Blog List

We’re in the process of building a new house here in Brisbane. It will serve as our new home upstairs and as a much larger home office downstairs. Since we’re working with clients around the world we do spend much of our time working from home.

To remember the “experience” we have been taking a tonne of photos, I have been taking a panorama (about 8 photos across) from each of the four corners of the property every time something interesting happens. They are about 25 Megapixels each and capture all the detail.

Although we are only a few days into the build I thought I would see how well things would line up, here is a small taste:

(Animated Gif – 1MB, I’m swamped with work at the moment to do any more)

The end goal is to make a full resolution DeepZoom with a temporal aspect, allowing you to zoom into the detail and then wind through the calendar to see the construction.

I’m still not sure on the interface but since I will have 4 different angles all synced I should be able to do some sort of a cube with perspective 3D, need some time to make a POC.

Let me know what you think and any ideas.

At TechEd Australia this year I sat down with the Delicate Genius to talk about all the software Microsoft makes for those that love taking photos. You can see the video here:

http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=2a425f94-3718-46fe-8269-4c4bcfad7c61

It runs for 20min, we don’t get through everything and get way too side tracked with Multi touch in Windows7.

These are the products we covered with links to download and play for yourself:

Windows Live Photo Gallery

http://download.live.com/photogallery

Part of Windows Live Essentials this photo viewer is aimed for all windows users. It offers many ways to sort and tag your photos including people tagging. If you have a multi touch Windows7 device then pinch-zoom, rotate and flick through your photos.

Pro Photo Tools 2 ...

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Here at Tech Ed Australia 2009 we are presenting on the Bing Maps Silverlight control, it’s session WEB302. If you’re in the crowd or simply reading this after the event you can follow along with our demos here.



http://about.soulsolutions.com.au/

First up is a little visualisation of where we work and play. This data is hard coded into the application and took less then an hour to put together. The minimap, custom navigation and custom image pin are part of the open source DeepEarth project.

 



http://bingmapsupdates.cloudapp.net/

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Sarah Vaughan, the Windows 7 Group Lead in Australia, today demonstrated our Silverlight 3 / Windows 7 Multi touch application in the keynote of the Australian Partner Conference.



The Silverlight application is built on top of Bing Maps and uses our open source controls called DeepEarth. This particular application allows you to annotate the map, drawing polygons and lines and adding points. All of this data can be captured and stored into a SQL 2008 database. We added a custom tile layer of the exhibition venue itself.

In order to support multi touch you need to be running Windows7 and have a multi touch enabled screen and drivers. HP, the hardware sponsors of the event supplied the nice screen Sarah is using and also lent us a TouchSmart Tx2 tablet for the development.



If you have such a device you can see the application here (works with just a mouse as well):

http://multitouch.soulsolutions.com.au/

The gestures are:

pinch zoom in / out 2 finger swipe left / right to show / hide the drawing panel 2 finger hold 1/2 sec for AerialwithLabels, 3 finger hold for road, 4 for plain aerial. Drag the map with one finger. One thing to note is that multi touch doesn’t currently work in full screen mode.

Commercially we are working with a Mining Company here...

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Just an update to the sessions we’re presenting and activities we’re involved in at Tech.Ed Australia this year on the Gold Coast.

WEB 302 - Bing your data to life, the Virtual Earth Silverlight control  Wed 9/9/2009 13:45-15:00 in Meeting Room 7 Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) provides a slick and powerful data visualisation engine for your spatial information. Join John O'Brien for a look at how the core control can be combined with other Silverlight components including DeepEarth and Photosynth to produce a rich and engaging interface. See how SQL Server 2008 spatial data can be rendered in real time and how this whole interface can be integrated into your Sharepoint site.

THG007 - 3 the New Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit for Social Websites Thu 10/9/2009 15:00-15:30 in Green Interactive Theatre

See how to add IM to a site with the Windows Live Messenger Library and UI Controls, and how to build new relationships around content with Messenger social capabilities. Also hear how top sites and marketers are using the social connections of Windows Live users to grow and build brand loyalty.

WIT Women in IT Wed 9/9/2009 12:45-13:45

Hosted by Catherine Eibner, Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Dynamics, Women in IT is about growing strong female leaders in the IT industry. Leading women in IT and industry experts will lead discussions...

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The project I’m working on at the moment I’m taking a bunch of content that in the previous system was stored as HTML and I’ve re-written the application in WPF and displaying the content as a FlowDocument.  Today I sat down to look at how to do the data conversion, basically I needed to convert HTML to XAML.  After looking at it awhile and thinking it’s quite a bit of work, someone else must have done this before I stumbled upon the HTML to XAML Prototype Conversion Utility. Now the code has a lot of todo’s but the HTML I was working on was pretty simple..basic font sizes, bold, italic, text align etc and this worked a treat and saved me a lot of code and testing. Just had to tweak it a bit to output the document the way I wanted it and it was all good.

It is very common to have a some of your spatial data sources still in SQL2005 and sometimes you don’t have the option to have this upgraded to SQL2008. Rather then having to deal with the data differently we decided we would treat every data source as Well Known Binary. If your data is simply some Latitude and Longitudes you can do this:

 

WKB:

select 0x00+0x00000001 + cast([Longitude] as binary(8)) + cast([Latitude] as binary(8)) WKT:

'POINT(' + cast([Longitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ' ' + cast([Latitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ')' GML:

'' + cast([Latitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ' ' + cast([Longitude] as nvarchar(20)) + ''  

Important to note that WKB and WKT are XY, Longitude, Latitude while GML is still YX, Latitude, Longitude.

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I had a situation where I needed the user to select an image to display and then move the location of the image. What I quickly found was while I was bound to the image I was holding a file lock on it that prevented me from moving it.  On a BitmapImage there is a CacheOption that allows you to cache OnLoad. Unfortunately I couldn’t set this on the bindings for the Image so to get around it I had to use a converter on the Source :

public class ImageCacheConverter : IValueConverter { public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { var path = (string)value; // load the image, specify CacheOption so the file is not locked var image = new BitmapImage(); image.BeginInit(); image.CacheOption = BitmapCacheOption.OnLoad; image.UriSource = new Uri(path); image.EndInit(); return image; } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { throw new NotImplementedException("Not implemented."); } } Image Source="{Binding Path=SmallThumbnailImageLocation, Converter={StaticResource imagePathConverter}}"/> Technorati Tags: WPF,BitmapCacheOption,FileLock

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This event we're going to try something a little different.  This year, Microsoft TechEd event is being held on the Gold Coast and we'd love to see as many of you as possible at the event - registration details can be found here: http://www.msteched.com/australia/Public/registration-info.aspx. We’re taking advantage of having so many ladies at one location and holding our next dinner at Broadbeach.

Of specific interest to all the girl geeks is this year's Women In Technology Event at the conference is the Women Build LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY (LSP). Microsoft have partnered with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) through Robert Rasmussen & Associates with their local agency Management Consultancy International to create a unique interactive workshop, using LEGO® Bricks to model solutions for growing strong female leaders in the software industry.

The session will give you an opportunity to meet other females in the IT industry – local and international, learn from role models that have been successful in their career and give you access to resources that can help you build your career and your own network. The session will help you make the most of the Microsoft Women in Technology community.

Who is invited?

If you are a geek and a girl or know of one who is willing to escort you then you are welcome and encouraged to come along. There is a technical focus with the intention of having fun and connecting with other women...

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Our 6th Girl Geek Dinner was held on the 2nd July. We were fortunate to have Kay Lam-Beattie as our guest speaker, who runs her own legal IT business and answered many legal questions from our geek girls. 

Kim Weatherall, a UQ Law Professor, also helped out with many of the questions and conversation.  The discussions ranged from politics with a hot topic being the proposed Internet filter, file copying and sharing, how copyright can be changed etc.  The discussions went well into the night and it was great to see a bunch of new faces!

The guys at the Hutch Bistro were great. We even had our own personal menus made up which was a really nice touch. The food and service were great too!.

Thanks to Tim for taking photos on the night an look forward to seeing more ladies at the next dinner. His photos can be seen on Tim’s Flickr stream here.