Video link was used during Macro Amoedo talk on Microsoft Dyanmics CRM on Thursday, 27th August @ http://epicenter.ie

You can find out more about Marco Amoedo, Head of Developement and Solution Architect at AlfaPeople

Firstly if you haven’t heard of Epicenter 2009 head over to http://epicenter.ie/ which was organised by http://irishdev.com Ireland’s Premier Source for Business and Technology news.

Epcienter 2009 was broken down into Java, Web, Open Source and Microsoft Zones. This event also also part of the Irish Java Technologies Conference [IJTC], the Irish Web Technologies Conference [IWTC],  the Irish Open Source Technologies Conference [IOTC] and the Irish Microsoft Technology Conferences [IMTC].

So, in order of events as listed on the Epicenter website, I would like to take you through a tour based on the talk I attended and the people I conversed with. This is intended to be a light hearted review. If you really need to know more, check out the site.

Java Zone.

Jeff Genender

Savoir Technologies CTO http://savoirtech.com

This is one man who talks I would have love to go and attend in the future. There was a mountain of criteria and content that I would simply have loved to have listened to. Simply there was no way to attend ‘every event’.

Jeff is a part-time support of his local Fire Service and was to be scene wearing his honorary Dublin Fire Brigade shirt presented to him last year.

Both Jeff and his Wife comprise a vivid unit of two very active people. Jeff appears to need little sleep and will talk to the little hours, while being up 6am for a run, as in the case of Friday morning where he complete an advance circuit of Phoenix Park. Jeff and his Partner are both avid Mountain Runners.

Presentations:

Thursday, 27th August

14:30 The Rules of SOA – A Road to a Successful SOA Implementation

Wednesday, 26th August

13:30 Open Session – Getting into Open Source – Everything you wanted to know about open source that nobody told you

Rob Lally

Technology Evangelist http://robertlally.com

Again, another person whose talk I was not able to attend. However I had the good fortune to spend some time with Rob. What an absolutely lovely, funny and passionate guy. Not knowing Rob extremely well I can say one thing ‘indecision bothers him’, he straight to the point with zero time for time wasters. He is an absolute delight to be around.

Friday, 28th August

16:15 Next Generation Languages for the JVM

Friday, 28th August

14:30 Lean, Kanban and Theory of Constraints for Managers

Barry Carr

Ixian Software. http://www.barrycarr.org.uk

Barry presented ‘What is functional Programming (JVM)’ and ‘F# :: What is Functional Programming (.NET). I had the great fortunate to attend the first of Barry’s lectures. It was well attended and divinely simple to understand. Barry has directly engaging, and his understanding approach inspires others via his teachings. Barry all I can say is ‘Thank You’ in one hour I got to completely understand F#.

Presentations:

Friday, 28th August

11:45 What is Functional Programming (JVM)

Friday, 28th August

16:15 F# – What is Functional Programming (.NET)

Colm Mulcahy

Found & CEO Saaspoint

Colm [in my option] held the most engaging keynote of the two I attended. The seamless translation between traditional infrastructure to modern ‘cloud based’ solutions was an eye opener for anyone who didn’t already understand these principles.

There are companies even bigger than SalesForce [$1 Billion in holdings] that could learn many valuable lessons from the Saaspoint Business Model.

Presentations:

Friday, 28th August

10:00 Friday Keynote – Cloud Gamekeeper Turned Poacher

Tim Hodkinson

Liberty-IT Technologist & Scrum Master

Again another talk that I could not attended. Tim spoke on Agile Development in Scrum, which ‘I’m sure was of great interest to many of the attendees’

Presentations:

Thursday, 27th August

16:15 Agile Development with Scrum

Eugene Ciurana

Independent. Open Source Evangelist. http://ciurana.eu

Once more another amazing set of sessions that I could not attends. However I did have the good fortune to observe Eugene at Thursday nights speakers session and around Trinity College Campus. What a composed, Zen like presence this man has. If you ever get the chance to observe Eugene in action, I suggest you do it, you not forget him.

I encourage you to read up more on Eugene.

Presentations:

Friday, 28th August

16:15 Mission Critical Enterprise Cloud Applications

Friday, 28th August

11:45 Google App Engine Java Applications HOWTO

Tony Jewtushenko

Product Innovator. CEO. http://productinnovator.com

A chance meeting, Tony gave me both a synopsis of his talk in regards to Software Globalisation for Java Developers. Tony is a remarkable man, dresses impeccably and another person who I would enjoy seeing again given the opportunity.

Professor Barry Smyth

ChangingWorlds. Founder and Chief Scientist. http://barry.smyth.ucd.ie

Unfortunately, I did not get to directly engage with Profession Barry Smyth, a highly distinguished expert in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and was short-listed for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the year 2006, cofound ChangingWorld sold to Amdocs for $60m in December 2006.

His keynote on Day 2 was clear and concise.

Presentations:

Thursday, 27th August

10:00 Thursday Keynote – The Secrets of An Irish Software Entrepreneur

Werner Keil

Creative Arts & Technologies. Eclipse RCP Developer

What can I say about Werner? Firstly, I would like to consider him a friend. We spent many sessions together and had significant commonalities that allowed use to bridge separate technology and programming environments.

Werner’s work on advanced predictive patterns for H1N1 using STEM – Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler is ‘extremely engaging and important work’. If you ever get the chance to engage with Werner, I suggest you do. Some problems are completely Universal.

Werner is committing member of the Eclipse Foundation, Babel Language Champion (German) and active member of the Java Community Process, including his role as JSR-275 Spec Lead, JavaEE 6 EG and Executive Committee Member(SE/EE).

Web Zone

Andy Gibson

Rockstar North. Information Systems Developer. http://andy-gibson.co.uk

Rockstar North employee and RockStar by nature [Andy won’t mind me telling you]. Didn’t get to Andy talk or his Belfast talk jQuery, but believe me it his highly worth attending his events. His rundown on the HTC, Android and Windows Mobile 6.5 environment over dinner on Thursday with Barry Carr was extremely informative.

Keen to give back to the community, Andy has spoken at a number of community events including DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Belfast and is currently the Tayside Events Coordinator for Scottish Developers.

In his spare time (not that he has much), Andy enjoys table top wargamming, keeping up with the computer gaming industry and drinking malt scotch.

Presentations:

Thursday, 27th August

16:15 Web Application Testing With Selenium

Marc Grabanski

MJG International

Owner / Web Developer

http://marcgrabanski.com

Marc Grabanski is an interesting and passionate guy when it comes to VC investment. He ‘totally’ understands the value in modern Agile Business development. However, it seems that some start-up companies are still living in 1998 expecting multimillion investments for very low equity.

Marc is an entrepreneurial web developer out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He currently runs a consulting corporation and is co-founder of two startup companies.

Marc’s technical skills are focused towards user interface development, but also span across a wide range of technologies and skill-sets. This enables him to manage resources remotely to implement new ideas with his consulting company, MJG International, LLC.

Presentations:

Thursday, 27th August

11:45 jQuery Essentials

Thursday, 27th August

16:15 Web Interface Essentials

Damian OSuilleabhain

OS3

Founder & CTO

http://os3.ie

Damian OSuilleabhain has extensive experience in software development principally in the financial services and banking industries and has worked on several award winning applications.

While at Epcienter, Damian took a great interest in rapid prototyping including attending my Silverlight 3 talk. Damian and Dermot Daly [Tapadoo] could be seen working very closely together on presentation work during the three days.

Damian and Dermot won’t mind me saying I did give them a number of tips for Damian’s presentation as given on Friday. Sorry I didn’t make it guys. SQL 2008 virtualisation with the ProData.ie guys/gals beckoned.

When Apple released its Software Development Kit in 2008, he saw the opportunity to create easy-to-use functionally rich applications for this revolutionary device, and so set-up OS3, working on his own Apps and offering development services.

Damian currently has three Apps in the App Store.

Damian was seen with his very young daughter and his partner in the Science Gallery in Trinity making an ‘everlasting bubble’. A Great Chap and Family Man who I whole-heartily recommend to anyone even remote interested in iPhone development.

Presentations:

Friday, 28th August

16:15 Walkthrough of Building an iPhone App

Dermot Daly

Tapadoo

Founder & CTO

http://www.tapadoo.com/blog/

Dermot actively engaged everyone at the Speaker Dinner on a number of topics in reference to Irish Development past & present.

After many years in software development at various levels, Dermot recently turned his skills to development for the iPhone.

Presentations:

Friday, 28th August

14:30 Objective-C

Finally

I would have loved to attended both John Wood [IQContent] and Robin Christopherson [AbiltyNet] both talking in Usability and Accessibility in Design.

So check out http://epicenter.ie to get even more speakers’ details that travelled from all quarters of the world to give up their time and speak in Dublin.

More details coming on the site soon and Epicenter2010 preliminary date of 9-11 June has been ‘unofficially’ announced. Stay tuned here for more details.

Presentation notes for Epcienter 2009 talk on “Introduction to Silverlight 3″ given on the Wednesday, 26th August.

The Powerpoint is available to download here. Please feel free to re-use, re-edit and re-distrubte as required with no restrictions.

http://stuartmanning.com/files/Silverlight3Epicenter.pptx

Just a ‘very’ quick post to say that Twitter now supports > 140 character posts :: simply turn of Javascript in you browser and try. Discovered first while using Rtweeter desktop client in response to @BizSpark

Update:: The format seems to be 246 character maximum – standard SMS size.

Also, Twitter does show the 246 format you need to click on the “…” to see it.

See http://twitter.com/stuartmanning/status/3661474429

Quick note to say that I am moving my content over to WordPress. All the old content is still available http://archive.stuartmanning.com

I entend to put in some regular expression handlers on IIS7 instance to redirect to existing articles. However I’m off to Barcelona in a few hours and it may have to wait.

Enjoy your Weekend.

Make yours a good one.

As some may know I been working on this site recently over the last week and also have fielded a few email question and answer sessions. So I’m posting an email that was originally sent to Dave Simms @davy_sims

What is Rtweeter?

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter – it more than just a buzz word – it really is more important than Google. There is a big difference in waiting for news to appear in Google after its been broken via press wire sites or actually experiencing it. Think of Twitter as that CNN bar and the bottom of the screen ‘breaking news’ following past you an into your subconscious wither you observe it or not.

Rtweeter was originally designed to help extract the information pertinent to user from potentially 1000’s of sources. However as it has been developed it has also became apparent that being ‘part of the news’ is equally important.

Rtweeter could be deemed in one way as a ‘Google Analytics’ for Social Networks. We provide [I] a toolset of metric tools to measure the value in the information they distribute. The value in knowing who, when and where you articles are being read is important to the individual and companies alike.

The website only went live on the 2nd July to promote allow user to share web address, post maps for events and send tweets that exceed the 140 chars and was more publically launched on the  17th. Tweeting or ‘micro blogging’ are much very convenient as opposed to reading a blog. And when we write some we want to know how many people view our article and gave use feedback. With Rtweeter we provide a number of ways to give the user these valuable metrics :: How many people viewed this link I posted, where has the link been reused, where do my reader some from and who that are. These services are really at core of Rtweeter.

The current RTweeter.com is just an example of what you can do and what information you can extract. GeoLocation services, as in Rtweeter Maps are also valuable, the site already works with the iPhone and other mobile providers to extract GPS or Cell tower information or reverse back an IP address to find out where you are at that moment. As more and more users start considering their Phone as a viable Pocket PC to surf and share information then Twitter is the ideal platform as it has routes as being an SMS service. Indeed I look forward to O2 returning free SMS service for Twitter users later this year.

In addition to these we have a desktop client that allows the user to better organise the information they receive via Twitter. There seems to be a threshold in the number  of users you follow [about 300] before it becomes impossible to manage and you start to miss the more important information.  So with this Rtweeter was originally created to address some simple and yet obvious missing from Twitter. [desktop came first]

High on the list was ‘Groups’ or at least the ability to organise the information supplied to you in a more meaningful way. It was apparent back then there was one or two desktop applications like ‘Tweetdeck’ that did this but, as a programmer’ I was not happy with the result from a technical perspective. Indeed these client seemed to consume a lot of memory on your computer to do what I viewed a very simple task.

Additionally, there was another problem with Twitter, and one category I fell into :: We sometimes tweet ‘too much’. This can be a turn off for your followers if they only are watching say 50 people and you are posting all the great and wonderful articles you have just been reading to share with the twitterverse, but in fact to the follower are of no use. Then they are seeing multiple posts filling up there twitter stream very quickly. Also even if they all your followers where ‘actually’ interested in every article you mentioned having 10 tweets with your article links posted within a 5 minute period would definitely result in missed opportunities to promote whatever it was you where trying to communicate. So scheduling out you messages over a period of time became another high priority, wither it is too reduce the noise generated by back to back article tweets or to specifically target a time that you wish to sent out your message.

Users of the desktop application have told me that they use in ways I would never have imagined. With regards to the scheduled message service : one person told me they used it as their bosses also used twitter, so while they were supposed to be working at home they had scheduled in messages such as ‘busy working on report for tomorrow’ and other similar tweets spread out over the morning when in fact they had been outside working on repairing a patio. I was also contacted by an angry girl friend that said it was ‘disgraceful that provided a tool’ that allow her partner to tweet ‘at home’ ‘walking the dog’ or whatever it was at time. This was never the intended use.

Engaging with the user base brings forward ideas on how to use your services that you would never think of. Twitter users are really passionate about what they believe or expect to see with twitter. I take the time to personal answer any question that users have and will even talk the time to talk directly on Skype. After which, say 20 mins, I have useful feedback on the services that I am developing and can immediately action upon. In addition, the user will often blog and ‘tweets’ your graces ‘at last, a developer that care about users’ and plug your website and encourage other users to try it out. I do this because it is important to get you product right and I believe that companies in general need to be aware of what users are saying about their products. Get it right now with the customer and you have one person who will sing you graces, get it wrong and well… you get the idea.

What is the idea behind it?

What we are providing is a set of tools that can get you started creating your own services. What is ‘key’ for any of these services are what are called Application Programmable Interfaces (API’s) these are just simple libraries that allow anyone to re-use your services as they see fit. Whilst we are not directly developing an iPhone Application : We fully support anyone to develop and build up to our services from within their application or website. We have done the hard work to make it easier for others. What we have created allow us to quickly create new sites and services.

One example we are developing as a showcase is GoingTweet a website that takes our Location based services, tweet longer and stats service to allow users to sell and find items for sale within their area. User can create a good detailed description of each item, add a few pictures and then tweet this once or even share this on any social network. Then just like on the Rtweeter website they can view how much interest people have in each item within seconds of their post. This helps them make crucial decisions very quickly : not getting enough views’ then they might lower the price and re-tweet. Buyers can be members of their social network or just find them via the site itself. In addition you can go to the website and it immediately know where you are and summarise items for sale in your area, the buyer can refine this as they like by item, category or other. Again this is just a showcase and we are not encouraging people to list the items of their house, we encourage user to list items in approximation to where they are eg. Belfast. A user for example in Lisburn or Newry has the option to see local listing or say ‘items’ in their immediate area – however if you ask to show items with 50 miles (or km) then you will see the more listings appear.

Again this is just an example and showcase of what can be done based on the works we have created. The actually bulk of creating GoingTweet was created within 2 days based on the pre-done works of RTweeter. Now that we have this service we can quickly revise this to provide other services, for example a ‘what’s happening’ or ‘event listing’ site using exactly the same principles.

The idea behind Rtweeter.com, as it is now, is to provide a Swiss army knife, of sorts, services for Twitter users and developers. We are not limiting ourselves to one network, it is being used on Facebook, Digg and a variety of Social Network platforms as well as blogs and emails. Emails to me are a dying trade : it is interesting when I have read article or have spoken to teenagers who don’t see the point in email when they can easily share their information from on pivotal point like Bebo or Facebook. This makes sense why dig or troll though you entire list of friends in your mobile or email address contacts to get people attention :: Post once is suffice. With many of the social network’s including Facebook providing free or sponsored SMS alerts to you groups – it’s pretty much job done.

Rtweeter can provide the tools, all you need is an idea.

Why are you doing it?

Rtweeter, as mentioned, started off as a way by which I could improve and manage the information on Twitter. The services I created where to help me manage the vast array of information that was available and put it into an more meaning content. What Ev Williams [Ceo Twitter] has created is a phenomena in our current age, whilst twitter has been around for a while I still think it in infancy with the explosion only being the last 6 months.

Once we saw CNN using twitter to take comments from viewers prior to the US Presidential Election then you had to know twitter was going big. People knew it was only a matter of time until a big celebrity, the ‘Brittany’ effect [in reference to Brittany Spears] that ‘John C. Dovak’ [http://www.crankygeeks.com/] a regular on many tech shows and podcasts predicted very early on last year, and he was right. And a year later the top 5 users [according to twitterholic.com] are as ordered : Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Britney Spears, CNN and Oprah each with approximately 2 million users.

Prior to January this was lead by a contingent of British celebs with a big lead by Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) [then 350k now 660k followers] who encourage people like the then suspend Jonathan Ross [@wossy] and other to get into ‘tweeting’. People in the states who had never watched UK television where talking about Jonathan Ross due to @stephenfry talking about him – this showed the truly wonderful potential of twitter. Stephen fry also credited twitter with ‘breaking him into the states’ [citation needed].

It really come down to the fact that I developed the tools use myself at the start and it was quite easy as a programmer to open these services, expand on them and offer these services to others. Rtweeter and it related tools and services are used on more than 200+ site [227 at last count] to help track, measure and share link across a multitude of social networks :: that pretty good going for a service that didn’t exist two weeks ago.

There are a whole range of services developing around twitter, so as a developer, what’s the  appeal of working with Twitter as a development tool?

As a developer it the ease and simplicity of the API that Twitter provides. It’s open and readably accessible for any developer on any platform to use. It, in my opinion, set the standard by which a lot of social networks are trying to met – Facebook as an example have been heavily influence by Twitter by re-interfacing [designing] the users default home page to resemble the twitter style flow. It also open up its own ‘messaging’ API as a direct result of the sheer amount of applications and websites that where taking advantage of twitter. They even approached twitter with a $500m offer earlier this year and where rejected after which they really started to push the facebook messaging APIand SMS service.

For me, it just makes sense. Ease of use and re-use. I come from a background in Business Systems Integration and Search development and both these aspects are brought to play when looking at and wanting to develop for Twitter. Twitter is very affective at creating content that is completely fresh and available in real time. The recent Indonesian bombing where first broke on twitter by users tweeting from mobile phones. [ looked up a reference for this http://www.loosewireblog.com/2009/07/jakarta-bombings-and-twitter-timeline-and-thoughts.html should be other examples]. So we see breaking news as it happens before it gets to the AP and reported within traditional media.

This is an extreme case of breaking ‘very sad and tragic’ news but important none the less as how information travels out so fast.

Twitter also has a unique position with Google. Google tends to really like Twitter users and offers unique page rankings based on frequency of updates and the number of followers. I know that from my own experience that web site can be indexed on Google within hours of tweeting them. Now think of the days before twitter and you wanted to launch a website it could take weeks or even months before you could get listed on Google and longer to build up a following of visitors. Get your product right on Twitter and once you tweet it you immediate alert  thousands of people who follow you, who in turn Re-Tweet this to the people who follow them in turn. Twitter is very viral in this way. So what we have done is not only got users by potential 100’s of links back to you site which Google recognises as a good sign that you have something worth indexing.

So the rewards as a developer within the web industry seem to be obvious to me.

And as far as you want to say, what other tools you are thinking about?

Well I mentioned ‘GoingTweet’ as one service. I also working on a completely new desktop client build on Silverlight 3 [a new browser technology from Microsoft]. This desktop version allow me to expand on the current desktop that was built using Flex [a Flash based technology] and overcome some of the technical limitations of the latter platform. Silverlight itself also for more parallel development of the central Rtweeter code and API and they literally share the same code at heart. The desktop version will allow for more ‘behind the scenes’ services for users. That all we can say at this point, although groups and scheduling will again be one of the at heart services.

Rtweeter.com itself is getting a few more services ‘live groups’ is one and I’m currently in talks with a number of potential partners to provide file sharing from the platform. We will have to partner on this as bandwidth and storage can get quite expensive in relative terms to running a our sites.

We already have the ability to share all types of file from images, pdf’s word documents etc and see this as a value service to user wanting to share a holiday picture during their holiday, a company wanting to share a press release or an engineer wanting to send a report back from location.

In the engineering example we just employ the GPS system as demoed on rtweeter.com [ http://rtweeter.com/TweetMaps] which is already being used. This same service to a holidaymaker, as mentioned earlier allows them to say ‘I am here, it nice’ and here’s the picture. Returning to GoingCheap, we can already provide information over any Geographical area so we see this as a viable and potentially commercial service, for twitter and other social network but possibly as a standalone product when you think of engineering and reporting.

Also we will be expanding on our Schedule a Message service which will bring even more value as a service. It fair to expect that some tools will be commercial while others are free. Indeed the best route to market is free : I think alot of internet developers and user are all familiar with the whole ‘Beta’ gambit now played out by so many company. This allows for the 1000’s of hours of user testing often need to launch new services. I want users to have the best experience they can but there are some services that would simply cost too much in terms of resources and investment that there would be no other way to fund. The upside is that this commercial element can be driven back to the free everyday users, so user wake up one morning and discover the Rweeter.com or one of its associated sites or applications now has picture sharing service with maybe a little endorsement contained on their view page to the provider.

There are a lot more services that I want to produce but you have to stay focused on achieving and developing services, just talking about ‘what might or could be done’ doesn’t write the code or deliver results. New services have to go though the whole building and testing and possibly rebuilding prior to releasing them into the wild.

So that’s it hope this helps.

If you need any information just get in touch.

When will I get Windows 7 RTM? [article from windowsteamblog]

I recognize this is an important question to have answered. Many of you have said you want to know exactly when you will be able to get your hands on RTM. Last Monday, I gave an update on RTM to close out some myths. In that update, I also gave a broad timeline on when different groups of people – or “audiences” – would get the final RTM code.

While I have nothing new to add regarding RTM today, I do however have more precise information to give on when you will be able to get RTM. Again, when you can get RTM depends on who you are.

Read more ::

http://rtweeter.com/s/a36

When will you get Windows 7 RTM? – Windows 7 Team Blog – The Windows Blog

Brad Abrams : Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 8: WCF Based Data Source

Just a reminder post on how to test for IE6. Unfortunately there are clients out there who still use the 8 year old browser being that its tied into there corporate infrastructure :: Don’t get me started :: So here’s a quick set of tips ::

Virtual PC 2007

It free and available from Microsoft.com :: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en

To get this work you will need to download a VPC image, as follows are available::

• IE6-XPSP3.exe contains a Windows XP SP3 with IE6 VHD file. Expires August 31, 2009
• IE7-XPSP3.exe contains a Windows XP SP3 with IE7 VHD file. Expires August 31, 2009
• IE8-XPSP3.exe contains a Windows XP SP3 with IE8 VHD file. Expires August 31, 2009
• IE7-VIS1.exe+IE7-VIS2.rar+IE7-VIS3.rar contain a Vista Image with IE7 VHD file. Expires 120 days after first run.
• IE8-VIS1.exe+IE8-VIS2.rar+IE8-VIS3.rar+IE8-VIS4.rar contain a Vista Image with IE8 VHD file. Expires 120 days after first run.

http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en 

Note: That the expiry dates where as of the time of typing this :: However MS always do release revised images :: By default IE^ also comes with the ‘Developer Toolbar’ a bit like and pre-dating the much lauded Firebug for Firefox.

SuperPreview

No need for Virtual Machine :: Simple and easy to install :: Side by Side Comparisons and overlays for IE6-8 with highlighter

The Beta is available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e6ac106-525d-45d0-84db-dccff3fae677&displaylang=en

Preview videos have shown ‘other browsers’ being demoed with the application :: Simply awesome tool ::: Good article link on Super Preview from MIX09

Update: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc136523.aspx via @MarthaRotter

XP Mode

Windows 7 users take note :: XP mode is available for you to run application in a virtual level within the new darling OS

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

Still a Beta at time of post but worth checking out