Windows Vista

Wow!  We’ve posted the source code to the Patient Monitoring WPF prototype.  I’m sure this will be one of the top WPF sample applications for developers and designers.

Some background for folks that have never heard of this app:  About 2 years ago I started working on a prototype that would demonstrate some of the coolness that is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly codenamed “Avalon”). It was shown publicly for the first time at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July 2005.

Since then it’s sort of taken on a life of its own.  It’s been shown at an incredible number of events both publicly and internally by myself and numerous others.  It’s even made it onto what we refer to internally as the Windows Vista Readiness Toolkit.  This is the standard toolkit that most Microsoft employees and some partners are using to demo Windows Vista.  So it’s sort of become one of the canonical Vista demos as well.

Since the very beginning the demo has helped many partners envision how an application might take advantage of some of most interesting new features in WPF and Vista.  Based on feedback I know that it’s done a great job of that.  Onthe other hand, one of the top requests has been from developers wanting access to the source code.  Rob Relyea even built a tutorial for building a portion of that app which he presented at PDC’05.  That was incredibly useful and whet the apetite of many developers.  Nothing beats having the full source code and that’s exactly what we’ve just posted publicly.

Kudos and thanks to Tim Sneath and Karsten Januszewski for making numerous changes to keep the code fresh and working with the many Windows Vista builds.

Wow!  We’ve posted the source code to the Patient Monitoring WPF prototype.  I’m sure this will be one of the top WPF sample applications for developers and designers.

Some background for folks that have never heard of this app:  About 2 years ago I started working on a prototype that would demonstrate some of the coolness that is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly codenamed “Avalon”). It was shown publicly for the first time at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July 2005.

Since then it’s sort of taken on a life of its own.  It’s been shown at an incredible number of events both publicly and internally by myself and numerous others.  It’s even made it onto what we refer to internally as the Windows Vista Readiness Toolkit.  This is the standard toolkit that most Microsoft employees and some partners are using to demo Windows Vista.  So it’s sort of become one of the canonical Vista demos as well.

Since the very beginning the demo has helped many partners envision how an application might take advantage of some of most interesting new features in WPF and Vista.  Based on feedback I know that it’s done a great job of that.  Onthe other hand, one of the top requests has been from developers wanting access to the source code.  Rob Relyea even built a tutorial for building a portion of that app which he presented at PDC’05.  That was incredibly useful and whet the apetite of many developers.  Nothing beats having the full source code and that’s exactly what we’ve just posted publicly.

Kudos and thanks to Tim Sneath and Karsten Januszewski for making numerous changes to keep the code fresh and working with the many Windows Vista builds.

I’ve been working with Accruent, a Microsoft Gold Partner, as they migrate to their next generation of Real Estate Management System.  Sanjay Parthasarthy, who heads up all things evangelism, invited me to demo the really cool work they’ve done during his keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July.  In this demo, I step through various parts of the app showing how Accruent takes advantage of various pieces of the Microsoft stack to its full advantage.  

I start off in Office on the client, in this case Word, showing how they pull line of business info down to the desktop to help individual information workers be more productive.  (starts at: 0:50)

I then move to the server where they use SharePoint and Excel Web Services as the infrastructure on which they build their dashbaords for team collaboration around individual stores.  It’s here that they use Virtual Earth and Windows Live Local to build a mashup showing geospatial data that would have been a hard-to-grok list on a web site.  Cool! (starts at:  2:49)

The grand finale comes where we move to an jaw-dropping, eye-popping 3D view of customer data.  I won’t spoil the ending by trying to describe it but it’s defintely worth watching.  (starts at:  8:00)

Have a look and let me know what you think.

P.S.

By the way, Jason Suess interviewed the team from Accruent that worked on this project.  That video is also up on Channel 9.

I’ve been working with Accruent, a Microsoft Gold Partner, as they migrate to their next generation of Real Estate Management System.  Sanjay Parthasarthy, who heads up all things evangelism, invited me to demo the really cool work they’ve done during his keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July.  In this demo, I step through various parts of the app showing how Accruent takes advantage of various pieces of the Microsoft stack to its full advantage.  

I start off in Office on the client, in this case Word, showing how they pull line of business info down to the desktop to help individual information workers be more productive.  (starts at: 0:50)

I then move to the server where they use SharePoint and Excel Web Services as the infrastructure on which they build their dashbaords for team collaboration around individual stores.  It’s here that they use Virtual Earth and Windows Live Local to build a mashup showing geospatial data that would have been a hard-to-grok list on a web site.  Cool! (starts at:  2:49)

The grand finale comes where we move to an jaw-dropping, eye-popping 3D view of customer data.  I won’t spoil the ending by trying to describe it but it’s defintely worth watching.  (starts at:  8:00)

Have a look and let me know what you think.

P.S.

By the way, Jason Suess interviewed the team from Accruent that worked on this project.  That video is also up on Channel 9.

Last night I presented at the SDForum Windows SIG in Mountain View, CA.  As usual I had a blast.  The presentation went well.  The demos went well and there were a lot of great questions.  I’ve posted my slides those who might want to dive in a little deeper.  Email me or let me know below if you have any questions or comments about the session or Windows Vista.

I posted the slides here as a PDF (2MB) for those who want them.

Whoa!  I was catching up on some blog reading and saw on Carter’s blog that Channel 9 posted a video of the heathcare app I’ve been working on for the past while.  It wasn’t supposed to be posted until after PDC but I guess Scoble was too excited to hold back. 

It’s very cool stuff.  It’s a prototype of a couple of real-time patient monitroing applications.  The first is WinForms based and interesting but the really cool stuff is in the 2nd part of the demo where I show the business value that Avalon… err Windows Presentation Foundation brings to the healthcare world.  The psoting says it’s for a user group conference but this was actually shown at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

Have a look.  Let me know what you think.

My colleague and team mate, David Weller, has just posted a new video to MSDN.  It’s a pretty slick lap around an application built by Accela with help from Keyhole and IdentityMine.  Using an emergency services worker scenario, the video clearly demonstrates the busisness value of some of the new technology coming in Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 and then to top it all off it shows how Longhorn makes these types of scenarios even more compelling.

Very, very cool.