Code & Technology Cocktail
Technology
22
Sep
Jonathan, Luigi and Sarah are visiting LBi London! Let’s follow their adventure.
Jonathan – London
7:30 am – Time for Luigi and I to leave our accommodation in the Docklands to go pick Sarah up at St. Pancras! I’ve been working at LBi London for 2 weeks, while Luigi joined the team yesterday and Sarah will come just for the FatWire training.
9:00 am – We finally arrive at LBi where a unicorn (!) is there to greet us. It seems there’s a lot of shooting activity going on at the office these days! Yesterday we saw people in white spandex, a guy dressed as a panda, and we barely missed taking part in a balloon release (red ones of course) on the 2nd floor terrace. Keep an eye on http://twitter.com/#!/LBiLondon for more details! (hint: new show reel coming out soon)
9:15 am – Day 1 of this FatWire tailor made training kicks off. The whole team is attending even though the topics are rather tech savvy. We have a technical architect, a test lead, 4 testers, a configuration manager, an IT lead and 6 developers including our guest Sarah.
The dev team is quite blended: one is LBi London, 2 are from the client side (a big financial kingpin, “thou who shalt not be named”) and then Luigi and I from Brussels
The FatWire consultant goes over a list of topics requested by the team, which include:
- RealTime publishing: current publishing method used by client is “mirror to server”, meaning the assets being published are queued, mirrored to the destination and then unpacked. RealTime publishing is a dynamic process copying assets and their dependencies from one system to another. Each of the 5 stages of the process can be monitored through a user interface. The publishing can be scheduled to run at a specific time.
- Content Server developer tools (aka CSDT): Eclipse plugin allowing to manage FatWire resources and exchange them within a team. This has been improved in FatWire 7.6 and makes developer life much easier!
Tomorrow’s session will mainly be about CAS (SSO for all FatWire products), CIP (Content Integration Platform, which is used to connect to third party systems such as Documentum in order to export/archive FatWire data) and Engage (recommendation framework allowing personalization).
31
May
Yesterday i dug up an old sitecore project.
when everything was installed and downloaded i tried to login at the sitecore admin. it kept on giving following error:
“Session state can only be used when enableSessionState is set to true, either in a configuration file or in the Page directive. Please also make sure that System.Web.SessionStateModule or a custom session state module is included in the <configuration>\<system.web>\<httpModules> section in the application configuration”.
Nice error he
The Sitecore version is 6.1 and it is not really compatible with the “integrated” mode of IIS 7.0. IIS 6.0 uses classic mode so we change the application pool setting to “Classic” mode.
but that’s not all, then you need to be sure you are using the correct DLL’s for the system. if you are having a x64 machine you will need to find following DLL’s for x64: dtsearchNetApi2 and System.Data.SQLite.
and that fixes the problem.
enjoy
15
Apr
The second day’s keynote was THE keynote that we expected. Today, the main topic was Windows Phone 7 codename “Mango”, the very expected update for the mobile operating system of Microsoft which will be available on October 10. And now we know why it is so expected: it will bring the phone to a new level, with a lot of very interesting features. The two other topics were Silverlight 5 and Kinect (make sure you look at the last link of this post below).
WP7 codename “Mango”The phone will now fully support Silverlight 4.
New API’s to access phone resources. Developers will now have access to the contacts and the calendar, and also be able to launch the Bing maps application. There will also be more possibilities to use the device’s sensors with the help of a framework that will ease the usage of those sensors.
The multitasking will give the possibility to fast switch between applications and will now be available for third party applications, which means that developers will have new API’s at their disposal to:
- Access the phone services like the alarms, the reminders, the background music stream or the possibility to transfer data using a queue mechanism that will persist even if the phone is switched off.
- Use background agents to perform background processing that does not require the UI.
A local SQL CE database will also be available on the phone to support data intensive applications. This local database will support Linq queries.
It will now also be possible to use Sockets to introduce TCP/UDP based communications. Developers are not limited anymore to http requests. The demo demonstrated an IRC application on the phone, and the arrival of Skype on the phone was announced.
More possibilities with the usage of Tiles and Push notifications, with for example the possibility to use both sides of the tile, deep linking from the tile to a specific task of an application, multi-tiles per application, the local access from an application to the tile API…
It will now be possible to mix Silvelight and XNA in one application, bringing the whole bunch of Silverlight controls to the game world, and the 3D capabilities of XNA to Silverlight apps.
IE9 will be fully integrated in the phone, with support of HTML 5, geolocation in the browser and the exact same engine than on the pc, which means that the html markup will not have to be adapted to work on the device (except if we want the website to appear in another way of course).
Scott Guthrie also announced some new tooling for the phone development, like an accelerometer and GPS emulator embedded in the current phone emulator, and also an advanced profiling tool which will help developers fine-tune their application for performance.
Silverlight 5This new release of Silverlight will be available in October. The keynote focused on the new hardware decoding media capabilities of the platform and the introduction of the XNA API to Silverlight, with two great demo’s. The first one is the website that will replace this one in the future: http://www.blueangels.navy.mil, and which will use a lot of embedded videos. A great demonstration of hardware decoding capabilities in Silverlight.
The second demo was an 3D House Builder application which showed us the integration of XNA’s 3D capabilities within Silverlight. The demo will come as open source software along with the beta release of Silverlight 5.
KinectThe Kinect for Windows SDK is now available in beta here: http://research.microsoft.com/kinectsdk, and will be released in May. To demonstrate the use of this SDK, we got 4 great demo’s. It is quite difficult to express the magic of all these demo’s with words. Fortunately, they are already available on channel 9 here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/C9Team/Kinect-Demos-with-the-Channel-9-team.
Enjoy !
13
Apr
Hello from Las Vegas, where I’m attending the MIX 11 conference. MIX is Microsoft’s biggest event about web and devices technologies, and is a real opportunity to have an eye on what is coming in this area from Microsoft.
Today’s keynote was presented by Dean Hachamovich – Internet Explorer corporate Vice president – and Scott Guthrie – who’s responsible for all development platforms for the .Net framework. The main announcement today was the availability of a preview of Internet Explorer 10, which continues to go in the html and CSS standards adoption and also puts a real focus on performance with it’s hardware accelerated rendering capabilities. Here are the links:
- http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Info/Downloads/Default.html (to download IE10 preview)
- http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ (a lot of demos to see what are the capabilities of IE9 and IE10)
- http://worldsbiggestpacman.com/ (a geeky demo of the pacman game done with HTML5)
- http://foursquareplayground.com/ (another demo using the foursquare data)
Besides Internet explorer, Scott Guthrie (helped by Scott Hanselman), showed us some demos of WebMatrix, a lightweight development environment targeted to web (ASP.Net MVC and php mainly) and from which you can easily create new application from a lot of open source platforms. We also have seen some demos about the Orchard CMS, developed by Microsoft on top of ASP.Net MVC 3 and another cool demo from Niels Hartvig, founder of the Umbraco CMS, about their Windows Azure support. They have a really great deployment to Azure module which can handle also from the admin the scalability of the platform by defining rules used to upscale the deployment to more servers (or downscale if the traffic becomes lower). This demonstrates again how innovative the Umbraco CMS platform is.
After this first day keynote, I heard the the second day’s keynote will be full of great announcements, so stay plugged for the next post !
25
Mar
LBi Belgium went to the SDL Tridion Partner Training at Amsterdam. This training was the occasion to touch at the new features of Tridion 2011 and to eat some delicious kroketten. (National food in Holland )
We saw the following features of Tridion 2011:
- Core Services (in WCF)
- New Event System in .net
- Tom .net library
- OData Provider
- UI extensibility (how to add commands to the new ribbon)
17
Jan
Microsoft has presented a new toy at CES: Microsoft Surface 2.0.
About a year ago I followed an interesting surface training. Back then I also wrote a blog post on my adventure. I was very exited about this toys, because that what it is for a developer! So it did not take long before I created a first application for the LBi client afternoon. It was very interesting to see people interact with my application on a real table:
Some of the features I like about the new toy:
- Slim: there is actually free space under the tabletop!
- You can also mount it on a wall.
- HD: your app will look very appealing on 40-inch 1080p LCD HD screen.
- No big cameras anymore: every pixel of the screen acts as a camera (Pixel Sense Technology).
- Better OS: Vista is replaced by Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.
- New hardware: 2.9GHz AMD Athlon II X2 processor and a Radeon HD 6700M.
- Cheaper: $ 7600 (more…)