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.

Advanced Mixed Reality Development and Best Practices - Content for the MR Dev Summit 2019 Session

Greetings from London where we are having a good time at the MR Dev Summit 2019 networking and learning with passionate Mixed Reality experts.

I also delivered a session "Advanced Mixed Reality Development and Best Practices".
The presentation covered my Top 10 of HoloLens / Mixed Reality development best practices, including Deep Learning and WHY Azure Spatial Anchors are a transformational technology and HOW to develop applications.
I also had a live demo for a spatial-persisted sticky notes AR app with native versions for Android ARCore and iOS ARKit. The code is available on GitHub and I walked attendees through the architecture and the technology under the hood.

The slide deck can be downloaded here. It's quite large with embedded videos and I recommend to download it.
The demo source code for the Azure Spatial Anchors app is available here on GitHub.

Developing Mobile AR Applications with Azure Spatial Anchors - Content for the Microsoft Build 2019 Session

Greetings from Seattle where we had a blast delivering our breakout session at Microsoft's largest developer conference Build 2019.
The title of our talk was "Developing Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) Applications with Azure Spatial Anchors".

This was my 5th time in a row speaking at Build as an external, non-Microsoft speaker. What an honor.
This time I was co-presenting with Paris Morgan from the Azure Spatial Anchors team. An even bigger honor.

The presentation covered WHY Azure Spatial Anchors are a transformational technology, what a Spatial Anchor is and why mobile AR is very much relevant even when we have advanced head-mounted devices like the HoloLens 2. I also showed lots of examples and use cases for enterprise and consumer scenarios. Then Paris explained HOW to develop these applications yourself. We also had a live demo for a spatial-persisted sticky notes AR app with native versions for Android ARCore and iOS ARKit. The code is available on GitHub and we walked attendees through the architecture and the technology under the hood. Paris also covered UX best practices including how to best place anchors and we were able to answer a couple of questions.

The slide deck can be downloaded here. It's quite large with embedded videos and I recommend to download it.
The demo source code is available here on GitHub.
You can watch the session recording here or embedded below.
There seems to have been a glitch with the recording around 21:50 minutes where the production crew had to cut out 1 minute of content. :-( I will post the MR Dev Days video once it is out which hopefully does not have such a recording/processing issue.

My 10-Year Challenge - WriteableBitmapEx turns 10 with v1.6

It was 2009 when I started my first open source project and announced it with this unspectacular blog post. Back then it was developed with Visual Studio 2008 targeting Silverlight and hosted on CodePlex.
Many things have changed and tech comes and goes but during the last 10 years I always adapted, extended it, added bug fixes and reviewed/merged Pull Requests. Even after all the years WriteableBitmapEx is still quite popular, especially with Windows desktop WPF developers.

Version 1.6.2 of WriteableBitmapEx finally adds dedicated libs for UWP and an UWP sample. For WPF it now supports .NET Core, both the .NET Framework and .NET Core libs are part of the NuGet pack.

If you are using the source code and the VS solution directly, you can choose the .NET Framework 4.5 or .NET Core 3 as the target in the VS drop-down.

WriteableBitmapEx supports a variety of Windows platforms and versions.
WPF and Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform (UWP) are actively maintained.
Silverlight, Windows 8/8.1 WinRT, Windows Phone WinRT and Silverlight 7/8/8.1 are not maintained anymore but the latest stable libs are still part of the NuGet package.

You can download the latest via the updated NuGet package. The packages contain the WriteableBitmapEx binaries. All samples and the source code can be found in the GitHub repository.

A huge shout out and thank you to all the contributors, bug issuers and users of the library. ❤

Content for the DevTernity Session - Advanced Mixed Reality Development and Best Practices

DevTernity in beautiful Riga, Latvia was a great conference and I had good fun delivering my session called "Advanced Mixed Reality Development and Best Practices".

The presentation covered best practices we learned while developing for the HoloLens since 2015 and my Top 10 HoloLens Developer Recommendations 2018. I also talked and demoed exciting new things with MR + AI showcasing near real-time object recognition running on the HoloLens and leveraging WinML for on-device Deep Learning inference. You can see a video of the demo embedded at the bottom of this post. I also showed how the new RS5 Windows 10 update brings hardware-accelerated inference to the HoloLens via DirextX 12 drivers.

The slide deck can be downloaded here. It's quite large with embedded videos and I recommend to download it.
The WinML object recognition demo source code targeting RS5 APIs is here.
The session was recorded. You can watch it here or embedded below:



Also, here's a video recording of my WinML object recognition demo targeting industrial scenarios: