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Mirrored Weblogs
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Download now Kinect for Windows SDK ! (links for everything listed can be found at the end of this blog post) Kinect SDK Beta Launch Content You can watch this now at http://channel9.msdn.com/live and once the event is complete within about 24 hours, it will move to a permanent home at http://channel9.msdn.com/events where you can download all the sessions and slides. Coding4Fun’s Kinect Project Gallery Coding4Fun Toolkit A handy developer API for things like converting a byte[] array to a bitmap for Windows Forms and WPF or getting the distance of a particular pixel in one line of code. Kinect for Windows SDK VB Samples All of the SDK samples have now been ported over to Visual Basic Express using today’s build (ShapeGame shown below)! Kinect cursor Brian Peek built an awesome Windows cursor that includes click and click/drag support (see me scrolling the KDK Web site with Kinect) Kinect Paint A fun, Metro-esque designed paint with your hands app (Drawing the word “cool” with a “caffeinated” apperance) from Evan...
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Καλώς το κι ας άργησε. Από τη πρώτη στιγμή που έγινε διαθέσιμο το kinect πήραν φωτιά οι πιο προχωρημένοι developers ανάμεσά μας και άρχισαν να ζητούν ένα SDK για να υλοποιήσουν διάφορες ιδέες χρησιμοποιώντας αυτό το πρωτοποριακό...
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Πρόσφατα κυκλοφόρησε o Google Chrome 12 με αρκετές αλλαγές. Μία από αυτές, η οποία μου έκανε πολύ θετική εντύπωση, είναι η δυνατότητα που δίνει ο Browser να κάνει ένας Developer De-Obfuscate ένα Javascript κώδικα. Η δυνατότητα αυτή υπάρχει μέσα στο Scripts Panel (κάνοντας δεξί κλικ στον κώδικα και επιλέγοντας De-obfuscate source) και πραγματικά είναι πολύ καλή καθώς πολλές φορές δεν μπορείς να δεις τι γίνεται σε Javascript αν ο κώδικας έχει γίνει minimized. ...
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Cloud => Azure => The future... Just a week ago I discovered Windows Azure AppFabric Learning Series ! In this learning series you will find short videos that are episodic for easy consumption. These videos are available via Silverlight streaming and available in full-screen and can be easily embedded in blogs, social media outlets, audience marketing campaigns, and upcoming enhancements to AppFabric . Episodes include technical samples, such as database scripts and code, and have all the technical assets available for download on the A ppFabric Codeplex (Public) site . If you are seriously interested in Azure you should not miss it!...
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Ιδού πως προέκυψε με το Excel 2010: 1) αντέγραψα από το εκκαθαριστικό της ηλεκτρονικής δήλωσης 2010, από τον πίνακα που δείχνει στο τέλος την 1η στήλη του PDF στη στήλη A ενός φύλλου Excel 2) αντέγραψα τη 2η στήλη από το PDF στη στήλη C του Excel 3) έκανα δεξί κλίκ στον τίτλο της [...]...
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Now who has to be more clever? Me or the Twitter programmers who apart from not being polite have managed to fail in simple character counting? They have added automatic link shortening if your message exceeds 140 chars, but fail to count the resulting chars correctly and allow you to press the Tweet button which [...]...
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In this blog post, we are going to see how and when Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control(IoC) can be applied for writing nice and maintainable code. Note that although there are plenty of tools out there that give you the ability to apply DI out of the box, in this post we are going to implement such a tool on our own gaining valuable insight on the workings of IoC and DI. Suppose that in your code you have two classes (A,B) like the following: public class A { public A(){} public void Method1(){ } public void Method2() { } } public class B { private A _a; public B() { _a = new A(); _a.Method1(); _a.Method2(); } } That is, we have a class A that has two methods and class B that has a field of type A which is initialized and used in the constructor. Whenever we have such situation we say that “B depends on A” since B needs to create and use A directly. Also, B “has the control” of the creation of A. We will show that dependency graphically with an arrow as follows: If you implement...
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I am very happy to announce the release of eXpandFramwework v11. Our team has already tested the framework in production. However any feedback or discussions the new version are most welcome. Please you our forums for better collaboration. In addition we most welcome Martynas Dauciunas as the newest eXpandframework member. Martys joined our team along with his ImportWizard module. The module can map and import Excel files! You can read more about it and see the demo video in our blog As always eXpandFramework is available for download here...
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Η Microsoft Ελλάς σε μία προσπάθεια να ευχαριστήσει τους συνεργάτες της που “ανέβασαν” τις εφαρμογές τους στο Windows Azure, ανήρτησε ένα ολοσέλιδο αφιέρωμα στην Καθημερινή της Κυριακής της προηγούμενη Κυριακή 29/5. Σε αυτό, εκτός από την ευχαριστία από πλευράς Microsoft, υπήρχαν τα λογότυπα των συνεργατών και δύο κουβέντες για τις εφαρμογές τους. Αυτοί αποτέλεσαν την πρώτη ομάδα συνεργατών που υιοθέτησε το Windows Azure πολύ νωρίτερα από την υπόλοιπη αγορά και φυσικά άλλοι έχουν τρελή επιτυχία και έχουν φτάσει να υπογράψουν και EA Agreement με τη Microsoft για μεγαλύτερες εκπτώσεις λόγω εξαιρετικών πωλήσεων, ενώ άλλοι βαδίζουν πιο αργά, προσπαθώντας να συνηθίσουν σιγά-σιγά τα νέα δεδομένα. Ας σημειωθεί ότι υπάρχουν και άλλοι που δεν δέχτηκαν να προβληθούν μέσω του αφιερώματος, είτε γιατί δεν ήταν έτοιμοι ακόμα για μία τέτοια ευρεία ανακοίνωση, είτε γιατί είναι πολιτική τους να μην προβάλλουν τα πληροφοριακά συστήματά τους προς τα έξω. Παρόλα αυτά μπορεί να πάρει κανείς μία ιδέα για την σαφή τάση της αγοράς προς...
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One of the projects we had the chance of working with a while back, but hadn’t gone live due to licensing and policy reasons, finally made it and is now publicly available at www.meteo.gr/bingmaps/ . We had a lot of fun in this project as there were a few challenges we had to overcome, let me give you the insights on one of them to get an idea and possibly help your future Bing maps projects . The biggest challenge we faced was how we were going to draw Contours over the map. To that end we read the very useful Practical C# Charts and Graphics book and found out all about Triangulation a technology widely used in Topography. Using Triangulation we’ve eventually developed a solution, only to find that it didn’t work as expected. The algorithm was correct, but when dealing with millions of points to draw shapes (vector graphics) over Bing maps performance degraded rapidly and this was unacceptable. So next we thought that instead of drawing shapes over the map, it would be faster if we could just place another tile...
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Και εκεί που περιμέναμε να ακούσουμε για ένα νέο PDC (Professional Developers Conference) από τη Microsoft, να που προέκυψε καινούργια εκδήλωση ονόματι BUILD. Η διαφορά με το PDC, που απευθύνεται σε επαγγελματίες προγραμματιστές, είναι ότι το BUILD απευθύνεται...
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As our company motto clearly suggests we are addicted with technology, whenever a new technology is introduced we’re the first to check it out and use it in our software. So when Microsoft announced its Cloud Computing platform , we almost immediately started exploring it. It didn’t take us long to see the huge business opportunity, so we’ve decided that we’re also all in . We’ve started working on making all our software Cloud Enabled. We’ve worked hard, hit a few walls, had fun, learned a lot, managed to earn the MVP (Most valuable professional) award from Microsoft on Windows Azure and were able to produce ContentCommander . ContentCommander is an enterprise level Content Management and E-Commerce platform that is the first in Greece (and among the few rest in Europe) that fully supports Microsoft Windows Azure . It’s designed using the ten year accumulated experience of working with similar systems discovering their strengths and weaknesses and built with a clear focus and target on cutting edge Microsoft...
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Just came across one more case of trying to over-protect users and in the way losing functionality (maybe originally unforeseen functionality, but which is nevertheless useful to many end-users). At Windows 7, Microsoft doesn’t allow you anymore to press F2 or click on a filename to enter edit more for it when the file resides [...]...
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Έχει αρχίσει ήδη η αντίστροφη μέτρηση για την πολυαναμενόμενη νέα έκδοση των Windows Phone με το κωδικό όνομα «Mango». Βλέποντας διάφορα video και διαβάζοντας τις νέες δυνατότητες μπορώ να πω ότι έχω εντυπωσιαστεί και περιμένω πως και...
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Yesterday I had the chance to talk about the Microsoft Windows Azure platform for a Microsoft hosted developers’ event called devdays. I met and had a chance to chat with a lot of new faces which was very inspiring, as this means that more people become interested about cloud computing and Microsoft’s offering in this area, as time passes. What is more interesting is that many of them did not come from a Microsoft Computing background. For those of you that couldn’t make it yesterday, I’m posting my slide deck and demos Soon you’ll also be able to watch the recorded session from www.techdays.gr...
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This is going to be my first post on Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) and Ajax controls. Ajax is my favourite technology and I use it a lot when I build ASP.Net applications. This is going to be a beginner's level post on Ajax in ASP.Net applications...( read more )...
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Trouble appears when it's least expected. Continuing from part 1 let’s go into the things that not only will require more coding effort but will also change the whole design of your app. And if you are managing a team then it’s two times more difficult because you have to stand all their whimpering. Let the party begin: No default button! Long gone the simple WPF property on the Button class that was making it the default one for the page/form. What is even stranger though is that even in the web, typing in a textbox and then pressing Enter is the DEFAULT BEHAVIOUR! I mean why on earth someone wouldn’t provide this functionality on a web framework! No double click! Let’s say you have a grid for your search results. No you have to click (select) a row on the grid and then move the pointer to another button which will actually get your selection and do something with it! No more double click on a row and get things done. Focus on a control! So let’s say you move into a new screen and you want to focus on a textbox....
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Never believe it is as easy as they say... I used to have a colleague in the team I manage that was sure that moving back and forth from WPF to Silverlight was easy!!! I will dedicate these series to him as reality proves us most of the times wrong. (Research is the only path to knowledge). So I am the architect of a quite big project and it was originally coded in WPF. But since we wanted to move to a unified architecture where both our users and the clients will have the same user-experience, we decided to move on to Silverlight. There are tons of things that are different and some of them are addressed to Silverlight 5 but still, there is quite a distance. First things first… When you just copy over the code you will see you xaml getting full of red lines. The exactly same controls are not on the same namespace!!! (WTF?). So let’s say you have a label, well your xaml tag is no more < Label > but instead it should be < sdk : Label > . Then I moved on to test my colors and text fonts. Again we had...
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Are you anxiously waiting this years Champions League final game between Barcha and MU? Well this doesn’t even come close to the ultimate football game of the year . Can’t wait to see Messi, Iniesta, Xavi, Rouney, Giggs and Nani? Why bother, when you’ll get the once in a lifetime chance to see stars like djsolid , hyper-vangelis , spantos , ipplos , gvarakis , dstellakis , grandpa and others on the field. Don’t miss it!!!...
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How do you handle exceptions in your live web app? Windows Event Logs? Log files on the web server? Log tables on a relational database? Are you using an exception handling framework? Of course not….. why bother when you can let your users know what the exception was and how they can exploit it to bring your system down?!!!!!...
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Just got the following e-mail offer from Amazon.com regarding the cool Parrot AR.Drone quad(ri)copter. Note the part “You Save: $0.04”. That’s what you get when you have automated pricing (hint: follow this link for an even more #LOL example). Tagged: Amazon, AR.Drone, Fail, Funny, Parrot, Pricing...
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I had the chance to speak at a Microsoft event this month (on April 6th) about the new mobile phone development platform unfortunately and due to my blog maintenance I wasn’t able to blog about it. Now that everything is back in order though, I can let you know about it and share some of the event’s content with you. The event had three sessions and a demo fest where developers presented their applications. On the first session Dimitris Gkanatsios gave an intro to the platform and spoke about the Pivot control, sensors (GPS, Accelerometer, Vibration), HTML parsing, WCF, Media Library, Navigation, Launchers and choosers, Isolated Storage and briefly talked about the market place and how can someone upload an application. On the second one I got to speak on more advanced topics like Data Binding, Panorama Pages, RSS, Video, Notifications, Application Bars, Application Lifecycle, and the Web Browser control. You can find my slide deck here. The third session was about XNA and how someone can use it to build killer...
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Microsoft Hellas is holding a very interesting event in two weeks, on Thursday 12th of May, regarding application testing....
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Microsoft announced today that the Caching service has been released as a production service . The Caching service is a distributed, in-memory, application cache service that accelerates the performance of Windows Azure and SQL Azure applications by allowing you to keep data in-memory and saving you the need to retrieve that data from storage or database. There are going to be 6 different cache size options for you to choose from, varying from 128MB to 4GB. The prices of the different cache sizes are the following: · 128 MB cache for $45.00/month · 256 MB cache for $55.00/month · 512 MB cache for $75.00/month · 1 GB cache for $110.00month · 2 GB cache for $180.00/month · 4 GB cache for $325.00/month In order for you to be able to start using the service and evaluate your needs though, there is a promotional period in which you will not be charged for the service for billing periods prior to August 1, 2011. The service is billed on a monthly basis, based on the cache size you sign up for. You can also sign up for...
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Microsoft Hellas is holding a very interesting event in two weeks, on Thursday 12th of May, regarding application testing. If you are interested to learn how to load test your application, how to use lab management using Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server then harry up and register ....
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