Tomislav Bronzin [RD&MVP]

Live Mesh and Live Mesh for Mobile available (for limited number of users)

www.mesh.com is interesting new member of the Live Services family that is enabling users to have "on-line" Desktop that has folders/files that are synchronized with all your computers and now mobile devices too: http://blogs.msdn.com/lokeuei/archive/2008/11/04/live-mesh-tech-preview-for-mobile-available-now.aspx

Beside folder/files synchronization, it also enables you to add device to the collection of the devices that can be accessed with Remote Desktop as well as other new features that are coming soon!

Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Finally - final version of Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c22d6a7b-546f-4407-8ef6-d60c8ee221ed&DisplayLang=en

Tools package is an add-on for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 2. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1, and it provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic.

This download will install the following:

P.S. Currently if you try to download it you cannot - maybe there is so much demand that server can not respond in a proper manner :-)

VS 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Enhancements Training Kit

Microsoft have excellent resources for developers to get their hands and migrate to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 (including 3.5 Service Pack 1 Enhancments) in their training kits:

.NET Fx 3.5 SP1 enhancements:

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=355c80e9-fde0-4812-98b5-8a03f5874e96&displaylang=en

Visual Studio 2008 Traininig Kit ( LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management):
Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=8BDAA836-0BBA-4393-94DB-6C3C4A0C98A1&displaylang=en

Why is so important to speak about Unified Communication DEVELOPMENT platform?

On the recente CodeCamp 2008 (http://codecamp.mscommunity.net/English/Overview.aspx) I have beeing talking about how to use Exchange Server as a Development Platform. In one hour session I was explaining usage of Exchange Server Web services (you no the drill: in Visual Studio: install server certificate, Add Web Reference, bind to the Exchanfe services, CreateItemType/MessageType, call CreateItem) and I got following responses from the people that were sitting in the room and using Exchange Server (as "ordinary" users) for years:

"We did not realize that it is so easy to 'convert" Exchange into developer tool."

"Exchange Server was 'sitting' there for years in our organization and we did not realized that we can use it as a development platform"

So, if you are interesting in deatils about UC Development - I will be posting my presentation at CodeCamp site soon and put the link - HERE :-)
For all the people that understand Croatian (presentation slides are in English) they will be able to watch the presentation - because we have been using Live Meeting to record it :-) (link coming soon!)

CODECAMP 2008 - Another great INETA Community success!

Well known Vladan Strigo, Microsoft MVP organized yet another CODECAMP 2008 in Zagreb, Croatia. This was INETA Europe Sponsored Event where I delivered following session:

"Unified Communication Story 2: Using Exchange Web Services and Exchange Server as Development Platform"

I must congratulate Vladan to motivate speakers, and speakers themself: Andrej Radinger, Dean Vitner, Josip Saban, Marko Culo, Bernard Katić.

Also, thank you to Anka Novkovic Slamnig and Marin Mamic from our Microsoft Croatia office.
Special thanks to Marko Drenovacki and Tomica Kaniski from Microsoft Innovation Center for technical support in recording the session (they will publish them soon!), and all the rest that were involved in this great event!

Unified Communicaton Development - Live Meeting

If you are speaking Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian (or understand :-)) then you can join us at Live Meeting about Unified Communication Development that will be originally held at in Sarajevo INETA Europe - Bosnia & Herzegovina chapter.

Meeting link is: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mspp/join?id=MSComm.BA&role=attend&pw=MSComm.Attend 

Mobility Day Conference, September 9th 2008, Zargeb, Croatia

Because I was involved in several project that were havily use Windows Mobile platform, I have being awarded with Mobile Architect MVP status.

Being Microsoft MVP Mobile Architect, my dear collegue Andrej Radinger and I decided last year to re-start annual regional Mobility Day Conference that will be starting in 10 days in Zagreb!

Conference is organized by companies Mobendo and Citus, aimed at decision makers and ICT professionals that are involved in envisioning, developing and implementing mobile solutions using Microsoft mobile technologies. Sessions will be delivered by leading Microsoft (Redmond;UK), local and regional experts in mobile development and mobile business.

Visual Studio & .NET Framework Service Pack 1 is out!

Visual Studio & .NET Framework Service Pack 1 is finally out!

You can find them here:
1. VS SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBEE1648-7106-44A7-9649-6D9F6D58056E&displaylang=en
2. .NET Fx 3.5 SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=AB99342F-5D1A-413D-8319-81DA479AB0D7&displaylang=en

IMPORTANT
- If you previously installed a Visual Studio 2008 Hotfix or Visual Studio 2008 SP1 pre-release, you must run the Service Pack Preparation tool before installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1.
- If you have multiple Visual Studio products installed, you must upgrade all of them to SP1. If you have Visual Studio 2008 and one or more 2008 Express Editions, you cannot upgrade the Express Editions until you have upgraded Visual Studio.
- Sometimes installation of VS SP1 RTM will require that you provide VS 2008 Installation DVD media (if you have installed some hotfixes or SP1 pre-release)

Comparing Office Live Workspace features with Google Docs ...

Windows Live Services, MS Partner Community Builder, Live@Edu

Hello!

Recently I started to use Live Services through MS Partner „Community Builder“, that should be very similar to the Live@Edu, and after 2 months of experimenting with it (several domains, primarily my Community domain: www.mscommunit.net) and writing the “user manual” with “scenarios of usage” I come up with following:

I think that Live@Edu (Community Builder: http://domains.live.com) idea is excellent:

1. Free services
2. Lots of services: E-mail, spaces (blogs, photo gallery, events, Skydrive …)
3. Lots of services 2: workspace.office.live.com, video.msn.com
4. Easy to setup (guide that enables system engineers to setup domain forwards in a few seconds)
5. There is possibility to develop your own “look and feel”
6. There is some possibility to pick what Live services one wants to integrate
   - When opening the new domain – you can pick not to opt for e-mail support - Some of the education authorities have their own e-mail and they are not willing to give it up-but would like to use other Live functionalities
7. Excellent desktop client apps (Live Writer, Photo Gallery, Live Messenger) that are accompanying services (translated!)
8. You can enter the users using admin module or from application using SDK
9. Lot of possibilities for ISV’s, consulting etc. to develop their own solutions based on the Live platform
10. References:
    • http://www.windowslive.com
    • http://dev.live.com/
    • http://get.liveatedu.com/
    • http://my.liveatedu.com

But, I can also identify some of the problems (I will address each of them in separate post):

1. Cryptic and not very understandable access to lot of services
   • Because of different branding (for example video.msn.com, workspace.office.live.com)
   • Different look of “dashboard” (for example http://spaces.mscommunity.net/ does not look the same/not the same options/ when I choose English or Croatian – Skydrive is missing, even it is available in Croatia)
   • Authentication: (BIG ISSUE!)
     • Requires NEW Live ID for every domain that user wants to join!
       • Joining Live ID accounts helps a little)
       • Identity Federation – I did not find support to
         • Open ID integration
         • Any other kind of identity integration – Croatian Academic Research Network (www.carnet.hr) have its own authentication for every pupil/student/academic citizen that is provided by the institution that person belongs. Authorization is done by administrators of that institution.
     • Not enough granularity in authorization system
       • for example – in SkyDrive you cannot enable somebody only to upload and delete their files, but NOT the files that were uploaded by someone else!
     • Not enough flexible “sigin-in” module
       • You can only open it for all to join or close it
       • Of course you can enter the users using admin module or from application using SDK
   • Lack of some functionality, examples:
     • if you put video or photo on Skydrive – you cannot reference it from your Blog
     • you cannot reference photo galleries from the Events, you must create new one bounded to Events
     • you can embed video in blog, but after a lot of investigation
2. Not all of the services are completely translated in a lot of languages (I am interested in Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Macedonian ….)
   • People from education (as well from governments) is very sensitive to this!
   • No translation of web mail and some other services or partial translations or inadequate translation
     • Inadequate translation: for example: friends should be translated in education to “contacts” because not all of your contacts are your friends.
   • I will try to investigate if there possibility to “help” in translation of Live Services Team to do that “right” :-)
3. Branding
   • Yes, there is possibility to do the branding – but is a so small and inadequate that it is not worth mentioning
     • You can add your (very, very small) logo in upper-left corner on the “menu line”
   • There is possibility to develop your own “look and feel”
     • But, there is NO possibility to pick your (new user) default theme – that was (possibly) developed by you
4. Not a lot of information about availability of Live@Edu in some European countries (or it is not obvious to the local MS offices how to offer this to the Education)
5. Development: Missing SDK-s
   • There is no adequate SDKs for every service or even API (Web services) to be used to manage Live Services!
   • Still hard development, mostly based on using RSS and XSLT to transform the look (one example is here: http://pil2test.mscommunity.net/RSSfeeds/tabid/54/Default.aspx)
   • Not easy to understand terms of usage (license and fee)
   • Question still to be answered: how to develop modules for http://spaces.live.com and add it to the?
     • Not talking about gadgets that you can add at your 1^st page or events – but spaces!

All, at all this is very exciting (NEW!) platform and I will be investigating the platform and possible scenarios of usage further!

If you have any experience of using this platform and building solutions on it, I would like to hear about it and exchange experience!

INETA Europe launched http://community.ineta-europe.org/

Join us in discussions, publish articles on blogs and make this site alive :-)!

Live Meeting - great tool for the User Groups

I am not writing that because I am an Unified Communication Fan (especially if we are talking about development of UC applications), but I really think that Microsoft is doing great job by developing services like Live Meeting and offering it - to the INETA and Culminis User Groups!

Some of the best usage of the generous offer by the User Groups can be find here: http://www.developers.ie/webcasts.aspx 
Colleagues from the Ireland INDA User Group have used Live Meeting to deliver “.NET Coffee Break Show” which is short form of a web cast to: deliver and record presentation from the interesting speakers – some of them from the Redmond.
By using the Live Meeting technology User Groups can not only bridge distributed membership (especially when it is summer time and most of the people are on holidays outside of their place of residence) but also enable membership to hear what some interesting speakers or experts have to say directly from  them, without need to travel long distances.
And they can record it for latter use!
If you are the User Group member – ask your User Group leader if he/she can provide such service for you!
If you are User Group Leader – and you do not have (yet) Live Meeting account – ask INETA (Developers) or Culminis (ITPro) to provide you with the one account!
Happy (live) meetings!

Microsoft Innovation Center initiative announced in Armenia!

On the request of the Microsoft Armenia, I delivered session about what are Microsoft Innovation Centers (MIC's) and how they can help ISVs to get technical and business advantage at the USAD RCI Conference on Regional Competitiveness Initiative in Yerevan, Armenia. Session explained how ISV's were helped by MIC in Croatia (http://www.microsoft.com/croatia/msptc/en/about.mspx), who are stakeholders beside the Microsoft and what are steps to found the Center.

If you would like more information about the Microsoft Innovation Center in Varazdin, watch the video here.

KulenDayz Regional Community Conference

 Microsoft Community Osijek together with Microsoft Croatia® with support from INETA are organizing the first regional community conference KulenDayz 2008. Conference is bringing together leading IT Experts from the region with local IT Community and giving them a chance to spend a weekend filled with 18 attractive sessions presented by top speakers and relaxing at  Kopacki Rit Nature Park and enjoying unspoiled nature.

Content:
Sessions in conference are organized in 3 parallel tracks: 
♦ Advanced Development
♦ Databases
♦ System Infrastructure

The idea is to make a conference "a little different", so together with traditional sessions presented in conference halls there will be a number of unplugged Open Space/Chalk & Talk sessions presented at Gazebos in Ethno-Village. In Open Space sessions all participants are invited to co-create the agenda and pick the discussion topics. Chalk & Talk sessions are "unplugged", so without PowerPoint/laptops/beamers but with good-old flipcharts!

As a part of HEROS happen {here} events,  sessions at the KulenDayz 2008 will be mostly technically oriented, level 300+, with highligt on the new products and technologies (Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, ASP.NET MVC)

The conference schedule is subject to change. New sessions are currently being added to the program. Check back regularly for updates.

KulenDayz 2008 Agenda...
 

Unified Communication METRO Training delivered in Italy!

I just finished my 4th training, so I must be a "veterean" in UC Development :-).

I am starting to collect not just a knoledgebase about UC development (you always find something that is representing Catch 22), but also I am "collecting" the people who are pioniers in the field - first of the kind that will do new generation Unified Communication development!

After Denmark, The Netherlands, Czech Republic and Italy, I hope that I will "bring the good news" to the developers in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria - by delivering the training in the Microsoft Innovation Center in Varazdin, Croatia http://www.msbtc.net