InterKnowlogy is always on the cutting edge of the Microsoft Platform so its not surprise that we were among first to build applications in WPF, Silverlight and now on Microsoft Surface (a touch screen computer embedded in a coffee table). I'm excited to show you two applications that we released recently.

First one is VirtuView - a 3D environment for viewing and annotating patient's examination results on anatomic models. This application is a evolution of our earlier Angiographer that we build for InterMountain Healthcare together with our partner Zygote (world's leader in 3D human anatomy models and textures). VirtuView lets users zoom and rotate the 3D heart models with your hands. You can use your fingers to draw arteries, place Stents and add annotations. And because this is multitouch you can use more than one finger or many people can work at once. This application is done in WPF and uses Microsoft HealthVault to securely store patient's data.

Check out this video demonstration from Tim Huckaby and Kevin Kennedy:

Second application is called History at your fingertips. This amazing application was built in conjunction with Microsoft and the Library of Congress. It chronicles the history of the republican and democratinc national conventions in interactive Surface experience. The application is featured LIVE on Surface units at both upcoming conventions, and it was shown on the ABC National News this week and you can watch it on the ABCnews.com website (move forward to approximately 01:18).

Meanwhile I've been working with great team at Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Company that built the Harmony solution. We helped them built an offline version of the Web based Harmony self-enrollment system that will be used by insurance agents. You can find more details in this Microsoft case study.

Some time ago I wrote that there is a wave of HCL events sweeping through Poland. Today I'm happy to announce that we opened registration for the Code Camp in Kraków. This is the first such conference organized by the members of KGD UG for the .NET developer community.

We will meet on June 7th for the chance to listen to sessions from five great speakers:

• The world has changed… What are the dilemmas of designing software solutions in the year 2008? - Tadeusz Golonka
• Reach End-Users With Next Generation Web Applications - Chris Koenig
• Addressing non-functional requirements with PostSharp - Gael Fraiteur
• SQL Server 2008 Integration Services - Grzegorz Stolecki
• Developer's role in an agile project - Bartosz Pampuch

Follow this link to register. The conference is free but the number of seats is limited so make sure to register early.

Along the conference we organized a little programming contest. The first round is over but you still have a chance to win one of the cool prizes (including XBox 360) in the second round. It's quite simple - you just need to implement a single method. More details on this page.

Hope to see you soon at CodeCamp.pl

[PL] Dzisiaj o 10:38 urodził się mój drugi synek Antoś. Duży chłopak z niego bo waży ponad 3,5 kg i ma 58 cm "wzrostu". Oboje mama i dzidziuś są zdrowi i czują się dobrze. Tatuś też jeszcze się trzyma i jest strasznie szczęśliwy :-)

[EN] Today at 10:38 (GMT+1) my second son Anthony was born. He is a big boy, weighting 3.5 kg and 58 cm "tall". Both mommy and baby feel well. Daddy is the happiest man in the world!

Updated 19/03/2008

New photos:

Updated 20/03/2008

First Contact... with older brother:

Honestly, I still don't know how I did it. The LAB49 WPF in Finance Innovation Contest was announced back in December and I think I first read about it on Tim Sneath blog. With all the cool prizes I was very inclined to participate, but it quickly turned out that its available only to US citizens. However that changed in the first week of February, so I started considering it again, but still didn't had any clue what to do. You see the goal of this contest was to create a WPF application that visualizes a set of provided financial data in some interesting way. While the first part was easy (writing the app in WPF) the hardest part was to figure out what to do with the data. Only after "last call to action" email from Daniel Chait I decided its about time to start coding.

Because I started working late on this project, initially I wanted to create only a charting control capable of displaying the line and candlestick plot of stock prices. But after the contest deadline was extended I started thinking of a better way to visualize the stock prices for a given day – something that goes beyond a simple listbox or a datagrid. The next option I considered was to create a heatmap – i.e. use color gradients to denote the change in stock prices relative to the previous day. But in all samples I’ve seen these symbols were placed on a regular grid and the placement didn’t correspond in any particular way with the data. I started thinking about how to sort the symbols so that those that experienced similar data change would be close to each other, and those with different data change remain further apart. This finally led me to the idea of applying Craig Reynolds’ flocking algorithm to perform this clustering.

Here is a screenshot from my final entry called Stock Information Boids:

Also you can already download the source code for this application from my resource page at MSDN Code Gallery. Make sure to read the user guide that describes how the algorithm works and how to use the application.

Turns out that for some reason the judges liked my solution, because last week at the closing keynote of 2008 Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference in New York, Daniel Chait announced that I won the grand prize in the contest!

The two finalist were Jacob Carpenter and Jobi K Joy, while the honorable mention went to Paul Hounshell. Congratulations guys, great work! You can download their very cool applications from here:

In following weeks I will try to share some details on my implementations (in particular about the Timeline and Flock controls). I was already told that Jobi K Joy and Jacob Carpenter plan to do the same, so make sure to subscribe to their blogs too.

I would like to thank the judges for selecting my entry. And last but not least, big kisses for my wife Joanna for letting me work on the project all nights and weekends considering her present condition (L)

Last Wednesday I had the privilege of representing the KGD.NET user group at the Heroes Happen Here launch event in Kraków. It's hard for me to say anything about the presentations because I actually didn't see even a single one (but others already blogged about it here and here). Instead I spent the whole day backstage chatting with my good friends: Asia Grzywna, Mateusz Kierepka, Paweł Potasiński, Bartosz Pampuch, Tadeusz Golonka, Grzegorz Kolarz, Paweł Łukasik, and Michał Brzozowski just to name the few.

After the event Michał Żyliński and Barbara Sokólska invited us to a geek dinner where I had opportunity to meet great guys from Insys - company that build the first commercial website in Poland using Silverlight 1.0 (Lech Poznań TV).

For me this was the ultimate geek day so thank you all for taking your time to hang out with me!

There are so many good things happening right now in the Polish .NET Community that I thogh it would be best to put it together in one post. So here you have it:

C2C'08 is a first ever countrywide IT conference organized by community of Microsoft .NET and SQL Server professionals. On April 5th 2008 eleven speakers will have opportunity to show the most wanted topics, and answer the most desired questions. The list of speakers looks very impressive and includes celebrities like Dino Esposito and Matin Kulov, along with best speakers selected by members of Polish user groups.

Here are the key facts:

• Purpose: learning, sharing knowledge and interacting with other professionals and geeks
• Topics: two tracks - .NET and SQL Server
• Number of attendees: 200
• Date: April 5th, 2008
• Place: Microsoft, Al. Jerozolimskie 195A, Warsaw, Poland
• Pricing: free
• Website: www.c2c2008.pl

Although the official Heroes Happen Here product launch wave is over, there is still opportunity to learn about the new exciting products and other Microsoft technologies. Very soon user groups around the globe will begin executing the Heroes Community Launch events delivering deep technical training on Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. Here is the current schedule for Polish user groups:

• March 27^th, Warszawa – Warszawska Grupa .NET
• April 3^rd, Białystok - Białostocka Grupa .NET
• April 30^th, Szczecin – Szczecińska Grupa Specialistów IT
• May 6-8^th, Lublin – Lubelskie Dni Informatyki
• May 9^th, Dąbrowa Górnicza – Śląska Regionalna Grupa Microsoft
• June 2^nd, Wrocław – Wrocławska Grupa .NET

Our group, KGD.NET will organize the conference on Saturday, June 7^th 2008. We plan to have 5-6 sessions and about 200 attendees. To make this happen and to bring you some great speakers we are joining forces with Wroc.NET. I will post the details here in following weeks.

SharePoint training in Kraków

Besides the regular meetings (the next is scheduled on 26th March) in next few weeks KGD will organize a SharePoint training for group members. It will cover both WSS and MOSS and will be deliveried by Michał Gołda, certified SharePoint expert from Making Waves. We don't have the date set yet but if you are interested register now.

Speaking

On personal note; I received several invitations to speak on some of these events. Here is my current schedule:

• I was invited to speak at the event called "Discover the Next Web" that will be held on March 31st at Microsoft's Polish Office in Warsaw. My session is titled "User Interface 2.0", and as you could guess I will by speaking about WPF and showcase some of the cool projects that we've done at InterKnowlogy
• I'm also helping my friends Marcin Celej and Michał Brzozowski build the coolest app ever to showcase during their session at the C2C conference on April 5^th.
• I accepted the invitation to speak at the Warsaw .NET UG in April but we need to work out the exact date.
• And finally I will be speaking at the Heroes Community Launch event in Wrocław on June 2nd.

I'm looking forward to meet you there!

When I started blogging here on GeeksWithBlogs it turned out that if want to publish any code samples I have to find yet another place to host the source code. I didn't own any web servers that I could use for this, so I started looking how other bloggers do this, and came across ProjectDistributor.net. It did exactly what I was looking for:

ProjectDistributor is a web application for distributing small pieces of software - such as tools, components, widgets and controls. Users create groups to store projects against and visitors can login to download those projects or to leave feedback about bugs or to request new features.

Although it's quite simple and didn't offer many features it did a decent job hosting my samples. The projects can be grouped by author and category.

However recently I got several comments that the download links don't work, and the site was down for some time (now it's up again). To fix this I decided to move my files to Windows Live SkyDrive. It's a generic service for hosting any files on internet. When you sign up you get 1GB of free space. The UI is very simple: you can create folders, setup the permissions (private, shared or public) and you then quickly upload your files.

The nice addition is that when you publish a file on SkyDrive, it creates a nicely formatted HTML snippets that you can embed in your page (there is even a Windows Live Writer plugin that helps you with this):

These nice emblems is the only thing I really miss abut SkyDrive. They were just easier to find on the page then a simple download link.

But as I said, SkyDrive is a generic service not really targeted to host programming samples. You don't get any ways to categorize, tag or search the projects. You don't even get the number of downloads or any other statistics. In addition some of my friends reported that they get redirected to Sign In page for Windows Live whenever they open my blog.

That's why when I heard about CodePlex's younger brother – MSDN Code Gallery on recent .NET Rocks! interview with Matthew Manela I decided to give it a try and this weekend I moved all my samples there:

Here is the link to my resources page: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KobushCode

My experience so far was very positive. It's basically a CodePlex (even shares the same codebase from what I heard) but without the TFS integration - so you don't get version control or project management features. But when you create a resource page you still get:

• Home page that you can edit with wiki syntax and supports comments. You can also create subpages to publish your articles or documentation. You can also tag your project so it would be easier to find for others.
• Rleases tab where you publish your source code, binaries or stand alone documentation (and it has a downloads counter).
• Discussions forum that your readers can use to publish questions or comments.
• You can even run an Issue Tracker to record bugs or feature requests if you need to (it's optional and you can turn it on in the Resource Page Settings).
• If you find someone to help you out with the project you can manage your team on the People tab.
• License tab shows the terms and conditions the user needs to agree when downloading your code. Note that currently it's the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and you cannot change it (you can do this on CodePlex though). It's a basic "use it how you want - no guarantee" type of license, and personally I don't have any objections to it but you need to judge it for yourself.

Also note that while I decided to publish all my samples on a single resources page, nothing prevents you from creating more than one. You can then link them together using Related Resource Pages sections.

For me the site offers all I really need to host my code samples. But if your project eventually grows and you need more features you can move it to CodePlex (I wonder if there will be any migration path for doing this). Also note that in many aspects it replaces now retired GotDotNet site and some popular samples were migrated from it.

Probably most bloggers that write about programming face the same problem that I had, and MSDN Code Gallery does a good job solving it. So if you are looking for a place to put your samples I strongly recommend to give it a try.

About two weeks ago Daniel Biesiada (who is ISV DE here in Poland) announced on his blog a little programming contest. The goal was to build a .NET application that would check if the the theory of Six Degrees of separation applies to two given topics in Wikipedia. In order words to find a path from the source page to destination with no more then six links. At the time I had not much else to do (apart from setting up website for the C2C Conference, helping out with the European Silverlight Challenge, and preparing for the WPF Beta Exam) so I decided to give it a try.

Fast forward two weeks and I present you my WikiSpider:

As usual building this took me much more time than I initially anticipated (including few sleepless nights). And still I didn't make it before the deadline, so this even didn't count as a contest entry anymore (sigh!). However this was mainly because my personal goal was to throw in there every new piece of .NET 3.5 I could find fit - and most of them I never used before.

Here are some key technologies I managed to put into this:

• The UI is done in WPF (and this was the only thing here I knew a bit about). However I borrowed the graph control from the excellent Kevin's WPF Bag-o-Tricks.
• The caching is done using SQL Server Express. Initially I wanted to do this using SQL Compact but I run into performance issues and had to switch to full SQL in order to run the queries in profiler. But since this was fixed (with big help from Paweł Potasiński) I could try with SQL Compact again.
• Of course data-access is done using LINQ to SQL. And of course this was the main source of my problems, as it was first time I've done anything in it, and so far I only read the Scott Gu's tutorials. Still, I'm already in love with it.
• Speaking of LINQ. Initially we were screen scrapping the HTML pages to get all the links.  But turns out that Wikipedia has a little known about Query API that enables to get the page content in XML. So the obvious move was to rewrite this part with LINQ to XML.
• The path-finding algorithm was borrowed from Eric Lippert. The nice thing about it is that it uses lots of C# 3.0 language features, so it is a great resource to learn from. The new C# syntax is so addictive that I already miss it in my other project.
• Finally, I wanted to publish the app with ClickOnce but run out of time. So maybe later.

I learned many interesting things and tried out some new stuff that I wanted to check out anyway. I will try to share my discoveries in the next few days, but in the meantime feel free to download and take a look at may code (I know it's not prettiest piece of code you've seen but I was in a rush to finish this on time):

Download the source code

Here you can also download the entries from other participants: Łukasz Sowa, Maciej Rutkowski, and Arkadiusz Benedykt. Congratulations to all of you!

Installation

1. Download the code from the above link and extract it.
2. The application uses local SQL database for caching and unfortunately you need to create it yourself (now you know why I wanted to use SQL Compact). Simply launch SSMS and create empty database called WikiCache.
3. Run the Create_WikiCacheDB.sql script from the data folder to create the database schema.
4. By default the app is configured to look for the WikiCache database on the local SQLEXPRESS instance. If you installed it somewhere else update the connection string in app.config accordingly.
5. Run the build.bat or open solution in Visual Studio 2008 and run from there.

Usage

1. Enter the name of the Wikipedia page in the address bar at the top and press the Go! button. The entered topic and the pages it links to will be displayed as graph.
2. Clicking on any topic will make it currently selected (put it in the center of the graph).
3. Right-click on any topic to open the context menu. Select "Open in browser" to.... load the page in browser.
4. Select "Set as source" or "Set as destination" to put the topic name in appropriate field on the sidebar
   [Note: Currently it's the only way to show the sidebar]
5. You can also enter the source/destination topics manually.
6. When both are set click on the Start button to begin searching for the path. Few statistics are displayed on the bottom of the sidebar.
7. During the search you can still use the graph or navigate to other pages (thanks to the BackgroundWorker magic).
8. When path is found it is displayed on the sidebar, and you can click on each topic to center it on graph.

Have fun!

Early this month I've read Scott Hanselman's invitation to Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest in Portland. If found the idea to get lots of people to install Visual Studio together quite interesting. I started looking around and quickly learned that this is a huge event for all .NET user groups in United States. However it turned out these meetings are not being held anywhere in Europe. What a bummer!

But I liked the idea so much that I though we should organize this in our user group ourselves. We asked for help our friends at local Microsoft office and although we didn't get free VS licenses we got two boxes of other gifts. We also got support from two local .NET shops: JCommerce, and Making Waves.

The meeting was held on Wendsday, 19th December at the nice pub called Cafe Szafe. We started by distributing copies of the VS Install DVD to everyone who wanted to install. Later Bartek Pampuch (MVP) did a great live demo of new features found in Visual Studio 2008. But we also had a fun part with two contests: a turnament in "Dead or Alive 4" on XBox360 and in Powerball spinning. The two winners got a special prizes, but we got plenty of other gifts so nobody left with empty hands. We also did a raffle for one license of ASP.NET RadControl provided by our friends at Telerik.

Overall 40 people showed at the meeting, and 33 of them got their laptops ready for installing VS. Among them we counted at least 25 successful installations.

You can find more photos here and here.

Thanks to everyone who helped me organize this. We got a lot of positive feedback from our group members so I think we should organize more of such events in future. We already have few ideas.

I'm really happy to announce that last week our good friend Bartosz Pampuch received the MVP award in Visual Developer - Team System category. I think this is a well deserved nomination.

I've met Bartek few years ago at one of our first .NET user group meetings (KGD). From the outset he was a very active member and throughout the years delivered many outstanding presentations.

Bartek is currently leading the RND team for one of the largest software houses in Poland, where he researches new technologies and software factories for other development teams. He is expert in Visual Studio Team System and MSF software process. Last year he was leading excellent workshops on VSTS and MSF, that I was fortunate to attend. Another area of his interest that we both share is Smart Client architecture, and Bartek is Microsoft's P&P Smart Client Software Factory adviser. He is also well known editor on the CodeGuru.pl portal (and soon on ITCore.pl).

Bartek is also a very funny person to talk with, so if you wish to meet him in person join us on the KGD.NET or Geek Lunch event. You can read more about Bartek and his many activities on his personal web page.

Congratulations!