IdentityMine

Going to Berlin (TechEd Europe)

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:15:22 GMT

I will make a short appearance at Tech Ed Europe. Due to the amount of work we have right now, I cannot spend more than a couple of days in Berlin, but I still hope to meet many of you all.

I will arrive in Berlin on the Sunday, 8th of November, and leave on Tuesday, the 10th. During the day, I will mostly be helping at the Silverlight booth, together with other MVPs and Silverlight evangelist superstar Tim Heuer. I really hope that many will come and admire the booth, Silverlight 3, ask many questions and hopefully get good answers ;)

See you there!

Laurent

Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)
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IdentityMine /forward Community Site

Laurent Bugnion — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:29:26 GMT

At the same time that Microsoft was releasing Silverlight 3 and launching Expression Blend 3 and SketchFlow, IdentityMine released our new community site:

(http://www.identitymine.com/forward/)

/forward is the IdentityMine home to share our ideas, technology and design thinking. We always want to be forward thinking and being able to share that passion is our goal. Here you will find our thoughts on all things UX. Some will see the immediate light of day and others may simply be relegated to the future.

This site will gather all the community contributions made by the IdentityMine team. By nature, we are passionate about software and design, and we love to help others make their applications beautiful. Remember, we love our (and your) software!! This is what makes us live, and this is the air we breathe. Most of us have this in our blood to blog, answer questions on forums, talk about the technologies that we love at conferences, etc.

With the new /forward site, you will have a great source of information, directly from experts involved every day with advanced technologies, and using them since the very early days. The sources of information include our personal blogs, Codeplex projects we work on, involvement in expert sites such as StackOverflow, videos and pictures taken at conferences, and more.

We are really looking /forward to your visit!!

New intro on my website

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:02:14 GMT

The time was ripe for a new intro on my website www.galasoft.ch. Here it is below, posted for my blog’s readers. I hope that you find it entertaining.

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Time sure flies when you’re busy :) Already middle of the year, summer is coming and I have been so busy with amazing projects! Yes, since last time I wrote here, much water has run under the bridges and I am loving my job.

I have taken part to an exciting series of conferences: The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional summit took place in March in Seattle. After that, back in Europe for a quick jump to Belgium where I held two talks at the TechDays conference in Antwerp. This was a fantastic experience by the way. Later, back to the US for the most exciting of all conferences, MIX in Las Vegas! And this time I was a speaker, what a thrill! I often say that MIX06 is the conference that changed my (professional) life completely, and to be accepted to speak at MIX09 was a fantastic and exciting achievement.

After my return in Switzerland, I had two more talks, one in Geneva and one in Bern. This was the same talk, but once in French and once in German. The response has been really good and it was a nice experience (even if it was a bit scary when I was preparing ;))

After this crazy travel time, I had time to work on exciting projects at IdentityMine. Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation are my daily bread and I love it. WPF really rocks, and the more I use it, the more I am in love with that framework. Since I have the chance to work with some of the best designers in the industry, I can really (some would say finally) create the beautiful applications I have always dreamed of, and Love my Software (which is incidentally IdentityMine’s motto). It’s really amazing to be part of that world class team of experts. What a motivation to get better. In the process, I am also learning a huge lot about interaction design, and sometimes it is tough, but it is always a passion.

One more talk took me to Belgium again, this time in Kortrijk for MultiMania 2009. It was an interesting event, with a crowd in majority favoring Adobe products, but I think my talk was well received and we had a lot of interesting discussions.

One project that has been occupying most of my “free programming time” is a toolkit to assist the implementation of Model-View-ViewModel applications in Windows Presentation Foundation and in Silverlight. After quite some time, I released the first version of the toolkit. I am still working on it and should post an installer soon (for the moment the installation is manual). I also have a couple of ideas about things I would like to add to the toolkit. Finally, the grand plan is to post everything on Codeplex and to let the community do its thing. That should be fun.

The coming weeks will be quite packed with work. I will be in Seattle from the 11th of July. I will stay a couple of weeks to work with the team (and meet tons of friends I am sure), and then my family will join me for a week of leisure between Seattle and Vancouver. This should be a lot of fun.

For more information about my whereabouts, planned talks (such as the one I will give at the SD2IG group in Seattle on the 15th of July), make sure to subscribe to my blog. Meeting you all is what is keeping my motivation high and my passion alive.

The #techdays presentations screencasts are online (French only)

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:21:17 GMT

Update: The German version of the presentation is online too.

I was just notified that the screencast for the session I gave at TechDays in Geneva a few weeks ago is now online. You can see this presentation (in French) at

http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/msdn/fr/techdays/Presentations.aspx

The slides are also available at this URL. Have fun!!

Posting the source code for #techdays (Switzerland) talks

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:07:39 GMT

Update:

I updated the installation instructions to make it clearer that you need the WPF toolkit and SQL Server express before you can run the application.

TechDays Switzerland is always a very nice venue, and this year in Geneva and in Bern were no exceptions. For me it was a special occasion, because I gave the same talk in French in Geneva, and in German in Bern, and I had never done this before. I think it went well. Altogether approximately 450 people saw this talk. I think I will possibly reuse it later this year at other occasions, because it is a good one.

The topic was "WPF today and tomorrow" and the abstract was:

Entwicklung von WPF Applikationen – heute und morgen

Im Rahmen dieser Session werden Best Practices zur Entwicklung der Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) erörtert. Wir erstellen Lookless-Controls und gestalten sie entsprechend. Ausserdem werden moderne Präsentationsmodelle, die den Designer-Developer-Workflow erleichtern sollen, sowie im .NET-Framework und im WPF-Toolkit erstellte Controls vorgestellt. Mithilfe von Visual Studio und Expression Blend üben wir uns in der Erstellung von Anwendungen.
Ein weiterer in dieser Session behandelter Aspekt ist die künftige Entwicklung der WPF. Mit der bevorstehenden Einführung von .NET 4 wird die WPF weiter an Flexibilität und Leistungsstärke gewinnen. Pixel-Shader, Ergänzungen an der XAML-Sprache, die Multi-Touch-Technologie, neue Controls und andere Erweiterungen – all dies führt uns zu einer neuartigen User Experience und zu neuen Möglichkeiten der Interaktion (Think Minority Report!).

Windows Presentation Foundation: aujourd'hui et demain

Cette session passe en revue les pratiques de développement utilisées avec Windows Presentation Foundation de nos jours. Nous construirons une application de business connectée à une banque de données, utiliserons les nouveaux contrôles « Line of Business » (Datagrid, Ribbon) et utiliserons Visual Studio et Blend pour rendre nos applications plus belles.
Ensuite, nous parlerons du future de WPF. Avec .NET 4 qui arrive, WPF sera aussi plus puissant et flexible. Pixel shaders, les additions au langage XAML, les applications à touche multiple (mulittouch) et d’autres additions nous rapprocherons de l’expérience utilisateur du futur (telles que dans « Minority Report »).

Slides

The slides for the sessions should be available on the TechDays website soon (www.techdays.ch) as well as a recording of the session. In the mean time, I uploaded the slides here.

TechDays Switzerland 2009

View more presentations from lbugnion.

Video

I showed a small video about pixel shaders in this talk. The video is available for download here.

Source code

Here is the source code of the "Line of Business" application we built together. As a reminder, it is inspired by a "hands on lab" put together by the DPE team at Microsoft Switzerland. This lab can be downloaded here.

To run the application, you must first install the following:

Install SQL Server Express
Extract the Northwind database to C:\temp.
Install the WPF Toolkit.
Source code for the LOB application.

Posting the source code for my #mix09 and #techdays (Belgium) talk

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:06:30 GMT

Note: I just updated the title for this article, sorry to all of you who were waiting for the TechDays Belgium source code and didn't realize it was here :)

I just posted the source code of the demo applications I used in my MIX09 talk "Working across the client continuum".

The source code is structured as follows:

DotNetContinuum: This solution contains the following projects:
- DotNetContinuum: a WCF service configured with 2 endpoints (SOAP and JSON), as well as 3 client applications:
- DotNetContinuum.Mvc: An ASP.NET MVC application showing a "pure" ASP.NET MVC application enhanced with AJAX content. See the following files
  - HomeController.cs (in Controllers): Contains the "ServerDateTime" action.
  - ServerDateTime.aspx (in Views/Home): Contains the view code for ServerDateTime.
  - Index.aspx (in Views/Home): Start page for the MVC application, contains the links to ServerDateTime, as well as the AJAX code.
  - Silverlight.html: Start page for the Silverlight application.
- DotNetContinuum.SL: A Silverlight application connecting to the WCF service in an asynchronous way. See the following files:
  - Page.xaml: Front end with a very simple UI.
  - Page.xaml.cs: Code behind with the code to connect to the WCF service.
- DotNetContinuum.Wpf: A WPF application connecting to the WCF service in an asynchronous way. See the following files:
  - Window.xaml: Front end with a very simple UI.
  - Window.xaml.cs: Code behind with the code to connect to the WCF service.
Customers: This solution is a WCF service reading a list of customers from an XML file and delivering them as a list of Customer objects.
- CustomerAccess.cs: Contains the LINQ to XML code used to read and write the XML file.
- Customer.cs: The class used to pass information between the service and the client.
- CustomerService.svc.cs: The service implementation.
- Customers.xml: The "data base" of customers
- Note also that there is a unit test project in the solution, used to unit test the WCF service.
CustomersApplication: This solution contains client applications for the Customers WCF service.
- CustomersApplication.Mvc: An ASP.NET MVC and AJAX client.
  - HomeController.cs: Contains the "ShowCustomers" action.
  - ShowCustomers.aspx: Contains a mix of ASP.NET MVC and AJAX code to interact with the WCF service.
  - Silverlight.html: Start page for the Silverlight application.
- CustomersApplication.SL: The Silverlight application connecting to the WCF service and showing the list of customers.
- CustomersApplication.WPF: Same application, implemented in WPF.

The last applications (CustomersApplication.SL and CustomersApplication.WPF) are implemented using the MVVM pattern, and share a maximum of code.

As soon as I have a moment, I will post a walkthrough of my demos. In the mean time, you can catch the Powerpoint slides and the talk's video from the MIX09 session page.

Have fun!!

My #MIX09 session is available in video

Laurent Bugnion — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:09:41 GMT

MIX09 is over, people are slowly going back home. I will be flying home tomorrow, quite a long trip since I will reach Zurich only on Sunday morning.

I had the great pleasure to see that the video of my talk was posted online! This is great, because I didn't have a huge crowd (what do you expect when you "compete" against and Vertigo and their Playboy talk, and the amazing Corrina Black :))

But it's OK, because the people at my talk were really great. I felt wonderful during the talk, and even the small issue I had with Visual Studio didn't manage to disturb me much (even though I kind of freaked out when it happened, you can hardly notice it).

The video is available for download. You can also stream it (Silverlight required) by clicking on the image below. Have fun!

#MIX09 Book Signing: "Silverlight 2 Unleashed"

Laurent Bugnion — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 04:49:51 GMT

When: Today, Friday 20th of March 2009, 10:30 - 11:00

Where: MIX2009 Book store (in 3rd Place)

What: I will be signing my book there.

Come and bring your friends!!

IdentityMine releases Gesture Engine for advanced multitouch development

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:56:52 GMT

Multitouch is going to be the next big thing. Natural User Interfaces (NUI) are going to change the way we use client applications soon. You think it's not true? See the iPhone hype. This is not a very good phone, feature wise. It is lacking very basic features. But being able to control your phone using multiple fingers was a real killer feature.

Apple is not the only one working on that, of course. Firms like Perceptive Pixel or Oblong have been exploring this space for a very long time. (watch these videos by the way they are amazing).

More recently, Microsoft released the Surface computing device, which is also using multitouch. Multiple users can use multiple fingers to control the device. Build in Windows Presentation Foundation, these application get input from the Surface device input API and transforms can be applied to the elements on the screen according to the fingers movements (or Gestures). The mapping of the finger movements to mathematical transforms can be complex and tedious.

Similarly, Windows 7 ( the next operating system developed by Microsoft, currently in beta) supports multitouch input natively. This opens the door to a new generation of devices (cheaper than a Surface, for example the HP Touchsmart) will bring multitouch computing to the masses, and not just on phone devices.

This just calls for a higher level API allowing to easily integrate complex gestures into an application. Like every technology developed by IdentityMine, this was developed with the developer-designer workflow in mind and will facilitate the development of rich, natural user interfaces.

The whole story is available here. We are all very excited about this major step and personally, I cannot wait to develop using this package. Congratulations to the team who did an amazing work developing this!

Reminder: My talk at #MIX09

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:58:01 GMT

Tomorrow Thursday 19th of March 2009

Location: Delfino 4105

Working across the .NET continuum

Come see how to build a continuum of client applications including HTML, AJAX, ASP.NET, Microsoft Silverlight, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) that all consume the same Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service. Learn how to reuse as much code as possible, how to optimize the development process, and how to address key logistical issues like external servers and cross domain communication.