November, 2011

Yes, that title is a mouthful. But this title is as cryptic as the error that can get generated when trying to install a NuGet package: Install-Package : Unable to find assembly references that are compatible with the target framework 'Silverlight,Version=v4.0,Profile=WindowsPhone71'. At line:1 char:16 + Install-Package <<<< Phone.Storage + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Install-Package], InvalidOperationException [...] Blog Post by: Wade

Host Integration Server 2010 comes with a BizTalk data conversion pipeline component. This enables the copybook parsing functionality, without the usage of the HostApps adapters. This is a report of a pipeline name dependency bug.

Amazing News!!! Almost million consoles sold.   Entering the seventh year of its lifecycle, Xbox 360 just closed the biggest sales week in the history of the hit digital entertainment system, selling more than 960,000 consoles in the U.S. during the week of Black Friday. Sales highlights in the U.S. during the week of Black Friday include: · Xbox 360 sold more than 960,000 consoles in the U.S. alone, with more than 800,000 sold within a period of 24 hours. · More than 750,000 Kinect for Xbox...

  Microsoft Acquires Video Content Discovery Company VideoSurf VideoSurf's technology will enhance video discovery capabilities for Xbox LIVE. REDMOND, Wash., and SAN MATEO, Calif., Nov. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Microsoft Corp. has announced the acquisition of California-based video discovery technology company VideoSurf Inc. Founded in 2006, VideoSurf offers a back-end computer vision technology that "sees" frames inside videos to make discovering content fast, easy...

Notification & “Duplex communication” are important scenario over the internet but firewalls and browser limitations makes them very hard to implement. In the browser world, tricks like long polling is commonly used to implement server-push requirements. For non-browser scenarios relay technologies like Azure Service Bus overcome the lack of inbound connectivity by creating a relay [...] Blog Post by: zamd

This is pretty cool. Maybe I should start playing with Kinect on Windows. Posted by Janet I. Tu Last month, Microsoft announced it would be launching a program for more established businesses to develop commercial uses for Kinect for Windows. Now, Microsoft, teaming up with TechStars, has launched Kinect Accelerator , a program for startups with ideas for commercial applications using Kinect's motion- and voice-sensing technologies. Applicants, who must be prepared to relocate to Seattle, have...

I was never a huge gamer but I still remember playing Halo when it first came out. It is amazing to see the new version. Halo Trailer Forbes Article : http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/11/20/halo-remake-honors-xbox-10-year-anniversary/ Blog Post by: Sudhirh

A couple days ago I wrote a post on outsourcing user authentication in a Windows Phone application, demonstrating how easy it is to leverage the Windows Azure Access Control service in your Windows Phone application. The solution is built using a set of NuGet packages that our team has built for Windows Phone + Windows [...] Blog Post by: Wade

Services are becoming more important with richer HTML5 style applications. But by default the browser will let you call into a service on the originating domain but not another one. And that means you have to include all your services one the same domain, not very practical. And worse if you want to use a 3rd part service you can’t call this directly from the your JavaScript code. A technique that has been used for quite some time to solve this problem is JSONP. Basically when you are doing a JSONP...

Yesterday I shared all the NuGet packages we’re building to make it easy to build Windows Phone and Windows Azure applications. Today I wanted to share how easy it is to build a Windows Phone application that leverages the Windows Azure Access Control service. The Phone.Identity.AccessControl.BasePage NuGet package includes a control for Window Phone that [...] Blog Post by: Wade

This week was 10th anniversary of Xbox and it was my 1st week anniversary at Xbox engineering. Yes you heard me right. I moved to Xbox live team and will be working on content services. Content services are web services that power your Xbox console. My area of focus will be content discovery and search. It is a fascinating space and am sure tons for me to learn. Super excited to go from team that build cloud computing platform to team that is building one of the most saleable cloud application that...

Earlier this week we released the Windows Azure SDK 1.6, which includes a lot of great updates to the emulators, tools for Visual Studio, and libraries. One of my favorite additions is a new way to get a management certificate installed into Windows Azure and onto your machine. You can now browse to https://windows.azure.com/download/publishprofile.aspx and [...] Blog Post by: Wade

If you’ve been paying attention to the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone (or my twitter feed) the last couple weeks, you’ve probably noticed something about NuGet packages. We’ve been building a lot of Windows Phone and Windows Azure NuGet packages that, when composed together, give you the ability to quickly build some cool applications. [...] Blog Post by: Wade

Various new updates for Windows Azure were just released (Azure SDK for .NET updates shown below): Windows Azure SDK (November 2011, )—Multiple updates to the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 that simplify development, deployment, and management on Windows Azure. The full Windows Azure SDK can be downloaded via the Web Platform installer here . Windows Azure HPC Scheduler SDK — Works in conjunction with the Windows Azure SDK and includes modules and features to author high performance computing...

Afgelopen vrijdag bracht de koerier mijn nieuwe telefoon, een Nokia Lumia 800 telefoon met Windows Phone 7 Mango als OS. En die heb ik dit weekend eens flink onderhanden genomen om te kijken of hij nu echt zo goed is als iedereen vindt en vooral of het beter is dan mijn huidige iPhone. De hardware. Ik kan er kort over zijn. Nokia heeft hier een hele mooie telefoon gemaakt. Hij is prachtig afgewerkt met een heel mooi helder scherm. Het eerste wat opviel is dat de het standaard blauw anders is dan...

In previous blog posts I wrote about using Server-Sent Events so send data from the server to the browser. This works but has the drawback that it is a one way messaging from the server to the browser. There is nothing preventing you from doing ajax style calls back to the server but basically you are using 2 connection. The big plus for Server-Sent Events is that is use standard HTTP connections so the infrastructure is no problem.   WebSockets Sometimes you want more flexibility of duplex...

In deze podcast spreekt Maurice de Beijer met Jurgen Thysmans van Nokia over wat de omschakeling van Nokia naar het Windows Phone 7 platform allemaal voor gevolgen gaat hebben. Tevens bezoeken we het Testpanel Nokia Lumia 800 dat die avond door Tweakers en Nokia samen georganiseerd werd en waar 40 testers met een Nokia Lumia 800 naar huis gingen. Links: http://discoveryzone.nl/ http://forum.nokia.com Marko Ahtisaari op http://conversations.nokia.com/   http://www.dotned.nl/PodCasts.aspx?id=18...

I’m working on a Windows Phone project that requires me to surface up multiple RSS feeds as a single source. I needed a way to do this quickly and easily, and with a little help from friends on Twitter (particularly a suggestion from @bertcraven) I found a nice way to accomplish this using the SyndicationFeed [...] Blog Post by: Wade

In the previous blog post I demonstrated how to use Modernizr to test for the availability of HTML 5 features. Doing so was quite easy but as every test is always performed to add CSS classes to the <html> element there is a bit of overhead in using the default Modernizr JavaScript file. Fortunately they have made a fix for this rather easy and added a page where you can quickly create a custom version with just the checks you need for your site.     Adding custom checks The careful...

In the previous blog post I demonstrated how to use Modernizr to test for the availability of HTML 5 features. Doing so was quite easy but as every test is always performed to add CSS classes to the <html> element there is a bit of overhead in using the default Modernizr JavaScript file. Fortunately they have made a fix for this rather easy and added a page where you can quickly create a custom version with just the checks you need for your site. Adding custom checks The careful reader might...