By now you have probably heard that the Build conference in September is sold out. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet you can enter a contest here. All you have to do is mail them a short (less than 140 character) reason why you should get one of these tickets.

Good luck and I hope to see you there.

I was asked at work today if I knew anything about “Jupiter”. The code name didn’t ring a bell but after a few seconds I knew what we were discussing. I didn’t have a lot of details so I went to Bing and searched for Jupiter and XAML. One of the top search results was a press pass article. I clicked on the link. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the article was from October 8, 2002. My first thought was “have they really been working on this for 9 years?” but I realized that the real issue is that Microsoft recycled the code name.

So the “Jupiter” that I really wanted to learn about is a feature of Windows 8. There isn’t a lot of information out there other than hints and innuendo that “Jupiter” is going to be a XAML layer on top of the native APIs in Windows 8. Mary-Jo Foley wrote an article in January that had some details but also has a later follow up saying that some of the details are in error. I guess we will have to wait until the Build conference to really learn what is going on with Windows 8.

Back at MIX Microsoft announced a developer conference in September in Anaheim. There wasn’t a lot of details and in the vacuum of information a lot of people were calling the conference PDC. At TechEd I asked around and was told that nobody at Microsoft was calling the conference PDC. It turns out that the name of the conference is “BUILD”. You can get more information about the conference and register at the web site http://www.buildwindows.com.

The conference will run September 13-16 in Anaheim, California so not only can you learn about “Windows 8” but if you go early or stay late you can go to Disneyland and the rest of the attractions in that part of California.

I was presenting on Windows Phone yesterday and didn’t see the announcement but as I am catching up it appears that Microsoft announced a little more about the next version of Windows that is code named “Windows 8”. There isn’t a lot of detail but from what I have seen there is a good mix between what we have in Windows 7 with a full file system and access to the resources of the PC and the Metro interface, tiles, and ease of use of Windows Phone 7. There is a video on YouTube that shows the new start screen and some of the other new features.

From what I can see there will be new ways of creating applications using HTML 5 and JavaScript. It is not clear to me if this is the entire application, the launcher, or a combination of the two. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the technology is similar to the way that Sidebar applications were created in Windows Vista. In any case since it is still a PC I would expect that my investments in WPF, WCF, WF, Silverlight, Winforms, etc. will still be useful and that it is not a 100% web only device.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the first betas and see what the future of Windows holds. This is an exciting time to be developing for the Windows platform.

In a survey (read non-scientific) poll done by PC Magazine as part of their 24th Readers Choice Awards the Samsung Windows Phone 7 scored higher than the Apple iPhone. You can read what went into the scores here.

We all know that trust is something that is fragile in that it is very hard to earn and can be lost almost immediately when something goes wrong. We have seen it time and time again with large companies that lose their customer’s data and spend a lot of time and money trying to regain that trust.

We also see the idea of trust in a lot of the social media and recommendation based nature of many “Web 2.0” sites. Microsoft has taken advantage of reputation to increase security with Internet Explorer 9. I have set up a new machine since coming to my new job as well as several virtual machines. In all the downloads I have only had one that triggered the warnings associated with the Application Reputation feature in IE 9. When downloading an application that the SmartScreen Filter does not know about the notification at the bottom of the screen appears in red and the warning message states “<filename> is not commonly downloaded and could harm your computer”.

You are given the option to delete the download from the download list before you even begin to download it. If you want to continue with the download you must click on the actions button. This will open a SmartScreen Filter dialog that has two important clues as to why this message appeared.

One is that the download is unsigned. The other is that the SmartScreen Filter has little or no information about the download. The default action at this point is to not run the program. The other visible option is to delete the program. In either case if you are not reading what you are presented and instead just blindly click on one of the options the download will be stopped and your computer will be protected.

To continue the download you must click on the more options button. You are then presented with the following dialog.

In this dialog you are presented with the same information as the previous dialog along with the same two options to abort the download and one new option to run the program anyway. If you click on the option to run anyway you can see the download just like any other trusted download.

The nice thing about this scheme is that even for unsigned but well known downloads you are not prompted to abort the download process. Of course signed downloads that are well known you are not prompted at all so the download process is frictionless.

Microsoft released the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta that includes the changes for the next version of Windows Phone code named “Mango”. You can read the official press release here. You can download and start working with them (including support for VB) here or get the iso image here. The press release discusses new samples and hands on labs. I guess I know what I will be doing in my spare time for the next little while.

Microsoft released a new toolkit for iOS yesterday as well as announcing that there will be updates for other mobile operating systems. I see this as Microsoft following through on their vision of the “consumerization of IT”. As much as Microsoft and Apple compete the reality is that there are a lot of people who carry an iPhone or iPad who also need to access resources. By making Windows Azure available to these other platforms I can take advantage of the scale out, security, access control, SQL Azure, and other services provided by Azure and reduce some of the additional effort needed to support multiple mobile clients.

I also applaud Microsoft for putting the iOS toolkit on github where iOS developers are more likely to find it.

Here are the links to the announcement:

• Official Microsoft Blog: Microsoft Announces Windows Azure Toolkits for iOS, Android and Windows Phone
• Windows Azure team blog: NOW AVAILABLE: Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS
• Wade Wegner’s blog: Getting Started with the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS

you can get the code here:

• https://github.com/microsoft-dpe
• https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-lib
• https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-samples
• https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-doc

and some other resources around the announcements:

Blog posts:

• Updates Coming Soon to the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 : What’s coming with the v1.2 release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7
• Using Windows Azure for Windows Phone 7 Push Notification Support : Details on how v1.1 of Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 provides out-of-the-box support for Push Notifications
• Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 1.2 will Integrate with ACS : Vittorio has blogged about upcoming details related to the Access Control Service 2.0 integration in v1.2

Screencasts:

• Getting Started with the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS : Webcast showing where to get the bits and how to get started
• Deploying the Cloud Ready Packages for Devices : Webcast showing how to deploy the cloud ready package to Windows Azure

Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7:

• http://watoolkitwp7.codeplex.com/

Cloud Ready Package for Devices:

• https://github.com/downloads/microsoft-dpe/watoolkitios-lib/cloudready.devices.zip

Enjoy the cloud goodness from Microsoft!

A month ago I changed jobs. There were many reasons but the masin one was to get back into coding all day. I have been updating my profiles on the various social networks that I am a member of and just realized that I didn't post anything here saying that I have changed jobs.

I am now working for Experlogix on their configurator product. I am now spending all of my day in Visual Studio instead of working in Office doing marketing type stuff. I learned a lot during my work at Advaiya and will always appreciate the people that I got to work with but sometimes change is good.

This whole change means that I will be doing more coding and therefore should be doing more blog posting. This will be good for the frequency of my posts here and should increase the signal to noise ratio of this blog. I appologize for the lack of useful content in this post and hope it will be the last for a long time.