Here’s something you wouldn’t see every day. Bill Gates introducing the world to DirectX in 1995.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JokM_fExpI
Don’t interrupt him! My how things have changed.
The moment we’ve all been waiting for, the final release of the Windows Phone 7 SDK has been released! What are you waiting for, go download it and try out some cool things!
No Visual Studio installed? Not an issue, it comes with the Express edition of VS2010 and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone as well as XNA and Silverlight tools for Windows Phone and an emulator – all for free too!
For more information, see ScottGu’s great post about it!
With the release of the final Windows Phone 7 SDK just days away, now’s the time to get into understanding the concepts, architecture & development side of Windows Phone 7. There’s an interesting series posted on Channel 9 to hep you get there.
This Windows Phone 7 Jump Start video training is for all developers interested in developing applications or games for the new Windows Phone 7 Platform. The course is based on the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Kit and taught by Microsoft MVP’s and Microsoft Press Authors, Andy Wigley and Rob S. Miles. Watch these entertaining sessions and complete the labs found on Channel 9 (http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/WP7TrainingKit/) to gain development skills using both XNA and Silverlight. For copies of the student files and links to demo code, you can go to the Windows Phone 7 Born To Learn Forum (http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wp7/m/classresources/default.aspx).
Enjoy – the ! I’ll be posting about my own adventures soon!
As promised, here are some of the (Microsoft) developer events happening down under.
When / Where:
20-21st of November 2001 / Charles Sturt University Wagga Wagga | Map | How to get there.
Cost: Free of charge | See the CodeCampOz FAQ
Accommodation: See Charles “Chuck” Sterling‘s list of accommodation places!
Registration: http://codecampoz2010.eventbrite.com/
When / Where
Cost: Free of charge
Registration: See Dave Glover’s blog post.
Please bring your laptop with you on the day.
Day 1
• 9.45am registration for a 10am start
• Session 1: Introduction and Windows Phone User Experience Overview
• Session 2: Animation, Orientation and Overlays
• Session 3: Application Lifecycle, Navigation, Application Tiles and Notification
• Session 4: Tasks and Touch
• Session 5: Working with the Accelerometer, Sounds and Location
• 5.30pm close
Day 2
• 9.15am registration for a 9.30am start
• Session 6: Connecting and Consuming the Web
• Session 7: Retrieving, Storing and Synchronizing Data
• Session 8: Silverlight Analytics, Unit Testing and other Frameworks
• Session 9: Security, Authentication and Performance
• 5.30pm close
Are you interested in Windows Phone 7 Development? Are you keen to get ahead of the competition to create apps for the Windows Phone 7?
Windows Phone 7 is a fresh exciting mobility platform and potentially a land of opportunity for killer apps! These workshops are designed to take your skills to the next level beyond the online training kits and helps you explore some more complex scenarios.
You need Silverlight/WPF, C# .NET Framework skills and you should have completed a subset of hands on labs from the following:
• Windows Phone 7 Training Kit
• Windows Phone 7 Jump Start Training
• Windows Phone Design Day Recordings
The workshop will be run by Nick Randolph from Built to Roam.
Finally downloaded the latest 3.2.0 release of VirtualBox today and gave it ago!
From the forum post for this pre-release.
VirtualBox Version 3.2.0 is a major update. The following major new features were added:
- Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility.
- Experimental support for Mac OS X guests
- Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)
- CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)
- New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)
- Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
- Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI (see the manual for more information)
- USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available
- LsiLogic SAS controller emulation
- RDP video acceleration
- NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
- Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system
- OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard
In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
- VMM: fixed crash with the OpenSUSE 11.3 milestone kernel during early boot (software virtualization only)
- VMM: fixed OS/2 guest crash with nested paging enabled
- VMM: fixed Windows 2000 guest crash when configured with a large amount of RAM (bug 5800)
- VMM: fixed massive display performance loss (AMD-V with nested paging only)
- Linux/Solaris guests: PAM module for automatic logons added
- GUI: guess the OS type from the OS name when creating a new VM
- GUI: added VM setting for passing the time in UTC instead of passing the local host time to the guest (bug 1310)
- GUI: fixed seamless mode on secondary monitors (bugs 1322 and 1669)
- GUI: added –seamless and –fullscreen command line switches (bug 4220)
- Settings: be more robust when saving the XML settings files
- Mac OS X: rewrite of the CoreAudio driver and added support for audio input (bug 5869)
- Mac OS X: external VRDP authentication module support (bug 3106)
- Mac OS X: Moved the realtime dock preview settings to the VM settings (no global option anymore). Use the dock menu to configure it.
- Mac OS X: added the VM menu to the dock menu
- 3D support: fixed corrupted surface rendering (bug 5695)
- 3D support: fixed VM crashes when using ARB_IMAGING (bug 6014)
- 3D support: fixed assertion when guest applications uses several windows with single OpenGL context (bug 4598)
- 3D support: added GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object support
- 3D support: added OpenGL 2.1 support
- 3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (Mac OS X only) (bug 4653)
- Added support for virtual high precision event timer (HPET)
- LsiLogic: Fixed detection of hard disks attached to port 0 when using the drivers from LSI
- NAT: fixed ICMP latency (non-Windows hosts only; bug 6427)
- Keyboard/Mouse emulation: fixed handling of simultaneous mouse/keyboard events under certain circumstances (bug 5375)
- Shared folders: fixed issue with copying read-only files (Linux guests only; bug 4890)
- OVF: fixed mapping between two IDE channels in OVF and the one IDE controller in VirtualBox
Bootilicious! Download links are on the site (updated for BETA2).
An interesting article posted on the Android Developer Blog from Dianne Hackborn (born to hack!) who discusses the way multi-tasking works on Android. Recommended reading as it goes beyond how it works (and why!) and offers some suggestions on how to make the most of it!
What a whopper of a weekend, Sun has ratified Java EE 6 and also released Glassfish 3 and NetBeans 6.8 to celebrate. If that wasn’t enough JetBrains has also released TeamCity 5!
You can read all about the Sun releases on InternetNews and catchup with whats new in Java EE 6 Overview from Suns site.
Next weekend its time to move Confluence & Jira (Glassfish 2) and TeamCity 5 (Tomcat) to Glassfish 3 in a opensolaris zone and see how things progress. Did I mention I love the zones in OpenSolaris?
I’ve been porting a few products to .NET 4.0 and came across some cool new additions in .NET 4.0 which will be quite useful for developers.
String.Join("one","two","three","four","uno","dos","tres", "quatro");
Remember writing this before to copy one stream to another?
public static void CopyTo(this Stream input, Stream output)
{
byte[] buffer = new byte[2048];
while (true)
{
int read = input.Read (buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
if (read <= 0)
return;
output.Write (buffer, 0, read);
}
}
Now you don’t need to, just use the Stream.CopyTo() method.
inputStream.CopyTo(output);
Previously to detect a 64bit operating system you would either P/Invoke out and call the IsWow64Process in Kernel32, looked at the “PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE” environment variable or even easier (and completely managed code) way of checking the size of a Pointer.
public static bool IsWin64
{
return (IntPtr.Size == 8);
}
public static bool IsWin32
{
return (IntPtr.Size == 4);
}
Now you can simply use the Environment class that comes with two new properties.
There are simply too many to list, see the article on ScottGu‘s blog about WPF4 and VS2010/.NET 4.0.
One very important tweak are the Text Rendering improvements that TextBlock‘s now have a new TextOptions.TextFormattingMode that greatly improves the quality of text rendering.
<Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.MainWindow" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="MainWindow" Height="350" Width="525"> <Grid> <StackPanel xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation' xmlns:x='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml'> <TextBox TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Ideal" FontSize="11">ThushanFernando.com - Ideal</TextBox> <TextBox TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Display" FontSize="11">ThushanFernando.com - Display</TextBox> <TextBox TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Ideal" FontSize="16">ThushanFernando.com - Ideal</TextBox> <TextBox TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Display" FontSize="16">ThushanFernando.com - Display</TextBox> </StackPanel> </Grid> </Window>
Here’s a pretty picture showing the difference between using Ideal and Display. The difference is noticable for text sizes below 15.
Alternatively you can place it in the Window so all child controls will render nicely.
<Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.MainWindow" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="MainWindow - Display" Height="350" Width="525" TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Display"> <Grid> <StackPanel xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation' xmlns:x='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml'> <TextBox FontSize="11">ThushanFernando.com</TextBox> <TextBox FontSize="16">ThushanFernando.com</TextBox> </StackPanel> </Grid> </Window>
There are LOTS more coming in .NET 4.0 that will make anyone doing .NET development today just wet their pants over, just read the article on MSDN by Justin Van Patten about Whats new in the BCL in .NET 4.0 and also posted on the BCL team blog.
Since ditching Outlook after Outlook 2003 (Outlook 2007, 2003 was fine in comparison) came around I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my ever faithful email client. Its fast, lightweight and not as bloated as Outlook is – couple it with Lightning and you’ll be laughing!
Thunderbird 3 brings some cool features for users with the biggest being tabbed message windows (and calendars etc). If you downloaded the new 3.x betas make sure you get Beta 4, the long standing issue with the Messagebox Summary file being corrupt has been finally addressed. Its been a pet hate for a long time now, sometimes searching a folder can corrupt an MSF (means having to go and remove the MSF so it rebuilds the index!), no more! Thunderbird will now fixup any problematic MSF files in the background, yay!
The search in Thunderbird 3 is a massive improvement over the other clients I’ve used, give it a go!
After you download Thunderbird, make sure you get the latest nightly for Lightning Calendar Addon and Google Provider and use them.
