Gil Fink's Blog : Microsoft

Announcing - 20481A and 20484A Microsoft Official Courses

Gil Fink — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 08:43:10 GMT

Announcing - 20481A and 20484A Microsoft Official Courses

I’m pleased to announce the release of two new Microsoft Official Courses (MOCs):

Course 20481A: Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 and JavaScript
Course 20484A: Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps Using C#

Both of the courses were created by Sela Group and I had the pleasure of co-authoring course 20481A. This is the third Microsoft Official Course that I’m co-authoring. The previous ones were:

Course 10953A: HTML5 Programming
Course 40003A: Programming Windows 8 Metro Style Apps using HTML5: Early Lab Collection

Enjoy!

Microsoft Courses 40003A and 40004A Released

Gil Fink — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:35:20 GMT

Microsoft Courses 40003A and 40004A Released

In the last few months, I was co-authoring (with Amit Raz, Erez Harari, Alon Levi and Sebastian Pederiva) two Microsoft learning courses:

Course 40003A: Programming Windows 8 Metro Style Apps using HTML5: Early Lab Collection
Course 40004A: Programming Windows 8 Metro Style Apps using C#: Early Lab Collection

The courses are a three-day instructor-led courses. they provides students with a first look at the features of Metro style app development for Windows 8. They also provides hands-on opportunities to implement WinRT APIs, to manage the Metro style app lifecycle, and to develop Metro style apps that target multiple device types, screen resolutions and view states.

For more details about the courses you can go to:

Enjoy!

Build Modern Web Applications with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript Third Round – Slide Deck and Demos

Gil Fink — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:09:37 GMT

Build Modern Web Applications with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript Third Round – Slide Deck and Demos

Today, I delivered a third round of my HTML5 MSDN session at Microsoft HQ. I want to thank all the attendees who attended and heard about the transition that the web eco-system is going through. The session agenda was as follows:

What is HTML5?
The New Elements
Migration to HTML5
HTML5 APIs (Canvas, Web Storage, IndexedDB, AppCache, Geolocation and Web Workers)
CSS3

The slide deck and demos can be downloaded from here.

Enjoy!

Build Modern Web Applications with HTML5 CSS3 and JavaScript – Slide Deck and Demos

Gil Fink — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:09:23 GMT

Build Modern Web Applications with HTML5 CSS3 and JavaScript – Slide Deck and Demos

Today, I delivered a second round of my HTML5 MSDN session at Microsoft HQ. I want to thank all the attendees who attended and heard about the transition that the web eco-system is going through. The session agenda was as follows:

What is HTML5?
The New Elements
Migration to HTML5
HTML5 APIs (Canvas, Web Storage, AppCache, Geolocation and Web Workers)
CSS3

The slide deck and demos can be downloaded from here.

Enjoy!

Keep Users Coming Back With Desktop Notifications for Web Apps Article

Gil Fink — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:11:13 GMT

Keep Users Coming Back With Desktop Notifications for Web Apps Article

A few days ago, an article I wrote for DZone web site was published in their HTML5 Microzone. The article is called “Keep Users Coming Back With Desktop Notifications for Web Apps” and it discusses desktop notifications and in particular IE9 Pinned Sites and HTML5 Notification API.
You can read the article here.

Enjoy!

Third Year in a Row

Gil Fink — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:46:00 GMT

Third Year in a Row

Yesterday I received the mail from Microsoft that congratulate me for being a Microsoft MVP for the third time. It’s is a honor for me to get the award three years in a row. This time the receiving of the mail was somewhat weird since I saw on Twitter that people got the mail and I didn’t get it…
Apparently, my Gmail mail account (which is my personal mail account) “thought” that the congratulation mail is spam and moved it into the spam directory. This of course shows the true relationship between Google and Microsoft .

I would like to say thanks to all of you, my blog readers and the Microsoft community, for helping me keep the MVP Award for a third year! Also, I would like to thank the following people - Guy Burshtein, Maor David, and all my colleagues in Sela Group which IMHO everyone of them deserve to get the award! (and Congrats to Ido and Arik for their new MVP Award. You deserved it!)

SDP Conference 2011 is Coming

Gil Fink — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:14:45 GMT

SDP Conference 2011 is Coming

Sela Developer Practice (SDP) conference will occur between 13 to 16 of March. In this annual conference we (Sela Group) are going to share the current and future Microsoft technologies. The conference will give you a chance to see the best lecturers and leading experts, to be exposed to new technologies and to learn about the Microsoft products that have been launched last year. This is of course an opportunity to meet with colleagues from different organizations and to share knowledge.

In the conference I’m going to have a session about Code First in Entity Framework and to attend the MVP Panel which is an ask the experts like session. Also, I’m taking a part in an very interesting Entity Framework seminar along with Ido Flatow and Erez Harari. In the seminar we are going to talk about O/RM as a concept, explore Entity Framework as an O/RM solution and talk about best practices for using Entity Framework in applications. This is going to be fun.

There are other tutorials and sessions that are very recommended so if you want to be a part of the conference you can go to the conference web site – SDP.
See you there.

Microsoft MVP for the Second Time

Gil Fink — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 21:35:16 GMT

Microsoft MVP for the Second Time

A few minutes ago I got the mail from Microsoft that informed me that I’m a Microsoft MVP for the second time. The mail is written as follows: “Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Data Platform Development technical communities during the past year.”

I would like to say many thanks to the following people - Guy Burshtein, Maor David, All my colleagues in Sela Group, all my friends and of course You my blog readers for helping me keep the MVP Award for another year!

Web Platform Installer – Web Installation on Steroids

Gil Fink — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 13:16:00 GMT

Web Platform Installer – Web Installation on Steroids

One of the most annoying things that I’m sometimes
get stuck with is to install my machine with the latest
components. Trying to grab all the installation packages
for every application or library that I need can be a
very painful thing and also consumes a lot of time.
This is the reason that a tool like Web Platform
Installer was very welcome to my arsenal of tools.
In the post I’ll describe what is the Web Platform Installer and show a scenario of installation.

Web Platform Installer

As I wrote at the beginning of the post, installation can be a very painful thing. The Web Platform Installer is a tool provided by Microsoft to ease this process when we install Microsoft Web Platform. You can download it from here.
So what is this tool?
Taken from Microsoft’s site - “The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. The Web PI also makes it easy to install and run the most popular free web applications for blogging, content management and more with the built-in Windows Web Application Gallery.”. The current version of the tool is 2.0.

Using the Web Platform Installer

After you install the Web Platform Installer you can run it and install your desired components. You should have a connection to the internet in order to use the installer. When first started the Web Platform Installer will go to the web and check for the latest Web Platform products. Then the main screen will be opened:

In the screen you can choose the relevant components that you like. You can use the following tabs to choose components by categories:

What’s New? – shows all the new components available.
Web Platform – enables the installation of web servers, frameworks and runtime, databases and tools.
Web Applications – enables the installation of web applications such as DotNetNuke, WordPress, BlogEngine.Net and many more web applications.

You only need to select the components and then press the Install button in order to install them. You also have the ability to customize your installation. For example go to the Web Platform tab:

In the Web Server press the Customize link:

Now you can customize the server that will be installed.
After Choosing the components press the Install button and that is it the products will be installed.

In some components you will need to configure things. For example I installed the BlogEngine.Net and after the installation inside the Web Platform Installer I had to configure the web site for the BlogEngine.Net. So you get the help from the platform even in these parts.

Summary

If you haven’t installed the Web Platform Installer go and grab it from here. This tool is very useful and helpful and it can help you to save a lot of time and headaches.

MIX10 - Summary

Gil Fink — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:17:02 GMT

MIX10 – Summary

Home sweet home!

I arrived today back
to Israel after a trip
of six days to the
MIX10 conference
(three days conference and almost three days “on the roads”).
To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed from the conference.
I’ve expected more relevant information and less recycling of things
that I already know. As you know (if you followed the MIX10),
there were announcements about Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 4, OData
protocol, IE9 and more. After being at the conference and meeting attendees
from all over the world, I think that Microsoft missed an opportunity to do
more buzz then I think they did. Every person that I talked to said the same
things so apparently it isn’t only my opinion. As I see it the world of the
web is going to shift to platforms like Silverlight which I’m going to learn
in the future in order not to stay behind.
Moreover, I’ve be asked why did I went to the conference. The answer is really
simple – from the beginning of my professional life I’ve been more web oriented.
So I hope this is making more sense to the people who asked me that question.
The next thing in mind now is my session in the DevAcademy4 conference which
is going to take place next Monday in Israel. If you want to hear my EF4 session
you are most welcome.
See you there!

MIX10 – Last Day Wrap up

Gil Fink — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:02:24 GMT

MIX10 – Last Day Wrap up

The last day of MIX
has arrived and
in this day we haven’t
had a keynote session.

The first session I went for was Building Great Standards-Based
Websites for the Big Wide World with Microsoft ASP.NET 4.
A very big title for a session about XHTML, usability and accessibility
which are things that you are require to do when you develop
major sites. The lecturers showed an Australian site which was
developed with standards. Also they showed an nice open source
framework that they wrote which is called WebFormsMVP.

The second session that I participated was Building Innovative Windows
Client Software. It was an experts panel about all kind of stuff that is
connected to innovation and design. It really resembled the SDP MVP panel
we had last year but without the technical stuff. In the end there
was a lottery and five people won Zune devices.

The third session of today was IronRuby for .NET Developer
with Cory Foy. I wanted to learn a bit about DLR so this talk was
my first look at the IronRuby language.

That is all for me today in regard of sessions. In the forth slot I couldn’t
find a session that really interests me so I decided to go back to the
hotel and enjoy Vegas.
Expect a summary of my visit in a next post.

MIX10 – Second Day Wrap up

Gil Fink — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:30:03 GMT

MIX10 – Second Day Wrap up

This is the wrapping up
of the second day I had in
the MIX10 conference.

In the keynotes Dean Hachamovitch talked about
IE9 and how it will support HTML5 standard. There will be a lot
of improvements in IE9 which include: performance, standards
support, GPU powered HTML5, an IE9 platform and the punch line
hardware accelerated HTML5 video. After Dean Scott Guthrie
talked about the Microsoft web platform which include a lot
of enhancements and there were demos of VS2010 by Scott
Hanselman. Then the main part for me started. Douglas Purdy
talked about the OData protocol which will give a uniform
protocol for services powering experience. The protocol is being
used by SharePoint 2010 which exposes OData services. Also, there
is Excel support plug-in for OData and more. Much to expect in this
area. For more details I encourage you to go to http://odata.org.
Then Bill Buxton talked about our real role has developers and application
creators which isn’t the technology which is our tool but the experience
that we deliver to our users.

The first session I went for was Pablo Castro’s OData: There is a Feed
For that. Pablo explained what is OData which is

Uniform way of representing structure data.
Uniform URL conventions.
Uniform operations.
Based on the AtomPub (or Json)

Then he showed how SharePoint 2010 exposes lists as OData.
Also he showed that we can use OData in reporting services and many
more examples.

The next session which I attended was Nikhil Kothari’s Developing
with WCF RIA Services Quickly and Effectively. Nikhil showed an end
to end application that uses WCF RIA Services under the hood.
I enjoyed that session since it was a long demo that showed how to
do stuff with WCF RIA Services which is an area that I want to explore
further.

I then went to Mike Flasko’s session – Implementing OData: How to
Create a Feed for That. Mike is a great presenter and since I like
WCF Data Services I enjoyed this session a lot. There were a few things
that I learned such as $select operation which perform data projections.
This was the second OData session I saw this day and it completed the
first session by Pablo so if you are interested in OData go and see both
of the sessions.

The last session was How jQuery Makes Hard Things Simple by jQuery’s
creator John Resig. It was a Tips and Tricks like session.

Wrapping the day, the second day had lots of interesting sessions
and I need to see some of the sessions that I missed in the future.
Stay tuned for more updates.

MIX 10 – First Day Wrap up

Gil Fink — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:40:00 GMT

MIX 10 – First Day Wrap up

As I wrote earlier
this week I’m
attending the MIX
conference at Las
Vegas.
This is a summary of the
first day I had in the conference.

The day started with a keynote session by Scott Guthrie. The keynotes
included information about Silverlight 4, Windows Phone 7 and more.
Lots of cool demos and exciting news for web developers.

After the keynote I went to the Building Offline/Cache mode web Apps
using Sync Framework session with Mike Clark. The news here are the
OData-Sync protocol and Windows Azure support. Combining the OData
protocol which is AtomPub+EDM protocol with a sync protocol will enable
the Sync Framework to reach application on other platforms. Also
Sync Framework team are working on a Silverlight integration for
offline using Sync Framework which will use in memory collections
which will be put into isolated storage on the disk. Making Silverlight
integration also means that this will work on Windows Phone 7 in the
future.

The next session I attended was Understanding the MVVM Pattern
with Laurent Bugnion. In the session I learned about the
Model-View-ViewModel pattern which is being used with Silverlight.
Laurent also explained how to use command, messages and more.

The last session was Designing and Delivering Scalable and Resilient
Web Services with Ron Jacobs. Ron talked about AppFabric cache
which was once known as Velocity. I learned a new thing – the bulk
get method. All the other stuff I already know but Ron is
a great lecturer so it was interesting. At the end of the session I
talked to Ron about some stuff such as integrating AppFabric
caching to WCF Data Services which was a question that was asked.

Here are some pictures I took in the first day:

I’ll continue tomorrow so stay tuned.

Entity Framework Evolution in .NET 4 at DevAcademy4

Gil Fink — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:59:54 GMT

Entity Framework Evolution in .NET 4 at DevAcademy4

As I wrote yesterday
DevAcademy4 is coming
next month. My part
in the conference will
be a breakout session
on EF4. In the session
we will explore the major
changes that EF4 offers and how they can contribute to develop better
data access layers.
There are other great sessions in the conference which you can review
from here.
See you there!

Developer Academy 4 is Coming

Gil Fink — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:40:00 GMT

Developer Academy 4 is Coming

The biggest Israeli .Net
developers conference
is coming.
Today the conference
site of Developer
Academy 4 was launched
and you can sign in to the
conference from here.
You can also register as
a fan in Facebook from
here for online updates.

This year the conference will be
focusing on Visual Studio 2010,
Windows Azure and Silverlight.
There are going to be many breakout
sessions and also mini sessions which
will include only demos.
The conference will occur in March 22, at the Airport City in Israel.
See you there!