Michael Wolf

Thursday May 21, 2009

Cynergy.Cruises at TechEd 09

Last week we I had the honor or presenting with the Surface team during Tech.Ed about the announcement of Microsoft Surface SP1. For the session at Tech.Ed 09 myself Rick Barazza and Jon Bradley developed one of the first public surface sp1 applications, were calling Cynergy.Cruises . Take a look at the screencast below.



From a technology stand point theres some pretty interesting stuff in here.

The WPF / Silverlight Continuum

For the silverlight readers you might notice the card drop animation looks similar to a blog post a couple weeks ago. That's because it is, the animation was generated from after effects during the same session, and pulled into the surface application using the exact same code as seen on the silverlight post. This code is actually part of our internal tools which is compiled for WPF (aka surface) and Silverlight. With xaml in the browser / surface / desktop (+windows 7) maturing we will see more and more of these scenarios.

Element Menus (would be awesome in Windows 7)

My wife recently "upgraded" from a mac book to an HP touchsmart tx2. I really like it , and the touch experience is really great and even better with windows 7. Yet one of the items that feels odd is context menus, as that our fingers don’t have right click buttons. What the surface team did to enable these type of interactions to allow for a more natural navigation/feature paradigm is element menus. Element menus can be developed much like any other menu or context style system, and is very easily done with xaml.

Object routing

One of the things I like most in the surface pack is something called object routing. Object routing is nice new feature which allows you to connect applications directly with an object even when the application isn't running. This acts as a way to launch applications from the launcher and the attract screen. Its pretty simple to set up using a combination of registry keys and xml. At first this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it adds a new development plan to surface development. For example imagine Cynergy.Cruise started with just our 3 apps, but a month later we decide to add a new application to allow visitors to make restaurant reservations. Instead of deploying an updated application which might introduce bugs etc, we can simply deploy a whole new application which acts as a single integrated experience using object routing. Generally making it much easier to build surface experiences that scale larger and larger as time and development allows.

Faster each day

All and all I was very happy with the level of integration we were able to achieve and speed we were able to develop this up (2 weeks) using the sp1 features. Its often easy for us as technologists to gripe about a feature here or there, but if your living in the XAML trenches like we do, you have to admit WPF/SL is really moving at a pretty rapid pace. Bring in windows 7 rc , Silverlight 3 beta, WPF 4 beta (coming soon), and Surface SP1 and were moving forward a little bit each day.