Personalized Pages

I’m a big fan of Personalized Pages, which I use to subscribe to feeds from all around the Web, and view them in one single Web page, which is a pretty convenient way to allow me to keep myself updated with recent news.

But when using Firefox 3.0, the Personalized Page service I was currently using, Windows Live Personalized Experience, wouldn’t work nicely. Some of the feeds couldn’t be loaded and I am no longer able to navigate to the various tabs I have.

Thus, I went and tested out the various Personalized Page services like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes and Pageflakes, to decide which service to migrate to, and these are my thoughts.

iGoogle

Pros:

• Google Reader as RSS reader
• Loads of widgets available
• Able to view feeds contents directly by clicking the + beside the listed titles
• Close integration with other Google services (Gmail, etc)

Cons:

• Ugly GUI
• Unable to customize layout (Fixed number of columns)
• lack of beautiful theme choices
• Search bar taking up loads of screen space, (I can Google stuff with my Web browser)
• adding stuff is troublesome
• No OPML import or export (containing all my feeds)
• Unable to drag and rearrange order of tabs.

Event: Remix Essential 2008

Just got news from my MSP manager that Remix Essentials 08 will be held at:

Date	:	27th May 2008
Time	:	9.00am – 1.00pm
Venue	:	Lim Kok Wing University, Cyberjaya

I’ve been hearing “rumours” that Remix 08 will be held at  soon, and I was really looking forward to it.

There will be sessions on stuff like Expression Studio, Windows Live, Silverlight, WPF, and UX. The speakers of these sessions are awesome guys like Leon Brown, Arturo Toledo, Angus Logan, and our resident Silverlight guy, Rohan Thomas.

Unlike the Remix or Mix events of other countries, Remix Essentials 08 is totally free!

On top of that, attendees stand a chance to win a full copy of Expression Studio 2! The seats are limited to a first come first served basis, you’ll definitely not want to miss out, so register right now!

TARC Imagine Day 2007

Its been some time since I last blogged, which was almost 4 months ago, and it was in these 4 months that me and my friends organised one of the biggest school events ever, the Imagine Day.

The Imagine Day 2007 is organized by the Microsoft Student Partners of TAR College, and the Computer Science Society, and thanks to the the full support of the School of Arts & Science of TAR College, and the sponsorship and collaboration from Microsoft, everything is made possible.

The objective of the Imagine Day is to make a difference in the lives of students, by exposing students to the worlds premier technology competition for students, the Imagine Cup.

Thus, we have organised a scaled down version of the Imagine Cup, the TARC Imagine Cup, with various categories, which are:

We managed to get 183 participants, which is much much more than the total Malaysian participants of the Imagine Cup last year, where we prepared many classes to expose them to the latest tools and technologies, to better prepare each and everyone of them to compete in the Imagine Cup.

The finals of these competitions are held on the Imagine Day, where teams came head to head, and only the best team wins.

We are also prouder than ever to have Joe Wilson, Senior Director of Academic Initiatives for Developer and Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Corp. (US) as an attending VIP, to officiate the opening ceremony of Imagine Day.

In his opening speech, he mentioned that 30 or more years ago, there were a few students that sat down, and believed that in the future, each and every household would own a PC, and today, they have formed one of the biggest technology companies in history, Microsoft.

He went on to say that the Imagine Cup is one of the biggest technology competition ever, and is organized for and students, and even the Imagine Day, its all organized for students.

It was a monumental speech, and I was more than honoured to bring him around to tour the various booths of the event, where he couldn’t stop snapping pictures all around the place, and it was absolutely fantastic that he, and the other VIPs, were all impressed with the whole event.

We, the organizing committee, took 3 full days, from morning to night, even skipping some meals (and some classes ), to set up the Imagine Day venue, but it only took an hour or so to dismantle everything.

As I stared around when everyone was dismantling everything, the first thing that came to my mind was what Joe Wilson quoted from the Vice Principal of TAR College, Mr. Yeow -

“It takes hours to cook a meal, but only a short amount of time to eat it”

Very true indeed, organizing the Imagine Day and the TARC Imagine Cup took us around 4 months, and it all ended, just within a day.

I’m immensely proud and honoured to be the Organizing Chairperson of this monumental event, getting to know and work alongside many fantastic people, learning to deal with the many ups and downs, it has been an experience of a lifetime!

Finally, I would like to say Thank You, to the organizing committee, to the faculty of SAS, and to those from Microsoft, and each and everyone, who made a difference, and made all of this possible!

PS: I will upload some Imagine Day Wallpapers shortly, stay tuned

Awesome Interview with Scott Guthrie by Tim Anderson

Tim Anderson has just posted an awesome interview with Scott Guthrie, where they talked about many cool geek stuff like LINQ, ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WPF.

I finally understand why they’re going crazy about LINQ, that allows the use dynamic SQL to perform CRUD operations on other databases like MySQL and SQLite, that’s the next best thing to seeing the functionality of stored procedures in free databases!

Tim was great in pointing out certain issues that many have always wondered about Microsoft’s vision of Silverlight, and based on what Scott says, it could be fair to say that Microsoft is definitely sticking by their word in enabling the delivery of Silverlight across different platforms and browsers.

There was also comparison of Silverlight between different technologies like WPF, Google Gears, Adobe AIR, and of course, Flash and Flex, where some very very good points were pointed out, like whether or not XBAPs are still viable now that Silverlight is out in the streets.

Especially loved this part:

“I’ve seen comments from Mac users that have used the Silverlight 1.0 release, say for the Halo 3 streaming video, to the effect that “I didn’t think video on the web worked this well, and I’m pretty shocked that when I right-clicked on the control it says Microsoft.”

This is the link to the Halo 3 trailer powered by Silverlight, (the original version is still Flash though) I’ve never seen Silverlight work on Macs, could anyone justify that statement?

Microsoft Silverlight site Silverlight-enabled

Even though it should have “happened” earlier, Microsoft’s official Silverlight site is now Silverlight-enabled! (It was actually Silverlight-enabled a few weeks back)

The animations are slick and smooth, for example when I click any one of the sections, there is no refresh, which means…partial-page updates…its the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel Control in action, and the animation included in UpdateProgress Control, is a sexy spinning Silverlight Orb (I’m not sure if its a .gif file or an actual Silverlight animation), neat!

The site would be a great example that shows what could be done with the combined usage of Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX, everything loads faster, with the use of the update panel control, even the video at the main page, probably encoded using Expression Media Encoder, and the slick animated objects for each section were very cool indeed.

The only flaws of the site is that some of the content’s text color is light grey, even though it matches well with light blue, the text isn’t that readable. And the Silverlight RC1 build isn’t exactly stable, there is always error messages popping up, not only in this site, but most other Silverlight powered sites I’ve browsed.

Its funny though, where if someone wanted to download any one of the Silverlight plug-ins, going to the site would automatically prompt the person to download it, else he wouldn’t be able to view the site.

Well I doubt it’ll make any difference anyway, as Microsoft would most probably would be distributing it with Windows Update once its released anyway

Tech.Ed SEA 2007

This coming September, Microsoft will be having its premier & largest annual conference in the South East Asia region, Tech.Ed SEA 2007, at 10-13 September at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center.

Why should you attend?

Those attending would be able to learn about the new Microsoft products and technologies, not from just any instructor, but experts and specialists in the industry, some of them even from Redmond, and even some which helped built the products and technologies. Which means you can fire questions at them without thinking twice, neat! (On second thought, do think twice)

Not only will you be able to learn, you would also get to know more people in the industry, share your knowledge, get to know more on what’s happening in the ever-changing world of technology.

Who should go?

The conference is mainly targeted at IT professionals and developers, not only to get them exposed and aware of the new products and technologies available, but to better equip them with the priceless knowledge on how, when, and what technologies or products should be used as their business solution, better improving both themselves, and their organizations.

But this time around, developers that like design, or designers that have technical knowledge, should also take part in this conference! Why? Continue on to find out more!

Malaysian Florist Site adopts Silverlight

“flowers for you”, is a Malaysian Florist Site, selling fresh flowers to certain parts of Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, Penang), nothing special at first glance, but in fact, the cool thing is, they’re one of the showcased silverlight-powered web sites in Silverlight.net!!

The company have chosen to choose Silverlight, along with ASP.NET AJAX, to create their full website, where it uses a combination of video, audio, and animation to showcase the beautiful flowers they sell for various occasions.

Well, the RC1 build isn’t fully stable yet, and the web site’s large usage of video is probably the driving reason why they’ve chosen to implement Silverlight, but judging from the design of their overall site, and the animations of their catalog page… this definitely must be a site in development.

Why do I say so? Well, the first thing is, the design is almost unacceptable, especially the color schemes (i’m seeing like sooo many different colors that seriously don’t contrast and match). For the logo….its jumbled with almost everything, and the and the spinning flowers looks funny.  On top of that, I have no idea why they have video in their catalog, its too distracting, and coupled with the color scheme…its almost disgusting, or maybe they just used it to showcase Silverlight’s media streaming capabilities?

The designers of the site should definitely learn from the design of sites like They’re Beautiful, which is a free virtual flowers site, founded by designers who left Microsoft, on the other hand, has a pretty simple and neat design, and the virtual flowers are very very nice, to find out more, about the site, check out this post from TechCrunch.

Silverlight isn’t always the ideal business solution, there are times when interface design is much, more important than flashy animations, and this site may very well be a case.

10 great things about Silverlight

I was reading through my Insider newsletter and found this awesome titled “10 Things You Should Know About Microsoft’s Silverlight”, written by Shawn Wildermuth, a Microsoft MVP in C#, to me, its more like 10 great things you should definitely know about Silverlight!

In the article, the Shawn talks about the 10 key points based on his hands-on experience for dealing with Silverlight for months. He covers on how Silverlight could very well be the solution synchronizing Web Strategy with Rich Internet Applications, as even though it currently may not be able to match Flash in the RIA industry, one thing to note (that even I myself sometimes forget), is that it is currently in its embryonic stage (still RC), and when released, its features would most likely be able to rival Flash.

Even though it was just an article, it was very in-depth, and Shawn clearly defined the key areas of Silverlight that sometimes even eludes most of us, and how Silverlight 1.1 is clearly the version that all of us should be keeping our eyes on, like how Silverlight utilizes technologies developers already know, which is .NET, and the XAML used for Silverlight is much more easier and lightweight compared to that of WPF, and much, much more easier to pick up. Come to think of it, Adobe AIR is going in the same direction.

And with Microsoft holding true to its promise on Silverlight being Cross browser/OS, looking at how they’re helping the Moonlight team come up with the implementation of Silverlight for Linux, Silverlight may very well live up to its “flash killer” name.

More and more companies are starting to notice the existence of Silverlight, especially those in the video industry, one of the latest web sites to implement Silverlight RC1 is MLB.com (Major League Baseball), as pointed out by Ryan Stewart, its probably the first customer-facing usage of Silverlight running on the RC1 build (not sure if NetFlix etc has already implemented RC1 or not, but the transition will be quick).

Judging from the rapid growth of the It will probably be a matter of time before more and more web sites would choose to fully implement Silverlight.

Whether Silverlight will be a success or not, you’ve just gotta understand why the barons of Redmond are quietly confident, they’ve pulled it off once with the .NET Framework (“displacing” the Sun’s Java platform), so…who knows?

Remix’07 Australia Videos

Didn’t have enough from Mix’07? Craving for more videos to get your mind up and spinning?

Look no further! You could check out the videos from Remix’07 Australia from the PostMix Australia blog!

So far only the videos of day one have been uploaded, and the cool thing is that you could actually see the presenter, unlike the Mix’07 videos that were first uploaded (They’ve replaced some, if not all, of the videos to have both presenter and presentation content, guess I have to re-download……)

One of the videos to note would be Lee Brimlow’s (Design Technologist of Frog Design, author of theWPFblog) session “Rapid Fire Design and Prototyping in WPF”, where he shares his experience in developing WPF applications, including the upcoming Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista! Awesome! He also posted some of the sources he presented in the presentation in one of his post, here.

Conclusion? Download them all

Silverlight 1.0 RC1 & loads of tools!

Sweet, Silverlight 1.0 RC1 has been released, as mentioned from Tim Sneath’s post in his blog. He also mentioned in his post that Silverlight 1.0 RC1, which code-behind is done using Javascript, is now much more feature complete and stable (2000+ bugs fixed!), where Silverlight 1.1 is released as an Alpha Refresh, so download them now and install them!

For those who are interested in developing on Silverlight, Tim Sneath also included links for some of the tools, which are:

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Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

The newest Visual Studio, VS 2008, codenamed “Orcas”, comes with load of features, like multi-targeting support (backward compatibility), WPF & Silverlight editor, Javascript Intellisense, better CSS support, LINQ enabled, and many others.

For more information, refer to Scott Guthrie’s post on VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 Released. For information on its support on ASP.NET AJAX, refer to his post on ASP.NET AJAX in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008.

There are also many other cool stuff about VS2008 you could check out Scott Guthries post here to find out more, I didn’t post them because I really didn’t want to spoil the fun, but hey, its seriously cool, so make sure you check it out.

Visual Studio Extensions for Silverlight

Its an add-on to Visual Studio 2008 to support for the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh, make sure you download it along with Visual Studio 2008.

Silverlight 1.0 SDK / Silverlight 1.1 SDK

I’m not sure but the SDK may include steps to help developers upgrade their “broken” Silverlight applications (due to them not supporting the RC1 Release), judging from what I got to know from this post.

ASP.NET Futures CTP

Includes controls that could be bundled together with the ASP.NET default controls in the futures, like the Media control, built with Silverlight, (I saw it demo’ed in this Mix’07 session - DEV05 – Developing ASP.NET AJAX Controls with Silverlight, check out the sessions here), new ASP.NET AJAX features, for more information go here.

Expression Blend August Preview

Make sure you download the Expression Blend 2 August Preview, though the only key add-in I noticed is its support for Visual Studio 2008 (I’m praying “Edit in Visual Studio” goes through the UAC, though I doubt it), but I think they’ve definitely included much more support for Silverlight.

Expression Media Encoder Template Updater

An update for Expression Media Encoder Preview, make sure you have Expression Media Encoder installed, else you could get it here.

Microsoft Expression Blend 2 August Preview could be downloaded here, for more information, you could also refer to the Blend section in the Microsoft Expression website.

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Wow, thats a LOT of tools, make sure you download them all and go crazy