Windows Space » Developers

Microsoft Zeollar : A place for Technical Webcasts

Admin — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 17:24:06 +0000

Zeollar is a place to get connected with IT pros and Developers from Microsoft , where they help people with Video tutorials on the most asked topics or guides from a common developer or a user.

Zeollar team comprises of Microsoft Developers and IT pros who specialize in one or the other technologies.

Aviraj , confirmed that from 13th january Zeollar Webcasts would be starting first session scheduled for IT Professionals.

Incoming search terms:

visual studio 2010 toturials
zeollar microsoft

Internet Explorer 9: THE STORY UPTIL NOW…

GauravK — Fri, 28 May 2010 20:37:16 +0000

Microsoft could regain the edge over rivals Google and Mozilla Firefox with its new Web browser due to be launched next year. IE9 is months from release, but already it holds the potential to alter the browser market. Not only could it reinvigorate competition with a host of new rivals, it could help usher in the cloud computing era that some of those rivals are eager to embrace. In that era, the Web transforms from a foundation for static documents and Web sites into a foundation for interactive programs.

With IE9, though, Microsoft is trying to rebuild the browser for the Web that’s to come through new standards such as HTML5 and CSS3, updates to Hypertext Markup Language for describing Web pages and Cascading Style Sheets for formatting.

1^st developer preview of IE9 was launched on March 16, 2010.

The preview is bare bones and doesn’t have much in terms of user interface. Still, it provides a good glimpse into what we can expect from IE9: a complete reboot. It supports HTML5, the new version of the mark-up language that supports more dynamic webpages, video embedding, and geolocation. Microsoft also focused on adhering to web standards. IE9’s Acid3 test — a measure of how well a web browser follows certain web standards — achieves a score of 55/100. Microsoft also shows off its improved compliance with CSS, including rounded corners (if you’ve ever developed for previous version of IE, this is definitely a sore spot). Microsoft also seems intent on being compatible with CSS3, which is currently under development. However, IE9 will not support Windows XP. But it could prove to be a smart move, as it might help push more people to upgrade to Windows 7.

May 5 2010: 2^nd developer preview of IE9 released.

The new preview offers a higher ACID 3 test score, 68 out of 100, and there’s a 117-millisecond improvement in speed according to Webkit.org’s SunSpider benchmark tests. Microsoft didn’t provide exact numbers for context.

Webkit.org's SunSpider Performance Update

Microsoft promised improved performance and graphics support, and the company said it’s been working closely with standards bodies. It submitted 79 new tests to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) responsible for HTML 5 compliance, bringing the total to 183.

The 2^nd release builds on the first Platform Preview, delivering improvements to IE9’s performance, support for standards, and hardware acceleration of HTML5.

Another headline element for IE9 is a new JavaScript engine. When it comes to these engines for running Web-based programs, Chrome has V8, Opera 10.5 has Carakan, Safari has Nitro, and Firefox has the new JaegerMonkey.

Now Internet Explorer has its own new name for a JavaScript Engine: Chakra. One big change in the JavaScript engine is its multicore support. As soon as a Web page is loaded, Chakra assigns a processing core to the task of compiling JavaScript in the background into fast code written in the native language of the computer’s processor.

Microsoft has also updated the test drive site with a new set of developer samples to show what developers can do with GPU-powered HTML5. As part of its commitment to enabling developers to use the Same Markup – the same HTML, CSS, and script – on the web, it has contributed many new tests to the W3C for HTML5, as well as CSS3 Media Queries and DOM. The Developer Tools in this preview include some new features to make finding and fixing markup issues easier.

The IE9 Platform Preview itself is a change, too. Previously, Microsoft delivered a more finished product to the world. Now it’s trying to get feedback at an earlier stage of development. And it’s explicitly seeking comment on a wide range of elements.

The platform preview installs side by side with Internet Explorer 8 so that you can try it without replacing the full IE that comes with Windows. This second release of the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview will install over the first version. There is no need to uninstall the first Preview before installing second. You’ll also find more information on what’s included in this release of the Platform Preview in the Release Notes, including known and resolved issues.

You can download the 2^nd developer preview from here.

Free Windows 7 Sensor-Driver Sample Available

Admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:21:12 +0000

The Windows Sensor and Location platform is a new addition to the Microsoft operating system, introduced with the advent of Windows 7. In this regard, the Redmond company is trying to make it easier for developers to leverage the new capabilities built into the successor of Windows Visa, in order to have the computer and associated applications continuously adapt to their environment. Essentially, Microsoft is aiming to simplify the way Windows 7 can be used in order to monitor a Motion Sensor. Developers can access and download the Windows 7 Sensor-Driver Sample from MSDN, a resource set up to streamline the use of the Windows Sensor and Location platform.
“We’ve just wrapped up a whitepaper that describes the creation of a sample driver that supports four sensors: compass, 2-axis accelerometer, ultrasonic distance, and passive-infrared (or motion). In addition to the driver source files, you’ll find source files for the sensor firmware as well as source files for a simple .Net application that you can use to test your driver and sensors,” revealed a member of the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) team.
Developers can connect Widows 7 machines, as well as applications running on top of the company’s latest platform to a variety of location sensors. Windows 7’s Windows Sensor and Location pl… (read more)

Extensions Gain More Steam As Shareaholic Is Chrome-Ready

Admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:32:41 +0000

Google has begun its big push to bring extension support to its Chrome web browser. Currently, it’s accepting extensions from developers that it will be placing in some sort of gallery to launch at a later date. Last week, we showed the nice, new Aviary extension for Chrome. Today, we get very popular Firefox extension that is now Chrome-ready, Shareaholic.

As we noted in September when Shareaholic closed its seed funding, the extension has surpassed over 1 million downloads for Firefox. And for good reason: It makes sharing on just about every service on the web as simple as two-clicks. The new Chrome version works pretty much exactly the same as the Firefox version; you click the button and you are presented with a drop down list of social options for sharing. A shortened URL is automatically made for the webpage you are sending.

If you have a Shareaholic account you can set options for the extension including picking and choosing which social networks to include in the drop-down. You can also pick which URL shortener to use (Bit.ly is the default one). But you don’t have to have a Shareaholic account to use the extension, it will simply use the default sharing options (such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc) to populate your drop-down.

The extension is fast, and thankfully, does not seem to slow down Chrome at all. Obviously, extension support is a big key to Chrome competing with Firefox, the browser known for its extensions. And this simple extension support also gives Chrome a huge leg up over the top dog of the browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Shareaholic’s extension, which is technically still is beta, is accessible through this direct link. Once you download it, simply drag it into your Chrome (version 4.0 or greater, which is still testing) browser window to install it. One note: It’s not working correctly with the latest dev build of Chrome for Mac, but it is working in the latest Chromium builds for Mac. Chrome for Mac’s beta launch is imminent, but Google has stated that extension support will not be in that build right away.

Shareaholic noted that the team at Google helped them port the extension over to Chrome. Clearly, they want to have the best extensions available early.

Source: Techcrunch

Webcast: See What’s New with Bing Maps

Admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:19:20 +0000

Join Bing Maps technical evangelist Chris Pendleton to learn about the latest innovations in the Bing Maps Platform that can help you take your Web mapping solution to the next level. Hear about Deep Zoom and multimedia integration possible in the new Silverlight Control and see how the latest release allows developers to show data in more innovative, powerful, and faster ways. Attend this webcast to stay at the forefront of mapping innovations with Bing Maps.

Date: Thursday, December 10, 2009
Time: 10 A.M. Pacific Standard Time

The rich imagery, quality geospatial data, and leading-edge technology of Bing Maps is already being used by thousands of organizations, governments, and developers worldwide. Choose from a robust set of APIs to build innovative applications that allow you to better display data, excite end users, and improve business insight.

Learn more: http://www.microsoft.com/maps

pendleton.bmp

Source: bing community

New Book: Developing for Microsoft Surface

Admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:26:55 +0000

The people over at nsquared have released the first book for developers and designers getting started on Microsoft Surface. Aptly titled, Developing for Microsoft Surface: Crafting Exceptional Experiences, provides the more than just the essentials for developing software on Microsoft Surface. It provides insight into what makes creating experiences on Surface different. It also goes through theory and onto hands on labs for practice.

Don’t forget to pick up Visual Studio 2008 and the free download ofMicrosoft Surface SDK 1.0 SP1 Workstation Edition if you don’t have a Surface to start out on.

Source: MSDN

Programming Google App Engine

Admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:02:33 +0000

Google App Engine is a cloud computing service unlike any other: it provides a simple model for building applications that scale automatically to accommodate millions of users. With Programming Google App Engine (O’Reilly, US $44.99), you’ll get expert practical guidance that will help you make the best use of this powerful platform. Google engineer Dan Sanderson (@dan_sanderson) shows you how to design your applications for scalability, including ways to perform common development tasks using App Engine’s APIs and scalable services.

You’ll learn about App Engine’s application server architecture, runtime environments, and scalable datastore for distributing data, as well as techniques for optimizing your application. App Engine offers nearly unlimited computing power, and this book provides clear and concise instructions for getting the most from it—right from the source.

"Some of the most exciting areas in web application development involve the potential for rapid success, especially mobile and social apps," says Sanderson. "With traditional web app development, this potential is a hazard: you either grow slow and miss an opportunity to connect with your customers, or you grow quickly, fail to meet demand, and halt development while you re-engineer for scale. Small companies and independent developers often can’t afford either of these options. By working at a level of abstraction designed with Google’s experience in building scalable web apps, small teams can build apps that are scalable from the start, get hot new ideas to market, and innovate at the cutting edge based on feedback from thousands of active, happy users."

With Programming Google App Engine by your side, you will discover the differences between traditional web development and development with App Engine, learn the details of App Engine’s Python and Java runtime environments , understand how App Engine handles web requests and executes application code, learn how to use App Engine’s scalable datastore, including queries and indexes, transactions, and data modeling, use task queues to parallelize and distribute work across the infrastructure and deploy and manage applications with ease

More @ Learn xpress

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Early Preview Demo

Admin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:06:48 +0000

Much to everyone’s surprise, Microsoft shared details about Internet Explorer 9 very early on in the browser’s development process. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager, Internet Explorer, explained that the first IE9-related information offered via official channels was simply the Redmond company joining the discussion of browsers. The software giant choose its Professional Developers Conference 2009, in Los Angeles, to showcase a preview of IE9, but no bits were released as the browser is merely just weeks old.

“The topics that we’re going to talk about pretty much choose themselves, when you look at the conversations that happened throughout IE8,” Hachamovitch noted. More specifically, Microsoft touched three topics, in particular, standards support, performance progress, and the introduction of graphics hardware acceleration.

You will be able to watch the first public demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 via the video embedded at the bottom of this article, courtesy of Microsoft. Obviously the company did not single out the content focused only on IE9, so the video covers the entire PDC 2009 Day 2 Keynote, featuring such Microsoft executives as Steven Sinofsky, president, Windows and Windows Live Division, and Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform. It will be Sinofsky demoing IE9, as along with the Windows project, the Microsoft president is also responsible for the development of the next iteration of the Internet Explorer browser.

As far as I’m concerned, the entire PDC 2009 Day 2 keynote is well-worth watching, but I do realize that you have to dedicate a consistent portion of your time in doing so, as the video goes on for about two and a half hours. So, for those that just want to skip directly to the IE9 demo, just go ahead and jump to minute 40 in the presentation and take it from there (spoiler alert – IE9 has no GUI as of yet).

For more details, Check out softpedia.com

New book: Introducing Windows 7 for Developers

Admin — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:01:14 +0000

Here’s a post about the newly published Introducing Windows 7 for Developers, by Yochay Kiriaty, Laurence Moroney, Sasha Goldshtein and Alon Fliess. (The book’s ISBN is 9780735626829, and it contains 416 pages.)

You can read the Foreword by Mark Russinovich here.

Chapter 7
Building Multitouch Applications in Managed Code

In Chapters 5 and 6, you looked at touch-based applications—in particular, the new multitouch
capabilities that are available in the Windows 7 operating system—and how to program
applications to take advantage of Windows 7 multitouch features.

Perhaps you’re not really that into writing in C++, or perhaps you already have applications
that are written in managed code and would like to be able to use them with multitouch. This
chapter will look at how you can build applications with multitouch in mind using the Microsoft
.NET Framework and, in particular, the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
version 4.

Instead of making a dry run through the features, you’re going to get hands-on experience
right away and learn by doing. So fire up Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and let’s get going.

Building Your First Touch-Sensitive Application

Visual Studio 2010 supports the ability to create WPF Windows applications. You can do this
from the File menu. Select New Project, and the New Project Types dialog box opens. Make
sure that you’ve selected .NET Framework 4.0 as the target framework (on the top right side),
and select WPF Application from the available templates.

Visual Studio creates a basic WPF client application for you containing a couple of XAML files:
App.xaml, which contains the application definition, and MainWindow.xaml, which defines the
application UI. You’ll edit MainWindow.xaml in this section.

Let’s take a look at the basic XAML that is created for you in Window1.xaml:

xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation”
xmlns:x=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml”
Title=”MainWindow” Height=”300″ Width=”300″>

This example defines the window and the code that supports it. In this case, you can see that
the class that implements this code is Chapter7Sample1.Window1. This code resides in the
code-behind file called MainWindow.xaml.cs. We’ll look at that in a moment.

The attributes on the Window element define the namespaces for the XAML code so that the
XAML can be validated by the Visual Studio compiler. Finally, some basic properties such as
Title, Height, and Width are set.

XAML in WPF supports a number of controls that allow you to command how the user interface
is laid out. The Grid control is one of these; it allows you to define how your controls are
laid out within defined cells. These controls can be placed anywhere within any of the cells. If
the Grid control is used, as it is here, without cells (that is, defined using rows and columns),
you should consider it a single-cell grid where only one control will be displayed.

Let’s add a control to this grid. We’ll add a rectangle in it, like this:

This defines a 100 by 100 rectangle (also known as a square), which will appear centered
within the single default cell of the grid. You can see the result in the following screen shot:

If you’re thinking that this isn’t very interesting, you’re right. So let’s make it a little more interesting
by making it touch sensitive. You can manipulate an object using touch in Windows
7 in a number of ways, but we’ll start with the simplest—moving it around the screen.

Using Windows 7 Touch to Move an Object

In the previous section, you built a (very) simple Windows 7 WPF application that rendered a
red rectangle on the screen. Now you’re going to add the first step of basic touch input by
adding the code that allows you to move the rectangle around the screen using touch.

First you need to inform Windows that you want to be able to manipulate the rectangle using
the touch system. You do this in XAML with the IsManipulationEnabled attribute. This is a
Boolean value, and should be set to ‘true’ if you want to manipulate an object
using multi touch.

You’re going to make one more change to the rectangle, and that is to add a named Render-
Transform object that is defined by a MatrixTransform that does nothing. You’ll see shortly
that this transform can be manipulated to provide the drawing functionality that changes the
shape or location of the rectangle upon user input. The MatrixTransform object is defined as
an application resource, so if you look at your App.xaml file, you’ll see a section for resources
(called Application.Resources), where you can add the MatrixTransform object.

Here’s the code:

As you can see, this matrix transform doesn’t do anything. If you apply it to the rectangle,
nothing happens. However, later in the code example, you’ll manipulate the transform, and it,
in turn, will manipulate the rectangle.

Here’s how the rectangle XAML should look with the transform applied:

RenderTransform=”{StaticResource InitialMatrixTransform}”>

Now that the rectangle is configured to allow manipulation, the next step is to set up what
the window needs to capture manipulation events from the operating system. These are captured
using the ManipulationDelta event. Add this, and specify a handler to the Window tag
at the root of the XAML for Window1.xaml.

It should look something like this:

xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation”
xmlns:x=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml”
Title=”Window1″ Height=”300″ Width=”300″ ManipulationDelta=”Window_ManipulationDelta”>

When you created the ManipulationDelta event handler on the Window just shown, Visual
Studio should have created a stub function for you. If it didn’t (for example, if you cut and
pasted the attribute declaration instead of typing it), you can see it here:

private void Window_ManipulationDelta(object sender, ManipulationDeltaEventArgs e)
{
}

If you’re familiar with .NET programming, this code will look familiar. It’s a typical event handler
that takes a general object called sender, which refers to the object that the event was
raised on, and an object containing the event arguments (that is, the metadata associated
with the event).

In this case, you get a ManipulationDeltaEventArgs object. This object exposes a function
called GetDeltaManipulation, which returns a Manipulation object that contains exactly the
metadata that you need to understand what the user has done to the object.

Here’s how you can get a handle on the manipulation that has just been performed:

ManipulationDelta m = e.DeltaManipulation;

Next, you want to get a reference to your rectangle, and to the Matrix that defines its Render-
Transform. Here’s the code:

Rectangle r = e.OriginalSource as Rectangle;
Matrix matrix = ((MatrixTransform)r.RenderTransform).Matrix;

The Manipulation object exposes a Translation property that returns a Vector object, which
has member properties for the translation on X and Y that results from the user’s action of
moving the object. To move the object, you should call the Translate method on the matrix.
(Remember from the code shown earlier, that the matrix here is the RenderTransform from
the rectangle.) Here’s the relevant code:

matrix.Translate(m.Translation.X, m.Translation.Y);

And now all you need to do is set the RenderTransform for the rectangle to be the new matrix
(that is, the one that has been manipulated by the Translation function):

r.RenderTransform = new MatrixTransform(matrix);

And that’s it. Now, all you have to do is implement this event handler and you can move the
rectangle based on user input from the touch screen! Here’s the full event handler:

private void Window_ManipulationDelta(object sender, ManipulationDeltaEventArgs e)
{
Manipulation m = e.GetDeltaManipulation(this);
Rectangle r = e.OriginalSource as Rectangle;
Matrix matrix = ((MatrixTransform)r.RenderTransform).Matrix;
matrix.Translate(m.Translation.X, m.Translation.Y);
r.RenderTransform = new MatrixTransform(matrix);
}

Now if you run your application, you can move the rectangle around the window by touching
the screen with your finger! Here’s an illustration of how it works:

In the next section, you add to this to see how the multitouch system accepts scaling information
that allows you to change the size of the object.

> > >

Microsoft is interested in hearing your feedback so that we can continually improve our books and learning
resources for you. To participate in a brief online (and anonymous) survey, please visit

www.microsoft.com/learning/booksurvey/

Enjoy the book!

Source: MSDN