Microsoft ends its fiscal year on June 30th each year. The result of this is that July tends to be a time for some vacation and offers a great opportunity to "sharpen the saw" a bit. Like many of you, I really thought the Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia site done with Silverlight and Deep Zoom was a really cool application, so I decided to dig and learn as much as I could about it.

The result was an application I built for a new blog site I also started in July called DrummBlog.com. As many of you know, I'm a pretty active musician and have been for most of my life. It turns out that I enjoy writing about drums and percussion about as much as I do about technology, so I started this site up to serve as an outlet for my other passion outside of Microsoft. I decided that I would pay homage to my favorite drummers by making a photo collage using Deep Zoom.

First, I downloaded the free Deep Zoom Composer tool. I first had a look at this tool early this year and, frankly, it was pretty difficult to use and the output was very raw. The most recent version has made leaps and bounds in usability and performance.

Creating my collage was a three step process.

First, I imported all the photos I wanted to use. Deep Zoom Composer allows you to do this individually or as a group, which is a nice time-saver. Imported photos appear in a column to the right of the design face with the detailed photo in the center.

Once you've imported all the photos you want to use in your project, you need select the Compose option at the top of the screen and begin clicking-and-dragging the photos onto the design surface. You can resize and layer photos to your heart's content. Remember that if you have a large number of photos, you can reduce the picture size as much as you like to fit them in the available space -- your user will be able to zoom in to see the detail. I only had thirty-four photos in my project, so I could leave several of them large while reducing some of them for fun and effect.

Also, you can switch your photo column to a layer view, which gives you a little more control over how the images are presented on the screen, as well as letting you do custom sizing and tagging for each individual photo in the composition.

When you think you have the design the way you want it, you come to the final phase which is exporting the project. You have two options here: You can export it to PhotoZoom if you have an account there or you can export it as a Silverlight project. I went for option number two and created a Silverlight project.

Once the export is complete, you are presented with a few options for moving forward. You can preview the application locally in the browser, view the image folder or look at the project folder. I previewed the collage in the browser a couple of time, observing that there were some noticeable gaps between photos when I zoomed. This preview capability gave me the chance to fix those before putting it online.

When I was done tweaking the design, it was time for me to move the project to a hosting server so I could show it off on DrummBlog. The Export Location field in Deep Zoom Composer is not exactly accurate if you need to grab all the application files for packaging. The full path to what you need is here:

[project name]\source images\OutputSdi\[project name]\DeepZoomProjectWeb\ClientBin

You'll find an HTML file, and XAP file and a directory will all the images stored in it. This is all you need to show the application online.

My original intent was to host the application using the Silverlight Streaming service. As Deep Zoom doesn't have the ability to automatically publish the project to this service (and yes, please consider that a feature request), I needed to try and package the application for manual upload. I tried this a couple of times, but the service kept throwing errors, telling me that the manifest included in the archive wasn't valid.

I ran out of patience for this very quickly and decided I would upload the project to my own web server. I uploaded everything in the ClientBin directory to my web server. However, when the upload was complete and I went to load the HTML page hosting the applications, I got an error telling me that file extension was not recognized by the web server.

This was easy enough to fix. Since I have remote access to my hosting web server, I logged in, fired up IIS admin and added a MIME type for the XAP file extension, the syntax being application/x-silverlight-app:

I navigated to the HTML page that was part of the output for the project to make sure that I could view the application in the browser. I then added a link to the HTML page that reloaded the page. I put this in to allow folks to reset the page back to its original state.

The only thing left to do after that was to add some HTML to my blog post to imbed an IFrame to host the project web page and there it was. I was all done.

Here is the result:

I should also point out that, with the exception of a little HTML tweaking here and there, I didn't have to write any code at all to produce this. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of coding, but in this case I wanted to focus on the look and feel of what I as producing and I honestly think code would have gotten in the way of that. What's more, had I been able to get the application to load into Silverlight Streaming, I could have used the free plug-in for Windows Live Writer to automatically embed that application for me, thus requiring no coding at all.

If you're interested in building your own Deep Zoom project, I highly recommend grabbing the latest bits for Deep Zoom Composer and give it a try. My next project? Doing a Deep Zoom class reunion album for my wife's high school class. Fun stuff.

I've fallen behind on keeping you up to date on new ARCast.tv shows being published on Channel 9. Mea culpa.

The first one features an interview with Steve Resnick, Rich Crane and Chris Bowen about their new book, Essential WCF. The interview was conducted by my colleague and good buddy, Bob Familiar, who always does a great job on the show:

ARCast.TV - Essential WCF

Also in the "recently published" category is my interview with Roy Osherove of Typemock where we talk about test-driven design and the role of testing in the real world. Any time you can demonstrate the often confusing state of maintaining tests in a large system with a pile of rubber bracelets, well that just good TV, right?

ARCast.TV - Roy Osherove on Test Driven Design

First, I'd like to thank everyone who came to my talk last night at the St. Louis .NET User Group meeting. I was nice to see so many people from the community come out and support this group. I hope that my presentation helped clarify what software plus services really means from and architectural and development standpoint, as well as providing you with some ideas on how you might apply some of these principles to your work as well.

As promised, I've uploaded my deck from last night.

There was also the matter of the Day In the Life... video that I showed, but could not get the sound system to work. So, since we spent some time last night talking about the Silverlight Streaming Service, I went ahead and uploaded the video to the service and embedded it below.

By all means, feel free to comment or send me an email if you'd like to talk more about S+S.

Unfortunately, most people still look at SharePoint as an "intranet in a box" solution for quickly putting up team home pages and managing documents. The truth is that SharePoint Server 2007 has evolved into a rich development platform that can be extended and utilized in your custom software projects. If your project has requirements for search, content management and/or membership, MOSS can save time and money on the project by providing that functionality which can then me implemented as part of your solution.

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with Sundar Swaminathan, a Solutions Architect at Quilogy in St. Charles, Missouri, to talk with him about his experience as lead architect on the project to redesign Energizer.com (the web site that goes on and on and on...sorry, I couldn't resist!) to run on top of MOSS. Fortunately, I had my camera gear with me and we were able to turn it into an ARCast.tv segment.

ARCast.TV - Sundar Swaminathan on MOSS for Public Facing Web Sites

Please feel free to join in the discussion. Leave a comment either on the ARCast,tv site or here on my blog. Enjoy the conversation and thanks for watching!

For those of you who didn't get the memo, Ron Jacobs is no longer hosting the very popular Channel 9 show, ARCast. After spending a couple of years traveling the world talking to hundreds of practicing architects, Ron decided he needed a change and is now a Technical Evangelist in Redmond working with the WCF and WF teams.

Because of the popularity of ARCast worldwide, I and a small team of fellow architects from across the country have been working over the past several months to bring into being what we're calling, "ARCast 2.0." Instead of having one regular host on the show, any architect evangelist in the world that has a story to tell and is willing to sit down and record it can be the host of an ARCast episode.

We published the first official episode of ARCast 2.0 last week. My colleague and good friend Bob Familiar sat down with Simon Guest, Senior Director of the Platform Architecture Team at Microsoft, and had a great conversation about what his team does and what types of content and activities his team will have for the community in the future. If you haven't had a chance to watch the interview yet, you can watch it here.

And this week it's my turn.

A few weeks ago at TechEd Developer 2008, I had an opportunity to sit down in the TechEd Online "fishbowl" and have a conversation with Juval Lowy about his ideas concerning interface-based design in software. Any conversation that starts with, "Object-orientation has completely failed us," is going to be a good one.

You can watch the full ARCast video here:

ARCast.tv - Juval Lowy on Interface Based Design

If you never want to miss an episode of ARCast, then be sure to subscribe to the show's feed here. Please let me know what you think of the interview.

I'd like to thank everyone who came to the Next Web Roadshow event we held in St. Louis last week. The turnout was phenomenal and, based on your feedback, it looks like the material was very useful and on topic.

As promised, our presenter, Mike Henderson, has posted a set of links to resources from his presentation.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm re-posting Mike's links here:

WPF Information:
MSDN WPF samples
Code Project's WPF Pages
Vista x64 Forums on WPF
XCeed's WPF Wiki
Kazaml

Good WPF-related Blogs:
Josh Smith
Mike Hillberg
Beatriz Costa
Tim Sneath 

Silverlight Information:
Silverlight splash screen + dynamic content sample
Silverlight.net 
Silverlight Cream 
MSDN Silverlight Dev Center
Silverlight 2 Controls Source Code

Good Silverlight Blogs:
Brad Abrams
Expression Design + Blend
Joe Stegman
Mike Harsh
Mike Taulty
Scott Guthrie

ASP.NET Information:
ASP.NET 
MSDN ASP.NET Code Gallery
123ASPX Index 
4 Guys From Rolla

Good ASP.NET Blogs:
DotNet Slackers
Scott Mitchell

Books:
Programming WPF 
Essential WPF 
Apps = Code + Markup 
Professional ASP.NET 3.5
ASP 2.0 Website Programming 
Essential ASP.NET

It never ceases to amaze me how contentious the very definition of "software architect" is. It really seems like something that should be very cut-and-dry, and yet a great deal of my energy at Microsoft TechEd Developer was spent discussing this very topic last week. In fact, I'm working on a series of articles on this subject as we speak which should be published online in the near future. And if it is that difficult for working architects to create a standard definition of their own role, imagine what it would be like for those aspiring architects out there.

In an effort to help those individuals who are aspiring to be architects better understand the role and the big topics in architecture today, there is a great series of webcasts starting next week that will provide a primer for moving into the role of the architect. In fact, much of the content in the series would work very well for many working architects out there as well. To get an idea of what you can expect, you can review last year's webcast series here.

Below is the schedule for this year's series as well as links to the registration sites for each:

June 16^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Introduction to the aspiring architect Web Cast series
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380836&Culture=en-CA

June 17^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Services Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Service Bus – Beyond the hype
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380838&Culture=en-CA

June 18^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – TOGAF and Zachman, a real-world perspective
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380840&Culture=en-CA

June 19^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Services Oriented Architecture (Web Cast in French)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380842&Culture=en-CA

June 20^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Interoperability (Web Cast in French)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380844&Culture=fr-CA

June 23^rd , 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Realizing dynamic systems
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380846&Culture=en-CA

June 24^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Web 2.0, beyond the hype
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380848&Culture=en-CA

June 25^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Architecting for the user experience
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380850&Culture=en-CA

June 26^th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Conclusion and next steps
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380852&Culture=en-CA

Brian Moore called me out on providing some answers to a few questions about how I got started in software development. Seeing as it's Brian that asked, I'm only too glad to oblige.

This post is actually the most recent in a thread of posts from different bloggers, essentially a blog-based chain letter with a purpose. And I can guarantee that you won't get ten years of bad luck if you don't respond.

Here is the stacktrace for this thread as it stands today:

With that said, here's my contribution.

How old were you when you started programming?
I was thirteen. My friend next door got a Commodore VIC-20 for Christmas. After spending more time on it than him, I immediately began earning money to buy my own and, after a particularly lucrative garage sale in the summer of 1984, I went to Toys-R-Us and bought a Commodore 64. From that point on, most of my  free time was spent sitting at the keyboard copying programs from the popular computer magazines of the time and learning how to code by changing them to make them do what I wanted -- it was my first experience with extending third party software.

And by the way, I still proudly own my Commodore 64 and even pull it out for my kids sometimes when they start complaining about how slow their Internet access is.

What was your first language?
BASIC

What was the first real program you wrote?
This depends on your definition of "real." The first thing I ever wrote that did something, looked a little bit like this:

10 print "Denny is awesome"; 20 goto 10

This, of course, had the expected output of printing "Denny is awesome" an infinite number of times, or at least until I hit the Run Stop key.

If that's not real enough, then I guess it would be a text-based adventure game I wrote called Despair Mountain. Inspired by Zork, I set about writing my own game in that same particular genre. I know this will be hard to believe, but I was a big Dungeons & Dragons nut when I was that age, so my game was set in fantasy-adventure universe. I had two major achievements from that particular development project:

1. I managed to develop a calligraphy font for the UI before there were such things as fonts
2. I wrote a very basic "fuzzy logic" algorithm for interpreting directions typed in by the user

I would hate to go back and run a cyclomatic complexity text on that app, but for that time in history and my level of inexperience, it wasn't bad.

What languages have you used since you started programming?
I cut my teeth on BASIC, both at home and what passed for a computer education course at my high school (we learned on the Apple IIe in class). When I started my professional career, I was writing in C and moved quickly into Perl, as I was doing a lot of web development work in the mid-nineties and Perl was preferred language at the time for CGI.

Around that same timeframe, I learned and developed in Java for awhile. I was really drawn by the promise of "write once, run anywhere" that Sun was making. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for me to recognize that it was all a pipe dream.

Disillusioned with Java, I picked up a copy of Visual Basic 5.0 and started writing software for Windows. While I was never crazy about the VB syntax, I soon discovered a new web technology Microsoft was touting called Active Server Pages that used VBScript as the primary language and that alone made it worthwhile. ASP changed the way I looked at software development in general. Sure, we look back and laugh at the simplistic model "classic" ASP provided, but in a world where CGI was the only option, ASP was an enormous evolutionary step forward in web development.

When .NET was released in 2001, I stuck with VB in the form of VB.NET for a month until I started playing with C# and just fell in love. To this day, I'm still a C# developer through-and-though and only go back to VB.NET when I have to.

What was your first professional programming gig?
I actually sold my first piece of software before I ever had a full-time job as a developer. A friend of mine at the time contacted me in February of 1996 with an opportunity to write an application that would produce web pages and associated CGI scripts that could tie users into a proprietary document management system. I developed a VB5 app, which I named Voyeur with tongue firmly planted in cheek, that let users start a new web project, customize the look and feel of the document and add custom search fields, content and logos. When the user published the project, it produced a web page reflecting their chosen layout and a corresponding Perl/CGI script that connected through a COM component to the back-end of the DMS.

For its day, it was pretty slick little application and I sold it to the document management company for a tidy sum.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Absolutely. In fact, I would have started earlier.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Wow, nailing down one thing is going to be hard -- there's a lot of advise I would dispense to those just getting started.

I guess my advise would read like this: "Trust in God, but lock your car."

You'll be presented with many technological panaceas over the course of your career. It seems every year has another "If-You-Just-Use-This-Technology-Nothing-Will-Ever-Go-Wrong-Again" product line. The sad fact is that nothing of the sort really exists or will likely ever exist. Development tools, frameworks and platforms are like tools you keep in your work shop: Each one is very good at certain things and not so good at others. So be optimistic and open-minded, but also learn to develop a healthy sense of skepticism. Look at each technological advance you come into contact with and give it a thorough, objective examination before deciding whether or not you're going to use it.

And one more thing (yeah, I'm breaking the "one thing" mandate -- sue me):  Don't get emotionally attached to one specific technology or platform. The only thing that you can count on in this business is that things are going to change constantly, and if you're married to the wrong technology, you'll likely find yourself on the outside of things very quickly.

What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?
Back in 1997, my wife and I owned and ISP in suburban Chicago. Our company web site was my first ASP project and was a wonderful learning experience. I was pretty new to the Windows platform and had a blast writing an application that would allow customers to sign-up for service and provision their personal web site and database account online. I can't ever remember a time when I had so much fun making so many mistakes -- I learned so much. Even when I first started working in .NET, I already knew a lot about the platform, so it was fun, but not as much as that first ASP project.

Who am I calling out?
This was a lot of fun. These are the kinds of questions I don't get very often and it was very enjoyable walking down memory lane. That being said, I'm going to tag the following friends and colleagues to continue the thread:

• Clint Edmonson
• John Mullinax
• Jeff Julian
• Rob Foster

This afternoon, I attended career day at my daughter, Josephine's, school.

Now, I've spoken all over the country in front of audiences large and small, but I'll tell you this: There are few more intimidating audiences than 40 or so fifth graders. That being said, I came prepared.

I started my session by trying to explain what Microsoft does. I held up a picture of BillG and asked the group if they knew who that was. Scattered hands went up and we eventually got that part right. Then I reached into my bag and pulled out my Master Chief helmet and asked if they knew who that was and, not surprisingly, they got it on the first try. "Sweet," I thought, "I've got them in the palm of my hand now."

And indeed it seemed that way for the next 10 minutes. I answered more questions about Xbox, Wii and Playstation than I thought there were in the known universe. I even gently explained why Microsoft won't be producing an Xbox for the Wii.

As I was preparing to wrap up the Q&A, I picked a young lady in the front row who looked me straight in the eye and asked:

Isn't Linux better than Windows?

Like an underpaid, under-appreciated vaudevillian actor, I actually did a double-take and said, "Excuse me?"

"It's just that I think Linux is better than Windows and I'm wondering why you think it isn't."

Needless to say, I was not exactly prepared for this. I mean, I discuss the merits of Linux and Windows all the time, just not with eleven-year-olds. I answered her question by saying I didn't necessarily think that Windows was better than Linux, but that they were both operating systems and each had specific strengths and weaknesses, and that it really depended on what you were looking to do. That seemed to satisfy her, but she concluded by saying, "I still like Linux better." I absolutely failed as an evangelist in this instance, but in all fairness, she did ambush me.

This really got me thinking about the younger generation and their ubiquitous connection with technology. We hear about this all the time. In fact, the one major argument I've had with my oldest daughter, Zoe, in the past few months has been whether she's old enough to have her own mySpace page ("But Daaaaaaad, all my friend have one!"). Both of my oldest daughters have cell phones and the idea that mobile phones used to be carried in bags and had batteries that lasted 20 minutes carries the same level of incredulity as when I showed them the video games I used to play on my Atari 2600. Even my six-year-old, Gwynneth, can play most Nintendo DS games far better than I can and even laughs at my eventual failure each time we play.

But this question was different. Here was an eleven-year-old child that already had a preferred operating system, and challenged me to explain the major advantages of one platform over another. She was alone in this group of kids, but a 1:40 ratio of kids with deep technical knowledge to kids who think software is just about video games is a pretty significant part of the American population and worth noting.

As kids become more discontented with just experiencing technology, they are going to start looking for ways they can become a participant in it, and this is going to lead them to start exploring platforms and the tools available to develop software for these platforms. Because they will have had so much exposure to technology growing up and the ability to learn and build new software will be so available to them, they will have no fear as they approach new problems that require innovative, creative solutions.

There is a post I've been working on for some time now, inspired by Zain Naboulsi, about Second Life and the impact it can have on interpersonal relationships. The holdup in finishing and publishing that post has been that I needed to get deeper into that experience to prove out some theories I had about it. What I've found is fascinating.

When letting my kids ride "shotgun" with me in Second Life, they seem to form connections with the other avatars I interact with in the virtual world. One example that comes to mind is when I walked away from someone I was conversing with in the middle of their sentence. My kids actually admonished me for being "rude" to the other "person." This, I think, shows the connection that our children have with technology that perhaps we, as adults, do not. I see a screen where my momentary rudeness to another virtual being is not even worth noticing. But, to my kids, that was equivalent to turning around and walking away from someone I was speaking to in "meatspace," and that, therefore, is rude.

This is the thing we need to really understand about this younger generation. The lines between personal and virtual relationships are going to melt away. I want to believe that machines will never replace real, interactive human contact, but that may be because that is the the world I've grown in. My children live in a world where they can befriend digital representations of real people half-way around the world and it is as real as if they lived next door. The text messages that they send and receive can carry as much value as a personal conversation over coffee does to us "older folk." And a mySpace page can be the difference between social success and failure.

So here's what I learned at school today: Don't underestimate kids and their depth of understand when it comes to technology. They are living in it now and will drive the direction it takes in the future.

"The Next Web." "The Next Generation Web."

What the hell is that, anyway? Just another buzzword? More "marketing techno-babble?"

I like to think of it as "Web 2.5." It ameliorates the technical innovations that drove the Web 2.0 movement and really takes them to the next level. If you consider the impact that AJAX has had on the way web applications are built, essentially making them behave more like desktop applications, next generation Web applications look and feel like desktop applications as well. In the Microsoft world, the technologies that are driving this evolution are Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight and the incredible advances in ASP.NET.

If you live in or near St. Louis, I encourage you to register for a great seminar we're going to be holding on Wednesday, June 11th at the Microsoft offices to talk about the next generation of the Web and how these technologies will play into it. You will take part in a technical exploration of the latest technologies Microsoft has to offer, and how you can take advantage of those technologies to provide a truly next-generation user experience in you Windows and web client applications. During the seminar, Mike Henderson from Pluralsight will guide you on a technical walkthrough of each technology, demonstrate the technologies' capabilities, and show the tools and techniques used to provide those capabilities.

Seating will be limited for this event, so I highly encourage you to register today if you would like to attend.