I got to leave my mark on TechEd US
As you probably know, TechEd US has just passed. I didn’t get to go (like always), but I did get to make my mark on the conference. I got to build one of the apps that Microsoft demoed on stage. I have actually built a bunch of demo apps for Microsoft and their conferences the last year. At some point, I will actually try to find them at some point a post some videos of them here. But they involve a CRM demo with a phone company, a SharePoint demo with a racing team and some other bits and pieces. Anyhow…this year my demo was a Word add-in, and my personal opinion about this project, before it got started, was that it sucked. I I’m not very fond of building Word add-ins as you might have guessed.
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Subtitling videos
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft asked me to add closed captioning to the videos on the www.office2010themovie.com. And no…not automated subtitles that converts to what is said into text, like YouTube does…just subtitles from a file. This is not very complicated, not even when you add the fact that the videos are actually being streamed using Smooth Streaming. But I wanted roll it al into a control, to make it fast and easy to add subtitles to any MediaElement in future projects…
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Using SharePoint thmx files to style Silverlight
A couple of weeks ago, I requested to build a code sample for Microsoft. It was supposed to make it possible to restyle a Silverlight application based on a SharePoint 2010 theme. In SharePoint 2010, theming is based on OpenXML, and saved as files with an extension of “thmx”.
But I guess the first question would be WHY you would use a huge thmx file just to restyle a Silverlight application… Well, imagine that you are building Silverlight applications that are to be used inside a SharePoint application. Imagine how nice it would be if the Silverlight applications would change appearance if you changed the theme of the SharePoint site. That way, changing the theme would not be a problem, and would not cause a whole lot of rework.
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Microsoft PDC 09 and Silverlight
As you might have noticed, Microsoft PDC ‘09 has “just” finished. Unfortunately, like with all other conferences, I didn’t get to attend. PDC did however give me a lot of good things. First of all, the most obvious, a new Silverlight beta. Silverlight 4 includes a lot of interesting stuff that will be really interesting to play around with. Among the interesting features to note is webcam support, COM integration, support for external devices, access to local files, support for showing HTML, RichText and lots more. Oh…yeah…they have also added a bit of commanding support… And a few nice Visual Studio enhancements for Silverlight, such as Intellisense for bindings…
Another cool thing about PDC was that even if I didn’t get to attend, I was still sort of there. I was involved in building three Silverlight applications for Microsoft. If you attended, or have looked at some of the videos from PDC, you might have seen one or two of them.
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Quick initial impressions of Microsoft "new" Charting Controls
Microsoft released some really cool charting controls a while back. ScottGu writes about it in one of his blog posts. It is a sweet little collectio of charting controls both for windows and web development. In the web scenario, you add a specific webcontrol to your page, give it some data and it renders it nicely. At least that is the simple explanation. There is a LOT more things you can control and tweak to make it look like you want it. However, this time I'm actualy using the windows parts of the controls. Reason? Well, I need to create some charts in memory to be added to a PDF document. So I don't really want a webcontrol... So, here are some of my thoughts after working with it for a couple of hours.
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