Archive for May, 2007

Jeremy Boyd in Computerworld

Tagged as News

Computerworld spoke with Jeremy Boyd recently about Gadget development here in New Zealand. Mindscape has been involved with several gadgets – for example you’ve all seen the PowerShell Gadget from Andrew. They have proved very popular and gave us experience in writing some of the more sophisticated gadgets out there. It has been great to see so many New Zealanders developing some really cool gadgets and now Microsoft have a page dedicated to Gadgets that have been developed in New Zealand.

Mindscape recently released the Gadget Template to help people develop Windows Vista Gadgets more easily. Jeremy Boyd undertook this development and has really been evangelizing Gadget development in New Zealand and to his credit other organisations are starting to jump on the bandwagon with some great gadgets.

You can download the Gadget Template here (MSI file).

You can read the Computerworld interview here.

John-Daniel

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 21 May 2007

Template for Windows Sidebar Gadget development

Tagged as General

Earlier in the year we posted up a number of posts around Gadget development.

Based on feedback from a number of people interested in developing Gadgets for the Windows Sidebar, we have put together a community template to help kick-start your Sidebar Gadget development.

The template includes:

• New “Web Site” templates for Visual Studio 2005
• Guidance documentation with how-to’s
• Samples covering RSS, .NET integration and integrating with Silverlight

To use the template you will need Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2005 installed on your development machine.

You can download it from: http://community.mindscape.co.nz/Windows%20Vista%20Sidebar%20Gadget%20Template%20-%20RC.msi right now, so download it and give us some feedback!

We are planning to update the template with feedback and contributions, so please email them through.

If you want some ideas of Gadgets you could build, take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/nz/windows/gadgets/default.mspx to see what others have been building!

Jeremy

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Posted by Jeremy Boyd on 21 May 2007

BrainDump #1 – Simone Chiaretta

Tagged as BrainDump

I’m excited to announce the first in a new series of video blog posts. We thought it would be interesting to tap the brains of a number of the .NET development community around New Zealand and get them to spend 5 minutes telling us about what they are up to.

To get started we talked with Simone Chiaretta who is an Italian developer who recently moved to New Zealand. Simone works with Calcium in Wellington and is also on the core team for Subtext. We asked Simone about Subtext and the recent Cruise Control gadget he built..

Check out Simone’s blog at http://www.codeclimber.net.nz, and you can also subscribe to our video blogs via RSS!

Jeremy

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Posted by Jeremy Boyd on 17 May 2007

LightSpeed Open Beta == You could win an iPod!

Tagged as LightSpeed

We’re opening up our beta program for Beta 2 of LightSpeed and we want to offer an incentive for people to provide feedback, tool around with and try and break our software. Everybody that submits a bug, provides some constructive feedback will be entered into the draw. The prize is a 4GB iPod Nano (2nd generation) and the competition is open from today until the end of June 2007 and a winner will be announced here on the first of July (click here for terms and conditions).

You will get extra entries for:

• Posting a bug.
• Posting a working sample.
• Providing documentation feedback.
• Linking to the Mindscape Blog.
• Blogging about your experience with LightSpeed.

Anything you do to help with the testing and delivery of LightSpeed with be considered another entry. You’re welcome to email me with any questions.

This competition is open to anyone, wherever in the world you live. We know that a lot of people code for fun and already spend time playing with code so why not give yourself a chance of winning an iPod at the same time? If you’re not a developer but have a blog you can still get an entry for helping us gain exposure of what we are doing.

To take part simply sign up to the beta program here (existing beta testers will need to complete this as well).

Thanks, I look forward to the feedback and to announcing a winner in July.

John-Daniel Trask

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 17 May 2007

Mindscape becomes exclusive Castle Stronghold Partner

Tagged as News

I’m excited to announce that Mindscape has reached an exclusive partnership deal with Castle Stronghold, a Brazilian based company delivering enterprise based solutions based on beliefs of software quality and agile development practices.

Castle Stronghold was created by the founder of the Castle project, an open source framework which has helped developers worldwide build on recognised software patterns and techniques to deliver successful software solutions.

This is the first partnership of its kind that Castle Stronghold has entered into and we are delighted to be chosen as their foundation partner.

This partnership enables Mindscape to further cement our focus on developing highly robust solutions using quality tools and techniques. Mindscape now has the exclusive New Zealand rights to working directly with Castle Stronghold meaning that Mindscape is the most highly qualified organisation in New Zealand for providing solutions that leverage the Castle project.

More about the Castle project:

The Castle project is a collection of open source frameworks and components that apply modern and robust principals to enable faster solution delivery with more confidence in the quality of a delivered solution on the .NET framework. Currently several people at Mindscape have submitted patches that have been accepted into this project and this deal highlights our further commitment to the project.

Click here to visit the Castle Project homepage.

More about Castle Stronghold:

Castle Stronghold is the company created by the founder of the Castle Project and is now the sponsor of the Castle project. Castle Stronghold was created to leverage the demand for delivering Castle based solutions.

Click here to visit the Castle Stronghold homepage.

If you have any questions regarding this partnership please email me.

John-Daniel Trask

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 14 May 2007