Dennis Vroegop

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 say order entry application, make sound every time an order is entered. Especially if that application is used by more than one person at the time, in the same office. Computers need to be quite and business applications even more so.

And then I moved to developing Surface applications. I never thought that I needed to include sound effects, mainly because the whole idea of SFX has never been on my horizon. Until I read this article on Sound on a Surface by Richard Wand. It was quite an eye ear opener for me.

Of course my applications can benefit from the right amount of audio feedback! The Surface unit is equipped with 2 pretty decent speakers, so why not use it? I know that there are situations where sound is discouraged, but in most cases the right amount of audio feedback can make the emersive experience that Surface is supposed to deliver even better.

The danger is of course that I will make a big jukebox or pinball machine out of my application: adding sounds to every gesture and action the user can do. To be honest: I have no idea what the right amount of sound is.

But right now I’ve added one little sound effect: the sound of cards shuffling. I think this sound is pretty effective: it gets played whenever the user selects a product from the product catalog and wants to see the photos associated with that product. The visual effect is that you see a list of photos stacking up, the chosen sound effect fits perfectly.

Since I am not a sound designer and our graphical designer doesn’t know anything abuot sound either, I had to find some good sound resources on the web. Luckily, they are not that hard to find. One quick search brought me enough resources to continue improving my application.

So, turn up the volume and enjoy the even better Surface experience!

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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 guy in the room. I’ve heard that the Dutch have, relative to the number of people, the largest installed units in the world!

Of course, “a lot of Dutch Surface users” isn’t enough for me. So in order to make people in the Netherlands more aware of the possibilities of Surface and to help companies make the right decisions, we’ve decided to launch the Dutch Surface User Group.

In this usergroup we will focus on three main areas.

1. What? Here we will answer all questions on what Surface actually is, what the hardware is like, how to deploy it, etc.

2. Why? This is a bit harder: why should a company invest in the hardware and the knowlegde around Surface? What is the business case for a Surface machine? What will be the benefit of an organization should they decide to purchase a Surface unit?

3. How? The how is more on the software side of things. We will help out the developers with the struggles every starting Surface Dev faces in the beginning. How do you use the SDK? How do you accomplish a certain task in WPF?

In order to answer those questions we will organize real life meetings (after all, things are much easier to explain when you have access to the hardware!), we will blog (such as this blog!), we will give lectures and we will maintain a forum.

The site of the UG is (all in dutch) http://surface.dotned.nl The UG is part of the larger dotNed community, which currently is the largest .net usergroup in the Netherlands (of which I happen to be the chairman, but that’s besides the point :-) )

We hope it will be a success and that we will be able to make Surface even more succesfull!

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My english blog has landed. Although I have been blogging in Dutch for quite a while now, it’s time to change gears a bit. I will continue to blog on my original blog site (which is http://www.dotned.nl ) but I will also post stuff here which might be of interested to a larger audience.

Being a C# MVP means I will talk about Visual Studio .net, C# but mostly about Microsoft Surface.

So stay tuned!

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