 7 Prototype I’m holding a Coffee and Code with mobile developer Mark Arteaga and mobile expert Anthony Bartolo in downtown Toronto at the Starbucks at King and Yonge this Thursday from noon to 7 p.m. (4 King Street West, right on top of the subway station). We’ll be at or near the big conference table they’ve got in the back. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, “Coffee and Code” is an event where I take advantage of my status as a mobile worker and work out of a work-friendly cafe, where I’m reachable, findable and approachable. If you’ve got any questions about Microsoft, software development, the industry, the tech scene or just about anything else, this is a perfect chance to ask me!

This is a Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code, and I’m bringing a couple of Windows Phone 7 people along with me. If you were at last year’s TechDays conferences, you may have seen them: Mark Arteaga, who’s written many apps for the old-school Windows Mobile and now writing apps for Windows Phone, and Anthony Bartolo, who’s been working in the mobile industry longer than a lot of my peers have been working. Come join us for a coffee (or tea, or lemonade) and some tech talk!

Catch Mark’s blog entry about this upcoming Coffee and Code here.

Anthony has also written a blog entry about Coffee and Code here.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Perspectives on Clojure and F#

Get Microsoft Silverlight

Don’t have Silverlight? You can download it here or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) and Zune formats.

Here’s a Channel 9 video shot at Emerging Languages Camp 2010, the first conference on up-and-coming programming languages held in Portland on July 21 – 22. It’s a casual conversation with:

  • Rich Hickey, creator of the Clojure (pronounced “closure”) programming language. It’s a dialect of Lisp intended general-purpose functional programming language with a lot of support for concurrent programming. If you caught our Ignite Your Coding webcast with Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin earlier this year, you heard his high praise for the language. Clojure targets both the JVM and CLR.
  • Joe Pamer, compiler developer for the F# programming language. F# is a “hybrid” programming language, built with functional programming in mind, but also programmable in a more imperative object-oriented way. Much of it is compatible with the OCaml programming language, there are some C# ideas in there as well, and it’s one of the languages baked right into Visual Studio 2010.

In this conversation, Rich and Joe talk about their ideas on programming language design and evolution, functional programming, concurrency, how F# fits into Visual Studio and the granddaddy of them all, Lisp.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

New Internet Explorer 9 Videos

Download IE9 Platform Preview 4 now!

If you haven’t tried the latest Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, get your hands on it now! This one’s got new goodies like a new SVG engine, the “Chakra” JavaScript engine now integrated into the browser instead of a separate object called via COM, better Acid3 (95/100) and WebKit SunSpider scores.

Channel 9 has posted some videos on this newest version of IE9, and I thought I’d share them here:

A Look at the New IE Test Drive Samples

Get Microsoft Silverlight

This video (2 minutes, 43 seconds in length) shows off some of the new demo apps on the IE Test Drive page that show off the benefits of IE9’s hardware acceleration. Rob Mauceri, Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer, narrates.

Can’t see the video? Download Silverlight or grab the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

A Look at SVG in IE9

Get Microsoft Silverlight

SVG is short for "Scalable Vector Graphics", whose specification is an open standard and supported by all major modern web browsers, including IE9. This video (4 minutes, 36 seconds in length) shows how you can take advantage of SVG and the fact that it’s hardware-accelerated in IE9. Patrick Dengler, Senior Program Manager for Internet Explorer, does the presentation.

Can’t see the video? Download Silverlight or grab the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

IE9 Rocks HTML5 Audio Support

Get Microsoft Silverlight

IE Beatz is a drum machine app written JavaScript, SVG and HTML 5 audio to demonstrate the combined power of HTML 5 and IE9. This video (6 minutes, 4 seconds) features IE Beatz’ creator, Josh Rose of the IE9 team, explaining his creation and showing some of the underlying code.

Can’t see the video? Download Silverlight or grab the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Windows Phone 7 App: Deluxe Moon

If you’re interested in the knowing what phase the moon will be in on a given day – whether you’re into astronomy, astrology or just trying to figure out if more fights and arrests happen during a full moon – the upcoming Windows Phone 7 app Deluxe Moon by Lifeware Solutions looks like a gorgeous way to find out.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Windows Phone 7 App: Ave Comics

They sure do love their comics in France, where they’re called BD (bandes dessinees, meaning “drawn strips”). I grew up reading translated versions of Asterix and Tintin, and later enjoyed Jean “Moebius” Giraud’s works, which took comics to wild new places (which as you might have guessed, included Metal Hurlant, which came to North America as Heavy Metal).

Hence it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a team in France built the Ave Comics app, shown in action above, which lets you preview, purchase and read digital versions of comics.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Internet Explorer 9, Platform Preview 4

I’ve been busy with all sorts of stuff, so I ‘m a little late with an announcement you might have seen elsewhere online: IE9 Platform Preview 4 has been released!

Download IE9 Platform Preview 4 now!

If you want the full story, check out IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch’s blog entry over at IEBlog, where he goes over the latest platform preview of our browser in detail. I’m just going to give you the major points, such as IE9 PP4’s Acid3 test score:

Screenshot: IE9 PP4's Acid3 test results: 95/100

…plus how IE9 PP4 stacks up against its previous incarnations and browsers built by the Esteemed Competition, according to the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test…

Chart: WebKit, SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results, showing IE9 PP4 in 4th places, only milliseconds behind Chrome 5. Chrome 6 nightly and Opera 10.6

…and that there are a new batch of demos showing HTML5 compliance, hardware graphics acceleration, JavaScript speed and the really wacky things you can do with IE9 if you use a little imagination, such as a game that melds “Hamster Dance” with Dance Dance Revolution:

Screenshot of "Hamster Dance Revolution" showing a framerate of 41 fps

Go Get IE9 Platform Preview 4, Get Ready for the Beta

Download IE9It’s one thing to talk about the goodies in IE9 PP4, but it’s an entirely different thing to experience them. Take the latest version of IE9 for a test drive – go and download it now!

As you take this version for IE9 for a spin, you might want to start thinking about getting your sites, whether they’re already up or in the works, ready for the next big leap: IE9’s transition from “Platform Preview” to “Beta”. That’s coming soon.

Here are some things to think about, as suggested in IEBlog:

  • Test your site in IE9 Standards Mode.  This mode provides the best performance and interoperability and will offer additional benefits in the IE9 Beta. We suggest using the HTML5 doctype. More details here and here.
  • We recommend sending IE9 the same standards-based markup your site sends other browsers. More details here and here. From the feedback so far, and our experience with sites, the best way to get your site working in IE9 Standards Mode is to start from the same markup other browsers receive rather than IE6, IE7, or IE8 markup.
  • Use feature detection, not browser detection to handle any cross browser differences in behavior or feature support.  This keeps your site working even as browsers change.
  • Please continue to report issues on Connect if your site doesn’t look or work right, and you’re giving it the same code as you’re giving to other modern browsers. With IE9 Platform Preview 4, we’ve fixed over 100 community-reported issues. We will fix even more between now and the IE9 beta and want your feedback.
  • Consider the experience for IE9 Beta users if you find that sending the same markup creates more issues than you can resolve in your production site. It is possible that running your site in Compatibility View is better for your users.
  • Take advantage of HTML5, CSS3, SVG, DOM, ES5, and more… all described here in the developer guide.  We’re excited to run the amazing experiences you bring to the web using these new capabilities, taking advantage of hardware through IE9.

Download IE9 Platform Preview 4 now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Half Off Manning’s SharePoint Books!

Book covers: SharePoint 2010 Site Owner's Manual, SharePoint 2010 Web Parts, SharePoint 2007 Business Data Catalog, SharePoint 2010 Workflows in Action

Today (Thursday, August 5) and today only, Manning’s offering their SharePoint books, in both electronic and dead-tree form, at half price:

Just enter the promo code in the Promotional Code box when you check out at manning.com. I got an email saying the promo code is dotd0805ccb; Bil Simser reports that the site says the promo code is dotd0805. Try them both!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.