Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category

BackgroundMotion is live

Tagged as News, Projects

Following up from the Microsoft Technical Briefings earlier this year BackgroundMotion is now live for everyone to use. While the site has been created for people to use a production manner one of the important aspects of BackgroundMotion was enabling developers to see how to develop modern solutions using Microsoft technologies.

Due to wanting to educate people we have provided the source code on Codeplex (download link below). We are also continuing to make updates and fixes as they’re needed and will upload any new changes we make. The source code and site aims to teach you how to:

• Develop with modern patterns such as the Model View Presenter (MVP)
• Use LINQ for SQL
• Write a simple Windows Vista Gadget
• Write a WCF secured Windows Vista Gadget
• Use Microsoft AJAX Extensions
• Integrate Microsoft Virtual Earth
• Leverage third party providers (Flickr, Live Spaces, SilverLight)
• And much more! :)

You can download the source off Codeplex

The live site has videos of our presentations relating to aspects of the site as well as “nugget” style videos covering a variety of topics such as our development methodology and how some of the patterns we use worked.

Nigel Parker has also create a video tutorial on how you can upload content and have it accessible in BackgroundMotion.

As with anything we do, feel free to provide feedback (on this blog or via email).

John-Daniel Trask

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 17 June 2007

PowerShell Gadget rated #4 best gadget

Tagged as Projects

We arrived at work this morning to find an increase in the amount of traffic to our PowerShell Gadget blog post. Jeremy started investigating and we found that IDG Sweden has rated our PowerShell Gadget the #4 best Vista Sidebar Gadget! This is fantastic news for us and kudos really go to Andrew who put in a lot of effort to build something that he thought would be cool to write and share.

If you haven’t checked out the PowerShell Gadget yet you can check out Andrews page here.

You can see the IDG article here (note: it is in Swedish)

John-Daniel Trask

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 17 April 2007

Technical Briefing Presentation Files

Tagged as Events, Projects

The Microsoft 2007 Technical Briefings have come to an end and that means we’re now able to post up the presentations, links and demos that we’ve been using throughout.

Building standards compliant websites

Presented by John-Daniel Trask

Presentation Links:

• Expression Web Designer demo
• Microsoft Internet Explorer Web Developer Toolbar Beta 3
• W3C Validators
• W3C Schools for learning more about the standards
• E-Government Web Guidelines
• IEBlog, the official Microsoft IE blog
• ACID 2 test site
• ASP.NET 2.0 CSS Control Adapters

Presentation File:

• Developing Standards Compliant Websites Presentation (2.33MB)

Demonstration Files:

• Table to CSS Migration Example Code

Building composite applications

Presented by Jeremy Boyd

Presentation Links:

• Web Client Software Factory (Composite Web Block)
• Enterprise Library 3.0
• Validation Block
• Article about the unit testing in Visual Studio 2005 Team Developer Edition
• NUnit Unit Testing Framework
• Cruise Control .NET

Presentation File:

• Building Composite Applications (5.4MB)

Extending the reach of your applications

Presented by Jeremy Boyd & John-Daniel Trask

Presentation Links:

• RSS Toolkit Project on Codeplex
• Create your OpenSearch xml easily using this online tool
• WPF: Community Home
• WPF: Charles Petzold’s Blog
• WPF: Download Expression Blend RC
• MSDN documentation for Sidebar Gadgets
• Example of a quick start for developing Gadgets

Presentation File:

• Extending the Reach of your Applications (8.9MB)

Demonstration Files:

• Web Parts Demo (110KB)

Note, some of the demos rely on BackgroundMotion being publicly available which it currently isn’t. We’ll be releasing a lot of demos, videos and papers about how you can build similar systems once we do make BackgroundMotion available.

Thanks to all of those that attended the events and to Microsoft for putting on a top notch set of events.

John-Daniel Trask

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 31 March 2007

Microsoft 2007 Technical Briefings

Tagged as Events, Projects

It’s been a fantastic couple of weeks tripping around a few main centers in New Zealand giving presentations. We’re off to Christchurch in a couple of hours for the final presentation day tomorrow which means we’ll be releasing our demos, presentations and ultimately BackgroundMotion very soon. Everybody I’ve spoken with has gained value from the event and Microsoft has done a great job putting them together. The success of the events has really been highlighted by the fact that it has had more attendees than TechEd!

So if you are coming along to the Christchurch event then come and say hi to Jeremy and myself.

John-Daniel Trask

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 31 March 2007