Laurent Duveau

Save the date: Microsoft TechDays Canada will have its second edition in 2009 and is coming back to Montreal on December 2, 3.

For others cities/dates go to: www.techdays.ca

The Silverlight Tour is coming to Vancouver, Canada in July and has been updated with Silverlight 3 content!!

I had the chance to try Bing already, and I must say I am very surprised!!

Bing is the rebranding of Live Search, but it is far from just a facelift. It is a whole new concept. Microsoft introduce Bing not as another search engine (Bing Is Not Google, BING!) but as a decision engine, and it is exactly that!

If you think about it, when you do a search on Google, it does a very powerful search on its index to gives you… links, and anything but links sorted by a robot, nothing contextual or organized, no more help, just raw links.

Is it helpful? Yes in many case. Google has realized an awesome job to index the whole Internet in a single textbox. This is the most incredible job that has ever been done on the Internet!! But at the end of the day all you get is… a list of links, with multipage, but nobody crawl more than the first page so what you get is… 10 links, no grouping, no organization, links.

The first time I used Bing, it took me 1 min to be convinced that this IS what I needed. This is my way to search and find information on the web. Bing shows links and related information. When you search “zune” you get results categorized by “Buying Guide”, “Reviews”, “Accessories”, “Shopping”. Typically I do my search on Google, then open results in reference website like TripAdvisor, Wikipedia, Farecast, Live Maps, ... Now I get all this in Bing. I think Microsoft just get it right! This was the thing to do, and to me Bing seems much more efficient than Google.

Sample searches: “Montreal Canadiens”

First link with latest games!
Sub-queries on the left bar. Note these categories are contextual, sometimes you get “Downloads”, “Reviews”, “Maps”, “Shopping”, etc..

 
Mouse hover the thumbnails, videos plays inside the thumbnail!

Great news Live Farecast is now part of Bing!! (name: Bing Travel)

Bing Travel uses a predictive algorithm to recommend when you should purchase your airline ticket.

Also integrated in Bing: Live Maps and Live Shopping, with the latter you get products detailed reports (so much more than just links), with images, pricing information and user reviews from various Web sites.

As Google, Bing has these kind of quick answers (use it all the time) :

Yesterday I gave 2 Silverlight presentations at the Montreal Code Camp 2009.

1. Business application with Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services

In this session I showed how Silverlight 3 new features and controls helps you build real business oriented app, and how you can take advantage of .NET RIA Services to simplifies 3-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Download my slides (french):

My demos were taken from 2 sessions I saw at TechEd 2009: WUX303 and WUX308 by Scott Morrison, so you can find the files on his blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/scmorris/archive/2009/05/17/tech-ed-2009-demo-files.aspx

2. Silverlight and SEO

After briefly explained the problem with RIA and SEO, I did 3 demos in Visual Studio 2008 to show different way to make your Silverlight app SEO friendly. The last demo was the Silverlight Store, a very efficient and easy way to do SEO-enable your Silverlight site using Silverlight 3, ASP.NET 3.5 and .NET RIA Services (More details by the author itself).

Download my slides (french) and demos:

Here is a teaser from Microsoft regarding the new Web Platform Installer… featuring Scott Guthrie and Soma:

Everybody asked me this question last week at TechEd Los Angeles, even at customs before my flight, and at registration, hotel, … (I wore an Azure Tshirt).

Windows Azure is the central piece of the cloud computing offering from Microsoft. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage their web applications in the cloud (Microsoft data centers worldwide). It is part of the Azure Services Platform and acts as a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment.

On top of this base infrastructure, you’ll find several services helping you to build apps for Azure:
Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services, Dynamics CRM Services.

Read more on the Azure Services Platform:
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/whatisazure.mspx

The platform is currently (may 2009) on Tech Preview and should be released at the end of the year.

Pricing will be announced this summer.

Try it!
Go to www.azure.com and log in with your Live ID to create your first solution.

Download the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (which includes the Azure SDK) now and try it for free:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b44c10e8-425c-417f-af10-3d2839a5a362&displaylang=en

Watch some Azure videos:
http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2009/05/07/windows-azure-videos.aspx

 
Code Camp Montreal will take place on Saturday, May 30th 2009.
It is free but you need to sign up on the website: www.codecampmontreal.com
If you are not registered yet, hurry up!

This year again I’ll be giving 2 sessions (in french):

• Business application with Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services
• Silverlight 3 and SEO

See you there!

The Silverlight Tour has now its own page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/The-Silverlight-Tour/83006391011
Not here to replace the official website, but to add a “social flavour”... become a fan!

Also you can join the Silverlight Tour Training Canada group!
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=47704291067

Windows 7 allows you to link your online ID with your Windows user account. This will pre-populate your credentials (username/password) each time you use a connected software. Any standards-compliant ID can hook into this feature. For now, only Windows Live ID works.

To add an online ID provider:
Open “User Accounts”, Click “Link online ID”, Click “Add an online ID provider”.

Select your online ID provider from the list and follow the instructions. 

For Windows Live you’ll be asked to download and install Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant 6.5:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=5e193cfe-f45a-4e29-b6b7-984e7802c639

“The Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant 6.5 installs the Windows Live ID online provider for Windows 7. This provider enables linking a Windows Live ID to a Windows 7 user account.”

Then go back to the previous screen and the Online ID Provider is now available:

Click “Link online ID” and type your user name and password once.
Now you’ll save time when you open Email, Messenger, Zune, …!

Want to learn more on Windows Azure?
Microsoft has a nice “How do I?” videos series:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/fr-ca/azure/dd439432(en-us).aspx

Also available as RSS feed:
http://www.microsoft.com/feeds/msdn/en-us/azure/RedDog-video.xml

There was also several Azure related sessions at MIX09: