My Blog has been moved

I have now moved my blog over to a new work account on MSDN using the following URL:

http://blogs.msdn.com/domgreen/default.aspx


Please feel free to subscribe to my new feed and leave feed back.

Live Mesh - Favorites

Recently found a great post by Laurent Duveau describing how to use Live Mesh to sync your Favorites from any devices with Mesh installed.

You can set up your favorites to sync with each of your devices by following these steps:

1. Browse to your favorite folder (C:\users\username\favorites )


2. Right click on the folder and select "Add folder to Live Mesh"


3. On each of your Live Mesh devices a shortcut to the folder will appear


4. Right click the new folder and select and select "Sync Options"


5. Sync to your favorites location on the new device (C:\users\username\favorites )

This will now allow you to easily get and sync your favorite websites no matter which device you are currently using.

Live Mesh Applications

This past week Tech Ed Australia has been happening "Down Under", with Imagine Cup winner and renouned blogger Long Zheng keeping us posted on the lastest gossip.

Long has just posted an amazing blog post, showing the world the first sneak peak of Live Mesh Applications.

The Live Mesh apps with be able to be accessed from any location that holds the data from the Mesh account you are signed in with, wether it be the Online Desktop, Mobile Device or any of the synced PC/Mac devices you are sharing you data between.

Not only can you have the same application run in multiple devices and even
just inside a web browser, it also syncs data across all devices
autonomously thanks to the underlying Mesh framework. Furthermore even if
the network is unavailable, due of the way Mesh manages data, the
application’s data and the application itself will still be available with
the latest version of the data it was able to sync.

(From Long Zheng's Post)

Live Mesh is just getting more and more exciting and I can't wait for the announcements from PDC in late October.

Shoe Shopping in Seattle

Eileen Brown has found this awesome new Microsoft video show Bill Gates and Jerry Sienfeld shoe shopping.

Now i want to get some Big Top points!

IE++ What I would like from future releases...

With the recent release of IE8 beta 2 there has been a lot of hype with most of the tech community talking about Internet Explorer and some of the great features within the latest beta release.

Two articles that I have read that really stood out are:

IE Blog
Poalo Barone’s Blog

However, as a lot has already been said about IE8 and its great (depending on your viewpoint) features so in this post I’m going to talk over some of the things I would like to see from future releases of Internet Explorer, specifically looking at how Internet Explorer can harness a cloud centric design using such things as Live Mesh, Skydrive and Midori.

With the new cloud centric design of these technologies, developers are beginning to realise that people want to get access to their documents, photos and music from any device they are using, why should browsing the internet be any different? No matter the device or platform you are using you should still be able to have the exact same browsing experience.

Your history, bookmarks, recent searches along with your temporary internet files should all be moved from the storage of a local machine and be placed into the cloud, meaning you would never have to remember the url of that great youtube video you viewed at home the other day, when your browsing the internet at your friends house as it would automatically be stored into your history which you take with you no matter what device or computer you are using.
Using your Live ID you people can log into Internet Explorer and instantly have access to their own personalised settings and history streamed to them straight from a storage area within their Live Mesh account.

With your bookmarks being held in the cloud such as with Foxmarks means that you will never lose track of your favourite sites.

Using your Live ID to log into IE you would not have the need to enter into Porn Mode to hide all those naughty sites you visit ... or buying presents ;) as your browsing history like the bookmarks would now be stored in the cloud where only you would have access to these details. Also meaning if you did want to revisit your history it would be possible from any location.

Also meaning that your usernames, password along with auto complete form filling data could travel with you, meaning you would literally never have to remember your Amazon, eBay, Flicker, Twitter, and Facebook passwords again as they would be accessed for your from the cloud data storage area.

Internet Explorer along with many other applications could really benefit by adding features that allow users to have the same experience no matter the device or location. I’m really looking forward to see more development in cloud computing in the near future (fingers crossed for PDC 2008 gossip).




One last thing, speaking with Firefox users today they mentioned one of the primary reasons for the use of Firefox is the ability to have add-on’s integrated into the browser, well now IE8 offers this as well all you need to do is go to Tools >> Manage Addons ... magic!

Popfly Experience - Photos

This is a set of photos showing my experience whilst out in Seattle for the week, the photos can also be found on Flickr here.

Highlights of photos:

Sumo Fight - UK Vs Canada
Surface
Shooting Range
.NET Beer

Popfly Experience - Meet the Team

Video: The Popfly Experience 2 : Working with The Team

Heres the second of a series of videos that Ben and myself are doing from Seattle, talking to various memebers of the Popfly team.

Note: I look horriable sweaty at the start as I had been upholding British machismo by fighting Patrick in a sumo match (and it was hot!!).

Popfly Mashup and Custom Block

As part of the work experience that I have been doing with the Popfly team I have been creating a number of mashups that would be able to be demoed as part of presentations and then be used with hands on labs so that the audience could go and create these mashup's themselves.

One of the mashups that has been created for the hands on labs is the creation of a twitter friend comparer, this will compaire the number of friends one user has against the other and give the results on a bar chart. The user who deploys the app will hard code their own user name in the app and then embed it into a website or facebook. Anyone visiting that page will then be able to input their own twitter screen name to see has the most friends.

(a number of errors may still occour with the mashup due to problem with the twitter API)




Creating this mashup posed a number of problems, one of which was that currently none of the social network API's/blocks support getting the number of friends a user has. Instead the API returns an array of objects that represent a friend. The number of friends can then be found by the number of objects in this array.

To do this I created a custom block that checks the ammount of entrys in the array from the input blocks. This can work for any number of blocks of any type, so if a Facebook block returns 147 friends the count block will output an integer with the value of 147.

This allows the above mashup to get the number of friends each of the users have and then display this integer to the bar graph block as data.

The created mashup can be found here and the "count" block can be found under the tool sub folder in Popfly.

Popfly Experience - Video

Ben Nunney has put together a quick video covering our first couple of days out in Seatle a where we are doing some work for the Popfly team.


Video: Popfly Experience Video Blog 1

Making Games the Hard Way

Making Games...before Popfly Game Creator

Say hello to my little friend...

First time firing a gun, what an exhilarating experience. I want more ...

Popfly, America and Jetlag

It's coming to the end of the second day out in America working with the Popfly team, and I thought it was only appropriate to undate everyone with whats been happening over this past couple of days.

The first day with the Popfly team, started of extremly early, with Ben and myself making it into the office (MS Building 41) for around 8:30, which is earlier than ive been out of bed this last couple of weeks :s

We met up with John Montgomery who is the GPM for the Popfly and Visual Studio Express teams, and John showed us around some of campus and introduced us to various people on his teams. Then on to set up in our own offices and start to flesh out some of the idea's that we have had for the projects that we will be doing this week.

This involved lots of writing on white boards (is alot cooler than it sounds) and story boarding our 3 presentations which will cover an "Overview of Popfly", "Mashup's", and "Game Creation". For each presention we will have to deliver a 60 minute presentation with a number of demos / builds, complete demos and walk throughs for presenters and also hands on labs for the audience to either complete in their own time or after the presentation.

With the outlines of each presentation done and we started on building up a number of demos that will be introduced into the slides, these include some great mashup's such as an Live Image search and display mashup and a recreation of the classic Amiga game "Bouncing Babies" (no babies were hurt in the production of this game!) whereby babies would have to jump from a buring building to be caught by the firebrigade below. We have also got an idea for a Deepdive for the mashups and block creation where we will use a number of different social networking sites and RSS feeds to either create a friend feed esq. sidebar app or an online presence idicator which can be put on your blog as "Blog Bling" (also check out Pimp My Live) to show visitors to your blog where else they can find more info about you, such as your twitter, FB or Flickr profies.

The second day we continued with our fleshing out of ideas and creation of demos and walkthroughs...

*edit* Remove mention of how horrid JavaScrip is *edit*

Along with the request for a Merge block to be included in Popfly (stay posted for the latest).

Needless to say after minimal sleep and alot of work, jetlag has started to kick in, however I will keep updating when more cool stuff happens.

Jose Fajardo - Deep Zoom Video

Just found this short video on DeepZoom on the Delicate Genius blog which shows Jose Fajardo skimming over some very cool stuff that can be done with DeepZoom! I especially like the thought of embedded adverts and overlays within a DeepZoom image.

Check out this video:

Microsoft Midori - OS in the Cloud?

Recent reports suggest that Microsoft will be moving to a more web centric user experience with there next generation of oprating system.

Codename Midori looks to be being released after Windows 7 and most probably 8. Making the most of the recent movement of software plus services that we have seen from MS. If you've not seen some of the great services released by MS go check out:

Live Mesh

Outlook Live Connector

Live Office

Popfly Work Experience

One of the prizes for winning the UK leg of the Imagine Cup with our entry EnviroMatch is a week work experience with the Popfly. During this week Ben Nunney and myself will travel out to Microsoft headquarters in Seattle and meet up with some of the greatest minds in Microsoft.

The week will start out meeting with Andy Sterland, the Popfly Team's token Brit who was also a previous competitor in the Imagine Cup, representing the UK in India. Andy will show us round the offices and start us on our main project for the week. As well as doing general babysitting just in case Ben gets arrested (anything could happen) or i get lost on campus.

Creating a number of 60 minute presentations on the Popfly platform, creation of mashups and also a deep dive into programming (javascript pfft) custom blocks. Will update when i get more indepth information on these presentations.

During the week we also get the honour of meeting up with Anders Hejlsberg (wiki) , who is the lead architecte on the C# programming language. Hopefully we will be able to get some interesting sneak peaks on what Anders envisages for C# 4.0.

We will be out in Redmond from the 3rd till the 12th of August, anyone who is free to meet and talk tech drop me an email or a tweet (domgreen).

Best Ever Popfly Video

Just been browsing around on the Popfly site and managed to stumble upon this really funny "Live Action Demo" of how to create mash-ups in Popfly.

http://www.popfly.com/Videos/?video=liLiveAction


Who said you need a PC to use Popfly?

Microsoft Scalable Fabric

Microsoft Scalable Fabric is a new way to manage tasks brought to you by the geniuses at Microsoft Research (MSR).

Rather than minimising or tabbing between each of the applications that are running Scalable Fabric allows you to pull applications to the side of the screen where they are scaled down.

Allowing you to still see all applications that are running on your machine right from your desktop.

A central "focus" area is defined where by dragging an app closer will scale it up and if the app is dragged away it is then scaled down.

One of the really cool things about fabric is that you can then group similar applications that you may be running together, in my screen shot (ace background im sure you'll agree) you can see that ive made an IM app group, consisting of my Skype and digsby chats. By clicking on the group label all o the applications can be brought into the focus area.

Although the app is very cool it does still seem a little buggy, will use it for a couple of days to see how i like it :D

Microsoft Scalable Fabric can be downloaded here.

Presentations from Paris

Ben Nunnery has uploaded a video of Resolve Evolve Sovles final presentation at the 2008 Imagine Cup, and can be found below:

Unfortunatly, we didnt make it to the second round of the finals but being in Paris was such a great opportunity. Hopefully I will be reappearing at future IC events as either a mentor or judge (fingers crossed).




Video: EnviroMatch Presentation


I would also like to thank all the Microsofties that gave us alot of support whilst we were out in Paris.

Imagine Cup 2008 - Paris

"Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable enviroment"

Microsoft and the Imagine Cup has brought the best student competetors from all around the world to take part in the Imagine Cup in Paris, France. With over 1000 student from 60 countries this years Imagine Cup has to be one of the biggest mult-cultural student gathering to ever happen.
Over the past two days the competetors have been competing and presenting projects that have been worked on for the past few months. All the competetors out in Paris are already winner having competed in regional finals within their own contries to get the honour to represent at a world level.

My own team Resolve Evolve Solve, have given our first two presentations for the Software Design invitational, each presentation should last around 20 minutes and display the entry to the judges showing what enviromental problem we solved and how it has been done. I feel that the presentations have gone really well and we will find out later today if we have made it to the semi-finals.

Making it through to the semi-finals would be a truley excellent experience, especially with the high class entries from other contires around the world.

From feed-back after outr first two presentations will deffinatly be put into practice if we make it through to the next round. One point of feedback was to make it much clearer how the EnviroMatch application will generate revenue, using the skinning services offered to our customers. To find out more about our teams Imagine Cup entry visit our website.

So, untill we find out the results of this round fingers will be securly crossed.

Iconfinder

Whilst skimming through posts on Channel 8 I noticed this item about icon searching.

The post offers two really snazzy icon search engines that you can use to find the perfect icon for your applications. The two sites showcased in the post are:

Iconfinder

Iconlet

Great work Channel 8, keep it up.