Just code - Tamir Khason : Microsoft, demos

New year – new blog or how to migrate Community Server to any other engine, supports XML-RPC

Tamir Khason — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 02:33:04 GMT

Please update your bookmarks, because the new url of this blog is http://khason.net/ (you have not update RSS feeds, it will be done automatically). Why I did it? Why I decided to go to “stand-alone”… Well. there are some reasons. Generally, I do not want to explain all those here, but trust me, there are some. The main reason is, that there is no responsible person in charge for this blog platform in Microsoft Israel. This why, if your blog is popular and you have a respect to your blog visitors, you cannot host it here… Take a look into new comments notifications in my inbox. Would you answer your readers with such “small amount” of SPAM and capcha, that cannot be fixed already for three years in this platform? This how my inbox looks like for last three years. So now, you should not ask me, why I not answered your email or comments. Aren’t you? :)

Currently, all comments in this blog are disabled, so if you want to comment, please use new url of posts (this will appear shortly in the beginning of each post). Also, this post will not be syndicated in RSS.

So, this post is the last. I loved this platform, and loved people started it. But, unfortunately, it seemed, that bloggers community is not important enough for new platform managers.

Also, If you want to learn how to use C# and XML-RCP to migrate from CS2007, used in this platform, visit my new home :)

Have a great year and, as always, be good people. This post marked with all possible tags automatically. Sorry.

Programming for Windows 7

Tamir Khason — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:12:38 GMT

[This blog was migrated. You will not be able to comment here.
The new URL of this post is http://khason.net/blog/programming-for-windows-7/]

Well, Windows 7 is going to be released by the end of next year. This is great news, because it seemed, that Microsoft finally understand how to get the best of Windows Vista and make it to work not only on monster machines.

It even works on new brandy my wife's pinky machine. And if it works there and my wife is happy with it, this OS going to be very impressive.

But from the other hand, we, as developers should be ready today to developer Windows 7 ready application (by the way, Vista Battery Saver works for Windows 7 as well as for Windows Vista, in spite of the fact, that power management in Windows 7 was improved dramatically). So let's start!

First thing we need is to read big Windows 7 Developer Guide. This document will explain most of new features for developers to build applications right. What is includes?

Windows Driver Kit (WDK) 3.0

Basically, Windows 7 works with Vista drivers, however, hibernation, power management, networking, PREfast will work much better. You also will have new WMI access for reliability monitors and ACPI.

Management and deployment

By default Windows 7 uses PowerShell 2.0 and Windows Installer. For PowerShell it includes enhanced cmdlets to manage Active Directory, IIS, etc. For Windows Installer, you finally can build "chainers" by yourself (the same approach, used for latest deployment of Microsoft products such as Silverlight, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 etc.) Also, you can get advantage by using Windows Filtering Platform (Firewall) and User Account Control (UAC) from inside your application by using new APIs.

Performance

The most significant change in Windows 7 for end-user point of view is improved performance. Windows 7 kernel is much smaller, that kernel of Windows Vista. Also it uses specific patterns to decrease background activities on low power, based on system triggers. New user-mode and kernel-mode APIs are used by Windows Drivers Foundation much more efficiently. Also system services are much smarter. For example, DCIA starts only when you connect new hardware. After drivers were installed the service shuts down. The same approach used by domain join, GP changes, new IP fetching etc. Windows 7 knows to run and stop services, based on system events, which decreases average work load and enhances whole system performance.

Multi-touch gestures and Interia API and used interface in general

Yes, you can use this API for your applications. Finally we can have more, then just mouse. And it is not only about multiple mouse devices. We can use single finder panning, raw touch input data, internal multitouch ink recognition, which is also supports math. Also it uses build-in MathML export feature.

There are a lot of other enhancements, such as smart bars, windows' stacking, gadget desktop (it does not eat battery as external process anymore), system ribbon menu integration. etc

Graphics

Direct 11, new Direct2D, DirectWrite (we can turn text anti-aliasing for small fonts, hurrah!), improved WIC, DX/GDI interoperability on system level with automatic fallback for weak hardware (yes, you should not be worry about it anymore). Also new video and audio format support with human readable interfaces. Yes, no more DirectDraw hacks. We can use new high level interfaces such as MFPlay to manage playbacks, Source Reader for decoding, Sink Writer for transcoders and re-coding compressions.

Web and communication

WCF is inside, as well as distributed routing table for peer-to-peer operations. BranchCache - new technology to reduce WAN traffic and latency.

Also Windows 7 is compatible with OpenSearch (I told, that Microsoft does not know to build search engines). Sharepoint integration and environment sensors platform, that can be used either for desktop and web applications.

There are much more features, that makes Windows 7 to pretend to be very good operation system. If you want to learn more about all those Windows 7 new features, I highly advice you to download and read this document. It includes most of new features of new OS with explanations and screenshots to make your learn and understand what can your future application do with all those new features.

Have a nice day and be good people.

BTW, if you have PDC version of Windows 7 and want to unlock it for using of some cool features, introduced during keynotes, it worth to visit here and learn how to :)

Download Windows 7 Developer Guide and start programming.

Arabic and Hebrew languages bidirectional support for Silverlight 2.0 beta 2

Tamir Khason — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:27:00 GMT

[This blog was migrated. You will not be able to comment here.
The new URL of this post is http://khason.net/blog/arabic-and-hebrew-languages-bidirectional-support-for-silverlight-20-beta-2/]

Those days, I’m, together with guys from Microsoft Egypt and Santeon, finishing development of bidirectional input and output support for Silverlight. I want you to take part in alpha testing of this solution. Please see the test form here and try it.

&lt;noframes&gt;Visit &lt;a href="http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2008/07/17/arabic-and-hebrew-languages-bidirectional-support-for-silverlight-2-0-beta-2.aspx"&gt;original article&lt;/a&gt; to test&lt;/noframes&gt;

Also, you can download latest development build or compiled binary version with debug symbols and try it yourself. Please, if you’re in any issue, report it, by using issue tracker in CodePlex.

In order to use it, all you have to do is to use custom namespace within your project and then, you’ll be able to get almost all controls, you know, but with Arabic and Hebrew RTL and LTR support. You have to set one property: FlowDirection to change the rendering method (exactly as in WPF). Here an example of usage.

<UserControl x:Class="BidiTest2.Page"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:l="clr-namespace:System.Windows.BidiControls;assembly=BidiControls">
…
<l:TextBlock FlowDirection="LeftToRight" Text="שלום עולם"/>

<l:TextBox FlowDirection="RightToLeft" Text="{Binding Text, Mode=TwoWay}"/>

That’s all. Thank you for your cooperation.

Microsoft future healthcare vision – boom, biga boom UX troubles…

Tamir Khason — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 23:44:00 GMT

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The new URL of this post is http://khason.net/blog/microsoft-future-healthcare-vision-%e2%80%93-boom-biga-boom-ux-troubles%e2%80%a6/]

About a week ago, Microsoft healthcare division put a lot of money into their future vision. The results are: cool SF promo, real big UX troubles. Let’s try to understand why

Fellow young pre-diabetic girl runs somewhere in wide, while big physiologist brother is watching her on 15” e-paper monitor with big box for something over it. He also typing on rubber keyboard in his table. Good idea, especially if he has coffee, that can split to it.

He has only 5 qualified patients to follow and their are not sorted anyhow. But who cares, maybe in the future we’ll have 20% of physiologists in the world.

In the future we’ll not have standard keyboards. All of them will be flat and chunky with huge circle in upper right corner instead of Enter (have you ever tried to blind type with absolutely flat keyboard? I’m suffering from this every day with my Windows Mobile.

But who cares about flat keyboards, when we’ll charge business cards and have only IPhones at home. We do not really have to use it as music player for jogging. Ah, and other thing, all our power supplies will be wireless, but we still need plates to put all devices into.

Wee! We’ll have Vista start button in upper left corner. Under it we’ll have some kind of mail client and them Internet Explorer. Well call button will be the smallest one in bottom left. Also, the default screen of our mobile phones will show cool graphs.

But phone is still small device, we’ll have to turn it in order to switch TV on. Also we’ll have huge tumbler button (flat) to do something useful with TV.

When we’ll want to see good film, one of our physiologists will appear from inside email message to show us two really useful graphs of “Qualifying range” of something. Also we are not really using email (we have only 5 messages for 3 month). Another problem is computer clock it seemed to be very broken (weather outside is very very good for 12 February). Please take a look onto user interface – emails without words, but very useful search block (we have no keyboards, remember) and Windows with IE hot buttons.

Hospital

Endocrinologist Christian Kemp is very new there, thus he need map to find the way out. Well', let’s take into account, that he has a lot of work and computer builds routing path for him. But why to go through the walls?

A moment after we’re understand why. This is the hospital for aliens from Men in Black II – green small aliens. So we should watch not to step over them. Also, the map on device shows absolutely different place. Treasure island?

Even worth is to be patient. You should see front view of driving cars and all Medication Reminders. When the reminder appears, it has fast forward, fast backward and pause buttons (you have click it very quick – the car will stop, but reminder remains, so you have no way out). Maybe if we’ll not have medication on time those cars become real and ride over us.

The bad news is, that all drugs looks absolutely the same. The only difference is the color of ellipse under it. If you’re suffering of daltonism, you’ll dead!

But this is not all. You have to move tube for perception to appear. Then all you have to do it to click it, wait, that take it again and take drug. Extremely user friendly technology.

Then, when endocrinologist finally found us he should look for something very strange. However X-rays of his device always how the exact place of his stuff. Wait a minute! It was 3:12 PM when we begun the hide and seek with Christian. It was 3:14 PM when the patient took his drug. Now Christian’s devices shows 3:12 PM again. Well another broken clock. Also his device has small horizontal and vertical offset. Also it makes another things to appear. Look into right upper corner of the imag

How Christian had to go out for smoking with the device. It’s 3:24 PM, when he begun to check Alex Roland’s eye. Also instead of looking into monitor near Alex’s bed (where car was), Christian trying to look into the hole in opposite side of the tube device he found. What he smoked?

Finally the doctor found anomaly and adjust something with stylus to show Alex. Now he (Alex), probably know his chances to be cured.

Now in his room, all Chris has to do is to shrink something to turn 67.8% of effectiveness into 84.2%. Very cool, especially when all other numbers (at right) had not been changed.

Now they should told the girl from the first scene about her chances. Well, all of them already know about her. More, then this they used Alex’s eye test results to make the right decision (everything happens momentarily, it’s 8:24 PM in device’s clock).

Now all we have to do is to turn off everyone and put doctor’s device to changing on cabinet door. The battery is really low (about 80%) and no one cares about patients privacy. A moment after the battery is full again, but device turned into door sign.

Now the girl come to visit the doctor (he told, her, that she has about 80% of chances not to see cars near hospital bed). But in order to be identified and get right directions, she should not wash her hands for a while. This way thumbprint scanning will work.

Then she should choose what card to use. Really strange is not the card the same?

Now just swipe a card to get directions (we already identified twice)?

Not really, now we have to type something. We’ll we have not. It types itself.

Now first “OK” will confirm our details (don’t we really know it?) Then we should choose why we come here. This “mini-hospital” provides only four types of services: Flu diagnosis (very important in sunny February), hemoglobin A1C (that’s why she here), Mononucleosis (abnormal increase of while blood cells in blood) and pregnancy testing. All this for $25 only. Cool hospital.

But actually she does not need tests. She already has prescription for 80mg oral hypoglycemic for $20 only. Thus she can pay immediately. Wait don’t she need to change cards in wallet? The machine become smarter.

Now all she has to do is to find way out (do you remember labyrinths in this hospital?)

Very cool CF film, but it’s very unreal and prognoses us bad User Experience in the future…

Have a nice day and be good people.

Tafiti goes open source (well, actually, shared source under MS-PL)

Tamir Khason — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:37:00 GMT

[This blog was migrated. You will not be able to comment here.
The new URL of this post is http://khason.net/blog/tafiti-goes-open-source-well-actually-shared-source-under-ms-pl/]

All those, how want to implement data visualization in Silverlight (as Tafiti does), can look into this CodePlex project and use it for your own. Notice, you can download, modify and, even, resell this code, due to fact, that it's under MS-PL shared source licence. Well done, Live team.

WPF for developers from Dev. Academy 2 - recordings

Tamir Khason — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:20:18 GMT

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The new URL of this post is http://khason.net/blog/wpf-for-developers-from-dev-academy-2-recordings/]

If you was unable to attend Developers Academy 2 and still want to see sessions there, you are more, then welcome to do it. Here link to the recording of my session. And here is the presentation. The quality of the recording is awful, as well as whole hosting site quality. It seemed like "Gisha Hadasha" has no QA and particle employed student to make sites. However, if you still want to see the screencasts of the sessions, go there.

See screencast "WPF for developers (or optimizing your WPF application)" >>