First release of Viddler.Net

If you read my article in the Dutch .Net Magazine about Vista Media Center add-ins and you came looking on my blog for the Viddler.Net api, you just found it! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please read on :)

This is my first release of the Viddler.Net api, which is a wrapper for the Viddler api. The Viddler.Net api allows a .Net developer to make use of the videos on the Viddler website through code. At this stage not all methods are implemented, but they will be soon. In the download you’ll find the full source code of the api including the unit tests. To be able to run the unit tests you need to modify the app.config and put in your own username, password and api key. You can request you api key here.

If you want to use Viddler.Net in your own project, you need to add a Viddler.Net configuration section to your app.config or web.config. To do this you first need to declare the configuration section in the <configSections> section in top of the configuration file. Then you need to define the configuration section somewhere below the configSections section, but between the <configuration>elements. You configuration file should look something like this:


  

Download Viddler API wrapper for .Net 2.0 Version v0.1 beta 

Note that not all methods are currently implemented or working correctly. I’m working on getting them all to work, but I thought to release a version now, while I’m still improving it. The current status is represented by the following test results overview (click to enlarge):

On my todo-list is currently:

  • Implement all methods
  • Complete all unit tests
  • Change http method from GET to POST to allow more characters for some parameters

Home Server campaign

in case you haven’t seen this yet, Microsoft has a rather interesting marketing campaign around Windows Home Server. One of the parts of the campaign is a book about Home Server which looks like it’s written for kids. The book explains what the magic ‘Server’ in the house is all about.

Microsoft went so far with this campaign that it actually looks like you can buy the book from Amazon! Absolutely hilarious!

If you would like to know more about that weird ‘Server’ that suddenly appeared in your house and what it does, you should definitely read the book!

How-To: New ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Video Screencasts

From the almighty Scott Hanselman:

Released today are four new screencasts about the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions by various members of the ASP.NET team. Every video is available in numerous formats, and note that this also includes re-encoded versions of my Intro to MVC Screencast in a pile of formats including an iPod/iTouch compatible format, as well as ones for the Zune and PSP and a utterly unwatchable ;) 40 meg 3GP one for 3G Phones.

Continue reading here (includes links to the videos).

Ext JS

Although I rarely develop front-end applications, let alone web applications, during my day-to-day job, I’m still practicing the skill in my personal time. Before my interests in application integration started to arise I was very much intrigued by all what is currently known as web 2.0 and Ajax. In the time we would simply call it DHTML, but that term was superseded by the more catchy ones.

So if I see someting passing by that really looks cool and is built using simply Javascript and HTML I always take a quick look at it. This time I was following an e-mail thread on Ajax libraries until Ext JS was suggested. As I’d never heard of it, I went out and looked at the samples. And I must say I’m really impressed with the style, smoothness and functionality of the library. Now I only have to check out how to incorporate this with .Net.

Please do check out the samples at http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/samples.html.

Jonas Butt, the new IT-talent?

IT-talent is an internship project which offers IT-talents an exclusive assignment with a prominent IT company. The goal is to create an unique experience and a solid basis for a successful career in IT. Check out www.it-talenten.nl (Dutch) for more information on this project.

One of the eight participating students is Jonas Butt, who’s doing his internship at Avanade Netherlands. During his internship he’ll try to answer the following research question:

How can Avanade promote the reuse of products (like code, patterns and domain knowledge) from similar projects within the same domain to reduce costs and shorten the run time?

If Jonas manages to make his blog the most interesting and entertaining of all eight he’ll be awarded the IT-talent of the year award. For more information please continue to read his blog.

Running

For about 5 months now I’m running with a couple of friends. We started out with a small route in the woods, but that got a little too dark in the winter. One time I was running right behind one of my fellow runners and I couln’t see anything but his white shoes. Suddenly I noticed the path was way to our right and we were standing somewhere in the middle of some schrubs. We then decided it was time for a new route. We found that route near the woods we used to run. Since then we expanded it to be around 7 kilometers in length. Our last record is about 41 minutes and today we’ll try to beat that. Below an image of the route.

DevDays 2007, were you there?

DevDays 2007…I was there, but were you? For those of you living in the Netherlands, Microsoft held the 2007 edition of DevDays and off course Avanade was well represented. On the main plaza you could find our stand where we were running an XNA demo on two giant plasma screens. One was running on a laptop and the other live on a Xbox360. Okay, Avanade doesn’t actually do projects using XNA, but we didn’t mind. In a part of our spare time Eric van Feggelen (http://www.fegelein.com) and I developed sort of a tech demo to show off the power of XNA. Both with little experience in 3D game development (Eric some more than I) we put together a scene rendering with water, clouds, an island and off course our logo.

I’ve put the demo online for you to download. You need at least a videocard that support shader language 2.0 and DirectX9 to run this.
Download Avanade DevDays 2007 XNA Demo Version v1.0

Most of the time I spend on our stand showing off our XNA demo, but I also was able to attend some sessions. Most of the DevDays were about Silverlight and Visual Studio Orca’s, and oh boy, some great stuff is ahead of us. I’m definitely going to play a little with Silverlight and LINQ to SQL, but also with XNA.

Here you can see me in action on the stand :-)

Me at DevDays 2007

Playing Blog-Tag

Jolly, they got me! Dennis just tagged me. At first I had no clue what it meant, but it seems a game of tag, and now I’m it. This means I have to write five things not much people know about me. So here it goes :)

  1. My girlfriend is Tamara Bos and we’re together for over 7.5 years now. She’s my first and only true love and we are very happy with each other, especially now we are living together in Almere since last october.
  2. I wanted to be a comic writer. You could always find me draw, wherever I was. I got a book on how to draw comics and tried every technique in it. Since I got a real computer I don’t practice drawing anymore. These days I express myself when I design websites on the computer instead.
  3. I was very active in the mod tracking scene under various nick names, including DJ Schnibble and Snith. It started out as a joke when I wanted to cover the horrific song ‘Ik zing dit lied voor jou alleen’ by Jantje Smit. After that I covered ’7PM’ by ATB and finally created about twenty tracks of various styles.
  4. I’ve made two short movies in a school contest and won the awards for best movie and best male and best music. The first movie was about a hippie who killed people because he needed meatloaf for in his soup. I created the complete sound effects track in mod tracker. Because I only had a video recorder I needed to dub the whole track to the tape at once. The second movie was called Split Second and it was about a detective who’s girlfriend got kidnapped. This was the first movie at the school contest to be edited completely on the computer. We added a lot of special effects like explosions, gun fire and sound effects.
  5. I played soccer for almost my whole life. At the age of five I wanted to play soccer, but was too young. Because they had one kid short I was added to the team at Unicum. My position on the field was left-back, but sometimes I played left-center. This means I didn’t score too often, but I didn’t care. For years I played in the highest team, but before I reached the age I could play for the first team I quit soccer. Mainly because I disliked the morale of a couple of players, but also because I needed time for my education. After my time on the field I played indoor soccer for a couple of years with some friends. When most of them quit I wanted to return to field soccer, but during the second training I made a wrong move and tore the meniscus of my right knee. I don’t play since then and won’t play it anymore. I’ve moved to other sports instead, like tennis and spinning.

Phiew, that’s it. Now I pass it along to Mark, Ronald, Olav, Tamara and Jeroen
Good luck, you’ve just been tagged!

Add existing project from web drama

Are you tired of dealing with the drama regarding adding an existing project from web in Visual Studio? If so read on, because if you follow these steps tightly you’re ready to go in a minute, or … well, faster then figuring this one out yourself :)

  1. Open your solution in Visual Studio and choose Add > Existing Project From Web
  2. Type the url to your site, e.g. http://localhost/YourSite
  3. This is the important part: in the open file dialog, instead of browsing to the project file, type the full url to your project file, e.g. http://localhost/YourSite/YourSite.csproj
  4. Visual Studio will tell you it was unable to match the url to the path. Now browse to the directory that contains the project file and select it.

As if magic, Visual Studio suddenly adds your project to the soltion. I hope this helps you not to waste hours to figure it out or even let you create a new project file (I dit that most of the time, go figure!).

Migration

The last couple of weeks I’ve succesfully migrated my Media Center including this blog to Vista Beta 2. While I was busy anyway, I decided to migrate my blog to Community Server, so here you are. I hope you like the new design as well.

Vista is running pretty well, although I have a driver conflict which makes my computer reboot about once a day, but I can live with that. Vista Media Center is really cool. I really like the way they present video’s and music in this version. It is somewhat slower unfortunately, but that may be fixed in future released (let’s hope it does :) ).