March 2010 - Posts
Rather than make an HTML index of the videos, I figured it would be more convenient for my visitors to watch the videos directly from here, thanks to the Channel 9 embedding capabilities (and Silverlight).
Introduction and Application ID
Overlay Icons and Progress Bars
Jump Lists Part 1
Jump Lists Part 2
Custom Previews and Thumbnail Clips
Tabbed Thumbnails
When more videos are posted, I will create new posts that will have them embedded.
As part of our work on the Windows 7 training materials, I recorded 23 short how-to videos explaining how to use the new Windows 7 features from managed code (often using the Windows API Code Pack) and from native code. Our Sela team, including Alon, Dima, Arik, and many others, collaborated on the slide decks, demo code, and other aspects of these recordings.
The first installment of these videos is already live on Channel 9—you can download or watch online six videos about the Windows 7 taskbar. As you might remember, the Windows 7 taskbar is one of my favorite new APIs in Windows 7, and I’ve covered it extensively in a series of posts, in an MSDN Magazine article, and in our book, Introducing Windows 7 for Developers.
Amongst the upcoming videos you’ll find an in-depth look at background services and trigger-start services; Libraries and Federated Search; an introduction to Ribbon development; and a series of videos on instrumentation (ETW, WMI, the Troubleshooting Platform, and other topics).
Here’s an index of the videos you can watch right now on Channel 9:
And here’s an index of my posts about the Windows 7 taskbar:
I promised you that my DevAcademy4 session will be recorded and available online shortly after the conference. Well, the conference was a blast, and the video recording, slides, and demos are all available online.
Everyone who had to stand me for over 60 minutes in the packed session hall—thanks a lot for coming, and I hope you had fun! If there’s anything at all that you would like to follow up on, feel free to use the contact form.
It might take a while before the materials are available at the official Microsoft DevAcademy4 website, so in the meantime I uploaded the slides and demos for my session, Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0 with Visual Studio 2010, to my SkyDrive. After extracting the demos directory you’ll find a file called DemoCode.txt under the ParallelTwitter folder. This text file contains all the code I’ve written during the session, and should make it easier for you to reconstruct the session precisely as I performed it on stage.
In the middle of the session the Internet connectivity went down—the XML returned from the Twitter service was malformed and I got an exception in the application. Fortunately, I planned for the offline scenario: My experience with Internet connectivity at previous conferences indicated that the odds of having glitch-free Internet during the entire session were very low (even though the speakers had a wired Internet connection).
How did I plan for the offline scenario? Well, I wrote two implementations of an abstract TwitterClient class—one that uses the actual Twitter search API and another that uses a static XML file in the project’s directory as well as profile images that I preloaded into a separate directory. Switching between the online and offline modes was as easy as changing a Boolean configuration switch and running the application again. To alleviate for even more unlikely problems, I prepared copies of the entire solution (including the compiled executables) for both the online and offline scenarios, one copy for after each demo. Luckily, I didn’t have to use these copies.
If you want to watch the session recording (in Hebrew), you can find them at the Sela website (Sela recorded the conference) in a Silverlight player. The recording quality is only getting better from one conference to the next, and considering the amazing speaker lineup at this DevAcademy, I strongly recommend that you look at the rest of the session as well.
Some screenshots from the session, featuring the ASCII-art Twitter client you can find in the demos:
Sorry for the late announcement, but on Monday I’m going to present a session called Parallel Programming in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 at the Microsoft Developer Academy 4 (Avenue, Airport City).
There are six (!) Sela speakers at the conference: Gil Fink, Alex Golesh, Shai Raiten, Alon Fliess, Noam King, and yours truly—and I’m sure they are going to rock, so take a look at the conference schedule to see which sessions you want to attend.
I wouldn’t want to ruin the fun for the ones who are planning to come to my talk, but here are some of the things we’ll see:
- Styles of concurrent applications today
- The shift from imperative to declarative parallelism
- What’s in the box with .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 with regards to parallel programming
- Data parallelism, processing parallelism, explicit task management
- Migration strategy and integration examples
The sessions will be recorded (AFAIK) so even if you’re unable to attend my talk, I’ll let you know how you can tune in after the conference. I will also upload the presentation, the demos, and any other materials after my talk.
As for the demos—let’s just say that it’s popular to integrate Twitter into every demo at every conference talk, so there will be a Twitter client of some sort but it might have a surprising user interface.
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