The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a programming toolkit for application developers. It enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

THE SDK includes the following features:

• Raw sensor streams

  Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.

• Skeletal tracking

  The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.

• Advanced audio capabilities

  Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.

• Sample code and documentation

  The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.

• Easy installation

  The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit (widely available at retail outlets).

This SDK is designed for non-commercial purposes only; a commercial version is expected to be available at a later date.

Two Locations – Houston & Dallas

• Dallas:   Tuesday, May 24, 2011  1:30 – 4:30 PM
  Microsoft Dallas Office -  7000 SR-161 (George Bush Turnpike), Irving, TX 75039
• Houston: Thursday, May 26, 2011  1:30 – 4:30 PM
  Microsoft Houston Office – 2000 W Sam Houston Parkway S, Houston, TX 77042

Brought to you by Microsoft, CODE Training & EPS Software, this free afternoon event presents an unbiased look at the current and future development with .NET. Join Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Markus Egger, for an afternoon of free and independent information about current Microsoft development technologies! What is the state of .NET today? Which of the many .NET technologies have gained traction? Which ones can you ignore for now? What other Microsoft technologies should you include in your development efforts? This event is completely free of charge and is designed for developers as well as IT decision makers. Specific prior knowledge is not required. Attendees of this event will come away with a clear understanding of which technologies to use for various technical challenges.

Topics will include:

• Cloud (Azure & others)
• The State of Services
• IE9
• HTML 5
• Windows Phone 7 and other devices
• ASP.NET MVC, Razor and jQuery
• Visual Studio Async
• Productivity Power Tools
• Various .NET Framework Topics
• Visual Studio LightSwitch
• and more!

Dallas Signup Link- Tuesday, May 24, 2011  1:30 – 4:30
Houston Signup Link- Thursday, May 26, 2011  1:30 – 4:30

Mark your calendars – it's time for the annual Tulsa School of Dev community conference!

May 27, 2011 at 700 N Greenwood Ave in Tulsa, OK

6 Tracks!

36 sessions!

Amazing speakers!

Tons of Prizes!

All it takes to get in is a donation of 2 cans of food for the Oklahoma Food bank – surely you have some extra canned goods lying around that you can bring with you?  You';ll get some great training on the latest mobile, .NET, SQL Server, SharePoint and Java technologies and help your fellow man along the way.

I will be there, speaking on Blend and WPF as well as discussing the latest in Windows Phone 7 (you've heard of Mango by now, haven't you?)

Come join us for a great time by registering today at http://tulsasod2011.eventbrite.com

Microsoft is back in the US for another Springboard Series Tour!

www.springboardseriestour.com

May 2 – Toronto | May 4 – Detroit | May 6 – Chicago | May 9 – Indianapolis | May 11 – Dallas | May 13 – Columbus

The Springboard Series Tour is back! This 6 city tour brings the top product teams from Microsoft to you. We understand the questions and issues that IT pros deal with every day. How do I manage end users bringing consumer devices into the office? Should we look to the cloud for key solutions? Should I virtualize? What are the best tools to manage application compatibility and deployment? The Springboard Series Tour brings the experts and the answers.

Join us for a full day’s deep dive into the tools, solutions and options to help you do more with less. We will cover managing the flexible workspace, a first look at Windows Intune and Office 365. We’ll also show you some of the new Windows Slates and give you details around Microsoft’s strategy for Slate devices. We will preview the new tools in the MDOP 2011 suite, a deep dive into managing and deploying Office 2010 and great tips and tricks to help you deploy Windows 7 and move your users from Windows XP with speed and ease.

REGISTER NOW and save your seat for this free day of technical demos, Q&A sessions, and real-world guidance from Microsoft experts. We’ll see you on the road!

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform, and a lot of developers are excited to try it out. To help you try it out, we have started a program called “Windows Azure Pass.” You can register a Live ID for a Pass and receive 30 days of free cloud computing. Just enough time to dip your toes in the cloud and see how easy it really is. NO credit card required. Do this before your boss comes over and expects you to have answers about ‘this cloud thing.’

Just go to www.WindowsAzurePass.com, and enter the promo code DPCE01. Your Pass will be activated within a few days, and you can start deploying code all day long.

Once you get a pass you can attend a two day boot camp to learn more about Windows Azure, try some hands on labs on your own time, or join us online during office hours to get all of your questions answered.

What exactly do you get for free?

The Windows Azure platform 30 day pass includes the following resources :

Windows Azure

• 3 Small Compute Instances
• 3 GB of Storage
• 250,000 Storage Transactions

SQL Azure

• Two 1 GB Web Edition Database

AppFabric

• 100,000 Access Control Transactions
• 2 Bus Service Connections

Data Transfers

• 3 GB In
• 3 GB Out

+

+

=

What do WPF, Silverlight 4, and Internet Explorer 9 have in common? No, that’s not a riddle. Really, it’s not a riddle. They are all FTW. What I mean by that is they all offer developers unique ways to exploit the power of Windows 7, such as integrating with the taskbar, leveraging jump lists, or offering the ability to exploit multi-touch or hardware sensors.

FTW?
And why am I even talking about this? Well closely following on the heels of our Windows Azure Boot Camp announcement, we are gearing up another boot camp series: For the Win: Window 7 Development Boot Camp. This new series of events will include evangelist-led presentations by none other than the purely awesome Jennifer Marsman as well as hands-on labs to help you really dig into developing client-centric applications using WPF and XAML, Silverlight, and Internet Explorer 9 (yes, client-centric integrations from your web site with just a touch of HTML5).

What’s Covered?
Jennifer will cover application compatibility and transitioning your application to Windows 7, leveraging the Windows taskbar and jump lists, exploiting the taskbar and jump lists from your web site using IE9, taking advantage of new sensor, location and multi-touch functionality, and creating Silverlight 4 out of browser applications. Each boot camp will last a full day, starting off right at 8am local time, include lunch, several sessions and a couple of hands-on labs to help you really get a feel for how to take advantage of Windows 7 capabilities in your applications.

So, yes, this is a BYOL (bring your own laptop) event. Windows 7 is required, as is several other pieces of software: Visual Studio 2008 or 2010, Windows API Code Pack, Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers, IE9, and Silverlight 4.

What Cities?

• Waukesha, WI on 1/17/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Downers Grove, IL on 1/18/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Indianapolis, IN on 1/19/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Independence, OH on 1/24/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Columbus, OH on 1/25/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Mason, OK on 1/27/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Franklin, TN on 2/3/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Southfield, MI on 2/7/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Bloomington, MN on 2/14/2011 at 8:00 AM
• St. Louis, MO on 2/15/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Overland Park, KS on 2/16/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Des Moines, IA on 2/17/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Houston, TX on 2/21/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Irving, TX on 2/22/2011 at 8:00 AM
• Austin, TX on 2/24/2011 at 8:00 AM

Nice job IE9 team! The animation was pretty smooth, but stuttered a bit at 26 and 69.  This is still WAY better than the scores were for IE8…

I also ran the SunScript JavaScript benchmark and compared it to a similar run on Google Chrome 6.0.472.59:

TEST                   COMPARISON            FROM (IE9)           TO (Chrome)     DETAILS

=============================================================================

** TOTAL **:           1.15x as fast     934.4ms +/- 5.6%   815.4ms +/- 7.7%     significant

=============================================================================

  3d:                  -                 157.6ms +/- 26.0%   119.4ms +/- 9.0%
    cube:              ??                 40.4ms +/- 10.3%    41.8ms +/- 11.0%     not conclusive: might be *1.03x as slow*
    morph:             1.43x as fast      58.6ms +/- 12.5%    41.0ms +/- 18.6%     significant
    raytrace:          -                  58.6ms +/- 65.8%    36.6ms +/- 7.8% 

  access:              -                 101.8ms +/- 15.6%    86.0ms +/- 12.6%
    binary-trees:      3.27x as fast      19.6ms +/- 65.4%     6.0ms +/- 65.5%     significant
    fannkuch:          *1.36x as slow*    29.4ms +/- 7.1%    40.0ms +/- 31.3%     significant
    nbody:             1.57x as fast      44.8ms +/- 5.3%    28.6ms +/- 5.0%     significant
    nsieve:            *1.43x as slow*     8.0ms +/- 11.0%    11.4ms +/- 31.4%     significant

  bitops:              *1.43x as slow*    51.8ms +/- 3.6%    74.0ms +/- 21.9%     significant
    3bit-bits-in-byte: ??                  4.6ms +/- 24.2%     5.8ms +/- 35.2%     not conclusive: might be *1.26x as slow*
    bits-in-byte:      *1.58x as slow*    12.8ms +/- 4.3%    20.2ms +/- 34.1%     significant
    bitwise-and:       *2.09x as slow*     9.4ms +/- 7.2%    19.6ms +/- 8.5%     significant
    nsieve-bits:       *1.14x as slow*    25.0ms +/- 3.5%    28.4ms +/- 33.3%     significant

  controlflow:         *1.58x as slow*     6.6ms +/- 16.8%    10.4ms +/- 131.4%     significant
    recursive:         *1.58x as slow*     6.6ms +/- 16.8%    10.4ms +/- 131.4%     significant

  crypto:              ??                 53.0ms +/- 8.6%    57.4ms +/- 20.7%     not conclusive: might be *1.08x as slow*
    aes:               *1.23x as slow*    20.2ms +/- 8.0%    24.8ms +/- 52.1%     significant
    md5:               -                  16.6ms +/- 15.5%    15.6ms +/- 16.5%
    sha1:              ??                 16.2ms +/- 3.4%    17.0ms +/- 30.6%     not conclusive: might be *1.05x as slow*

  date:                1.30x as fast     116.6ms +/- 8.3%    89.8ms +/- 13.8%     significant
    format-tofte:      1.34x as fast      58.2ms +/- 12.9%    43.4ms +/- 32.6%     significant
    format-xparb:      1.26x as fast      58.4ms +/- 13.8%    46.4ms +/- 11.8%     significant

  math:                *1.23x as slow*    78.2ms +/- 5.3%    96.4ms +/- 19.9%     significant
    cordic:            *12.7x as slow*     3.0ms +/- 0.0%    38.2ms +/- 50.5%     significant
    partial-sums:      1.16x as fast      50.2ms +/- 8.1%    43.2ms +/- 19.9%     significant
    spectral-norm:     1.67x as fast      25.0ms +/- 6.1%    15.0ms +/- 41.4%     significant

  regexp:              2.18x as fast      68.6ms +/- 32.0%    31.4ms +/- 11.4%     significant
    dna:               2.18x as fast      68.6ms +/- 32.0%    31.4ms +/- 11.4%     significant

  string:              1.20x as fast     300.2ms +/- 4.2%   250.6ms +/- 9.0%     significant
    base64:            ??                 23.8ms +/- 42.3%    27.6ms +/- 17.0%     not conclusive: might be *1.16x as slow*
    fasta:             1.41x as fast      53.4ms +/- 5.1%    37.8ms +/- 28.4%     significant
    tagcloud:          -                  83.0ms +/- 20.1%    76.8ms +/- 40.5%
    unpack-code:       1.24x as fast      89.2ms +/- 4.9%    71.8ms +/- 5.4%     significant
    validate-input:    1.39x as fast      50.8ms +/- 10.0%    36.6ms +/- 9.2%     significant

Overall, the JavaScript engine in the IE9 Beta was still slower than Chrome, but not by as much as I expected.  Chrome was only 1.15x faster than IE9 Beta, and in some cases was slower than IE by as much as 2x-3x! It looks like the test will tag any result over 1.1x as “significant” from a comparison perspective, but 1.15x doesn’t feel “significant” – more like “slightly”, but I guess I’m a little biased…

Now that IE supports HTML 5, I guess it’s time for me to finally get around to learning more about it.  I’m sort of pre-occupied with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 (have you noticed) but I had to do this special shout-out to the IE team for a job well done!

Saturday, October 23, 2010 – http://nwacodecamp.org

In the fine tradition of other great CodeCamp events across the world, the Northwest Arkansas developer community has announced their next CodeCamp, scheduled for October 23rd at the Tyson World Headquarters in Springdale, AR.  The event is free to attend, and there are several great tracks being planned including software development, project management, IT professional and more!

CALL FOR SPEAKERS IS NOW OPEN!

If you are passionate about a topic you feel the Northwest Arkansas technical community would be interested in, please submit it at http://nwacodecamp.org. The cutoff for speaker registration is October 1, 2010 or when all sessions are filled. Speakers interested in presenting must register on the site and fill out the information for your presentation. We will have many certified professionals presenting at this event, but we are especially looking for local talent.

Topic ideas:

1) .NET 4 and related technologies (themed)
2) Current .NET development topics
3) Non .NET technologies (yes, these are accepted!)
4) UI Design and business related topics

Code camps are volunteer driven events that are free for attendees. As such, speakers are expected to provide for their own travel arrangements. If you are affiliated with an organization that would like to sponsor Northwest Arkansas Code Camp 2010, please contact jay@jaysmith.us.

I’ve submitted 2 sessions – hope to see you there!

This is a little bit off the normal stuff I post (or at least the stuff I’ve been posting) but I wanted to share this great trick with all of you currently using Windows 7 – utilizing multiple default printers.

I use a laptop that moves between several different networks – my home network, our offices in Las Colinas, Redmond, Austin, and Houston, as well as my parent’s house and the local School where my kids attend. In each of those networks, there is at least one, usually several different printers. Before Windows 7, printing a document this way was always a 2-step process – I’d either have to manually select a specific printer when it came time to print something, or go into the printer settings and choose a new Default Printer before pressing the “Print” button. This was a real pain, and I often forgot to reset the printer when I moved on to the next place, causing the printing to not work as expected.

Along comes Windows 7 and this Multiple Default Printers feature – it’s really, really easy to set up:

Open the Printers list from Control Panel (or from the Search bar), select one of your printers, and click on the Manage Default Printers button in the toolbar at the top:
Select the “Change my default printer when I change networks” option, and associate your network to a printer using the dropdown lists provided.  Don’t forget to choose “Add” or “Update” as the case may be to apply your changes.  You can always go back and change them later if you want to.

And that’s it!  Easy, right?  If you get stuck, here’s a video I found that walks you step-by-step through the process:

Hey – if you’re not using Windows 7 – what are you waiting for?  Go out and get it TODAY!

NOTE: Since the first article was released, the WP7 tools have been updated with an April Refresh. The original post has been updated to reflect the proper download to get the April CTP-friendly code and we will use that as a starting point for this post.

OK – I have a confession to make. Actually, it’s more of something I have to admit – I made a mistake. In picking NerdDinner as the foundation for this blog series, I figured that having all kinds of screwball data in it would be perfectly OK since it wasn’t a “real” application, and I didn’t want to worry about working with actual live sites. That turned out to be a mistake. Although the NerdDinner site is a great idea, and a great learning tool for ASP.NET MVC developers, the data is *really* bad, and not something I want to continue working with for this series. SO… I’ve re-written the application from NerdDinner to use Community Megaphone, an event management and listing site maintained by my friend and collegue G. Andrew Duthie (a.k.a. DevHammer). I’ve also simplified things a bit and removed the repository pattern (at least for now) in favor of a more traditional approach, that we can look later at refactoring when we introduce an IoC container and begin to do DI, etc. So, for now, let’s just pretend that we’ve been working with CM all along, shall we?

Out of the box, the Windows Phone 7 tools give you a pretty good starting place for your application. The List template is based on the MVVM pattern, includes some sample code to help you better visualize your solution, and two pages to get you started: main page (list of items) and details page (details for an item). In this post we�ll explore the page navigation options available to the WP7 developer, starting with the OOB experience.

The sample application uses an, um� interesting approach to navigating from one page to another. The idea is simple: choose an item from the main list, show a cool page transition animation, then navigate to the new page with the details showing up. The way they accomplish this is to trap the left mouse button up event, store off the currently selected item, and start a page transition (i.e. storyboard). When the animation is complete, the main page uses the built-in Navigation framework to navigate the application to the new page. For that details page to get its data context, the main page (remember that he�s still in control until the current method exits) grabs hold of the root visual in the details page and sets that�s page�s DataContext attribute to the saved off currently selected item in the list.

hmmm.

I don�t know about you, but this somehow just plain bothers me. I realize that there are always several ways to skin a cat, but this one seems particularly icky to me. I don�t think it�s the job of the main page to force a data context on a details page. The details page should be told which object to use as its reference, or a key to that object perhaps, and then allowed to render itself.

To accomplish this in WP7 there are a couple of options:

1. Continue to attach to the details page after navigating to it and send it the data on which it should operate � just do it in a slightly less icky way
2. Send a parameter to the details page so that when it opens, it knows which object to get from the database, then it makes that stuff happen.
3. Store the selected item into Isolated Storage (or some other caching mechanism), navigate to the new page, and then retrieve it again.

Navigation in WP7 is based on a similar framework to what you�re used to with ASP.NET. It uses a simple URI-based scheme for indicating which page in your application to load and navigate to.

Uri theUri = new Uri(�/DetailsPage.xaml�, UriKind.Relative);
NavigationContext.Navigate(theUri);

In this example, the NavigationContext loads the DetailsPage.xaml and navigates the application there using an unadorned, relative URI. Note: absolute URIs are not supported – you can’t use this mechanism to cause the built-in web browser to open a web page. There is a different technique for that which we’ll look at later. One thing you get for free with the Navigation framework is the ability to respond smartly to the Back button on the phone. After navigating to a new page, if the user presses the Back button on the phone, the application will go back to the last item in the Navigation stack. Pretty smart, eh?

OK – enough bakground, let’s go build something. In the MVVM world, the ViewModel takes the responsibility for loading itself on behalf of it’s View. In our case, we�re going to need a ViewModel that will do this for a given Event based on it’s associated Event ID. We�ll start by changing the call to the Details page to accept an Event ID as a parameter in the Navigation Context

private void PageTransitionList_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // Set datacontext of details page to selected listbox item
    //NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/DetailsPage.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
    //FrameworkElement root = Application.Current.RootVisual as FrameworkElement;
    //root.DataContext = _selectedItem;

    Uri theUri = new Uri("/DetailsPage.xaml?eventId=" + _selectedItem.id, UriKind.Relative);
    NavigationService.Navigate(theUri);

}

The QueryString, you say? Yes, the QueryString. Once inside the Details page, we can then use the NavigationContext again to retrieve the associated eventId and load the ViewModel with the right data:

void DetailsPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    int eventId = 0;

    //TODO: put some better error handling in here
    Int32.TryParse(NavigationContext.QueryString["eventId"], out eventId);

    // Set the data context of the listbox control to the sample data
    vm.View = this;
    DataContext = vm;
    vm.LoadFromId(eventId);
}

The view model can then use our same tricks from before to load the specific Event:

public void LoadFromId(int eventId)
{
    var catalog = CMEventsEntities.Instance;

    //var query = from e in catalog.ApprovedEvents
    //            where e.id == eventId
    //            select e;
    //DataServiceQuery dsq = query as DataServiceQuery;

    DataServiceQuery dsq = catalog.ApprovedEvents
        .AddQueryOption("$filter", "id eq " + eventId);

    dsq.BeginExecute(new AsyncCallback(a =>
    {
        var result = dsq.EndExecute(a).FirstOrDefault();

        View.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
        {
            Item = result;
            NotifyPropertyChanged("Item");
            NotifyPropertyChanged("PageTitle");
        });

    }), null);
}

Note that this time, I was unable to get the typical LINQ query to retrieve the data I wanted, so I reverted to the AddQueryOption method of the DataServiceQuery to get what I needed from the OData service. I think this might be due to a bug in the pre-release version of the OData provider I’m using, becuase I can’t see any reason why the straight-up LINQ syntax shouldn’t work. Anyway, the pattern is the same as before: create a DataServiceQuery based on the data you want to retrieve, call BeginExecute, when the results come back they get processed on the UI thread in order to update the UI (note to self: I should probably create a code snippet for this so I don’t have to keep typing it all the time…) I’m also directly raising the NotifyPropertyChanged event for both the Item (our target Event) and the PageTitle property (which is based on the selected Item). That way, our UI will stay in sync with the data we’re maintaining in the ViewModel.

After this, and a little bit of Data Binding magic, our UI is populated and we have our details page!

One thing left to do related to Navigation – that pesky URL. As I mentioned before, you can’t use the built-in Navigation Framework to open a Web Browser to a given URL. You can try it if you want to – I’ll wait here… Didn’t work did it? Here’s what you can do:

• Web Browser Control: Create a separate page that hosts a web browser control, and navigate there using the target URL as a QueryString property. When the web browser page loads, you can navigate the web browser control bring up the page you want. This is an OK option, but depends on what you’re really trying to accomplish/
• WebBrowserTask: Using the WP7 Task infrastructure (I know, we haven’t covered that yet), you can launch the phone’s default web browser on a given URL. This is the method I’ll choose for this application, and I’ll show the code that makes it work.

We’ll be covering the Tasks infrastructure in more detail as part of a later post, but for now, just go with me…

There are many Task objects in the Windows.Phone.Tasks namespace – they are all designed to do a specific type of thing: launch some process to either display information, or capture information. The one we care about here, is the WebBrowserTask object. It’s whole purpose in life is to launch the phone’s built-in web browser to a specific URL. That being said, it couldn’t be easier to use. For our application, we’re displaying the event URL in a HyperlinkButton and capturing the Click event:

Once this event fires, we create an instance of the WebBrowserTask object, set it’s URL and call the Show() method to get the job done.

private void HyperlinkButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    WebBrowserTask task = new WebBrowserTask();
    task.URL = vm.Item.eventUrl;
    task.Show();
}

Clicking on the link launches the web browser and we can see the event in all of its default glory. Pressing the Back button takes us back to the details page, and back again will take us back to the home page.

That’s it for this post. In future posts, I’m planning to add an application bar that will allow us to modify our query parameters controlling what events we show in the main list, and hopefully integrate the Bing Map engine to show more information about the selected event.