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PDC2008 : 27th – 30th October

Things are definitely hotting up around Redmond as PDC looms ever closer and Microsoft put the finishing touches to the new tech it’s going to showcase. Earlier this week there was a well publicised leak of what may well pan out to be Microsoft’s brand new ‘Cloud OS’….but there is more….what the hell is this thing? A souped up tablet PC acting like some kind of mobile Surface computer? Some really snazzy UI design on show here. It’s going to be a very interesting month….

Remix UK 2008 – Day 2

Day 2 is off to a flying start with Scott Guthrie on stage showing off the soon to be RTM MVC framework. Good stuff but I’ve done so much rails in the past that I know the benefits of both MVC and webforms and webforms wins hands down, but each to their own I suppose.

After Scott I find myself sitting in the wrong room looking at the wrong session so it’s a quick dash to find Chris Hays’s ASP.NET Front-End Performance . Filled with great advice this session had a cookbook feel to it ( if you do x you get y) and Chris is an engaging host ( even if he is dressed like an extra from Saved By the Bell )

Next up is Mike Taulty with a session called ‘No Silverlight App is an Island’, that is focused on breaking out of the Silverlight runtime to interact with the outside world via the HTML DOM, web services, JavaScript and sockets. Interesting, informative and the session with most raw technical content of the whole conference.
Eric Nelson follows with a brutally frank once-over of the ADO.NET Entity Framework that I’m sure left most viewers with the impression that it’s just not ready for line-of-business applications. Good stuff all the same.

Then there is more Mike Taulty with A WPF Silverlight crossover session. I haven’t touched WPF at all so it was good to see that the transition between both models is relatively painless.
Finally it’s the Sneak Peeks where Microsoft unveils all the cool technology that it is going to unleash onto the market any time soon. To be honest this time its a let down compared to last years overload of innovation. The best thing was a kind of home-made-ghetto-Surface-Computer-type-thing that stores family photographs made by some boffins at Microsoft Research. Pretty under-whelming really.

All in all the event this year was much more of a mixed bag than the previous years conference. It’s obvious to me that Microsoft is entering a phase of transition. Competitors are becoming more agile and invasive in areas that Microsoft are keen to make advances in and there is much ground to be covered in order to catch up.
Maybe the reason this conference was so light on content is that all the good stuff is being saved for PDC. Only time will tell.

Remix UK 2008 – Day 1

I often feel I’m out of step with what the general consensus of opinion is about any particular subject and sitting through the keynote of Remix UK 08 just validated it for me. I put it down to the ingrained desire to question everything, a desire to truly understand a problem domain in order to resolve it and the ability to realize the difference between passion and plain old bug-eyed ranting.

Today Bill Buxton was just ranting. 30 minutes of ranting about design. I love a good rant as much as the next man, but if you are going to hector me about design for any prolonged period, make sure you are not doing it in front of the worst designed powerpoint I’ve seen for a long time. Do not tell me ‘Lawyers saved Apple’ or ‘Design saved Apple’. Thanks for stating the bleeding obvious. Instead of telling me who saved Apple, tell me who is going to save Microsoft. 

Microsoft Expression Suite is LIGHTYEARS behind the fluidity of use that Adobe provides in Flash or Photoshop. Expression Web is no better than Dreamweaver 3 and that must be nearly ten years old. There is a reason why most designers will not touch Silverlight and its because the tools are not good enough.
Bill’s main thrust was to “design for the experience”. Cool, well start with your own experience and tools first before telling me what is wrong with mine and everyone else’s.

Add in technical hitches, disjointed jumps of narrative and logic and several ‘haha you English drink cups of tea’ jokes, I was ready to get my coat. I’ve no doubt that many people in the audience thought it was ‘passionate’ and ‘brave’, bah  – get over yourself.

Enter Scott Guthrie who gives a great talk filled with solutions not problems. I stick around all morning for his Silverlight sessions and although at least 50 percent of the content was exactly the same as last year ( even some of his slides had ‘Mix07′ in the bottom right corner! ) there was much to learn and enjoy.

Lunch is a brief affair and then it’s back in for a Session on ADO.NET Data Services with Mike Flasko. Mike’s presentation was simply amazing and delivered at such breakneck speed you couldn’t fail to take on his obvious enthusiasm for the technology. It was so good that your brain fizzed as it struggled to multitask between imagining the fantastic possibilities or scenarios for use, and being scared to miss something. Startlingly good stuff.

There is not much good stuff to choose from for the last session, and I cant imagine that the Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips session consists of more than 1 powerpoint slide with the words ‘BUY RESHARPER’ on it, so try out the XNA programming session instead. It was good and delivered with passion and enthusiasm by Paul Foster but not really my bag. Everyone else enjoyed it though.

So thats day 1 in a nutshell, patchy. The freebie count is a little low right now so I will be putting in extra effort on day 2 to resolve it.

Remix UK 08 – The Journey To Brighton

It’s the day before and me and a handful of colleagues leave Liverpool to venture south to attend the Remix Uk 08 event being held in Brighton. What follows is brief pictorial of the journey.

Seconds after entering the car, Paul tries to install ASP.NET on the TomTom.

 
Lunch

Arrival in Brighton and a view through the venue doors of what awaits.

We are staying at the Grand right next to the venue if anyone fancies meeting up for drunken talks about Silverlight framerates and the benefits of Lotus 123 in the enterprise(!).

Our contingent decides to skip the trivialities of sleep and begins to queue outside the venue at 10.20 the evening before it opens(!).

Stay tuned. More news as it happens.

Google Chrome – OS in the Cloud? Not really….

Google’s has just announced the impending release of Chrome, a browser based on Webkit, but with many enhancements to supercharge web applications. The main interest seems to around a multi-threaded custom JavaScript virtual machine built to give you good stuff like garbage collection and true asynchronous processes.

Some of the less tech-savvy pundits on the web ( I love Ted Dziuba’s classy reply too! ) are saying it’s the beginning of the end for Windows and that Chrome represents a move towards Google dominating the OS space in the same manner they dominate the search space. You only have to look at problems Vista itself has with drivers and hardware compatibility, god knows how a browser will cope.

There’s no doubt, the OS will end up in the cloud sooner or later. If it’s Google owned, that remains to be seen. Microsoft’s domination in enterprise is going to take unfathomable effort on behalf of Google to try and make inroads as the project is essentially open source.

On another note though, as a long time JavaScript jockey, I’m looking forward to giving the new system a thorough going over. Multi-process JavaScript sounds simply fantastic! Have a look at the little overview that has been released.

Edit: It’s out and it’s very very good. A really intuative browsing experience but nothing approaching an OS….yet. Also, as you may have guessed – no Silverlight support !

Spinvox is Really Disappointing

I have tried, I really have, to try out Spinvox, the service that converts spoken word to text, but each time I try, I’ve been left wanting.

The first time I tried to sign up for the voicemail offering I hit a brick wall: no real support for PAYG on the Orange network. I purposely choose to go pay as you go as being in the line of work I am, I always need to be in the position to change to the latest and greatest model of mobile there is. I was running an N95 and thought I’d give Spinvox a go, but no Orange PAYG meant no service.

Things are a little different now though. My employers, the mighty Qire have got me a brand spanking IPhone to test out so I thought I’d give Spinvox another go,  but this time using the much touted live blogging service as the IPhone comes with the absolutely awesome Visual Voicemail feature built in. I’m off on holidays and then a raft of conferences so the ability to blog by voice on the go seemed like something I should at least try out. So I did……

It’s rubbish. The blogging service is utterly unusable as the duration of the recording you are allowed to make to have transcribed is about 30 seconds! Completely useless for anything other than "hello mum" style Twitter updates, and not a service that anyone who takes their blogging efforts seriously would want to use. I don’t want War & Peace transcribing, but give me a break. A post half  the size of the one you are reading is not unreasonable surely?

That, along with the fact I can’t find any pricing details on the Spinvox site, the account management tools are sparse and user-hostile, and suggestions that the quality of the transcription is not up to much anyway, means I won’t be giving it another go. I’m pretty sure I could knock together a better service myself with ASP.NET, VXML and the mass distributed cloud workforce of Mechanical Turk in a weekend anyway. At least then I could set the recording length to something usable.

Silverlight 2 in the wild

We have just completed the first release of our enterprise level cloud telecom solution called Qore here at Qire in Liverpool. It is the worlds most advanced multi-channel communications platform and we are really proud of what we have all achieved. My colleague Paul has especially worked magic on what is has been a really ambitious project.

Now that the main objectives have been met, we have a little time to add a few nice bells and whistles to add that little sprinkling of fairy dust that makes good software better. So what could be nicer than cracking open Silverlight 2 and knocking together some cool data visualisation tools.

The first is a big client network monitor display that is going to deployed on a enormous plasma screen stuck to the wall to give the whole company visibility of any issues that our A-List clients have while using the application. We can pre-empt any problems and offer a greater level of service by offering clients help before they even ask for it. Pretty snazzy. Check the video below ( starring Katy, who is captured here between moments of moaning about the cold and making a brew. Plus you get a quick tour of my desktop art gallery.

Silverlight 2 Client Network Monitor from jon on Vimeo.

The second little control is a call visualisation control that will be embedded in Qore to show call details and narrative in a much more interactive fashion. I’ll edit and post the video later as Vimeo is playing up right now.

So that’s it, a little demonstration of what we are making in Silverlight 2; controls to help our clients and improve business processes, hopefully giving you the idea is useful for more than just trivial applications.

MicroBlog Update

• Those lovely people at Zendesk have sent me a Buddha Machine! Lovely! http://www.zendesk.com/ http://www.buddha-machine.com/
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 released. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx
• AppDev Silverlight 2 training DVD is excellent http://www.appdev.com/prodfamily.asp?catalog%5Fname=AppDevCatalog&category%5Fname=XS2Product
• Layer Blending in WPF looks exceptionally powerful http://rakeshravuri.blogspot.com/2008/08/blending-modes-in-wpf-using.html

Wordpress for Iphone

I’m currently sitting in the back of a taxi writing this post on my new iPhone using a very nifty little wordpress client. I have got to admit that I gave never been an apple fanboy but this truly an inspiring bit of hardware.

Come and work for Qire in Liverpool: Marketing Executive position available

If you know one end of a Purple Cow from another, know who Clay Shirky is and know the difference between blogging and twittering, then we want to hear from you.  We are looking for a motivated and creative marketing executive to work closely with the software and sales team to evangelise about our products and services, and take advantage of all the good stuff that the modern web has to offer.

You will have excellent offline and organisational skills too, as they will be needed while working for the world’s most innovative voice application software provider here in sunny Liverpool. Your research skills will help us to move into any target market we wish, by providing us with sales collateral and insight; plus your keen eye for design and the written word will keep us ahead of the pack by understanding the visual language a bleeding edge cloud based telecom provider needs to speak.

Interested? Use the contact form or send us your CV and we will be in touch.