Surface

There are 23 entries for the tag Surface

Build 2012, some thoughts..

I think you probably read my rant about the logistics at Build 2012, as posted here, so I am not going into that anymore. Instead, let’s look at the content. (BTW If you did read that post and want some more info then read Nia Angelina’s post about Build. I have nothing to add to that.) As usual, there were good speakers and some speakers who could benefit from some speaker training. I find it hard to understand why Microsoft allows certain people on stage, people who speak English with such strong ......
Posted On Monday, November 5, 2012 8:57 AM | Comments (1)

MVP Program, Award and my view on things

If you follow the MVP program a bit, you might have heard about Rob Eisenberg and his struggles with the MVP program. If you haven’t, well, just move along, there’s nothing interesting to read here. Still here? Good. For those of you who don’t know who Rob is: he is the creator of Caliburn and Caliburn Micro, a MVVM Framework I truly love, support and have written about here before. He is one of the bigger contributors to the Open Source community in the Microsoft technologies. If you work on anything ......
Posted On Thursday, January 5, 2012 3:27 PM | Comments (1)

More on Metro

You must have heard about it. Windows 8 will all about Metro. Sure, you can run ‘old-school’ applications on the platform, but most attention these days is about the new user interface. The UI is based on the design language Metro, a design philosophy we first saw in Windows Phone. Nowadays you see more and more of Metro. The Microsoft website is loosely based on it, the Zune mediaplayer uses it and so on. So it wasn’t a surprise to see that Windows 8 is all about Metro. In this screenshot you see ......
Posted On Thursday, October 20, 2011 2:35 PM | Comments (3)

Speaking about Surface at Community Day 2011 in Belgium

June the 23rd the Belgium user groups have another free event. It’s called the Community Day and this year they will celebrate their 5th anniversary! To celebrate this they invited some collegue-usergroups from across the border to speak there as well. Timmy Kokke from Sixin (http://www.sixin.nl) and myself will be there to talk about a number of items. I will be doing a talk on MVC 3 (not so interesting for regular readers of this blog) and a talk on Surface Development (which fits this blog more ......
Posted On Sunday, May 22, 2011 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

Microsoft Surface SDK on 64 bit Windows 7

Let me start with this disclaimer: this is not a supported environment. You may/will run into problems and then you’re on your own. Microsoft will not help you here. If you want to develop for Surface (v1, that is, since that’s the only one available at this time of writing) you will have to use Windows Vista 32bit and Visual Studio 2008 Pro or higher. So, that’s out of the way. Let’s return to the real world. I am, of course, running Windows 7 Ultimate (64bit) and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. After ......
Posted On Tuesday, March 22, 2011 10:39 AM | Comments (0)

Sevensteps and I are joining forces

As of today, I will be partnering with Sevensteps when it comes to developing great Surface, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7 Touch applications. Below you’ll find the press release we sent out today. I am looking forward to this partnership and expect great things coming from us both in the future! Dennis Vroegop, Microsoft MVP, joins Sevensteps partner network 1 March 2011, Seattle / Amersfoort Today Dennis Vroegop and Bart Roozendaal, both Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Microsoft Surface, ......
Posted On Wednesday, March 2, 2011 2:40 AM | Comments (0)

Speaking at Mix11

In April Microsoft will hold the next MIX event. MIX was usually targeted at web designers and developers but has grown over the years to be more a general conference focused on the web and devices. In other words: everything the normal consumer might encounter. It’s not your typical developers conference, although you’ll find many developers there as well. But next to the developers you’ll probably run into designers and user experience specialists as well. This year I am proud to say that I will ......
Posted On Wednesday, February 23, 2011 8:27 AM | Comments (1)

Designing for the future

User interfaces and user experience design is a fast moving field. It’s something that changes pretty quick: what feels fresh today will look outdated tomorrow. I remember the day I first got a beta version of Windows 95 and I felt swept away by the user interface of the OS. It felt so modern! If I look back now, it feels old. Well, it should: the design is 17 years old which is an eternity in our field. Of course, this is not limited to UI. Same goes for many industries. I want you to think back ......
Posted On Thursday, February 17, 2011 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

Windows Phone 7 event

This might not be of interest to anyone living outside of the Netherlands, but I still wanted to share this. On march 10th the dutch .net usergroup dotNed (of which I am chairman) organizes a LAN party together with the company Sevensteps. Sevensteps is a big player in the Surface area: they are one of the few companies whose applications are part of the standard tools you get when you buy a Surface unit. They were also present at the CES in Las Vegas earlier this year to introduce the SUR40, as ......
Posted On Wednesday, February 2, 2011 1:36 PM | Comments (0)

Surface V2.0

It’s been quiet around here. And the reason for that is that it’s been quiet around Surface for a while. Now, a lot of people assume that when a product team isn’t making too much noise that must mean they stopped working on their product. Remember the PDC keynote in 2010? Just because they didn’t mention WPF there a lot of people had the idea that WPF was dead and abandoned for Silverlight. Of course, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The same applies to Surface. While we didn’t hear much ......
Posted On Thursday, January 27, 2011 9:08 AM | Comments (1)

Windows Touch: using the Surface Toolkit Beta for Windows 7

Let’s face it: not everybody can afford a full-blown Surface unit in his or her house. But most of us can afford a windows 7 touch enabled computer. The prices for these kind of devices have dropped a lot since the introduction of Windows 7. Companies such as Dell, HP and others offer notebooks as well as desktop systems that can handle multi-touch for a reasonable price. And with touch you’re halfway there. What you don’t have is the object recognition of the Surface. And the rigidity of the Surface ......
Posted On Thursday, November 18, 2010 3:58 PM | Comments (1)

Changes are coming…

I have to admit it. I’ve had fun the last 14 years. Starting a company, not knowing where it would take me. Hiring our first employee, that was kinda scary…Moved away from Delphi and jumped aboard the .net train, without a second of regret. Became a MVP because the company allowed me to spend a lot of time on the community. Saw my first Surface computer while attending a MVP summit in Redmond. Became one of the first 4 Surface MVP’s because the company allowed me to work with that technology extensively ......
Posted On Monday, November 15, 2010 2:11 PM | Comments (6)

Podcast on Surface with Erik Havir (Microsoft) and Dennis Vroegop

A couple of months ago Devnology recorded a podcast where Erik Havir from the Microsoft Surface team and myself were interviewed about all things Surface. You can listen / download it here. If you’re new to Surface, this is definitely worth a listen! Technorati Tags: surface,wpf,mvp ......
Posted On Friday, October 1, 2010 9:10 PM | Comments (0)

Changes… for the better!

For years I’ve been a Visual C# MVP. It was always a title I was very proud of, since it meant that the work I do for the community didn’t go by unnoticed. Still, every year when renewal time came around I got more and more nervous. Would I be an MVP again this year? Today was renewal day so I was anxiously waiting for that email (or not getting it…). And just after 4 pm I got that email: congratulations, you’ve become an MVP awardee! I was very happy of course. But then I took a better look at that ......
Posted On Friday, October 1, 2010 4:48 PM | Comments (0)

Surface development: it’s just like software development

Surface is magic. Everyone using it seems to think that way. And I have to be honest, after working for almost 2 years with the platform I still get that special feeling the moment I turn on the unit to do some more work. The whole user experience, the rich environment of the SDK, the touch, even the look and feel of the Surface environment is so much different from the stuff I’ve been working on all my career that I am still bewildered by it. But… and this is a big but.. in the end we’re still talking ......
Posted On Sunday, March 7, 2010 7:44 PM | Comments (0)

Developing for Surface, part I

Surface is cool. There’s no doubt about that. People who walk up to the machine and start using it are usually impressed by it. That also goes for developers: they are sometimes even overwhelmed by it and start to wonder how hard it is to develop software for this platform. The good news is, is that it is actually fairly easy to build software for the Surface platform. Well, easy… if you know how to develop in WPF that is. In this post I will outline the most common steps to take to develop your ......
Posted On Thursday, September 17, 2009 10:36 AM | Comments (1)

Microsoft Surface: just a big touchscreen?

I hear this remark a lot. Whenever I show Surface to people there’s always one in the group who, after about 10 minutes, comments that Surface is just a big IPhone or a flat touch screen. Of course, it’s not. First of all, you can’t use a Surface unit out of the box to make phone calls. Second, the Surface unit is hardly portable where the IPhone most definitely is. To these commentators, Surface is like an IPhone but with less features. Again, of course, it’s not. Usually I can convince these skeptics ......
Posted On Friday, September 4, 2009 8:40 AM | Comments (0)

Reduced finger recognition on Surface

Tags: Surface Development of Surface applications is done on the Surface Simulator. Even at Microsoft the Surface team works most of the time in the simulator: I’ve heard they have 1 Surface unit per 8 developers. The simulator works fine and is a great tool for developing the applications: the debugging experience is actually quite nice. But sometimes you have to deploy your application to the actual physical unit to see what it looks like in ‘real life’. I think that is the only way to determine ......
Posted On Friday, July 24, 2009 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

Dr. Neil to present for the Dutch Surface UG

With pride we announce that the next meeting of the Dutch Surface User Group will have Dr. Neil Roodyn as a speaker! This is the abstract of his talk: Surface has sex appeal, people are attracted to Surface as a sexy new technology. The development tools make it easy to build Surface applications and yet so many Surface applications fail to deliver the true value of Surface. In this session Dr. Neil will explore some of the things you can do to enable your Surface applications to deliver more than ......
Posted On Wednesday, July 22, 2009 8:33 AM | Comments (0)

Justifications for buying a Surface machine

Tags: Surface A lot of people come to me with the question “why should we, as an organization, invest in Surface?” Or, to be more honest: developers come to me with the question “What can I do to convince my manager to buy us a Surface Unit"?”, which is the same question but more honest. The answer is, of course, the same answer as I give to everyone who asks me for a justification for investing in hard- and software: there needs to be a business case. And in these hard economic times: there needs ......
Posted On Thursday, July 2, 2009 2:09 PM | Comments (0)

Video impression (in Dutch) of the first Surface UG

During the first meeting of the Dutch Surface User Group we had a video crew available who created an impression of the evening. All in Dutch, but if Dutch doesn’t scare you you might want to watch this. We’re looking forward to the next meeting! Tags: Surface ......
Posted On Wednesday, July 1, 2009 4:52 PM | Comments (0)

Sounds in a Surface application

Tags: Surface I have a confession to make. Never in my life have I ever felt the need to include sound effects in my applications. I have been programming professionaly for over 16 years and it has never happened to me that my manager or a customer walked up to me and said “Dennis, please add a whooshing sound to this button so I know that I clicked it.” I am sure that goes for the most of you. Well, at least the people who write LOB systems. After all, it would be quite disturbing to have a, let’s ......
Posted On Tuesday, June 30, 2009 4:40 PM | Comments (0)

Surface in the Netherlands

Sometimes I get the feeling the Dutch are pretty much of a gadget freak. Somehow we are always one of the firsts to try out new things, to play with new toys and to advocate new technologies. Since we have quite a small population (about 16 million people) I find it rather amazing that everytime there is something new and cool, you’ll always find some Dutch there. Same goes for Surface. Dr. Neil Roodyn told me once that no matter where he gave his Surface training, there was always at least one Dutch ......
Posted On Tuesday, June 30, 2009 3:32 PM | Comments (0)