Archive: March, 2008
Começa amanhã a 3ª edição deste grande evento a nível nacional que vai ser o TechDays 2008!
Aconselho vivamente a irem acompanhando os vídeos que estão a ser disponibilizados no site videos.techdays.pt. Dá uma ideia do ambiente que está a ser vivido e do que está a acontecer (inclusivamente já hoje, no evento de lançamento dos produtos 2008).
Para amanhã dou desde já destaque à sessão MOB02 - Sync Framework: Optimizações em Cenários Online, Melhorias em Cenários Offline e de Roaming e Colaborações entre Dispositivos,Serviços e Aplicações.
Vi uma sessão sobre o mesmo tema no TechEd Developers em Barcelona e valeu bem a pena.
Dou também destaque a duas sessões Hands on Labs, pois serão conduzidas por alguns Microsoft Student Partners. 
MOBHOL13R - Hands on Labs - XNA 2.0 (Bruno Tavares, João Fernandes e Marco Silva)
WEBHOL04 - Hands on Labs - Silverlight (Gonçalo Chaves e Bruno Silva)
Technorati Tags: TechdaysPT08
Just take a look at http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=94
“Microsoft SharedView is a fast, easy way to share documents and screen views with small groups of friends or coworkers; anytime, anywhere. Use SharedView to put your heads together and collaborate - create, convey, and communicate…across physical boundaries, through firewalls, and down to the smallest details.”
I’ve just tried it for 5 minutes, it worked pretty well, without any port forwarding or firewall configurations.
I had a lot of problems to even try to start using similar tools like Remote Assistance or Windows Meeting Space.
As you might know, it is possible to use Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK in your websites as an authentication mechanism. You put an iframe in your homepage, which links to the Windows Live ID sign in page. After a successful authentication the user is redirected back to your website, where you receive the user’s ID. With this ID you can find your user data in your database, and do whatever you need.
Since ASP 2.0, you can use the ASP.NET Membership/Roles Provider as an authentication/authorization mechanism in your websites. You even have controls that make these tasks easy. If you are not familiar with these functionalities take a look at a nice video available in the ASP.NET website: Securing your Web Site with Membership and Login Controls.
Yesterday I started to build a new website, and I wanted to use Windows Live ID as the authentication mechanism. But since I was using an existing website framework that used ASP.NET Membership/Roles Provider not only for authentication but also for authorization purposes, I tried to integrate both. I wanted to eliminate the need for a new user/password for the user to remember, and maintain the benefits of Membership Provider.
You can download the demo website that I wrote which is a simplified version of the website that I am building. It is pretty simple. Do not forget to register you application and change the corresponding parameters in web.config.
The first step is to configure ASP.NET Membership provider. You can use a tool that allows you to add the membership provider tables to your database (C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.XXXXXX\aspnet_regsql.exe) or use Web Site > ASP.NET Configuration menu in Visual Studio that creates an SQL Server Express database to store the data.
In your web.config file you must setup the Membership Provider. I’ve done some configuration which allows you to create users using just an user name and a password (eliminating the usual e-mail, question and answer of password recovery, etc). You will be using Forms authentication.
I have a default.aspx page which has an iframe that has a link to Windows Live ID sign in page. When you click the sign in link you are redirected to the sign in page, and the forwarded back to your website, to a authentication handler page named webauth-handler.aspx. This page is part of a sample that comes with Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK.
You will have just to add a few lines of code, that maps the Windows Live ID authentication to the Forms authentication of your website. You can see these lines in the demo website.
When you sign in with an account that is not registered in your website, a user account is created (only using the user ID as username and password), and you are redirected to a page where you can edit your profile.
Profile Provider is another great functionality of ASP.NET that allows you to assign custom data to your website users. In web.config you define which properties does a user profile has. Then you can access the Profile object from anywhere in your code, and read/write the current user profile properties. These properties can be changed, and Profile object has a Save method that persists the profile information into the Profile Provider (usually a database).
In default.aspx the current user profile is printed out into the page.
Posted on 2:34pm 3/06/2008 by Bruno Silva in
Software
Here I leave my first thoughts about IE8.
First of all, I’m pretty disappointed that IE team is still attached to the old search popup window… It is time to leave it behind and use a search like Firefox or some IE7 plugins.
In some websites I have problems with text selection. In the following picture I was trying to select the text after the “seminar” word… Awkward.
I really like the activities functionality. You select some text and an arrow appears to use the highlighted text to perform an activity. The arrow does not appear in all the text though…
Another problem that I had took place while I was debugging an ASP.NET application in Visual Studio. An Javascript error message appeared, and every time that I choosed not to debug, the same window would appear again in a endless loop.
Keep working in this software IE team. I would enjoy to use a nice Internet Explorer version, maybe somewhere in the future I leave Firefox to use IE as my primary browser (or maybe not… I just love some extensions)
Today I went to OPorto to a seminar organized by Bruno Tavares, a Microsoft Student Partner from ISEP (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto). It was a great seminar. The speakers were:
Verónica Orvalho: Teacher of Computer Graphics in FCUP, full-time researcher at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, CTO Face in Motion, developer of algorithms for 3D modeling, animation and new platforms of face characterization.
Bruno Tavares: Is a finalist of the degree in Computer Engineering in ISEP, and Microsoft Student Partner
Marco Silva: A finalist of the Master’s degree in Computer Engineering and Computation (MIEIC) in FEUP with specialization in Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence, he is also a co-founder of the Students Group of Computer Graphics (NeCG - necg.fe.up.pt), Microsoft Student Partner and Junior Flash Developer at Fullsix.
There was a lot of people on this seminar, and they were real interested about the video game industry and the whole process of game design and development. They also wanted to know what was the best approach to be successful in this field of expertise, and about technologies like XNA.
After the theoretical sessions in the morning where the subjects were the video games industry, and an introduction to XNA (with a great and simple demo of the Pong game), there was a “hand-on-lab” session where the attendees had a chance to try out XNA Game Studio 2.0 for themselves (using 2D models) with the help of our experts Bruno and Marco.
Tomorrow it will take place the second part of the seminar, with 3D game development. Good luck for tomorrow!
Take a look to Artur’s post about the news.
Including Internet Explorer 8 Beta, Silverlight 2.0 Beta and Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview.
