Infosys | Microsoft

I have had a chance to work on Windows from its Windows 3.11 for workgroups, back in 1995, all the way to the current Windows 7 and the upcoming Windows 8 as well. In my experience no previous Windows version was this eagerly awaited and extensively discussed as is happening for Windows 8.

There have been hitches in between like the Windows Millennium edition and Windows Vista, and the versions succeeding them did get good attention, but those are still easily eclipsed in front of news Windows 8 is making. Industry and media is abuzz with speculation on success or failure of Windows 8 and is the RTM version really ready for worldwide launch or not.

Continue reading "Windows 8: Waiting..." »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Metro or not Metro" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Metro App, Metro UI, What's all this?" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Although it's been some time Master Data Management (MDM) has been there in the industry, the significance of actually implementing it in enterprises is making more and more sense now, seeing the ever growing data needs and tons of applications waiting to get integrated to present a unified data view. Currently, this information is spread across heterogeneous applications with each application having their own interpretation of master data, which is inconsistent and incomplete. There is no comprehensive system which provides a single and accurate view of master data.

Continue reading "Master Data Management Offering by Microsoft" »

Posted by Sandeep Kalra at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "What it means to develop Metro Applications for Windows 8 " »

Posted by Mani Tripathi at 5:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One major differentiating factor for Metro applications on Windows 8 is that the application lifetime would be managed by the OS. To the end user, this would mean that they would be unable to close applications using a close button. This has also been discussed here .

Let us now understand how the OS handles the application lifetime and what are the implying considerations for Windows 8 development. An application can be in one of the 3 states - Running, Suspended and Terminated. When an application is brought in the foreground, it becomes a running application. If second application is launched, the first one moves to the suspended state after a short delay. Again, if a third application is launched, both first and second applications move to the suspended state. This repeats until the system becomes low on memory. When the system becomes low on memory, the applications consuming maximum memory is terminated. Applications can also get terminated due to system shutdown, application crash or if the user terminates it from the task manager.

Continue reading "Understanding lifecycle of Windows 8 apps" »

Posted by Mani Tripathi at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In Immersive Technologies Track we are working on some exciting technologies related to data visualization, touch, gesture and augmented reality. The main products on our radar are Phone 7, Surface and Kinect. We recently published a technology roundtable newletter sharing some insights of our work. You can get to the newsletter from here.

Comments are welcome.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 7:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Atul Gupta at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Atul Gupta at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "New ways to surface data from SharePoint 2010" »

Posted by K. Suyog Hebbar at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft Surface is a few years old, but I didn't seem to have done very well. There are limited instances of its usage and applications that run on it. Some reasons for this have been a bulky horizontal table, the cost and specialized hardware, which meant high replacement costs in case some parts were to get damaged. The base operating system was also Windows Vista, which we know wasn't all the successful

Continue reading "Surface 2" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post PDC there were many questions on future of Silverlight and Microsoft itself had caused these speculations. I had shared my views on it here. Well, yesterday Microsoft laid these to rest by announcing Silverlight 5 in the Firestarter event. The event was telecast live across the world using live streaming. If you didn't watch it live, you should be able to get to the keynote here.

Continue reading "Silverlight 5" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 2:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Silverlight 5 vs. HTML 5" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 6:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

If you check online forums, one of the issues that has caused possibly most grievances is the styling of the WPF button control. You set some property values for things like foreground color and background color and when you run the application things don't always work out. Either the button will show some default animation when having focus or will not use the specified background when is in disabled state.

Recently a colleague was styling a Button control and had a need for custom disabled look and we landed in the same problem. We had set a background color, but when disabled the button will default to the light gray color. Trying various options didn't work out. Interestingly the properties like Foreground or Opacity worked fine. The designer in us said that we can always create a custom style, but the developer in us wanted to know why this doesn't work.

Continue reading "WPF - Disabled look for Button" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 5:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Expression Studio 4 (including Blend, Web, Encoder, Design and SketchFlow) was released yesterday at Information Week in New York. See details here. You can get the trial version from the Expression site and in case you have MSDN subscription, you can get the full release from the subscriber download site. Do note that if you are working with Windows Phone 7, do not upgrade to this RTM version.

There was a minor update to Silverlight 4 runtime as well earlier in the month and the latest version is 4.05.50524.0. See details of what's changed here. You can verify if you have the latest or install if not, from here. Also if you have been following Silverlight Media Framework, you would be glad to know that Beta of version 2 is also now available at the codeplex site.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 3:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The time has come! Expression Studio 4 will be launched next week on 7th June as part of Internet Week at New York. More details here.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 3:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have written about SketchFlow earlier here and here. I and my colleague, Sakshi, spent some more time on it and have written a viewpoint paper on SketchFlow (version 3), its key features and how do we compare it with other prototyping techniques. You can access the paper from here, and in case you are interested in other papers from my other colleagues, those can be found here.  

Do have a look at the paper and share your comments. With the release of Expression Suite 4 round the corner, we will soon provide an updated version of this paper, that covers the new features of SketchFlow in version 4.  

Posted by Atul Gupta at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Silverlight - Using x:Key or x:Name" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Working with Images in Silverlight Application" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Atul Gupta at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 7:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "SketchFlow to Production" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In my earlier blogs (here and here), I have talked about Win 7 and the new touch experience it brings.

When talking about touch, there are essentially two aspects - touch and gestures and during a recent internal discussion, I felt that these aren't that well understood by people. What's really the difference between the two and what it means to be supporting either of these?

Continue reading "Win 7 - Difference between Touch and Gesture" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, this title is influenced by death by chocolate, where in you get an overdose of chocolate. At this time I feel exactly the same for Silverlight (SL). With just over 2 years since the first version made its mark felt, Silverlight has come a long long way. Ironically, as part of TechDays event hosted specifically at our campus, we talked a lot about SL3 and right then, across the ocean, at PDC 2009, Microsoft just unveiled SL4 beta bits.

When we started looking at SL 1.0 back in late 2007, it had limited feature set with XAML support, and most work had to be done in java script. It looked more of media (video) playback at that time. MS called it their RIA platform, but it didn't offer much at that time. With SL2 at PDC 2008 and SL3 just earlier this year in July 2009, a host of features have found their way in the platform. Along with multitude of controls, to .net language support, to IIS Smooth streaming, to perspective 3D, to out of browser experience, SL is a technology you just cannot ignore.

Continue reading "Death by Silverlight" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been busy with various other non-technical work for few months and hence didn't get a chance to experiment anything new Off late. I finally managed to find time and check out Sketchflow. Sketchflow is a new tool available along with Expression 3 Suite which allows quick and easy prototyping. It allows one to create prototypes that are very near real appliation like, but still retain their prototype look and feel (by using wiggly styled controls) and allow for easy feedback back and forth between you and your customers.

If you have't seen this as yet, you can get a very good idea on it by checking out the following
1. Keynote video from MIX 09, where Jon Harris showed a very interesting Sketchflow prototype. You can skip to about 1 hr 39 min into the video to directly jump to this part
2. From Concept to Production video, another session from MIX 09, by Christian Schormann, where he walks through a snowboard sketchflow prototype. This and the keynote video code comes as part of samples with Blend 3.
3. A very good step by step walkthrough of Sketchflow is available at the dynamic prototyping site.

I am enjoying working with Sketchflow.

Posted by Atul Gupta at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Visual State Manager feature for a WPF project – Expression Blend Based Approach" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One question I have faced multiple times since the inception of Silverlight technology is how well does it support Web Accessibility requirements?  The support for accessibility was quite limited in Silverlight 1; but with Silverlight 2 there have been significant improvements.

Continue reading "Silverlight 2 and Web Accessibility" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 2:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the world awaits better times to invest in newer technologies in the pursuit of mankind’s never ending and ever evolving ambitions on engineering newer things to make life exciting, Microsoft is showing pointers on the road ahead.

Microsoft has taken HCI and car infotainment to the next level through its Commute UX initiative.

Continue reading "Microsoft zooms into Car Infotainment with a bang! – Commute UX" »

Posted by Venkatesh Rajagopalan Narayanan at 6:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Atul Gupta at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One key new feature of the recently released Win 7 beta that should excite UX designers and developers is the support for building touch and multi-touch based interfaces.  Some time back, I had posted a blog entry about my first hand experience of using the Microsoft Surface computing device. These new technologies open huge opportunities for designers to transcend existing user experience limitations and build immersive, life-like interactive applications.

Continue reading "Windows Touch and User Experience" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As stated on the Codeplex link, the ‘Silverlight Toolkit’ is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle.

Continue reading "Silverlight Toolkit: Support for UX Design" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You would already be aware of the release of RC0 of Silverlight 2.0. If not check Scott's blog here. The details on the links for downloading these latest bits can be found in the same blog.

Note that unlike the previous Beta 2, this version doesn't comes with a go live license and if you visit the Silverlight installer page online, you will see that it still points to the earlier Beta 2 version (2.0.30523.8).  

Continue reading "Silverlight 2.0 RC0 Installation" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 6:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "WPF: Gadget-Style User Experience" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, we considered the need to derive UX differentiation by deploying RIA technologies (Silverlight, WPF, Flash, AIR and the likes) to address real user aspirations. We also took notice of the fact that very often; these user aspirations are about making the digital technology around them more life-like.

This week, let us dig a little deeper to understand why the users aspire for life-like interactive experiences; and how this has helped us identify the key principles behind ALIVE Design approach.

Continue reading "Emotional Design and Rich Interactive Applications" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Meaningful Differentiation for Rich Interactive Applications and the ALIVE Design Manifesto" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Silverlight for line-of-business applications" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "'Devigners' ?... or more complete software developers ?" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sliverlight 2.0, the relatively new presentation technology offering from Microsoft, is fast maturing into a viable platform for building high quality Rich Interactive Applications (RIAs).  Needless to say, the incumbent presently dominating this space, Adobe Flex, is feeling the pressure. The developer community, RIA developers included, is always on the lookout for opportunities to improve quality and  productivity. So how does the contest stack up?

Continue reading "Silverlight v/s Flex: …. And the winner is?" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been playing around with WPF for a while and have been blogging about some of the technical aspects on it. However today I will like to touch upon another important aspect of WPF and that is designer-developer connect.

Having worked on Windows Programming using C++, MFC etc for a decade and working with the various controls, it is a real pleasure to see the capabilities now available to WPF developers. It is true to a large extent that with WPF and XAML and the tools like Expression Blend, designers and developers can work lot more closely than ever before. The working closely is more towards the ability for designers to style the UI for the WPF application and the developers to write the code for it.

Continue reading "WPF makes Designers and Developers friends again" »

Posted by Atul Gupta at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

These days, Microsoft Evangelists are using a new buzzword – Differentiated User Experience’ -  to promote the capabilities of user interface technologies like WPF and Silverlight.  Needless to say, design community is scrambling to understand what this new term means and how they can build truly unique interfaces leveraging these technologies.

Continue reading "Demystifying the ‘Differentiated’ User Experience" »

Posted by Chandan Gokhale at 6:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)