Wow - what a Saturday!

The first ever Iowa Code Camp was held at the University of Iowa and I have to say I was blown away.  Over 100 attendees showed up to choose from 25 different sessions.  Not only that, every attendee was able to have free breakfast, free lunch, and a free dinner!  And the entire event went off without a single hiccup!!!!  WOW!  WOW! WOW!  The bar has been set very high for any events I go to from now on!

I sat in a couple of sessions and they were very good.  There was all kinds of stuff ranging from Drupal, to Java, to XNA.  Of course, there was a little bit of .NET in there as well. ;-)

The following guys were all instrumental in getting this thing done: Greg Sohl, Chris Sutton, Greg Wilson, Javier Lozano, and Bryan Sampica.

Yes, an old school movie reference for those of you old enough to remember that movie. No hints on the title - go figure it out for yourself if you don't already know. Let me just say, it was one of the last movies where Ally Sheedy was still "all that". What does that have to do with anything? Well, Microsoft has launched RoboChamps (www.robochamps.com), a simulated robotics league that is open to academics, hobbyists and developers from around the world.  From the official announcement...

RoboChamps is built on top of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio(MSRDS) 2008 CTP, and uses that product’s robust, physics enabled simulation environment to remove the barriers of entry that exist for many today. This simulated league provides individuals with immersive 3-d environments, simulated versions of robots, and compelling scenario-specific challenges where they can win real robots.  Environments range from a maze to the surface of the planet Mars to downtown driving to robot rescue to soccer.  The top four finalists will be flown to PDC, where the competition moves to the real world and participants apply their code to real robots.

It looks really cool and fun.  Even the web site is cool.  There are six different types of robot challenges you can choose from - navigate a maze, build a Mars Rover-style robot to explore alien worlds, drive through an urban setting, build a rescue bot, a bot that wrestles, or head-to-head tournament action.  Work a check out!

Looking forward to the first ever Iowa Code Camp next weekend.  It's shaping up to be a great event with over 125 folks registered already.  I'll be presenting and the speaker list is also impressive.  I'll be toting my vid camera along and hopefully will not hose things up like I did in Omaha (grrrrrrrrrrr).  I'm also hoping to maybe get a podcast or two recorded with some of the big brains that will be doing seassions.

Ok, I've been following the Twitter "thing" for a while now and have been going back and forth on the value of the service as a professional.  On a personal level, I have about zero use for Twitter.  I am not interested in a lot of the noise that comes across Twitter.  My personal life has enough commitments, noise, and distractions in it already.  "Hey look - Bob is at Outback".  BFD - I have a kid's soccer match so I won't be zipping over there to join him, and frankly, I really don't care he is at the Outback, even if I did have time since he would have invited me to go along if he was interested in my company. Call me anti-social (I'm not), but I'm not a fan of the "pop in". An extreme example perhaps, but at the end of the day, I like my "not connected" time.  I'm a firm believer that "always connected all the time" is not a good thing no matter how cool it may seem at first.  Yes, I know I don't have Twitter in my face, but if you don't, what is the real value of it as compared to the myriad other forms of communication we already have.

From a professional perspective, I have been thinking about the value of Twitter to my job with Microsoft.  While I am not entirely convinced that there is a great deal of value, I stumbled across this blog post on the 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter- A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners that has caused me to re-evaluate its value proposition.  For good, bad or indifferent, a large part of my current job is marketing.  While I consider myself a techie first and foremost, I find myself needing to think a lot about marketing.  That is not entirely a bad thing since it has caused me to stretch a bit and learn some new skills. When it comes to social networking (not thinking just about Twitter), there are a lot of different pivots, but the two that I am most interested in are how social networking aids or detracts from building your personal brand and standing in the community (and in my case, in particular, the developer community) and the value of social networking as an overall tool to EFFECTIVELY reach audiences with IMPACT.

Looking at the first issue, I can certainly see how Twitter can add to your ability to build brand - if used wisely.  The article I linked provides some great ways to go about doing that.  Not all of the 17 different ways of using Twitter apply to me, or at least, I don't want them to apply to me. ;-)  I view Twitter through the lens of being a communication medium for my role with Microsoft as opposed to being about me as an individual.  I envision using Twitter to send out notifications about important info, new podcasts being conducted or posted, when I am at a developer event, etc.  It will certainly not be about me going to O'Malley's or that I am in the bathroom (yes, I have seen a Twitter from someone saying they were in the can - sheesh!).  Doing those types of things allows my core market to be plugged in better and more "immediately" and thus have more of a connection.  I see value there.  So with that in mind, I set up a Twitter account with the not so imaginative name of MSFT_MSP.  I had thought about something a bit more catchy, but considering that someday someone else may be doing my job, I figured I would go with something the identified the role instead of the person. 

When it comes to reach, Twitter is as good a tool as any.  But from an IMPACT perspective, I think it is seriously challenged.  If someone only subscribes to a handful of Tweeters, then there is some impact.  But my second hand experience has been those that Twitter do so a lot and have a ton of stuff being dropped in their lap.  It's hard to stand out in that noise, much like it is hard to stand out in the blogosphere, but with Twitter I have to do it in only 140 characters! ;-)  Yes, those 140 characters can lead to something with more impact (is Twitter's biggest value that it makes tinyurl.com really useful again???), but again, I'm just one voice in a very crowded room.

Well, it's time to take the plunge.  I've got some recommendations on some good Twitter clients so I will have to check those out if I start following some Twitterers.  For now, you can follow me if you want! ;-)

I will be heading down to Omaha tomorrow.  Monday will be flying and some customer meetings that afternoon and last minute launch prep that evening.  Tuesday is the Omaha launch at the Qwest Center (sold out) - hit me up if you are attending.  Wednesday will be customer calls during the day and then driving to Des Moines that evening.  I will be syncing up Javier Lozano (ASP.NET MVP)  for dinner and a podcast on Ruby, IronRuby, and more.  I'm really stoked about that interview.  Thursday is the Des Moines launch (still spaces available - again, hit me up if you are there) and then I will drive back to Omaha to catch my return flight Friday morning.

I was at a customer meeting the other day, and we were going over WPF and what it meant for UI design and its value to traditional LOB types of applications.  We covered the usual glitz and glamour that makes WPF fun, but at the end of the day, not a lot of that matters to most LOB developers.  There are a lot of other "under the cover" reasons to use WPF (great databinding being just one example), but the conversation was predominately around the UI and the value of UI. 

Once you get past things like animations, styles, etc., the one concrete example that is often used to demonstrate the value of WPF is data visualization.  WPF certainly provide a great platform for data visualization.  When developers think of data visualization, they typically think of things like graphs, charts, and similar type of visual elements.  The picture at right is an example I took from one of the WPF demos I often show.  It graphs some financial data in a cool looking 3-D bar chart "thingy" and is a pretty good representation of what developers think about when they hear the words "data visualization".  For a lot of apps, that type of data visualization isn't needed so it has a "big whoop" factor when it comes to finding value in WPF.

This is not be surprising to some, but data visualization applies to a lot more than graphs and charts.  I've found that developers don't often think how visualization can be applied to "ordinary" UI design to provide a quantum leap in usability.  The picture at left shows a list box item from another demo I do.  Unlike the traditional item in a list box or drop down box that shows a simple piece of data (like a name), WPF allows us to template that item and visualize the underlying data in a much more informative and useful way.  In this example, we get not only the patient's name, but we also can see his age, medical conditions, and more (and no, I have no idea what all those little colored circles, squares and diamonds are).  From a usability perspective, the end user can now glean important "top line" data points about a given patient without having to actually click the item in order to display additional details in another window.  Another benefit is that this additional  information can help the user distinguish between multiple "John Smith" entries in a listbox because of the added detail.

Another benefit of this type of data visualization is that it frees up screen real estate that would have normally be used to display the detailed information on a given patient.  Granted, the new list box item template takes up more room than the traditional "line of text" items we are used to, but with WPF we can scale, shrink, or rotate those items in useful ways to maximize UI space.  Of course, we can always display some of those details in graphical ways that are easy to consume than traditional text boxes, grids, or what have you.  That is closer to the traditional notion of data visualization, but I do not necessarily mean charts and graphs.  Percentages displayed at color coded icons for quick analysis would be but one example.

So if you have dismissed WPF for you LOB app because you don't need "spinning buttons and bouncing balls", there is a lot more to WPF than just that. 

What am I talking about?  Well, the folks over in Microsoft Robotics continue to crank out versions of software for creating some cool robotic stuff.  They announced last week the release of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 CTP April is now available. What is even more interesting is that it appears that enterprise customers are starting to take an interest in Robotics stuff as well.  From the article..

“We’re seeing interested in the enterprise space,” Trower said, “for mail handling, financial trading, scientific modeling” and other business applications.

Businesses have discovered that the Microsoft Robotics Studio includes technology that is suited for programming multicore, distributed systems. Specifically, businesses are quite interested in the concurrency and coordination (CCR) and decentralized software services (DSS) runtimes that are currently embedded in the robotics toolkit, Trower said. These runtimes are part of the evolving multicore/distributed programming model into which Microsoft and other tech vendors starting to plow lots of money and development work.

Trower’s team has improved the distributed computational capabilities of the forthcoming version of the toolkit, he said, by building in support for distributed language integrated queries (LINQ), “which reduces network utilization and simplifies service authoring,” according to Microsoft’s April 9 press release.

“In the Microsoft Robotics Studio, you see the new programming model we are creating at Microsoft,” Trower said.

Very interesting.  I had been operating under the impression that this was kind of a "Lego Mindstorm" on steroids type of thing.  Entirely my fault and grossly inaccurate, but robotics (or hardware for that matter) has never really been my thing and I am not much of a gadget freak either, so I had not paid much attention beyond the headlines.  But after reading the article, it is obvious that some very interesting things are going on that have impact in my world as well.  After having watched Terminator 3 again this weekend (slow weekend for sure! - thanks FX) I see now that there may be a lot of "potential" to this whole robot thing, way beyond vacuum cleaners!  As a result, I'm preparing now for my role as a chrome polisher for my robotic master in the new world order.

Starting today, you can now get "traffic adjusted" driving direction from Live.Com.  This is cool stuff and is available for 72 cities in the US.

The reason I am excited about this is not just the ability to get directions that account for traffic conditions, but the fact that is is a real and tangible result of some of the work that is going on in Microsoft R&D.  I dogged the R&D guys in my last blog post for doing the automatic background music thing and wanting to see something that had some real value.  Well, those boys (and girls) listened and responded.  I never realized I had so much pull! ;-)

This CNET article provides a lot of the details around the project, which is called Clearflow.  A few highlights of the article:

- Clearflow is free

- Uses local traffic congestion information to provide the fastest possible route.  From the article, "The new service will on occasion plan routes that might not be intuitive to a driver. For example, in some cases Clearflow will compute that a trip will be faster if a driver stays on a crowded highway, rather than taking a detour, because side streets are even more backed up by cars that have fled the original traffic jam."

- The project has been in development and started in 2003.  It initially focused on developing algorithms for Seattle only, using data provided by the local traffic system and from Microsoft volunteers that recorded GPS data during their commutes.  As a result, "...they were able to build a model for predicting traffic based on four years of data and 16,500 discrete trips covering over 125,000 miles. The system effectively created individual "personalities" for over 819,000 road segments in the Seattle region."  The researches then adapted those results to be used in other cities.

Some very cool stuff to be sure.  I just ran a test of it and the result was pretty blah since the origin and destination (home to local Microsoft office) didn't hit any areas of congestion, but there was extra detail on the route map showing construction zones, clogged side streets, etc.  I can see how it would be very useful if you were trying to get around during peak traffic times.  The one downside of course is that you have to have access to Live.com to plan your route prior to leaving.  No word yet on if the feature will be incorporated into the Live Search Mobile app I have running on my Blackjack II Windows Mobile Phone.  That would be VERY, VERY useful if I could pull up my Live Search Mobile app while on the road (paying complete attention to the road while doing so, of course) and get a real-time route based on the current traffic conditions.  Fingers crossed that is coming some time soon.

Something that has not gotten a lot of visibility but I was recently asked about is "What is going on with Enterprise Library?".  EntLib is alive and kicking and is rapidly closing in on the release of EntLib 4.0. Some quick highlights for EntLib 4.0 include:

- Support for and integration into Visual Studio 2008

- Fixes to various quirks in the Validation and Policy Injection Application Block

- More extensibility in the Caching Application Block

- Performance improvements for the Logging Application Block

- Implement support for Partial Trust

All good stuff. You can get more details on what is being worked on at the EntLib v4 Product Backlog page.  As part of the EntLib 4 work, Microsoft will also be releasing Unity 1.0.  What is Unity you ask?  I think this snippet from the Unit CodePlex site does a nice job giving a high level summary of Unity:

The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection.

Unity addresses the issues faced by developers engaged in component-based software engineering. Modern business applications consist of custom business objects and components that that perform specific or generic tasks within the application, in addition to components that individually address cross cutting concerns such as logging, authentication, authorization, caching, and exception handling.

The key to successfully building such applications is to achieve a decoupled or very loosely coupled design. Loosely coupled applications are more flexible and easier to maintain. They are also easier to test during development. You can mock up shims (lightweight mock implementations) of objects that have strong concrete dependencies; such as database connections, network connections, ERP connections, and rich user interface components.

Dependency injection is a prime technique for building loosely coupled applications. It provides ways to handle the dependencies between objects. For example, an object that processes customer information may depend on other objects that access the data store, validate the information, and check that the user is authorized to perform updates. Dependency injection techniques can ensure that the customer class correctly instantiates and populates all of these objects, especially where the dependencies may be abstract.

There has been a lot of desire for something like Unity and I hadn't really caught wind that this work was underway, so I am sure others where as much a mushroom as I was/am.  Feel free to check out the Unity CodePlex site for more info.