I forgot to mention the cool 3d robot avatars for the community site (my mashupguy avatar embedded below)
For the past several months I've been working on a new project - it involves Silverlight 2.0, ASP.NET 3.5, WCF 3.5, REST, S+S, LiveID, Linq, SQL, IIS, .NET Framework 3.5, and..... robots.
That's right, I've been working on a worldwide robotics program called RoboChamps. The key thing here is we found a way for anyone to participate - we use simulation, we release content via rich commnity site chock full of training, videos, and other goodness, and we're using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008, which means you can code robots in .NET.
RoboChamps is a league, and like sports leagues, will have a regular season comprised of a series of challenges. As RoboChamps is based in simulation, we can provide you with access to environments and robots most people could never get access to - from a trapped filled maze, to city populated with driving cars and working trffic lights, to a city struck by an earthquake, a huge soccer stadium - even the surface of the planet Mars! We'll conclude the season with a single elimination tournament, where we'll continue until we've found four finalist and.... well, I'll talk about that more later in the season, but I'll give you a hint, it involves real robots and a major event.
If you're wondering "How much is this going to cost me?", I've got good news - there's no cost to join RoboChamps, no requirement to buy software, and we'll be giving away great prizes like real robots all season long. And I almost forgot, because this is based on MIcrosoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008, there's no huge learning curve - you can use the .NET skills you already have.
If you're not into competing but want to be part of the community, that's ok too. Check out the forums, our videos, get yourself a RoboCard with a cool animated avatar, and the fun stuff we've made available in our download area. In the fun stuff section, you'll find a Vista Sidebar Gadget, desktop backgrounds, even some blog bling. And don't forget to check out 'RoboChamps - The Show', our machinima-style video podcast. Currently hosted on our homepage, 'RoboChamps - The Show' will bring you updates on what's going on in the league and check out what's new and cool in the world of robotics.
Ready to get started? Go to the website at www.robochamps.com and click on the appropriately named 'Getting Started' link on the top left of the screen and you'll be programming robots before you know it!
Marc Mercuri
RoboChamps League Commissioner
mmercuri@microsoft.com
And for those of you who think robotics has nothing to do with your day job. Think again. I'm a services guy (remember those books on WCF?), and this stuff has it's applications outside of robots. It's distributed by default, scales to the compact framework and microframework, and has a rocking asynchronous messaging library called the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) - or as I like to call it 'ManyCore for Mere Mortals'
There's a video of quadraped robot from Boston Dynamics that is just amazing. Its movement is almost animal-like. Watch it self correct its course and navigate on various types of terrains, even self-correcting itself after being knocked off balancne pretty forcefully.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww
If you were at TechReady in Redmond last month, you know what my new project focuses in on. For those of you who didn't, I'll can share that my new project is robotics-related.
After transferring Tafiti over to Angus' team earlier this year, I've been focusing the vast majority of my time on robotics (via Microsoft Robotics Studio and it's underlying technologies CCR and DSS). While you may think this a big shift from my historical work in services and workflow - but it actually isn't. Most people have an emotional reaction to the word robot, typically connected with a robot from their favorite films. They get caught up in the science fiction and not the science fact.
When you begin looking at robotics, you realize that everything on a robot is a serivce and there is an orchestrating service that recieves information, analyzes it and when appropriate calls other services in response. Hmmm... sounds like services and workflows, doesn't it? 
More details soon...
It's that time of year again - another year, another birthday. My in-laws from the UK were kind enough to send me a gift card for Amazon this year. While browsing the Amazon site, I was looking at books and remembered I'd asked my publisher to update the description for my most recent effort (Beginning Information Cards and CardSpace from Novice to Professional). The bad news is that they hadn't. The good news is that I ran across an interesting statistic at the bottom of the page - it looks like readers have chosen it as their favorite on the subject by a ratio of 4:1. Alot of time and effort went into the book, so that news was quite a nice birthday present indeed. As a thank you to readers, I'll be working on some new content I'll make available free via my blog.
I'm working from my home office today, and when trying to send a 55M file to my desktop (via VPN), I was greeted with this dialog. Initial estimate to transfer the file? Just over 135 years. That's right, the initial swag was close to a century and a half.
Less than a minute later, this time was listed in minutes.
(Filename obscured for confidentiality reasons)
The BBC has posted an article today on Nokia's support for Silverlight. Specifically, they'll be adding Silverlight support in their Symbian-based S60 platform. The S60 platform is not only used by Nokia, but also in phones by Samsung and LG. Nokia has 53% share in the smart phone market, so this is a big win for Silverlight that will give it a strong presence in the mobile space.
You can find the article here - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7276907.stm
(and yes, that is a screenshot of Tafiti with the article  )
Awhile back we transitioned Tafiti over to Angus Logan's team, and I've been hinting there was some cool functionality coming. Well, today's the day.
The latest version of the Windows Live Quick Apps was released today, and with it an update to the Tafiti Search code that includes messenger integration. You can now perform searches, save your results and share that experience with your Windows Live Messenger friends and colleagues. The best is that with all the quick apps, you get the source code for this as well, under the very flexible MS-PL license.
try it | watch it | get it
For more details on QuickApps, as well as the technology underneath (inc. the new Windows Messenger library), be sure to check out Angus' blog, http://www.anguslogan.com
Note: This is not yet live on the Tafiti.com domain, but is ;ove at the http://tafiti.mslivelabs.com
The latest issue of Wired arrived over the weekend, and I was pleased to see it included an article by Chris "The Long Tail" Anderson. The article, titled "Free! Why the $0.00 Is the Future of Business", is effectively a preview of his new book and and an enjoyable read.
The issue is available online here , and someone mentioned today that they're actually making the print version of Wired available for free.
Just over three weeks ago, Katie and I became parents. My in laws are over from the UK helping out, which has afforded me a few minutes to blog about it.
Little Nicholas Edward Mercuri was born on January 28th, 2008 at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland. A big thank you goes to our doctor and the staff at Evergreen, they were fantastic and not a thing could have gone better. As you can see from the picture below, he's already a gadget guy like his dad, having negotiated a gaming laptop as a sign on bonus
My new project, currently underwraps, will make a brief appearance today in one of the TechReady sessions. If you're a MS employee, swing by and check it out.
The details..
Session Code: ARC325
Time: 3pm – 4:15pm
Location: WSCTC 3AB
One of the great things about Microsoft is that we have a number of distribution lists (dls) on every topic under the sun, from product or technology specific discussions (biztalk, wcf, silverlight), broader topic discussions (architecture, marketing), to the completely non-technical (concert tickets, people from country x, new college hires, poker players at MS, etc.).
On one of these DLs there was an interesting thread this week about architectural content. Specifically, someone was preparing a presentation and asked the DL audience (a mix of corp and field staff) what our architecture audience would expect. Most people immediately get the thought of "that's silly, it's obvious that it should include '[insert here]'". If we asked that question to 20 different people in the industry, you'd likely end up with multiple different responses. In a side conversation, I told someone that this was the 'Costanza Dilemma', and after describing it to him, he suggested I share it on the blog.
Part of the challenge is that the word architect is a loaded term. The terms architect and architecture mean a number of things to a number of people. Sure, at the top level there are some straightforward designations and areas of speciality - infrastructure architect, product architect, solutions architect, platform architect. From a presentation perspective, you could determine your top level audience and startup powerpoint, right?
Not so much. If you're targeting a small audience, you may have enough context you can make a decent go of it. But what if you were working on a presentation for a wide audience where you likely don't have that context? Unlike the architecture of physical structures, where there are industry accepted definitions, degrees and professional certifications broadly available internationally, we don't have the same for software.
If you've ever seen the US television program Seinfeld, there's a character named George Costanza who's had a number of interesting positions (real estate agent, hand model, bra salesman), but what's interesting is that in several of the episodes he identifies himself as an architect. George's knowledge of architecture is confined solely to the few issues of Architectural Digest that he's read. But George aspires to be an architect, and if he were at a conference he might attend an architecture session or if on a site might read architecture-focused blogs. But if you're developing for a breadth audience, where you may have George, an aspiring architect, and one of the worlds top architects, say Frank Ghery, what content should you include? This is what I refer to as the 'Costanza Dilemma'.
There are some folks doing a great job to address this very issue as we speak, and I also have some ideas on how to address it with context, personalization and collective intelligence. I'm working on my new project at the moment, so this is not a primary focus, but with the new public facing role I expect to do some additional blogging about this in the coming months.
What are your approaches to solving the 'Costanza Dilemma'?
Not sure if you caught the mention of this last week, but the Syndicated Client Experience Starter Kit Beta & Reader SDK was released last week. This is a "a Starter Kit designed to make it easy to create rich, syndicated multimedia and content experiences which engage the user, from documents and photos to videos and podcasts."
If you've seen the Architecture Journal Reader, the Times Reader, or the MSDN Reader you're already familiar with what this starter kit can do for you. If you want a rich presentation of RSS content (regardless of whether it's coming from outside or inside the firewall), it's definately worth a look.
You can find out more details on it here:
http://windowsclient.net/wpf/starter-kits/sce.aspx
|