Today we had a small “leak” from an unknown source from Microsoft, about TechDays 2010 in Portugal stating that you can already register for techdays 2010 at www.techdays2010.com.
Don’t forget to go there and start now to register for this incredible event for both Developers and IT Pros.
Every once and a while I go to CodePlex and try to look at some interesting projects that exist in there and this time I was looking for Silverlight related projects, and this was what I’ve found:
Hope this helps you.
(PT)
Depois do lançamento do Silverlight 4 Beta no PDC 2009, muito se tem visto no que respeita ás novas funcionalidades presentes nesta versão, e uma delas tem sido o suporte para a câmera, e a possibilidade de interagir com ela em termos de detecção de movimentos por forma a afectar a forma como a nossa solução se comporta.
Então para nos divertirmos um pouco o Adam Kinney criou uma solução que nos permite “dar cabo” de insectos através da utilização da nossa câmera para analisar os movimentos efectuados e com isso interagir com a aplicação.
Divirtam-se com a aplicação e analisem o código de forma a perceberem como exactamente é que conseguimos criar a detecção de movimento utilizando a suporte de câmera no Silverlight 4. Este é o post do Adam Kinney no seu blog.
(EN)
After the release of Silverlight 4 Beta on PDC 2009, a lot as been seen about the new features of Silverlight and one of them has been the WebCam support and the possibility to interact with it in order to provide a way to affect our solution by using motion detection.
And so in order for us to have a little fun, Adam Kinney developed a solution that allows us to “kick so bugs ass” by using the WebCam to analyse our movements in order to interact with the application.
Have fun with the solution and watch the code in order to understand how we can develop some motion detection with our webcam in Silverlight 4. This is the post by Adam Kinney on his blog.
In order to better understand the way Silverlight and Blend work, we normally need to “take matters in our own hands”, and test it ourselves, and in order to do that we need some tutorials, hands-on-labs, and other tools.
This post happened because we have now some new tutorials like:
- Silverlight
- Webcam and Microphone Showcase
- Using WebCam and Microphone, pixel shaders
- Out of Browser
- Using Out-of-Browser and Trusted Applications with COM Interoperability, and so on
- Data Validation, Binding, DataForm and DataGrid Features
- Image Browser
- Multi-touch browser, drop target functionality, right-click menu
- Rich Text Editor
- new RichTextArea control, programmatic clipboard access, bi-directional text, printing and FlowDirection
- Picture Browser
- Asynchronously load images from a web server into the new ViewBox control, Implicit Styles, and MouseWheel support
- Blend
Hope this helps, and good practices.
A lot as been said about “.NET RIA Services” now called “WCF RIA Services”, and much more about this name change, since many people doesn’t look at RIA Services like a real WCF Services with all their power, but that isn’t quite true since WCF RIA Services use the same bases as WCF but just make the work a little bit easier for us in terms of the “plumbing/low level development” part.
One of the Product Team members, in this case Saurabh Pant in his blog talked about this and why the change, and clarifies the WCF inside WCF RIA Services in this blog post. He also talks about the motivation of this alignment between the WCF and the RIA Services Team, and in this blogs post the .NET Connected Framework Team explain the entire ecosystem for WCF and in which WCF RIA Services is part of. Check the following picture to know more about this ecosystem that has technologies like:
- WCF Core Services
- The most commonly known WCF implementation
- WCF WebHttp/AJAX Services
- The RESTful WCF service implementation
- WCF Data Services
- The previously known ADO.NET Data Services are now also using WCF for all the communication
- WCF Workflow Services
- Workflows that are exposed and interact as WCF Services
- WCF RIA Services
- The previously know .NET RIA Services that now use the WCF communication capabilities in order to provide more power to the developer and at the same time, easier development and less “plumbing”
![clip_image002_4[1]](http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/nunogodinho/clip_image002_41_thumb_5B58BC12.png "clip_image002_4[1]")
Hope this helps clarify a little better the WCF part of the WCF RIA Services and their place in the entire WCF ecosystem.
Architecture
- Handled using a Driver Model that is implemented by the partners
- Based on WM_Messages that are exchanged by the application and the Multi-touch Hardware
Development Tiers
- Good
- Everything that comes for free
- APIs
- Panning/Zoom gestures
- Right-click Gestures
- Native Win32
- Controls with standard scrollbars
- WPF4
- Click Events
- ScrollViewer
- WinForms
- Controls with standard scrollbars
- Better
- Best
- Everything done before and even handle events that the Multi-touch supports
Coding with MultiTouch
- Gestures
- Native
- .NET 4.0 / WPF
- .NET 3.5
- Raw Touch
- Native
- .NET 4.0 / WPF
- Silverlght
- .NET 3.5
- Manipulation
- Native
- .NET 4.0 / WPF
- .NET 3.5
- Inertia
- Native
- .NET 4.0 / WPF
- .NET 3.5
Gestures
- One or two fingers “actions”
- Pre-defined in the platform
- On by default in Windows 7
- Using WM_Gestures
Touch
- Using WM_Touch
- Similar to WM_Gestures but just a lot more of them
- We need to opt-in to have Touch capabilities
- In case of using Touch we won’t get Gestures any more, just Raw touch
Geneva Framework has received a name change and now is called WIF – Windows Identity Foundation, since is the technology that will work with all types of Identity in the Microsoft world.
“It provides developers pre-built .NET security logic for building claims-aware applications, enhancing either ASP.NET or WCF applications. Windows Identity Foundation makes it easeir to build richer, more secure applications (cloud and on-premise) without being a security and identity expert. It will boost developer productivity, as a result, and enhance app security through a standard approach to federation, strong authentication and identity delegation.”
I’ve made a simple wrap-up of the several interesting articles about WIF, and they are:
Have good reading and tests with WIF
Windows 7 Usage of the GPU
- Continues from Vista
- Media Center UI
- Video Playback
- Desktop Window Manager (DWM)
- Win7 DWM uses DirectX3D10.1 API
- Scales in Performance all the way from low end integrated graphics cards to the highest level ones
Windows 7 High Color
- Wider Gamur
- Bigger then sRGB, eg. xvYCC, AdobeRGB
- Higher precision
- Higher Dynamic Range
- Windows 7 provides
- Color Calibration Tool
- Gamma LUT Loader
High DPI Displays are now Common
- Improvements in Windows UI & IE
- Automatic Configuration in OOBE (Out-Of-Box-Experience)
- Promotion the Control Panel UI for DPI
Current Challengues
- 3D
- Uses DX3..10
- Challenges
- New in Win7
- 2D
- Uses GDI, GDI+
- Challenges
- New in Win7
- Text
- GDI
- Challenges
- New in Win7
- Imaging
- GDI, GDI, WIC+
- Challenges
- Extensive Format
- Support for Security
- New in Win7
- Device Control
- GDI
- Challenges
- Outdated notion of devices
One of the most asked questions about Windows Azure is what is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and the ROI (Return of Investment) that we have in order to decide if we are going or not into the cloud.
Based on this questions Windows Azure Team putted together a TCO and ROI Calculator that will help you make your decisions better, and also plan how much are you going to spend in Windows Azure and Windows Azure Service Platform in order to maintain your business going. This is very important because even when having things going into the cloud our management still need some predictability on the costs and also some numbers to support the decision of moving to the cloud.
Start predicting and planning your TCO and ROI using this calculator here.
Sensor Platform Overview
- Develop better and more productive user experiences
- Enable environmentally adaptive user interface
- Windows 7 features a unified API for working with sensors
- No need to target vendor-specific APIs
- Consistent interface for sensors, extensions for location
- Access control and privacy
Sensor Platform Architecture
- Applications
- Sensor API
- Sensor class extensions
- UMDF Sensor Driver
- Sensor Device
Sensor class extensions and Sensor API connect to the Location and Other sensors control panel
Privacy and Access Control
- Sensor data is considered personal
- User consent is required to share data
- All sensors are disabled by default
- Can be preconfigured per user/services
- Administrator rights required to enabled a sensor
What is a Sensor?
- Category and Type
- Category, represents what is being sensed
- Type, represents how it’s being sensed
- Properties
- Read-only (Model, Serial Number) or read-write (Report Interval)
- Sensors may have custom properties
- Data
- Get sensor-specific data report object synchronously or asynchronously (recommended approach)
- Events
- State change, leave, data updated, other
- State
- Is sensor working properly? What is the problem?
Sensor API Architecture
- Native/Win32 API
- COM Based (includes sensorsapi.h and sensors.h)
- Consist in the following interfaces
- ISensorManager
- ISensor
- ISensorDataReport
- Windows API CodePack
- Managed class library to ease .NET Framework access to the Sensor and Location APIs
Location Platform
- A single API call to answer. Where I am?
- Enabled location based services
- Adjust functionality based on location changes
- Built on top of the sensor API
- Automatic transition between providers (most accurate providers have priority)
- Concurrent access for multiple applications
- Managed Wrapper
- In .NET 4 we’ll use the System.Devices namespace where this will be placed
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