What's up with this blog? - Still blogging?

You might be wondering why there's not much going on here on this blog since a while and if I stopped blogging. Well no, I still keep on blogging but focus my efforts more on the Valorem Reply company blog with similar contents.

 Please go here for my latest blog post.

Microsoft Regional Director

Today, I got an exciting email from Microsoft inviting me into the Microsoft Regional Director program. Needless to say I accepted the invitation. It's a huge honor to join this small group of outstanding experts. 

I would like to thank Microsoft, the community and especially all that nominated me for RD. 

It was almost exactly 8 years ago when I got the first MVP award and my blog post started with the same words (I only fixed the bug with exiting/exciting :-). Back then I got the Silverlight MVP Award and I moved over to the Windows Phone Development MVPs shortly after doing so much Windows Phone dev. The Win Phone Dev MVPs joined forces with the Client App Dev and Emerging Experiences MVPs a while ago and formed the Windows Development MVP category. 

Now, I'm honored to be a Microsoft Windows Development MVP and also a Regional Director. 

If you don't know what a Regional Director is, RD website describes the role pretty well:

The Regional Director Program provides Microsoft leaders with the customer insights and real-world voices it needs to continue empowering developers and IT professionals with the world's most innovative and impactful tools, services, and solutions.

Established in 1993, the program consists of 150 of the world's top technology visionaries chosen specifically for their proven cross-platform expertise, community leadership, and commitment to business results. You will typically find Regional Directors keynoting at top industry events, leading community groups and local initiatives, running technology-focused companies, or consulting on and implementing the latest breakthrough within a multinational corporation. 

There's also a nice FAQ with more information.

100 done...off to the next 100!

Oh wow, this is my 100th blog post here. Great things happened since I started this blog 6 years ago.
Most importantly were we blessed with our third and fourth daughters. I also got the Microsoft MVP award a few times, first as Silverlight, then Windows Phone Dev, now Windows Platform Dev and became a Nokia Developer Champion. I also joined IdentityMine almost 3 years ago. I judged the Imagine Cup 2011 and German App Campus, spoke at a few conferences like //build 2014, 2015 and wrote a couple articles for different magazines. I also published many releases of my apps and open source projects. And of course posted 100 blog posts with hopefully useful content.

Busy times but good times. I hope this goes on for a while.
Thanks for being part of it!

Goodbye 2010 - Hello 2011

This was an amazing year! Many great things happened and a lot of stuff was released by me. The most important release this year was a personal one. Our third daughter was born in September. Healthy and just plain awesome. She is developing very good and as amazing as her older sisters (photo).
This blog post is just a recap of all the things that happened and I've done in 2010 and some that might happen in 2011.




Community
The whole Silverlight and Windows Phone community is great and it's endless fun to be a part of it. I met a lot of great people online and offline. It's a pleasure to discuss and develop good things in this environment. Thanks a ton!
And don't forget, Silverlight is not dead! Silverlight 5 will be released in 2011 and it will come with a huge bag of new features.
Stay in the 'Light! - like my Silverlight MVP friend Dave Campbell would say.

MVP Award
In April 2010 I was awarded as Silverlight MVP. It is a real honor to be a Silverlight MVP. All the Silverlight MVPs I know are truly outstanding and I can hardly believe I'm considered to be one of them.

Blogging
Yep, I did some blogging this year. Most of it covered Silverlight development and lately also Windows Phone topics. I always try to provide unique content that hasn't been covered anywhere else. I hope you like it and find it useful. Your feedback is always welcome!

Open Source Projects

The one big think this year was the release of the Silverlight Augmented Reality Framework: SLARToolkit. SLARToolkit is a flexible Augmented Reality library for Silverlight with the aim to make real time Augmented Reality applications with Silverlight as easy and fast as possible. It can be used with Silverlight's Webcam API or with any other CaptureSource or a WriteableBitmap. It's open source and hosted at CodePlex.
The development of the library itself took a lot of time, but also the samples (1, 2), the documentation, the support at the forum and via email. It's good to see that some projects use SLARToolkit and the downloads aren't that bad. I'm especially pleased to see that most of the projects are from the academic field. Some projects are listed on the CodePlex site.
I have a lot of things on my idea / todo list I want to add. I hope I'll find a bit time during the next year to implement these.

One part of the SLARToolkit library was extracted and released as separate project. The Matrix3DEx library is a collection of extension and factory methods for Silverlight's Matrix3D struct. The Matrix3DEx library tries to compensate the minimalistic Matrix3D struct with extension and factory methods for common transformation matrices that are easy to use like built in methods. The CodePlex site has all the details and samples.

The WriteableBitmapEx library is another open source project. I actually released it in 2009, but I added a lot of new features during this year and the library got quite well adopted in the community. One reason might be the availability of a Windows Phone version.
The WriteableBitmapEx library is a collection of extension methods for Silverlight's WriteableBitmap. The WriteableBitmap class that was added in Silverlight 3 and which is also available on Windows Phone, allows the direct manipulation of a bitmap and could be used to generate fast procedural images by drawing directly to a bitmap. The WriteableBitmapEx library tries to compensate the minimalistic WriteableBitmap class with extensions methods that are easy to use like built in methods and offer GDI+ like functionality.
There are many different samples available at the CodePlex repository and I also spent a good amount of time with the support at the forum and via email.
The library is still not feature complete for version 1.0 and I will definitely continue my work on it.

Windows Phone Apps
Like many other Silverlight developers I got very exited when Silverlight was announced as the development  platform for Windows Phone 7 apps. I started some experiments right away when the first CTP was available at MIX 2010. I also provided the WriteableBitmapEx Windows Phone version a couple of days later.

Every Windows Phone 7 device is required to have at least a 5 megapixel camera with a flashlight. There are also other features which make Windows Phones amazing devices for taking pictures and dealing with pictures. I've been working heavily during the last months to enhance this photo experience with my kind of skills. My Pictures Lab app was the first picture effects application for Windows Phone with unique, high quality effects. If you like to take photos then this app is a perfect addition to your phone’s toolset. Or like msnbc.com wrote: "The app, a Swiss Army knife of photo tweaks". It's the original and the best selling photo app already since the Windows Phone launch. Pictures Lab comes with more than 20 controllable and easy-to-use advanced effects, a dynamic effect preview, crop, rotate and many more features. I just recently added a Twitter sharing function and the Happy New Year effect / frame (see photo above).
The app got very good reviews from various webites, blogs and offline magazines. The well-known site Engadget lists it under The best apps, accessories, and tips. They write: "... a must-have for WP7 devices ... the program provides a set of amazing effects and tweaks for your photos ...".
I will constantly update the app and add more features and effects in 2011.

I also developed a little fun app called Helium Voice. You can record your voice with the app and change the pitch while sliding over a balloon graphic (inhale or exhale helium).




I have a very long list with future app ideas and it's constantly growing. On some days I have the feeling my head explodes with new ideas.
I hope to find some time next year to push some more apps out. Silverlight is fortunately one of the most productive platforms out there.

Articles
I also wrote some articles for Microsoft's Coding4Fun site and a magazine.

It started with the FaceLight article about a simple facial recognition system using Silverlight 4’s webcam. The code for this article ended up on CodePlex, where you can also find a live sample.

The second article explained how to write pixel shaders for the Microsoft Silverlight and WPF platform with HLSL, as well as how to write an extensible Silverlight application with the help of MEF.
The code is also available at CodePlex.

My last two articles for Coding4Fun showed how to write a simple photo effects application for Windows Phone (1, 2). This is actually where Pictures Lab has its origin.









I just recently wrote an article for Germany's largest .Net developer magazine, dotnetpro. The article covers Windows Phone development and is available in the February 2011 issue and also online.

I also reviewed the media / computer graphics chapters of the two best Silverlight books available. The one is Silverlight 4 Unleashed by Laurent Bugnion and the other is Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown. Both are great books and every Silverlight developer should get a copy.

Talks and the Rest
I gave a talk at the .Net Usergroup Dresden about Silverlight 4's media capabilities and presented SLARToolkit. In May I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Carl and Richard from the .Net Rocks talk show. And I worked on some very interesting projects I can't write something about yet. I also spent a good amount of time answering Silverlight questions I got via email, at the official forum or at Stack Overflow.

It was a really busy year and I hope I can keep this high productivity up.

By the way, I'm also a frequent social network user and met great new people there (Twitter, Facebook). It's a pleasure to exchange thoughts and share knowledge with smart people. Thanks for being awesome!


I wish you and your families a happy and successful new year. 2011 will be good!

Microsoft Silverlight MVP Award

Today, I got an exiting Email from Microsoft:

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Silverlight technical communities during the past year.

I hope it wasn't an April Fools' joke. ;-)

It's a real honor for me to get the Silverlight MVP award. All the Silverlight MVPs I know are truly outstanding and I can hardly believe I'm considered to be one of them now. It's even more surreal that I'm the first Silverlight MVP from Germany and the second from the DACH region after the excellent Laurent Bugnion.

I would like to thank Microsoft, the great Silverlight community and especially all that nominated me for the MVP award. It's needless to say that I will continue my work with Silverlight to provide more useful content and I hope I'll be able to satisfy the high expectations.

Thank you all!

Poll Results: Do you block Google Analytics tracking in your browser?

I recently encountered a large difference between the Google Analytics statistics of my website and the server logs. This raised the question in me how reliable the Google Analytics data really is and I asked you to take part in a small survey: Do you block Google Analytics tracking in your browser?. The poll is closed now and here are the results.

The poll got 267 votes total and 68 people voted "Yes, I block Google Analytics." 199 voted for "No, I don't block Google Analytics." This means 25.47% of the participants block Google Analytics in their browser. 

You can now use a simple formula to get the real world Google Analytics statistics (at least for my visitors - the best of all). :-)

GAreal = GAreport * 1.25468164794007490636704119850187


Big thanks to all that helped me and took part in the survey!

Do you block Google Analytics tracking in your browser?

Recently I checked the server logs for my website and compared the statistics with the Google Analytics data for the timespan. I expected that the page views and visits won't be the same, but I haven't expected such a large difference I encountered.
Just to make it clear, I don't use Google Analytics for evil, I'm not Google and I'm not interested in advertising or web marketing, I'm just curious what my visitors (you) are looking for and what caught the interest, so I can provide more content in this field.
I know some people that block Analytics tracking in their browser because of the Google octopus, or disabled Java Script at all.

The difference between the Google Analytics statistics and the server logs raised the question in me how reliable the Google Analytics data is when several people block it in their browser. I started to search for some block statistics, but couldn't find any useful information and I also think the actual blocking-rate does crucially depend on the website's audience and used technology. That's why I created a little poll at twtpoll.com and asked my Twitter friends to vote. Big thanks to all that already voted, but not all of you are on Twitter, so I like to ask here too:

Do you block Google Analytics tracking in your browser?

I will publish the results here on my blog after the poll is over on Feb 28, 2010. Thanks for taking your time.

Update 03-10-2010
The results are now available.

Goodbye GPL

In the past I've released the source code that mostly comes along with my blog posts under the GPLv3 license to ensure that changes on the code always stay open and never get closed. But the GPL has a major drawback, it's too viral, which means if someone uses GPL licensed code the new code has to be released under the GPL too. And if someone uses this new code, the new code 2 has to be put under the GPL again and so on. And as the FSF states this even applies when the code is just linked dynamically with a GPL'ed library only except if it uses the GPL linking exception. That's why I wanted to move away from the GPL and searched for some alternatives. Finally I decided to use the Ms-PL license from now on if my work doesn't depend on GPL infected code. I've chosen the Ms-PL because it's approved by the OSI, it's short and easy understandable, the weak copyleft guarantees that changes on the original code have to be committed back and that it stays open and it could be used for commercial products. Jon Galloway (@jongalloway) summarized it nicely in his Twitter reply to me: "Ms-PL is essentially BSD + patent protection." So the Ms-PL is suitable, short, simple and keeps the trolls away.

I have changed all the source code headers and License.txt files and updated the Zip files with the source code you find linked on most blog posts. If you still find a GPL reference, just ignore it and if the Ms-PL is a problem for you, just contact me and I might put the relevant code under a second license.

Silverlight Live Streaming being discontinued. What now?

The Microsoft Live team announced in a blog post that the Silverlight Streaming service is being discontinued. The Silverlight Streaming service offered free hosting for Silverlight applications and videos.




The blog post states:

"Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live Beta is being discontinued and will eventually be taken down.
A new Windows® Azure(TM)-based hosting and delivery service will be launched by the end of 2009, though this is not a direct replacement for Silverlight Streaming and will have costs associated with its use."

Further they write:

"Don't panic! All your current content is safe and you will receive sufficient notice for you to make an informed decision on where to host your Silverlight content and applications. However, in the interim, we would like you to be aware of the following:

Effective immediately, no new sign-ups are permitted for the Silverlight Streaming service. In addition, the Silverlight Streaming publishing plug-in for Expression Encoder will no longer be available for download.
The new Windows Azure functionality will not be a direct replacement for the Silverlight Streaming service and will be a paid subscription service."

The blog post also gives some instructions on how to retrieve the hosted Silverlight content. One can't really say that the offered (Azure) "migration process" is comfortable and frictionless. Actually, as far as I know there is no real Azure migration service at the moment, one can only access the Silverlight Streaming file system and copy the content.

What now?
In my opinion this is not a very nice move of Microsoft for bloggers like me. I have used Silverlight Streaming to provide live examples for my Silverlight posts. I mainly blog about Silverlight development and provide content and source code for free, therefore I help Microsoft to spread their technology - for free. It's a shame that a free streaming service at least for personal / educational purposes like mine isn't offered anymore. I might see things too naive and got the intention of Silverlight Streaming wrong, but from my point of view it's definitely not nice.
For now I have uploaded the samples and Videos to my public Dropbox folder and stream them from there. Dropbox uses Amazon's S3 storage system to store files.
Timothy Parez (@delegatevoid) pointed me on this alternative and it actually works fine. Thanks Timothy!
I hope this blog post from the Silverlight Streaming team does not reflect the final decisions for Microsoft's Silverlight hosting. At least I can hope...

Better late than never…

I know I'm late to the game, but I think I'm at a point where I have something to share with the .Net community.
This blog will especially focus on .Net, C# and Silverlight software development and (Microsoft) technology in general. Nothing special you may think, but I also have a passion for algorithms, computer graphics and physical simulations and therefore I always try to implement nice algorithms using modern software development technologies. If you are interested in my previous projects, please visit my website.

You might ask why I have chosen Blogger / Blogspot as platform. It’s easy to use, the setup was smooth, it's free and not over-featured and I don't need super styled Themes. Not at least I could use my Google account. However I was a bit disappointed that Blogger has no integrated syntax highlighting, but I have seen other Google blogs with highlighted syntax. If you have any tips for me, I would appreciate it if you could drop a line in the comments or contact me in another way.

OK, enough for the first introductory post. In the next post I will write about a Silverlight topic.
Let the journey begin...

Photo by Jayme Frye

Impressum und Disclaimer

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Wenn Sie weitere Informationen benötigen, kontaktieren Sie mich bitte über meine Website http://rene-schulte.info

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This is a private website. The content is primarily written in English.
It is operated by René Schulte from Dresden, Germany.
If you need further information, please contact me via my website http://rene-schulte.info

 
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