Fullsix Blog

I’ve just released a package for Umbraco that adds support for IE9 Pinned Sites. You can get the package at: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/ie9-extensions.

This allows content editors to customize pinned sites metadata, tasks and jump lists. I’ll do a screencast and more detailed blog post on how to use it very soon. For now, please submit any feedback in the project homepage (http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/ie9-extensions).

Previous work done by Matt Brailsford allowed pinning the Umbraco admin area and has been integrated in Umbraco 4.7 core.

More info on pinned sites at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg131029(v=vs.85).aspx.

This is a wonderful feature of IE9 that you can take advantage of for a richer user experience for end users.

Thanks to Matt and everyone at Fullsix Portugal for help and input on this. Source code should be published at the project’s codeplex page soon.

Not long ago, Microsoft released WebMatrix, a new development tool that aims to make web development easy. At first, I wasn’t very convinced with it, and I was quite happy with Visual Studio 2010 for my web dev work. Did we really need another development tool for the Microsoft web stack? Visual Studio even has a free express version, so I didn’t quite get why WebMatrix was needed.

This post starts with an introduction to what is WebMatrix and I’ll share my experiences for real world projects with it in the end. And no, I didn’t stop using Visual Studio .

At one of our tech lunches (a regular event at Fullsix Portugal where we get the whole server team together, order great food – and chocolates! – and watch a tech-related video), we watched the CodeMash 2011 Keynote video where WebMatrix was launched.

It blew me away. If you haven’t taken WebMatrix for a spin, watch the video. You’ll find a lot of great demos and get to see some of the coolest features in action. Josh Holmes leads the way (a great speaker) and invites people from DotNetNuke and Joomla to show how you can leverage WebMatrix to get up and running with no time with those platforms. Wait, did I just say Joomla? Yes, it’s not ASP.NET + SQL Server only… Let’s have a closer look, shall we?

When you start WebMatrix, you’re presented with 4 options:

The most interesting, IMHO, is the “Site from Web Gallery”. This lets you choose an open-source web application as the foundation for your website. It can go from CMS systems to e-commerce, forums and more. You’ll find products based on the Microsoft stack like Umbraco, YAF.NET, Kentico and others, but you’ll also find PHP+MySQL stuff like Joomla!, WordPress and Drupal. Choose one and you’re set to go.

How I’m using WebMatrix

WebMatrix takes care of finding all the required dependencies to have your website running, so if that means installing MySQL, then you don’t have to worry about it. It’s all taken care of. There’s a lot more to WebMatrix, like features to make publishing a snap, statistics and more, but the “Site from Web Gallery” is the feature I’ve been using the most.

A lot of the times, I need to have a website up and running in no time. This can be for trying out some things or to showcase some feature at a client meeting, and I don’t have the time to go though all the hassle of creating a web application in Visual Studio, downloading the platform, database, configure everything, etc… With WebMatrix, it really takes a couple of seconds and you’re running. This is what made me a fan of WebMatrix. It’s click, click, choose some passwords for your database, and your site is running in IIS Express. You can now customize anything you want in your website, as you have the WebMatrix IDE with all the files and database tools you’ll need until your project gets big.

After prototyping, we can choose to continue the work in Visual Studio simply clicking a button (Launch Visual Studio). This is how I go when I decide to use the work I started in WebMatrix. I never use the publish feature and I migrate the database to one of our servers, so it’s integrated with our typical ALM process.

And did I mention Razor is fully supported?

Let me know how you’re using WebMatrix.

Until next time.

The one and only Mitch Lacey (Scrum and Agile guru) has a new book and is requesting feedback.

You can download the chapters here.

Adopting Scrum can be (and usually is) very hard in the beginning, but the end results show it’s worth the investment. More and more companies are adopting it in order to address the main problems usually associated with software project management (overbudgets, overtime, employee unsatisfaction).

This book is an essential reading both for anyone planning to adopt Scrum and for those who’ve been using it for some time.

Versão em [PT]

Fullsix Portugal developed for SuperBock (a major portuguese brand) a new movie search engine, completely implemented in Silverlight and using other Microsoft technologies in the background (SQL Server Integration Services, Expression Encoder).

You can play with it at: http://www.superbock.pt/cinema/.

In the past DevDays 2009 event, the prototype for this application was presented, and it is now live with extra features and integration with the main SuperBock site. Any comments, suggestions, etc…, are welcome and you can drop me an email (ricardo.fiel at fullsix.com) or use the application’s “Dá-nos a tua opinião” area.

One of the goals of this application was to improve the User eXperience of the current Superbock movie search engine, taking advantage of some Silverlight features such as DeepZoom and Smooth Streaming (this last one is not available in the application yet). It is still in Beta stage and there are some improvementes which are being implemented.

To anyone interested, here’s an architectural overview:

I’ll be talking about dynamic DeepZoom in a future post.

See you later.

[Translated from http://xamlpt.com/blogs/rfiel/archive/2009/09/08/deepzoom-din-226-mico-superbock-cinema.aspx]

Olá a todos. Antes de mais obrigado a todos que estiveram presentes no envento de lançamento da comunidade XAMLPT no passado dia 15. Foi uma tarde muito bem passada e esperemos que a comunidade seja cada vez mais uma referência para todos os interessados nestas tecnologias. O número de membros não para de aumentar, e a quantidade de designers presentes no evento, reflecte o interesse crescendo nas tecnologias Microsoft para UI.

Agora em relação ao player….

Em alguns projectos tenho usado o player que vem como template no Expression Encoder 2 SP1, com algumas alterações (mais sobre isso num post posterior). Com a saída do Silverlight 3 RTW, tenho tido um erro na conversão de todos os projecto que utilizam a source deste player. O erro ocorre na struct TimeCode, no projecto MediaPlayer.

Basicamente, a conversão para as ferramentas do SL3 faz umas alterações que não devia no ficheiro TimeCode.designer.cs (por ex, troca o namespace para MediaPlayer, quando este devia ser ExpressionMediaPlayer).

Seguem os passos para resolver este problema (tudo feito no ficheiro TimeCode.designer.cs):

1. Colocar o namespace correcto: ExpressionMediaPlayer
2. Mudar a declaração do tipo TimeCode para “public partial struct” em vez de “internal class”
3. Remover o construtor sem parâmetros

Feitas as alterações, tudo deve correr sem problemas.

Se tiverem outras sugestões, avisem por favor.

Cowbells para todos!