Blog List

The New Year started well when I received the following email:

Dear Bronwen Zande,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.

So I’m back for another year as a Live Services Platform MVP

Wow! What a year 2008 has been. We had a meeting to reflect on the year and it’s not till you start to write it down that you realise how much happened in 12 Months. We did quite a bit of travelling (all for work) this year including Seattle, Montreal, New Zealand and every capital city bar Darwin. We were fortunate to meet and get to know a bunch of really smart, passionate and just generally amazing people this year.

After such an amazing year I’m feeling a bit drained so my main goal is to take some time off.  I’ve got a trip to Egypt planned for March that should help us recharge.

Here’s a summary of our year:

We use Admin Centre for a few sites, one of the main ones is Geek Girl Blogs. I’ve done up an article to show the different membership and branding options it provides here.

We decided to be different and go to Tech Ed New Zealand this year.  We’re doing a couple of presentations at Tech.Ed NZ if you want to check them out.

WEB217 – The Live Highlights Package – 3/9/2008 – 1:40-2:10pm

GEN101 – Virtually There – Girl Geek Dinner – 1/9/2008 8:00-10:00pm

Abstracts are below:

Back in March I had an article on Live Search published in Code-Magazine. I’ve finally gotten around to publishing on our site. You can check it out here.

Today we received confirmation that we had achieved Microsoft Certified Partner with Information Worker Solutions Competency (Data Visualisation Specialist) for our work with Virtual Earth.

We thought we’d see who else is in the same area and had a look at the Partner Finder, and it looks like we’ll be the first Data Visualisation specialists in Australia.

With Roger’s Demos Happen {Here} Competition in full swing, I thought a new article to help get your videos in might help a few people.  So I’ve created a new article on how to upload videos to Silverlight Streaming using Expresion Encoder 2 and the Silverlight Streaming plugin.  Check it out here.

We've been a bit lax in our blogging the last week...mainly because we were travelling around for Remix Australia.  For those who missed out you missed an awesome event! So I'll use this post to give my highlights of the events and to answer some of the common questions we were getting from you all around the ASP.Net Virtual Earth Control and the upcoming Contoso Bank Quick App.  We had a great time and it was really good for us both to be allowed to show some unreleased bits for the first (and 2nd if you were in Melbourne) time ever!

 Remix is coming to Australia - double strength.  There are 2 separate events in Australia this year. 20th May in Sydney, and 22nd in Melbourne. We're presenting a couple of demos at both events in the Windows Live session with Angus Logan. 

I posted my first dev article on liveside.net on the weekend, it all about making a panorama, using deep zoom, virtual earth and silverlight streaming.

Today I checked the reports on usage:

5,644 hits on the sample application in a few days! That could have been my entire server's bandwidth for the month (50GB).