I had a PowerPoint 2007 presentation this morning that I needed to convert into the OpenDocument Presentation format, to make it usable in OpenOffice 3.0. It was a fairly simple presentation, with no animations or anything, just text and some figures.
My first attempt was to simply use the PPTX importer in Impress, and ended up […]
Tuesday July 14th
Brian Loesgen
on
Topic
Microsoft has embarked on a major initiative to make it easier to design, construct, deploy and manage distributed applications and services. The Oslo modeling platform is a key part of this vision, and "M", a new way to describe models, lies at the heart of Oslo. In this session we drill into the composite parts of M: MSchema, MGrammar and MGraph. We will see how these pieces can be used to create a DSL (Domain Specific Language) and how that DSL can be used. We will also look at the tooling that Microsoft is providing to work with textual and graphical DSLs. We will demo a DSL that can be used as a REST client.
Speaker
Brian Loesgen is a Principal SOA Architect with Microsoft. Based in San Diego. Brian is a six-time Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server, and has been involved with BizTalk since prior to the BizTalk Server 2000 beta. Brian has extensive experience in building sophisticated enterprise, ESB and SOA solutions. Brian was a key architect/developer of the "Microsoft ESB Guidance", initially released by Microsoft in Oct 2006. He is a co-author of six books, including "BizTalk Server 2004 Unleashed", and is currently working on "SOA with .NET". He has written technical white papers for Intel, Microsoft and others. Brian has spoken at numerous major technical conferences worldwide. Brian is a co-founder and past-President of the International .NET Association (ineta.org), and past-President of the San Diego .NET user group, where he continues to lead the Connected Systems SIG, and is a member of the Editorial Board for the .NET Developer’s Journal. Brian was also a member of the Microsoft Connected Systems Division Virtual Technical Specialist Team pilot, and is part of Microsoft’s Connected Systems Advisory Board. Brian has been blogging since 2003 at http://blog.BrianLoesgen.com.
When and Where
We’ll be meeting on the 4th floor of the Microsoft La Jolla office. Pizza will be available at 6:00 PM. The meeting will start at 6:30 and end at 9 o’clock.
Address:
9255 Towne Centre Dr San Diego, CA 92121 Map
PLEASE NOTE THAT PARKING ARRANGEMENTS HAVE CHANGED. YOU WILL HAVE TO PAY FOR PARKING IF YOU USE THE BUILDING LOT. WE SUGGEST YOU PARK ON THE STREET TO THE NORTH OF THE BUILDING OR IN THE UTC SHOPPING CENTER
I just installed the July 2009 .NET Services SDK and after reviewing it for changes, I started wondering how I might call a cloud service from BizTalk using the out-of-the-box BizTalk adapters. While I showed in a previous blog how to call .NET Services service anonymously, that isn’t practical for most scenarios. I want to […]
Am I embarking on some kind of weird philosophical/existentialist post? Nope.
If you’ve been exploring the ESB Toolkit 2.0, then you know that there is a management portal. In addition, some of the core services provided by the ESB Toolkit are available as Web services. One of those services gives the ability for a Web service client to register the fact that an exception has occured. This is a powerful capability, as (for example) it would allow a J2EE application in a heterogeneous environment to participate in a message-based unified exception handling strategy, leveraging the ESBT Exception subsystem.
HOWEVER if you submit an exception through the Web service, then it will not be visible in the portal, even if you ask the portal to show you “All” exceptions. Why? Because the portal is BizTalk application-centric. The list of available applications you get presented with is based on a call into the BizTalk OM that enumerates the apps. Any exceptions coming in through the Web service will not be associated with a BizTalk application, and as such will not show up in the portal. The following screen shot illustrates this. The exceptions in the table belonging to the “Exception Handling Service Test” were created by the sample application that calls the service.
Don’t like that behavior? No problem. The management portal is a sample application, and as such you get full source. In addition, nothing says you even have to use the management portal. In fact, I personally prefer the use of SharePoint-based process-specific portals. I would use that process portal to surface metrics and exceptions for a specific process, as well as using it as a shell for any human intervention. Access to the portal would be limited to a group charged with managing the process, and all they would see there is information related to that process.
This post is more a reference to me in case I come across this again, but also to anyone else that may experience the same error, as I couldn’t find any reference to it when searching online.
It was one of those infuriating situations where you believe everything is set-up how you expect, but you keep receiving an unexpected error. Therefore you know something isn’t quite right somewhere along the line and most likely something simple. So, after spending a bit of time going through the debug motions you obtain the extra eyes of a few colleagues to verify your sanity. Alas, still no joy. Then, after more frustration it suddenly springs out at you and you groan with the simplicity of it.
Anyway, in my case I was attempting to use Castle and WCF. We had this working fine on various projects using the WcfIntegrationFacility, but for some reason on this new set-up we were experiencing the error: “Could not find a component with the name <my component name>, did you forget to register it?”
It turns out that the id on the component element in the Castle configuration must exactly match the class type. For example in the configuration snippet below, the two highlighted must be the same otherwise you get the error described.
<components>
<component id=“This.Should.Match“
service=“Some.Interface, Some.Assembly“
type=“This.Should.Match, Some.Assembly“>
</component>
</components>
I won’t be forgetting that one in a hurry.
Today we officially shipped the final release of Silverlight 3.
Silverlight 3 is a major update and delivers a ton of new features and capabilities. Some of the new Silverlight 3 runtime capabilities include:
Silverlight 3 now supports hardware graphics acceleration – enabling both video and graphics compositing to be offloaded onto a GPU. This can dramatically lower CPU usage on a computer, and enables HD video to be played on older low end machines. You can now deliver and play 1080p HD video experiences over the web.
Silverlight 3 includes new media codec support for H.264 video, AAC audio and MPEG-4 content. This enables you to easily play and stream media encoded using these standards. Silverlight 3 also includes raw bitstream audio/video APIs that enable you to create additional codecs (in any .NET language) that support playing any other media format. Silverlight 3 also adds a variety of additional media features that enable better logging (for media analytics and ad monetization scenarios), provide the ability to disable screen-savers when playing long-form video content, and enable content protection.
IIS Media Services is a free server product that complements Silverlight and provides the ability to efficiently stream media over HTTP. It enables both on-demand and live HD video to be delivered using “smooth streaming” – which is an adaptive streaming algorithm that can deliver video at bitrates optimized for a client’s network conditions and CPU capabilities. Check out this demo to see a good example of smooth streaming in action with Silverlight.
The HD support within Silverlight, combined with the Smooth Streaming support of IIS Media Services, enables a dramatically better video experiences on the web. This past week alone, we’ve had multiple customers broadcast live HD events using Silverlight and smooth streaming (up to 3MBits) including: Wimbledon, the Tour de France, AVP Volleyball, and the Michael Jackson Memorial Service.
The new GPU acceleration capabilities of Silverlight 3 enable even richer and more immersive graphic experiences.
Silverlight 3 also adds new perspective 3D support that can be used with graphic elements, videos and controls. Silverlight 3 also includes new bitmap and pixel APIs, as well as the ability to create and apply custom pixel shader effects (e.g. blur, dropshadow, swirl, etc) to any image, video element, or control. Easing support can also now be used to enable more textured motion within animations.
Silverlight 3 enables applications to run outside the browser and taken offline. Users can safely install web applications on their computers, and create persistent shortcuts to them on the desktop, start menu and taskbar (this is supported on both Windows and the Mac).
New network detection support within Silverlight enables developers to monitor the network status of a machine and switch between offline and online modes within their applications. Silverlight 3 also includes an automatic update mechanism for applications – so that clients who have installed applications are automatically updated when new application versions are deployed on the originating webserver.
Silverlight 3 includes a ton of new application development features.
The Silverlight 3 runtime/SDK combined with the Silverlight Toolkit now includes ~100 UI controls that enable common scenarios (layout, data, charting, child windows, etc) while also providing full styling and template customization support.
Silverlight 3 enables richer data binding features. Element to element binding support between controls is now enabled. Validation error template support has been added to controls (enabling better error message display). Hierarchical data binding is supported by the DataGrid. And a new DataForm control enables better master/detail scenarios. Silverlight 3 also now enables SaveFileDialog support.
Silverlight 3 includes a new navigation framework that enables deep-linking and forward/back button integration within the browser. This also enables search engine optimization (SEO) support so that content within a Silverlight application can be indexed by search engines – including Google, Bing and Yahoo. Silverlight 3 also supports the ability to cache assemblies on the client, and re-use them across multiple applications (decreasing the download size and improving the startup time of applications).
Silverlight 3 includes much better text rendering and font support. Text rendered using Silverlight 3 applications is much crisper and cleaner than previous releases, and applications now have access to local fonts. The Silverlight 3 styling system also now supports merged resource dictionaries, BasedOn style inheritance support, and the ability for styles to be reset any number of times. Silverlight 3 also adds richer accessibility support, and is the first browser plug-in to provide access to all system colors, allowing partially-sighted people to make changes such as high contrast color schemes for ease of readability using familiar operating system controls.
Silverlight 3 includes richer networking support. WCF error faults are now supported across the network. Server-side push duplex support is now easier to setup. Binary XML serialization of payloads is now supported. The new .NET RIA Services framework (which now has a go-live license) can be used to easily build multi-tier data applications that span the client and server. .NET RIA Services enables you to write validation code once and have it applied on both the client and middle-tier layers of your applications.
Today we are also shipping a free download that enables Silverlight 3 development support for VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). The VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight download provides project support, intellisense, compilation, and debugging for Silverlight 3 applications. The next release of Visual Studio – VS 2010 – will add to this and provide a fully interactive WYSIWYG designer for Silverlight (including data binding support within the designer).
Click here to download the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight (this will also install the SL3 developer runtime + sdk). Click here to download the Silverlight Toolkit (which adds additional controls).
Today we are also shipping a release candidate (RC) of Expression Blend 3 (including Sketchflow) that enables rich editing of Silverlight 3 applications and projects.
You can download the Expression Blend 3 + Sketchflow RC here.
Expression Blend 3 is a major update and enables dramatically richer tooling support. Some of its improvements include:
Christian Schormann has a great blog post that describes Expression Blend 3 in more detail.
The final release of Expression Studio 3 (which includes the Blend + Sketchflow, Web, Encoder and Design products) will ship within the next 30 days. Expression Studio 3 will be included as part of the MSDN Premium and higher subscriptions (meaning MSDN Premium customers don’t have to pay anything extra to get all of the Expression Studio products). Expression Studio 3 will also be available for standalone purchase for $599 (with discounts available for upgrades from previous versions of Expression and/or competitive products).
Today’s release is a major update of our Silverlight stack of products – and comes only 9 months after the release of Silverlight 2.
You can learn more about Silverlight 3 and the tools that go along with it from the below sites:
Hope this helps,
Scott
Hi All,
I have been looking for silvelight virtual labs for a while and lo, Microsoft has finally released new set of Virtual Labs for Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 version as below:
MSDN: Silverlight Monster Factory – Using XAML template
MSDN: Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight and Sharepoint
Also, check out other virtual labs on Sharepoint 2007, webparts and […]
Often, i have noticed my colleagues ask me information on this.However, Microsoft has come up with a quick answer on this and has provided a new bundle to integrate silverlight applications into Sharepoint/MOSS 2007 portals in Codeplex.
The Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint is now in RTM Code for the version which works with Silverlight 2 Beta […]
Microsoft has released the next version of Silverlight (Silverlight 3.0). The following are the links from where you can download this version:
Silverlight 3 download and installation
Microsoft%u00ae SilverlightTM 3 SDK
Microsoft%u00ae SilverlightTM 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
The following are the set of new features available in this version:
Support for Higher Quality Video & Audio. With […]
Even though I have created a conversion tool that takes existing maps and change them to the 5010 version with the right click of a mouse button. There is still going to be the need to simply convert the 4010A1 data to the 5010 data, or vise versa from 5010 to 4010A1.
We have developed a series of maps that do the conversion of the data, not a conversion of the maps.
Here are some screen shots of the maps that can be used in orchestrations, or in receive or send ports.
Here is two images of it being implemented in an orchestration to convert the data from 4010A1 to 5010
You receive the source map files so you can add/modify the mapping logic to fit your business needs: