Adam Kinney, Continuum Explorer

Project Rosetta turns into a MIX09 workshop

Adam Kinney — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:22:00 GMT

I’m excited to say that the spirit of the Project “Rosetta Stone” Tutorials, which is “using what you know” has become a MIX09 workshop.

The workshop is entitled “Shio o Totte: Using What You Know” and the description is as follows:

Have you just started working on your first Silverlight project and wondering how it compares to Flash? Are you trying to figure out how to take your assets from Photoshop or Illustrator and turn them into XAML? And what’s really the difference between ActionScript and C#? This workshop is going to cover all of those topics and more. The goal is for you as an experienced web developer or designer to learn how to use your skills and toolset in the world of XAML, Silverlight and WPF.

A MIX Workshop is a half day session given before the conference. That means I have three and a half hours to fill with content! I’m not anticipating it being a problem, though, since there are many cool tools and useful things you can do with them to build Silverlight and WPF apps.

Look for new content on the Project Rosetta as a build up towards the Workshop, we may even have a few guest authors show up there again.

I want to give a quick shout out to my other “Advanced Tools and Processes Workshop” Track brothers, Robby Ingebretsen and Jaime Rodriguez, who will be giving the “Hiking Mt. Avalon” session.

Hope to see you at MIX09!

Extending the Surface experience in the BMW app

Adam Kinney — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:59:00 GMT

Although quite a few people have linked to this video already, I wanted to point out something interesting. Not that you wouldn’t catch it if you watched the movie. But with the comments of “familiar resizing, option selecting interaction”, you may not take the 2 minutes to check it out.

First off this is important because its a valid real-world usage of the Surface. It’s really fun to watch these pop up more and more.

Secondly, what I liked about the application was the added vertical surface (seen at 0:58). Not only does this create an editor and viewer screen available at the same time, it also works in the favor of the user. You’re used to manipulating things with your hands on a vertical surface. But the viewer showing the accompanying video is familiar as watching TV.

Nice inspiration for creating new applications, congrats to BMW and Vectorform.

DeepEarth - Maps served using Deep Zoom in Silverlight

Adam Kinney — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:59:00 GMT

DeepEarth is a prototype of an interactive map using the Deep Zoom functionality of Silverlight. The project is developed by the community and the code is available on CodePlex.

You may have seen the previous demo video before but the current demo site has been recently updated to reflect the latest changes, including a enhanced interface along with the addition of a few new services.

Along with the original Virtual Earth data you can choose from different data sources including OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap (Now we just need OpenPedestrianMap (I checked, the domain is available)). This is interesting not only because you can compare data, but it also shows the richness of the application switching services and data without inconveniencing the user.

Although drawing and routing functionality looks like its starting to show up in the application, the viewing experience is worth taking the time to check out. We all know by now that online maps use the Image Pyramid method to provide multi-scale resolutions of maps. Serving up the image tiles via Deep Zoom smoothes out the perception of the images loading.

This is also a prime example of using the full screen as resolution independent very effectively. How cool is it talk about the world with your kids using an interactive map that spans across 64 inches? They're so lucky :)

Windows FireStarter, free event on Dec 12th

Adam Kinney — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 07:41:00 GMT

On December 12th in the grand Kodiak room of the Microsoft Conference Center, there will commence a free training Windows event of the greatest proportions seen in the area for awhile.

Take a look at the line up:

Mark "Inside Windows" Russinovich will be there to explain Windows oddities.
Glenn"Prism Fingers" Block will be there to discuss MEF and Prism or Composite WPF.
Crispin "Standard User" Cowan will be there discussing the right and wrong way to perform privileged operations.
And much more...

Here's a glance at the official schedule:

*Time*	Session	Presenter
8:30 - 8:45	Kick off	Mithun Dhar
8:45 – 9:30	Keynote/Why Vista!	Chris Henley
9:30 – 10:45	The Case of the Unexplained	Mark Russinovich
10:45 – 11:00	*Break*
11:00 – 12:15	Building Differentiated UI Applications Using Composite WPF	Glenn Block, Bob Brumfield & David Hill
12:15 – 1:00	**Lunch (Provided by Microsoft)**
1:00 – 2:00	Best Practices for Developing for Windows for Windows Standard User	Crispin Cowan
2:00 – 3:00	Windows Security and Bitlocker	Byron Hynes
3:00 – 3:15	*Break*
3:15 – 4:00	(Windows 7 + Windows Server 2008 R2) Teaser Session	Byron Hynes
4:00 – 5:00	Windows for everyone!	TBA

Register on the MSEvents site, tell your friends you are going on Upcoming and then send Mithun Dhar a thanks for organizing the event.

Manifest Digital wins PhizzPop Chicago with Five Star City

Adam Kinney — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:16:00 GMT

For PhizzPop Chicago, Manifest Digital was tasked with creating a digital strategy for Chicago's bid to become the host city for the 2016 Olympics. Their winning entry was Five Star City, a digital scrapbook allowing the people of Chicago to express themselves and explain why think Chicago would be a great place for the Olympics.

The Silverlight-based application has a few interesting features worth calling out:

Custom Profile Page - users are allowed to post photos and videos on their page to give their personal view. I love that video has become so easy to do use now that it has become part of the UI, integrated among photos and other UI elements. Let's hear it for increasing the 4th dimension aspects of application development.
Avatar Editor - following a current trend in avatar creation users are able to plant their face on a cartoon body. maybe we'll get to do that in the next Xbox Dashboard update.
People Plotting - Plotting points using Silverlight and Virtual Earth is even cooler in 3D view. The more I look into Live Services, the more possibilities I see. I can't wait for this stuff to explode.
Tug of war comparison - Groups can organize and compare member count with a classic game of tug of war. Its a fun visually, especially with the shrunken avatars.

You can see the application in action by checking out there video presentation.

I'm really enjoying watching what the applications coming out of PhizzPop this go-around. I'm not sure if I wasn't paying attention as much before, but actually I believe its because their doing a fine job of holding the contests and training the contestants. To get an idea of what the contest is like checkout the Chicago Highlights video.

There's five more stops left in the current tour - Minneapolis, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin. I'm expecting five more inspirational winners.

XAML Power Toys from Karl Shifflett

Adam Kinney — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:13:00 GMT

XAML Power Toys - Instant Form Generation (28:10)

Karl Shifflett is someone you know you should know when you first meet him. He’s a super smart guy who builds great tools for WPF and is obviously having a good time while he’s doing it.

One of the first projects he was involved with was Mole for Visual Studio an object visualizer Add In. If you haven’t heard about you can check out the Mole Introduction video.

Karl stopped by the studio to talk about his latest project XAML Power Toys. A new Visual Studio Add In that can decrease your development time by generating hefty amounts of code. Similar to other code-generation tools, the Add In inspects a business object which then provides options for you to create input forms. XAML Power Toys stand apart though by the amount of control you have over what is created using a drag and drop designer that provides detailed property access like control type, max length and data formatting.

The Toys also include an awesome Grid Editor which can save you a ton of time when editing by inserting or removing rows. Roundtrip editing is definitely a feature that Karl thinks is important and has done a good job of implementing.

Along with all of this editing functionality is great customization. You can choose what XAML is outputted per control and you can even use your own custom controls.

And now for the big finish, both WPF and Silverlight are supported!

Check out the XAML Power Toys, Karl’s tutorial videos and Karl’s blog. In the video he mentions a larger framework he’s working on codenamed “Ocean”, which apparently marks “XAML Power Toys” as an appetizer to the upcoming main course.

Vectorform wins PhizzPop New York with Study Right

Adam Kinney — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:18:00 GMT

On the heels of my fascination with SurfaceDJ, Vectorform impresses again by winning the PhizzPop with Study Right, an innovative education application concept.

The application visualizes what the classroom of the near future may look like when students have Multi-touch laptops and the teacher has a Surface at the front of the room. The software provides tools for the teacher, students and parents.

Teachers can check attendance, student profiles and create lesson plans. Students use their own custom portal to to read and watch videos at their own pace while preparing for the next interactive test. Parent can login from home and see how well their children are progressing.

Its a great concept and I don’t want to ruin it, especially the ending. You should check out the Study Right video on the PhizzPop site. You can also find more information there like when the Chicago event is happening and how you can accept the challenge online.

Quickly Redesigning a Silverlight-based Twitter application

Adam Kinney — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:42:00 GMT

Celso Gomes: Styling a Silverlight based Twitter
application with Expression Blend 2 (10:28)

In 10 minutes, Celso Gomes redesigns a working Silverlight-based Twitter application using Expression Blend 2.

The fact that he is redesigning the working application without touching any code or breaking anything is awesome. Not only do you avoid the "throw it over the wall" model, but you can also run the application during design work, similar to hitting refresh when editing CSS.

Celso walks through some of the nicer features in Blend including:

Resources - similar to a CSS class in theory, but much more functionality available
Copy elements between projects - the beauty of persisting design elements in XAML
User Controls - encapsulating functionality into an object like a movie clip.
Custom Buttons - you can highlight a graphic element and the click "Make a Button" and you gain all of the functionality of a Button (visual states MouseOver, Click, etc.)
Richer Control templates - A ListBox is used to display the Twitter messages, and he restyles the item template once that then changes the appearance of messages.

If you like this video, you can find more Expression Training Videos on the Expression Community site.

Continuum on Channel9

Adam Kinney — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:37:00 GMT

The Continuum on Channel 9 is now open for business. Its a central hub for the different online projects coming from myself and my team, including The Continuum Show, Project Rosetta and Continuum News.

What is the Client Continuum?
The Client Continuum is way to view all of the Microsoft UI technologies, currently focusing on WPF, Silverlight, Windows 7, IE8, ASP.NET and Surface. If you look at these different technologies along a line, the range covers very rich client applications to far-reaching web applications, as well as spanning across many different devices. Once you look at that and and realize you use the same skills, languages and tools to create these applications, then you start to smile.

What is The Continuum Show?
The Continuum Show is, not surprisingly, a show focused on the Client Continuum. The object is to create concise videos that show great applications, tools or demos that people are creating with Continuum technologies. The unwritten rule is if the video goes over 5 minutes, than we make an Essentials version that remixes the content down to 5 minutes or less. We're going for "short and interesting" and a little bit of "inspiring".

What are the Project "Rosetta Stone" Tutorials?
The Project "Rosetta Stone" Tutorials are focused on helping designers and developers build applications by taking advantage of skills they already know. The initial launch includes the set of lessons From Flash to Silverlight.

If you have ideas for more lessons and tutorials that will help you learn how to do WPF or Silverlight, head over to the feedback forum and make your suggestion.

What about Continuum News?
Fresh information about what's happening in the world of the Client Continuum. Currently this is generated by targeted posts from my blog and the site also includes a buffet of Recommended Reading. Target posting goal is around 0.7 - 2 posts a day. Quality high, quantity negotiable.

What's your conclusion?
If you are designing or developing applications for WPF, Silverlight or another Continuum technology than this mass of content will ideally be one or more of the following: relevant, interesting, inspiring, helpful and make you feel good to know there are others like you.

If its not, let me know. Send me an email or add a comment below.

New Controls and Tools - PDC2008 Cool Hunting finale

Adam Kinney — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:44:00 GMT

Monday was a blow out day for The Continuum Show. 5 videos from PDC were posted showing off new, unique and useful tools. As UI technologies improve and expectations grow control and tool vendors are adapting and changing in interesting ways. I'm loving the attention paid to enabling better experiences.

Here's the rundown:

Exploring Time and Space with Infragistics - Timeline, Map and Zoombar controls
Smooth Scrolling Datagrids with Xceed - Innovative Datagrid from the future
Dynamic 3D Charts with Telerik - flexible 2D/3D charts, you can even use your own 3D model
Shazzam - A Tool for Creating WPF Pixel Shader Effects - Useful tool for building and designing WPF Pixel Shader Effects
Smart Search and Replace with Aggiorno - Regular Expressions with custom AI that runs in Visual Studio

To finish up the Cool Hunting expedition at PDC2008, I present two more videos. First off, actual footage of the big 9 guy walking around. Don't get too close, he might challenge you to a dance off.

Next up is a quick clip of David Teitlebaum's "Multiple WPF Pixel Shader Effects applied to the input of a WebCam in real-time" demo.

Multi-touch enlightenment with IdentityMine and Vectorform

Adam Kinney — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:30:00 GMT

Something about companies with compound names...

Being a UI guy, one of the biggest impressions PDC2008 left on me was Multi-touch. This is the first time I've seen it done in so many forms. There were Surface tables everywhere, in the Lounges, Hand-on Labs, Exhibitor booths, in the hallways and even in rare cases under the escalators.

Along with the abundance of Surface tables came the abundance of applications written specifically for Surface. Multi-touch at this scale presents a new design challenge and opportunity, these aren't your basic data entry apps.

IdentityMine's multitude of Multi-touch apps (3:26)

Surface beats with Vectorform (5:26)

IdentityMine had all of the Multi-touch bases covered. On a whirlwind tour of their booth, provided by Kurt Brockett and Meg McAllister, we get to see their Photo Sharing app running on Surface, their Photo Slideshow app using NextWindow touch screens and their AirHockey game running on an HP Touchsmart running Windows 7.

As an added bonus, Gilbert Corrales and Laurent Bugnion make a quick cameo in this Hollywood worthy action film.

You can see more IdentityMine's Surface work on their Surface technology page.

In this video, Vectorform performs using their SurfaceDJ application. Not only is it Multi-touch, WPF-based, Surface-enabled and spouting out fun electronic beats; it is also a great example of a new collaborative type of application. This app makes me want my own Surface table.

Check out Vectorform's Surface blog to see some of their other Surface applications. Yes, they are the ones behind NBC's Electoral application.

With the video interviews and the working and the talking and the more talking, I missed every session but one. Here a few of the relevant Multi-touch sessions, pulled from Mike Swanson's PDC2008 Sessions page, I plan on catching up on.

PC17 | Developing for Microsoft Surface (Brad Carpenter, Robert Levy)
PowerPoint
PC03 | Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications (Anson Tsao, Reed Townsend)
PowerPoint
KYN04 | Day 3 Morning Keynote (Rick Rashid)

Did you get access to the Surface SDK? Are you building something with it? If you are, I'd love to hear about it.

Cool hunting at PDC - Conchango's Tesco project

Adam Kinney — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:39:00 GMT

PDC2008 was an awesome show with a great turnout. This was the first year I was involved so much with the event crew so it was very interesting to see it from the logistics side. A lot of great work done by a lot of people, congratulations to the whole PDC team!

Conchango and the Tesco project (15:52)

Busy the first two days I was able to take time the next two days to run around with the camera and go cool hunting. Being a UI guy, I was really interested in capturing the new work done with Windows 7, WPF, Surface and the HP Touchsmarts. I ended up with 9 videos to post and I thought I'd lead off with Conchango's Tesco project. The WPF-based application is redefining how you order groceries online and the preview was so impressive it was shown during the Day Two Keynote (starts around 94:00).

After working and then shooting videos, I realized although I had gone to many events I hadn't made it to a single session yet. Luckily the realization came just in time and I was able to attend David Teitlebaum's WPF Pixel Shaders and DirectX talk.

Now having missed almost every session, I have quite about of catching up to do with the online PDC2008 videos on Channel 9. Along with the page on Ch9, I've also found Mike Swanson's PDC2008 Sessions list to be quite useful, especially when you know the title or speaker of the session you are looking for.

My goal is to release the rest of my PDC2008 videos this week, so expect to see an unusual flurry on the Continuum Show page.

Day 0 at PDC2008 - on inspiration and creativity

Adam Kinney — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 06:20:00 GMT

Here I am in my Moroccan hotel room at the Hotel Figueroa ruminating over the first day at the Conference Center for PDC2008 thinking, who works on a Saturday? Many people do, of course, and some people work really hard like those setting up the Conference Center for the PDC so that the attendees can enjoy the wonderland that it is and will be.

Other people are working hard on a Saturday, like Rick Barraza who shot a video of his latest work, Project Touchstone.

Touchstone is a lobby Surface application written in WPF that takes advantage of Effects and I believe the WPF Effects Library. Its always fun to see when people try new things with new capabilities.

Now I am going to be coy and say "I believe there might be a Surface at PDC". Maybe. Possibly.

On the note of trying new things and being inspired by design. I've recently found two other things I'd like to share. The first is an intriguing slide deck, which Don Campbell thankfully bookmarked, by Chris Wilson that discusses change in design.

Rapid Change in Design: The Changing Landscape & New Rules for Design Project

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

I really like his thinking and especially the packaging - "3 Rules of Rapid Design".

I don't want to give any more away, but its worth the 2,3, even 10 minutes you may find yourself thinking about the slides.

One of the things that really gets me about the slides is that I feel Chris Wilson, the author, may be watching TED talks like myself. If he hasn't that might even be better. It could be a clue that we're heading towards the singularity.

The second item comes from TED Talks, which have become my most recent passion.

I might be late to the game, but that doesn't matter. The reruns are great. Watching TED Talks are entertaining and they fill my head with ideas, give me a different perspective on some of my older thoughts and make me feel like we are not just a collection of gangs, tribes and countries, rather that we are also one human race. Just a peaceful, "ah yes, this is what life could/should be about".

Anyway back to design and being inspired by new things and big conferences in Los Angeles that start with a "P" and end with a "C... ya there", in one the recently posted TED talks Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses creativity, fulfillment and flow. I would recommend the talk to anyone who thinks about what they are doing with their time. I'm not quite sure the following the slide will have the same effect without listening to the talk but I wanted to end this post here because I'm still meditating on it. I think its a great way to think about the work you do. Simply put, aim to spend as much time in the flow as possible.

The PDC flow begins tomorrow with Registration, PDC Marketplace, Pre-Conference Sessions and the WomenBuild Workshop.

"C...ya there!"

QuakeLight, the Silverlight port of Quake, is coming...

Adam Kinney — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:12:00 GMT

QuakeLight Preview (3:00)

In the first post about QuakeLight, many people were interested and some just couldn't quite believe what they saw. I was pretty impressed myself and contacted Julien Frelat the man behind the scenes. He was more than willing to provide information on the story behind QuakeLight, the coding techniques and access to run the actual demo.

(And to save you the time of reading through the whole interview, a public demo is not available yet. This is a "When-I-have-free-time" project for Julien.)

I've recorded a video of the demo running on my machine and the text-based interview is available for your viewing and reading pleasure. "Shenanigans", although fun to say, is apparently not appropriate in this situation. Enjoy.

Hello, sir, please tell us a little about yourself.

I am Julien Frelat, a 31-year old french developer. In real life, I work as a project leader for a software company called Assima. We work on unique technologies to improve and accelerate the work of end-users in companies (training, performance, translation...). In my very little spare time, I work on emulation and videogame software projects (InnoveWare Solutions). I am the author of several emulators including BoycottAdvance, a famous Gameboy Advance emulator that was able to run games even before the console was available in the US or in Europe. I also developed demos and a 3D game (Space Racer) several years ago.

Where did the idea for writing Quake in Silverlight come from?

I saw the leaked video from Adobe MAX 2007 showing Quake in Flash running in fullscreen (they cross-compiled the C code into Flash bytecode and plugged a few AS3 functions). Since I was curious about Silverlight (as an alternative to Java), I wanted to experiment with it. To my great surprise, a quick port of an emulated Z80 arcade game in C#/Silverlight was running about 2.5 times faster than the same code in Java. Given this, I decided to attempt a Quake port.

When you released the first demo video, some people couldn't believe it. What's the secret? Is this all custom code?

I first tried automatic conversion tools and ended up doing the job myself, abstracting highly-optimized C code into C# classes. I did not use any existing 3D engines, apart from the original Quake code. So you can say it is custom ported code ;)

From a technical perspective, I was not really convinced by other 3D experiments in Silverlight (Kit3D or Balder for example) so I turned to a traditional pixel-per-pixel 3D engine (they use scanlines in Quake and a simple Z-buffer). The keypoint was to heavily optimize the bitmap rendering and blitting. I think I reached the limits of what it is possible to do in Silverlight at this point.

It sounds like you've had previous experience writing games. How does Silverlight and C# compare to previous projects?

I wrote several C/C++ handheld emulators (Neopocott, Boycott Advance) in the past and then I decided to focus my work and experiments on Java projects.

I was especially interested in applets and I wanted to see full applications or operating systems running straight in a Web browser (RIA are not far from this now).

Java is a good platform but there are several drawbacks to port or develop emulators: lack of signed/unsigned types, no jump tables, no gotos, no good development environment prior to Eclipse...

I think I adopted Silverlight in a matter of few hours: a powerful language that supports exactly what Java was missing, very fast development and debugging in Visual Studio, a powerful API ala Adobe Flash, a tiny plugin to install, and very good performance.

Of course, we are only at the second release of Silverlight and there are important missing features for people developing games or emulators. No raster bitmap support, no dynamic sound generation means you need to find some tricks (use images and transparent images for tiles and sprites, encode sounds in mp3, etc.).

I am pretty sure Microsoft will extend the set of WPF features supported in Silverlight in the future (WriteableBitmap, 3D api...) and I am convinced Silverlight will become a great platform for demos, games and rich applications in general.

I want to emphasize that QuakeLight was developed in about three weeks during my holidays, given that I was babysitting/watching my son in the meantime... So you can code in Silverlight very quickly and very efficiently!

We've seen the demo of the game now, what's left before we can play it?

I need to finish the 3D engine as there are still clipping issues left that prevent me from displaying correctly the main player weapon.

You can also notice that if you turn on JavaScript exceptions, the demo actually crashes (this occurs when the first bad guy attacks you) due to unexpected negative texture coordinates... This one will be a bit difficult to fix.

Regarding the game engine itself, you must be aware that id Software created a Quake C compiler. This is actually precompiled code with opcodes interpreted in the C code.

I have to implement this Quake-C interpreter and handle everything related to it (memory, stack, variables). This is very similar to interpreter cores used in emulators. This may be a long task.

There are other developments planned: add sound support (mp3), try network support for multiplayers. It really depends what it is possible to do with Silverlight.

Optimizations would be interesting too, to have a higher framerate for higher resolutions. As a reminder, the original Quake game was heavily optimized with assembly code (only a few cycles needed for a texel) and there are many optimizations not applicable here (especially no unsafe code is possible due to security reasons in Silverlight).

On the other hand, nowadays strategies could be interesting like a multi-threaded rendering to benefit from dual or quad-core processors.

What next from InnoveWare after QuakeLight?

I would say Quake II logically, as the source code is very similar. With this first Silverlight experience, I could also work on tools or libraries for similar developments.

This could be a 3D library, a graphics library, an emulation library... Maybe I can work again on emulator projects (Silverlight running Silverlight ?)...

As you can see, there are endless possibilities and it also depends on what Microsoft has in the hat for Silverlight 3.0.

I created a poll on the InnoveWare web site to see what people would prefer as the next InnoveWare project. 3D is the great favorite as for now (a sign for Microsoft ?).

So, do not hesitate to vote!

Thanks for the interview Julien!

I've also posted a few QuakeLight screenshots if you'd like to check them out.

Rounded Windows and Blur Sample Code

Adam Kinney — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:03:00 GMT

Tonight I saw this distressing tweet from @tsjordan:

#wpf: Window.AllowsTransparency, Background="Transparent", WindowStyle="None" ALL A DIRTY LIE. I NEED ROUNDED WINDOWS!

And I thought, "I know that works. Let me try it real quick."

So I did and I ended up with this RoundedWindow sample pictured to the right. Once I busted the dirty lie by having rounded corners and double checking that I could click through the window bounds to application beneath, I took it a step further.

With WPF Effects still firmly on the mind, I thought I'd a BlurEffect to the image so even more transparency could be demonstrated. I linked the Radius of the Blur Effect to the position of the Window in relation to its the screen. If the window is at the top of the screen the Blur is 0, at the bottom its 100.

The end result is pretty interesting as you drag the Window up and down your desktop. Effects are certainly fun. The sample also includes code for other tasks like setting the position of the Window and finding its position relative to the screen.

Now, I'm not sure if this will solve Jordan's problem, but it was a nice little coding break, from my other activities. PDC is only 5 days away!