I'm sure I'm not the only one who is glad November 4th is finally here. I've had enough politics, election coverage and negative advertising to last me until the 2016 election. Regardless, there are some pretty cool free tools available for election junkies like myself to help you follow the incoming results throughout the day and even make some of your own predictions about the election's outcome.

The first tool you should check out is the MSNBC Decision '08 Dashboard. This is a portal for following all aspects of the election throughout the day. It provides the most recent news feeds, streaming video and an interactive electoral college map where you can look at the most up-to-date information from MSNBC's analysts or make your own predictions as the polls start to close. The page also provides some customization capabilities, allowing you to keep the information that is most important to you at the top of the page. I'm intending to keep this page open throughout the night.

Have you seen the Microsoft Surface application Chuck Todd has been using to plot electoral college predictions over the past several weeks? Well, getting a Surface shipped to all of you might be hard, but MSNBC is providing you with a version of this application that will run on your PC. The NBC Decision 08 Electoral Map is a connected Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that imports current information from MSNBC, but also allows you to clear the map and make your own predictions state-by-state. You can even save your maps locally and reload them as the night goes on.

Here's a quick start guide on using the app:

• After you install the application, go to Start->Programs->MSNBC->NBC Decision 08 Electoral Map
• The “i” logo has the Information on the app and how to use it
• The initial load is Chuck Todd’s Predictions as of this week
• You click on a candidate and then on a state to give them the state
  • Ex: Click on Obama and on WA to make it blue
  • If you click WA again, it will turn light blue and “leaning Obama” 
  • If you click WA again, it will turn gray and will become a toss-up state
• You can save your prediction as an XML file

This is the most technologically advanced election in history and, as an electorate, we have a plethora of tools at our fingertips to help us participate in this historic event. I encourage you to try these tools out today but, more than that, be sure to get out and cast your vote1

It's been awhile since I posted about the many local events being offered by Microsoft in this part of the country and, frankly, they've kind of piled up on me.

ArcReady
The topic for this quarter's ArcReady is Professional Patterns on the Job and will focus on soft skills that good architects need everyday on the job. Here is an excerpt from the event description:

You're smart. You deliver. What more could your company want from you?  Why don’t they come to you for the big technical decisions? Why won’t they listen to your proposals? It seems like everyone has an agenda and they’re doing everything they can to kill your great ideas.

Join us this quarter as we focus on the soft skills that architects need to master. Learning these skills will boost your emotional intelligence and help you become a more professional, well rounded contributor. You’ll gain insight into the architect’s role as leader, influencer, and business professional and learn how to leverage your position to become a positive force within your organization.

ArcReady is offered throughout the central part of the country by the Microsoft DPE team. You can register for your local event at www.arcready.com. The following lists the cities and dates for ArcReady this quarter, with cities in the North-Central district in bold red:

MSDN Unleashed
On this current tour, MSDN Unleashed will be focusing on what's new in SQL Server 2008 for developers and building applications with the newly released Silverlight 2.0 RTW. Here is the schedule for this event over the next month:

With all the video editing and publishing I find myself doing these days, I have to tell you that Expression Encoder is becoming one of my favorite applications. I actually use Sony Vegas Pro to edit and construct my videos, but then I use Expression Encoder to convert the raw video output into HD streaming format and, using an awesome plug-in available from the Expression web site, I can publish my content directly to my Silverlight Streaming account in the cloud. It's quick (possibly the fastest encoder I've used) and super easy to use -- exactly the way it should be.

The product group announced Tuesday on their team blog that Expression Encoder 2 SP1 would soon be available for download and laid out the key capabilities available via SP1, namely:

• Full support for Silverlight 2 applications
• New Silverlight 2 templates which include rich functionality such as DVD-style chapter navigation, subtitles and metadata
• Encoding support for H.264/AAC video
• Publish content to IIS and other servers that support the WebDAV protocol for use with IIS Smooth Streaming

To this last point, IIS Smooth Streaming is the new name for what had previously been called "adaptive streaming" for Silverlight. Essentially, Smooth Streaming enables video playback to dynamically assess changing network and PC load conditions during streaming and make adjustments to the bitrate on the fly, creating a seamless viewing experience for the user. IIS Smooth Streaming will be included in the upcoming IIS Media Pack.

Expression Encoder 2 SP1 became available for download yesterday from here. If you're a frequent user of Encoder like I am, I encourage you to pull it down and install it today. The new Silverlight 2 templates are very cool and worth the installation alone.

Unless you've been under a rock or too preoccupied watching your retirement fund dwindle away to what used to pass for gas money, you know that the big news out of Microsoft today is the release-to-web of Silverlight 2.0. I know for many of us, this has seemed like a day that couldn't arrive too soon. It seems like a long time, but when you stop to consider that Silverlight 1.0 was released just over a year ago, the product team really did a fantastic job getting this done.

Silverlight 2.0
ScottGu posted on the release this morning, so I'll refer you to his post for all the delicious details about the final set of features that made their way into the RTW of Silverlight 2.0. For my part, I'll repeat the major developer-centric features Scott talked about for you here:

• WPF UI Framework: Silverlight 2 includes a rich UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier.  In includes a powerful graphics and animation engine, as well as rich support for higher-level UI capabilities like controls, layout management, data-binding, styles, and template skinning.  The WPF UI Framework in Silverlight is a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in the full .NET Framework, and enables developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications.

• Rich Controls: Silverlight 2 includes a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications.  The Silverlight 2 release includes core form controls (TextBox, CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, etc), built-in layout management panels (StackPanel, Grid, Panel, etc), common functionality controls (Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar, DatePicker, etc), and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, ListBox, etc).  All Silverlight controls support a rich control templating model, which enables developers and designers to collaborate together to build highly polished solutions.

• Rich Networking Support: Silverlight 2 includes rich networking support.  It includes out of the box support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services.  It supports cross domain network access (enabling Silverlight clients to directly access resources and data from resources on the web).  It also includes built-in sockets networking support.

• Rich Base Class Library: Silverlight 2 includes a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc).  It includes rich APIs that enable HTML DOM/JavaScript integration with .NET code.  It includes LINQ and LINQ to XML library support (enabling easy transformation and querying of data), as well as local data caching and storage support.  The .NET APIs in Silverlight are a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework.

• Rich Media Support: Silverlight 2 includes built-in video codecs for playing high definition video, as well as for streaming it over the web (including both live and on-demand support).  Silverlight includes support for adaptively switching video bitrates on the fly based on network conditions (enabling users to avoid seeing the dreaded "buffering..." message), placing and metering ads within video streams, as well as enabling content protection. 

And most impressively, all of this comes in a download package just 4.63 MB in size. That's  really amazing stuff. I encourage you to download and install the RTW package today.

Expression Blend 2 SP1
For many of you, Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 CTP has been key to building your Silverlight 2.0 application for the past several months, myself included. In order to support the RTW release of Silverlight 2.0, the Expression team released Service Pack 1 for Expression Blend 2 today as well. This will update the current version of Expression Blend to support Silverlight 2.0 design and development. Also, if you are using the trial version of Blend, you can install SP1 to update your trial software. In addition, SP1 will extend your trial period an additional 60 days.

Beyond enabling Silverlight 2.0 projects, SP1 enables two key new features in Expression Blend 2: Control Skinning and Visual State Manager.

Control skinning gives designers the ability to visually customize controls to enable them to exactly fit the function they play within an application, while the ‘Visual State Manager’ gives a flexible and visual way to control precisely how each element of a control will behave and look in a given state. Whether an element in a control snaps into position or glides, moves in a linear fashion or with inertia, the designer has the freedom to quickly and accurately experiment with different interactions before finely tuning and finalizing the user experience of the application.

To begin building your Silverlight 2.0 applications in Expression Blend 2, download it here.

So, it's been a big day of releases and there even more to come. As you may recall, there is this little conference call the Professional Developers Conference in LA at the end of the month. I see Silverlight playing into a lot of the other big announcements that are going to be made that week. Will you be there? I will. If you'd like to synch up while we're in LA, please leave me a comment on this post and we'll see about chatting at PDC.

Have fun Silverlighting.

I am an old school Windows developer. I spent a large percentage of my career actually writing software to run on Windows desktops, some of it for internal use at large enterprise IT shops, some for sale in the consumer market. Since the release of .NET earlier this decade, my primary outlet for delivering Windows solutions have been WinForm projects in Visual Studio, and while they are very practical and capable of delivering great functionality, incorporating an intuitive and memorable user experience tends to be difficult. Certainly I can leverage GDI+ or even DirectX to build some compelling UI features, but on a typical project timeline where the ship date was a week ago and the budget has long been in the red, we tend to settle for the status quo and deliver what we can.

This is one of the reasons why I was so excited when I first got my hands on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). This was truly a game-changing technology for developing rich, interactive experiences on the desktop. One of the most powerful aspects of WPF is that fact that the UI layer is designed and implemented in eXtensible Application Markup Language, or XAML. This XML-based markup language gives you with the ability to not simply mock up the UI, but to build the UI, exactly they way you want it to look. And what's more, XAML provides the capability to use transitions, timelines and event triggers so designers and developers alike can implement UI level effects and activities without this code residing in the business layer or even in the UI code behind files.

Sounds great, right? So why hasn't WPF taken over the world yet? It's very simple: WPF is new. Really new. And big. Really big. The object model for WPF itself is intimidating, but then when developers who've worked with standard visual design tools for the past fifteen years get their first look at XAML, the standard response is, "Wow, I don't have time to learn all that."

Enter <XamlFest />
<XamlFest />is a free two day seminar being hosted around the country to help show that XAML and WPF are not overwhelming or even particularly hard. If you live in the central part of the US, you can attend <XamlFest /> in Houston, Texas. Here's the 411:

Dates
Monday & Tuesday October 6^th and 7^th

Attendees
The capacity for this event is 40 people and registration is done on a first come/first served basis.

Venue
Microsoft South Central District: Houston, TX
One Briar Lake Plaza
2000 W. Sam Houston Pkwy. S. #350
Houston, TX 77042
Phone: (832) 252-4300
Fax: (832) 252-4545

Daily Agenda

Registration
You can register at the following link:

https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=253035

This program was originally intended only for Microsoft partners, but is now open to everybody. If you don’t have a Microsoft partner account, please send an e-mail with the names and e-mail addresses of your attendees to info@msregistration.com. Don’t forget to mention you are attending the Houston event.

<XamlFest /> Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What if I don’t have Visual Studio?
A. No problem, every attendee leaves with Visual Studio 2008 Pro!

Q. What if I don’t have Expression Blend?
A. Again, no problem! Everyone leaves with Expression Studio 2.

Q. What if I don’t have an idea for a starter project?
A. We’d like you to leave with something personal, but if nothing comes to mind that’s OK too. It’s the main reason we’re planning a few guided sessions where you can fallow along with us. These sessions should take no more than two hours, so if something sparks your interest you’ll still have time left for assisted development.

Q. What if I don’t have a laptop?
A. You can still participate in the training in the mornings and lunch, but assisted development in the afternoon is a harder problem to solve. We have no problem with people pairing up, so you might want to check with friends or co-workers to see if there interested.

Q. Can I just come for the training and skip assisted development?
A. XamlFest is about empowering designers and developers to deliver great user experiences and we believe a key component is hands-on assisted development. If you are unable to participate in the afternoon sessions please wait until the day before the event to register. This will give others the opportunity to sign up first, and if there’s still space available you’re welcome to join us.

<XamlFest /> -- Come as you are, leave Xamlized!

Just over a week ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at the Minnesota Developers Conference in lovely Minnetonka, Minnesota. I'd like to extend a sincere "thank you" to Farhan Muhammad and our host, ILM, for putting on a great conference and to all the attendees that spent the day with us.

My talk was on SharePoint and it's role as a service platform in the evolving world of software plus services. The talk was a tall order in that S+S alone is a hefty enough topic, but then to incorporate the SharePoint specific aspects on top of that was quite a challenge. I hope everyone who attended my talk found it interesting and, hopefully, thought-provoking.

As promised, here are the slides from my presentation (minus the e-Sponder video) if you'd like to review or use it to talk about S+S in your organizations. As I mentioned during my talk, I'm always glad to talk about this if you have questions or ideas.

With an industry focus on building rich applications for client computers and devices and augmenting their functionality with services in the cloud, designing performant, robust architectures is becoming a greater challenge. "Distributed systems" used to mean connecting different machine within the enterprise to consolidate functionality in a line-of-business application. Today, this could mean providing core business capabilities via services to a multitude of client application on multiple platforms, devices and continents.

This quarter's ArcReady is on architecting solutions for the modern distributed system. Here is the official write-up on the event:

Nearly every application we build today has dependencies to other systems. How do we design them to work together to meet our goals? How do we decide what to build and what to buy? Do we host it ourselves or in the cloud? With a bewildering array of choices, the biggest challenge we face today is how to architect robust applications with the right technologies to meet our user’s needs and integrate nicely into our existing IT ecosystems.

Join our Central Region Architect Evangelists for a great discussion on architecting distributed applications using all the latest technologies and best practices.

Session 1: Blueprints for Success. In this session, we will survey the modern architecture landscape from the ground up, including infrastructure, application, and client solution choices. We’ll discuss how current industry trends are shaping our architectures and present an innovative architecture mapping technique for analyzing our customer’s needs and aligning them to today’s technologies and solution patterns.

Session 2: Making It Real. In this session, we’ll take a look at several case studies to learn how to apply the mapping technique from Session 1 to architect real world solutions that add true business value. We’ll examine applications we use every day and take a walk through a Microsoft reference architecture that explores many of the decisions we face when building modern distributed applications.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

Architects and Senior Developers who are interested in becoming an architect.

WHERE ARE THE EVENTS?

Events are held in 4 cities across Microsoft’s North Central District.  Please join us for one of these free events.

· Minneapolis, MN September 16, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

· Omaha, NB September 18, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

· Kansas City, MO September 23, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

· St. Louis, MO September 25, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

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.