Windows Experience Blog : Developer

Code7 Contest Deadline is October 10th

Brandon LeBlanc — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:51:31 GMT

Back in July, Yochay blogged about the Code7 Contest on the Windows 7 for Developers Blog. The Code7 Contest is a worldwide contest recognizing developers building innovative and really cool applications for Windows 7. I wanted to give a quick update on the contest. We are now 5 days away from the close of the Code7 Contest. Developers, hobbyists and students (age 18+), can upload their videos by October 10th to compete for prizes up to $17,777 at www.code7contest.com.

We’ve had over 4,000 registrants submit applications! We offer kits/training materials available to all registrants to help them build a great and creative Windows 7 application. We are racing toward the submission deadline of October 10th so if you’d like to compete, I strongly recommend you upload your video as soon as possible.

To enter, build an original, consumer-oriented client application that runs natively on Windows 7 (either MFC, Win32, WPF or Winforms) and addresses one or more of the following category topics:

Simplify My Life
More Media, More Places
Gaming
Work From Anywhere
Safeguard Your Work
Applications for a Better Tomorrow

If you want some ideas, you can check out current submissions uploaded by other contestants on the Code7 Gallery page here.

Submissions for the Code7 Contest end October 10th so whether you are a novice or expert – don’t wait until the last minute! Upload your video today at www.code7contest.com.

Incorporating Accessibility into the Engineering Process Engineering

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:34:24 GMT

I am posting this on behalf of Jason Grieves who is a Program Manager on the Windows Accessibility Team. He and his colleague Masahiko Kaneko co-authored a book about our engineering process for accessibility. This is a great example of us helping the ecosystem build great software.

Our expectations of software are very high (as they should be!). We expect that the software we use will be reliable, secure, and perform well - we expect the software to “just work.” There are many ways that we experience software, some of us use the traditional input method of keyboard and mouse. I and many other people augment this with accessible solutions such as larger screens, speech recognition, and screen readers.

In Windows we consider accessibility just like reliability, performance, and security to be fundamental to all software in the operating system. Our feature teams create their software to meet these and other core requirements, which combine to create an operating system that meets the essential expectations of our users. In Windows 7 we continued the integration of accessibility requirements into our software engineering process. Accessibility, like the other fundamental requirements, has been planned, designed, implemented and tested in Windows 7.

In an effort to enable software developers to create accessible Windows applications, we wanted to share our process with the community. We have captured this engineering process in a new book, Engineering Software for Accessibility. The book addresses three basic questions:

How do you plan for accessibility?
How do you design your software for accessibility?
How can you implement and test to your software to confirm it meets the accessible design?

We encourage software developers and anyone with an interest in accessible software to get a copy of our book. You can download a free DOC version of the eBook (right-click to download), or order a paper copy from Amazon.

You will learn that properly implemented accessibility enables access to Windows applications for users with a variety of capabilities. We are pleased to offer you the ability to follow much of process our engineers used to make Windows 7 the most accessible operating system Microsoft has yet produced!

Engineering Software for Accessibility is the latest of several efforts to assist Developers and Testers create accessible solutions. Early in the Windows 7 development cycle we released two accessibility testing tools as open source on CodePlex. UI Accessibility Checker and UI Automation Verify are designed to check the accessibility of applications that implement programmatic access via the MSAA or UI Automation APIs.

We look forward to trying you accessible Windows software!

UPDATED: Silverlight 2.0 Released, Deep Zoom Composer Updated

Brandon LeBlanc — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 05:57:00 GMT

Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division, has announced the final release of Silverlight 2.0. Scott runs the teams responsible for Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET, and IIS 7.0. Silverlight 2.0 is a major release for Microsoft’s Developer Division and allows developers to utilize the benefits of .NET within any browser. Scott also lets us know of several high-profile websites that are jumping onboard in utilizing Silverlight 2.0 such as CBS College Sports Network to broadcast 20,000 hours of live games, AOL with their new AOL Mail, and Blockbuster with their new MovieLink subscription service.

My favorite example of the capability of Silverlight 2.0 is the Hard Rock Memorabilia website using Deep Zoom. This impressive site, ~~designed~~ built by the awesome folks at Vertigo, showcases tons of music memorabilia of historic value such as The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour Bus which is my personal favorite since I got to see it in person several years ago at the Hard Rock in Universal Studios Orlando.

CORRECTION: The Hard Rock Memorabilia website (including the embeddable "widget" that you can share on your website as mentioned below) was actually conceived and designed by the creative geniuses at the San Francisco-based advertising and design firm Duncan/Channon. You can read about the new widget capabilities in the Hard Rock Memorabilia website in this Duncan/Channon blog post. They also have a post up about the Hard Rock Memorabilia website for you to read as well.

They have enabled a super cool widget feature on the Hard Rock Memorabilia website where you can zoom in to a specific object in the collection and choose to share it by embedding it on your blog! As you can see above, I embedded the Magical Mystery Tour Bus Widget for you to see here. Special thanks to OffBeatMammal for the heads up on the sharing functionality in the Hard Rock Memorabilia.

Speaking of Deep Zoom, to go along with the final release of Silverlight 2.0 a new version of Deep Zoom Composer has been released.

Download: Deep Zoom Composer Preview 2 (October 2008)

The Deep Zoom Composer Team tells us that this release is mostly an “under-the-hood” release focusing on reliability. In the near future, expect the Deep Zoom Composer Team to talk more about the changes as they polish the V1 release of Deep Zoom Composer. For those not sure what Deep Zoom Composer is: Deep Zoom Composer is an application that lets users very easily compose their very own Deep Zoom collections, similar (but not as complex) to the Hard Rock Memorabilia website I mentioned above. After composing a Deep Zoom collection in Deep Zoom Composer – you are then given the ability to upload your collection to the Microsoft Live Labs PhotoZoom website. Developers can use this tool to develop their own Deep Zoom collections as well for their own websites. You can check out my Deep Zoom collections on PhotoZoom here. I plan on adding many more collections

Congrats to the Silverlight Team on their Silverlight 2.0 release!

Live Mesh Technology Preview Announced

Brandon LeBlanc — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:14:00 GMT

Today Microsoft is unveiling a technology preview to a really neat new software+services platform called Live Mesh. Live Mesh is a brand new platform that helps your devices act together through the internet enabling users such as you and me to manage, access, and share their files and applications from nearly anywhere. By bringing user's files, applications, and devices together along with the combination of social networking (such as with news feeds) - Live Mesh creates a unique platform experience.

First and foremost Live Mesh is a new platform. The first phase of the technology preview process provides a foundational experience that exposes core concepts and functionality of the platform. In the near future developers can expect to be able to take advantage of Live Mesh to extend their software to the Web, and their services to the desktop and devices.

Today's technology preview is a pre-Beta release designed to get early feedback to make the platform even better.

I've been lucky to be given the chance to play with Live Mesh for the last couple weeks. I've had a great experience with Live Mesh so far and thought I'd share my experiences with you.

So the first thing I did was logged in to http://www.mesh.com/. Live Mesh of course supports Windows Live ID. After logging in with my Windows Live ID - I am taken to the screen where I can add/remove devices to my "mesh".

To set up folders to sync with my devices in my "mesh" I need to go to my Live Desktop. This is essentially your device in the cloud where I can manage all my Live Mesh Folders when I'm not in front of one of my usual PC or mobile. You create folders in your Live Desktop and choose which devices you want to sync them with (after you add them to your Live Mesh of course). You'll notice I have three PCs added to my Live Mesh.

On my Live Desktop I have three folders I've created. The first Live Mesh Folder I created was the one you see here called "Mesh". I use this folder to toss files that get synced to the Live Mesh cloud - and then synced to all my Live Mesh devices. You'll notice that the Live Mesh folks have tried to present a familiar approach to file management. You can even drag the folder window to any place on your Live Desktop.

After creating a folder on my Live Desktop, I can choose to sync it with specific devices in my Live Mesh. I chose to sync with all devices. Because the Live Mesh client was installed on my PCs, the "Mesh" Live Mesh Folder automatically appeared on the desktop of all of those PCs I chose to sync with.

When I open the "Mesh" Live Mesh Folder on any of my Windows Vista PCs the standard Windows Explorer window opens but with a Live Mesh addition on the right-hand side. The Mesh Bar on the Windows Explorer window lets me access my Live Mesh information for that folder.

Each Live Mesh Folder has a News Feed where it displays a history of information like when files were added, when they were removed, as well as who added them and notes. This experience exists both on my Windows desktops as well as my Live Desktop.

A Live Mesh client sits on my Windows PCs in the taskbar. I can use it to quickly access my Live Mesh "stuff" (Live Mesh Folders, devices and news).

I have three tabs that you can switch between my news feed for all my Live Mesh Folders, my Devices, and my news.

From the Devices tab, I can use Live Mesh Remote Desktop to easily access any of my PCs. Building on the awesome Windows Remote Desktop technologies - I can login to any of my PCs running Live Mesh. You'll see that Live Mesh Remote Desktop also has a Mesh Bar.

I can also login to my PCs remotely using Live Mesh via the website as well.

I continue to use Live Mesh for syncing data and the overall all-out access to my information and devices. The above is just a quick overview of my experiences. To quickly recap - Live Mesh provides me with a way to manage and interact with all my data, devices and people.

You can read more about today's Live Mesh Technology Preview announcement from Amit Mital who is the General Manager for Live Mesh on the Windows Live Dev Blog. Keep your eyes on the Live Mesh Blog as well. Noah Edelstein, Group Program Manager for Mesh Platform Experiences, has a in-depth post discussing Live Mesh and possibly answering your questions about Live Mesh - like why you should care about this platform experience.

Channel 10's Nic Fillingham has a great hands-on video of Live Mesh worth checking out! Watch it here in Silverlight bliss:

Hands on with Live Mesh

I believe this is Nic's first video since joining the Channel 10 Team. I look forward to seeing more from Nic in the future.

Oh and Jon Udell over on Channel 9 got a chance to sit down with Ray Ozzie to discuss his role as Chief Software Architect and discusses Microsoft's overall software+services strategy.

You can sign up to get an invite to test Live Mesh for yourself here by logging in with your Windows Live ID.