Aug20

First Microsoft Surface in the UK

Engadget linked to a post today by Amnesia indicating they had thought they had he first internationally shipped Surface in the world -- which is infact incorrect.
 
On July 1st, Infusion Development became the first official reseller of Microsoft Surface in the world and is currently still the only one.  We've been working closely with Surface for many months and have an excellent suite of demos built out to truly showcase the devices capabilties, above and beyond the sample and demo apps shipped with the device.
 
Infusion's Microsoft Surface
 
Our leading demonstrator, FalconEye, is an operational dashboard that combines Microsoft Virtual Earth and business intelligence in a powerful Surface application.
 
Videos of our demos are in the works and will be posted here as soon as they become available.  Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions or interest.
 
In the interim, we've got a Surface Demo Slidedeck showing a number of our demos that you can view here to whet the appetite.
 
Syd.
 
 
Published: Aug-20-08 | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

May14

Winforms or WPF? CAB or Prism?

In general, WPF is the way to go if you are going to be building new rich client applications.  That said, many organizations have little to no WPF experience and from a managers' perspective, there is much more risk with a WPF approach and the timelines (timescales as they say here in the UK) are certainly going to be longer.
 
Apart from all of the features WPF brings to the table, teams programming in WPF will have an increased ability to attract top talent to work on those teams.  Techies being techies generally want to work on the latest & greatest, and WinForms is past its prime.
 
I recently came across a couple of interesting bits on the WinForms and WPF debate.  Infusion is doing a lot of work with WPF and CAB, however several of our projects spun up when Prism was still in its' infancy, so it wasn't an option.  Prism appears to be coming along nicely and I hope to be able to incorporate it into our next greenfield rich client WPF client.
 
First up is Glenn Block's Prism & CAB roundup that describes the various P&P  (and non-P&P WPFCAB by Kent Boogaart).  Second is an article by a former colleauge of mine, Josh Smith, demonstrating building the same app in WPF & Winforms and comparing the approaches.  Both are good reads.
 
Syd.
Published: May-14-08 | 23 Comments | 2988 Links to this post

May11

Woodgrove Silverlight Financial

Woodgrove Financials Homepage
 
This post is long overdue.  In March, Infusion showcased a Silverlight Beta 2 demo called Woodgrove Financial at the Financial Developers conference in New York City.  In addition to being a great demo to show off the capabilities of Silverlight, the complete source code was posted for the developer community.  You can also run the online version right now over here.
 
 
 
The demo was created in conjunction with the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) team of Microsoft US.  The demo isn't meant to be a product or a real site -- its meant to showcase the capabilities of Silverlight in various aspects of retail banking, and provide walkthroughs of scenarios that will speak to Retail bankers business and technology folks.
 
Since then, there have been a number of blog posts referencing the demo -- I wanted to use this post to consoldate the useful ones in a single post here for ease:
 
Silverlight is definately a cool technology -- one that most certainly will help the Web transform from the current DHTML experience into something much more polished and slick.  Although AJAX has vastly improved the interactations on web pages to provide a richer experience from a quick click-response perspective, it is fundamentally limited by the same asthetics that traditional DHTML provides.
 
Flash has for years provided a richer visual experience to DHTML, but at the expense of navigation, richness of content (generally flash is used for rather simplistic sites), but Microsoft is serious about playing catchup. 
 
From a developer's perspective, I'm especially excited by the overlap between WPF on the desktop and Silverlight on the web, versus say traditional WinForms development and traditional ASP.NET development.
 
Look for some future posts from me showcasing the Insurance flavour of this demonstrator (to us a UK term), Messenger/Live integration, and new Silverlight features that we incorporate as the framework develops.
 
If anyone has any issues running the code or getting the demo to work locally, give me a shout and we can work them out.
 
Syd.
Published: May-11-08 | 345 Comments | 52 Links to this post

Apr28

10 Biggest Stock Market Crashes

I recently came across an interesting article that outlines the 10 biggest stock market crashes of all time.
 
The interesting bit is that the majority of 'big crashes' occur when several different events happen in quick succession... each individually would only lead to a mini-crash, but together lead to making it onto the leaderboard.
 
That said, the technology bubble bursting seems to me to be a singular event....
Published: Apr-28-08 | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

Apr21

Worldwide Citizen Service Platform Launch

Tomorrow Microsoft is officially launching their Citizen Service Platform (CSP) for worldwide partners and customers at the Microsoft Local and Regional Government Solutions Forum in Porto, Portugal.
 
Citizen Service Platform provides a an applications framework that helps public sector organisations addess key business challenges by accelerating their Transformational Government projects to deliver services to citizens more quickly and cost-effectively while leveraging their previous investments.
 
The platform itself is built upon 3 key MS technologies:
 
  • Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS)
  • Microsoft Windows Live
  • Microsoft CRM

 

There is a good overview of CSP on the Microsoft site.  There is also a dedicated CSP site at www.citizenserviceplatform.com
 
In my next post I'll show some of the Infusion sample solutions built upon CSP.
 
Syd.
 
 
Published: Apr-21-08 | 158 Comments | 2944 Links to this post

Apr20

Relaunch of my blog

Today I am relaunching my Infusion blog.  Unfortunately I've lost my content from my previous 'Because you can't debug in production', but have no fear as this one should be full of goodies soon enough.
 
A quick background on myself:  I've worked at Infusion for over 5 year now, and currently and helping head up Infusion's UK office in London.  The office is now 1 year old -- my colleague Bryan Shiffman has started his new blog here and has a post regarding our the Infsion UK 1-year anniversary.
Published: Apr-20-08 | 6337 Comments | 2962 Links to this post