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 
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
It's not quite the end of January, but there's already alot of "new" in my new year. There's a new car, some new gadgets, and on the work front a new project and a new team.
As you may have heard, Charles Fitzgerald, left Microsoft to head to a startup. Charles was the GM that my old team, platform incubation, reported into. Charles set the mission for that team, and was the major stakeholder for Tafiti and several other internal facing projects that I worked on. Charles was a great GM, and while this is a loss for MS, I'm confident we haven't heard the last of him.
With Charles' departure, Scott and I will be moving to different roles in the company. I am happy to report that I am now officially part of Simon Guest's team.
One of the few negatives about my last role in incubation was that it was inherently secretive, as parts of the work could be patented. As a result, after delivering my book on CardSpace I mostly dropped off the public scene, save for promoting Tafiti. With Simon's team having a key focus on talking about architecture with the broader community, this is something that will change, and you'll see me engaging more publicly on architecture related subjects. Simon's team has a big focus on Software+Services, which if you've read the blog for awhile know is something I've been looking at for some time in and outside of Microsoft. Expect to see me blogging more, podcasting/screencasting more, and writing the odd article or two. (No more books for awhile, though. Having written or co-written 3 books in 2 years, I've committed to my wife not to start another one until 2009)
I also mentioned there's a new project. I'll be carrying over a project with me from incubation to Simon's team as well. Nothing I can share at the moment, other than it will be public focused and it's going to be a key focus for me for a good portion of 2008.
While this project is big, there's another project I'll be working on that's even bigger. This is a longer term project, estimated to last decades with a budget estimated to be in the seven figures. Oh, and it has nothing to do with software. My wife and I are expected our first child, a son, to literally arrive any day now. While there's alot of great 'new's in 2008 already, this will surely be the best.
Here's hoping your 2008 is going well, and I look forward to engaging with the community more broadly once again. If there's anything you'd like to see me engage on - be it in blog, article, or podcast, let me know. As always, I can be reached at mmercuri@microsoft.com
Nayna and Rob have made it official with their post (http://winliveid.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!AEE1BB0D86E23AAC!931.entry), Windows LiveID has added beta support for Information Cards and Windows CardSpace.
The way this works is identical to the way I described how to add cards to an existing website in my book. Through a management interface, you associate information cards with your core account, and the user is provided the option of signing in with either their information card or a password (as shown below).
All good stuff, and worthy of checking out. 
Getting ready for the tafiti launch, I had the chance to have a discussion with Jon Udell at Channel 9 last week. We talked about incubation, services, mashups and tafiti.
The abstract for the session is -
"Marc works on the platform incubation team. In this podcast we discuss what platform incubuation means, how the Tafiti project exemplifies it, and what the future may hold not only for Tafiti but for a platform that's evolving to encompass both software and services. "
The podcast of that conversation is now on the main page over at Channel 9 (channel9.msdn.com), the permalink for it is here - http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=335996
Being on an incubation team, many of the projects I'm attached to are not discussed with the public. Today, however, is a great exception to that rule.
I'd like to introduce you to Tafiti.
Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search.
You can try Tafiti following these steps:
· Go to http://www.tafiti.com
· Enter a search query
· Drag interesting results to the shelf on the right. Each box on the shelf can be used to save a related set of results. Shelf contents can be saved and shared.
· Use the carousel at the bottom left to do different types of searches (image, blog, etc.)
· Visualize your results using the Tafiti Tree View.
I did a video interview with Channel 10 on this that has just been posted here.
http://www.on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-tafiti/
I also did a standalone walkthrough you can get to here:
http://www.tafiti.com/walkthru.html
More to come as the week progresses....
When I wrote my new book, Beginning Information Cards and CardSpace: From Novice to Professional, I wanted the reader to go beyond building just 'Hello World' applications that just focused on learning features. Instead, I wanted to have the readers build practical, usable code.
In an effort to let you see what you'll be getting when you buy the book, I thought I'd do some screencasts to highlight what you'll build out.
I'm going to start with Chapter 13, which focuses on automating the issuance of managed cards with Workflow Foundation.
In that chapter, you'll create a number of Workflow Foundation custom activities that can help you automate the issuance of managed cards, complete with email delivery.
Also included is a sample application will calls the workflow and generates a card based on data provided.
Click on the image below to see the video:
After a very long hiatus, I am very happy to report my return to regular blogging. The book is now done, some of my major projects are either completed or winding down, and I'll have time to write, post and add screencasts.
So what have I been doing for the past year? Last summer, I took on a new role as an Architect in DPE Platform Incubation Team. I've spent the last year working on solving difficult problems and working on interesting projects. This has hands down been my most intellectually rewarding year in the company. While you won't hear publicly about alot of my work, there are some things I've contributed to that have been entering the public view recently.
I've been doing alot of work with teams in the company doing mashups and mashup events. Last December I wrote 5 'blocks' for a product we had in development that's now been launched over at http://www.popfly.com. I believe it's still on an invite only basis. If you've been on the site, you know it's pretty cool stuff. If you haven't, I believe it's still in an 'invite only' mode. If it is, let me know, as I've got a couple of invites I can share.
In addition, I ended up modifying the dasBlog engine and starting another site. That site http://www.mashupguy.com, is something you may have seen at various conferences this year. I wrote a number of labs that show how to work with various Live APIs, checked out a number of third party services, found some videos, and brought them altogether on that site. It's been used as a resource for everything from the MVP Summit to Mix07 to the Web2Open at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference earlier this year. I've been pretty quiet about the site outside of those events, and plan to migrate it over to silverlight when I get back from Europe later this summer.
I also had a chance to do some work with the folks over at Windows Live and worked with Koji Kato to get LiveInABox published. Specifically, I wrote some workflow activities that wrapped Live Expo and Live Search and generated an aggregate RSS feed and RSS client for them. In addition to being on CodePlex, we've managed to get VPCs hosted in the cloud for folks to try out.
I did have a chance to work with another one of our online properties as well, and expect to see some impact from one of our projects before the year is out.
In addition to cutting back on blogging, I also cut back my public speaking engagements this year, with just one exception. I had worked with the great folks over at Dollar Thrifty Auto Group last year and one of their architects asked if I'd be interested in coming to deliver a keynote at the Tulsa code camp, so I flew out to Tulsa for the day (an interesting route from Seattle) and had a chance to talk about CardSpace. For private speaking engagements, I was pretty engaged at a number of our internal events, and recently was interviewed for some of our internal videos for Engineering Excellence and Innovation.
My largest project, you won't hear anything about anytime soon, but I was honored to find out recently that I was nominated for 2 awards for it, Microsoft's Circle of Excellence Award and the Customer Partner Experience Award.
And then there's the book... with my change in role last year, I ended up spending much more time outside the office working on the research and writing of the book. The book, initially targeted for March, was pushed to June when content grew from the 300 pages I committed to, to almost twice that. Expect to hear (and see) more about the book over the next week or so.
So blogging will resume starting today, the blog will likely go through a site redesign later in the month, using the new template I created for mashupguy.com, and I'll be expanding the scope beyond framework 3.0, where things have been for the past year and a half or so.
Glad to be back, and happy to have you reading,
Marc
Chapter Three of my upcoming book focuses on the work being done with information cards and in the identity metasystem by people outside of Microsoft. The chapter covers third parties and open source projects, focusing primarily on the folks building identity selectors and security token servers. In the process of researching that chapter, I ,of course, ran across the work of Chuck Mortimore. If not famliar with his work, Chuck has built out a Java Relying Party, an identity selector plug-in for FireFox, and his site ( http://www.xmldap.org) issues managed cards. His identity selector has even been enhanced to handle interop with OpenID (see screenshot below).
Needless to say, I was impressed with his work, and reached out to him about including screenshots of his work in that chapter. He was very gracious and gave his approval. As I was wrapping up the book, one of the readers of this blog asked if we were going to have support for Java in the book. Initially, for relying parties, I'd only committed to the publisher for ASP.NET and PHP. In the pre-.NET world, I actually was an early adopter of Java (heck, I even hired Gary Cornell, of Core Java fame, to come to Boston and train my team on Java), so I thought what the hell, and decided to have a go at it. As I was dusting off my core-java books to write the sample, I thought to myself, if I was a java guy, who would I want a sample from? A Microsoft guy who hasn't written any Java code in awhile? Probably not
I thought of who - if I was a reader - I'd like to see the Java sample come from. A big fan of his work over at xmldap.org, I reached out to Chuck and asked if he'd be interested in contributing a java sample for the chapter. I am really pleased to announce that not only did he agree, he's already sent me the code. If you've not done so already, definately check out his site, he's doing some great work.
Speaking of folks that I got to work with last year, I had the opportunity to work with Alberto Arias on a major WF project in the UK (the first Fortune 500 WF project in production, I believe). Earlier this fiscal year, Alberto crossed the pond and took a job over in the Connected Systems Division.
He's been working on activities for BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) for awhile now, and while chatting with him tonight, he told me that with today's announcement on Paul Andrews blog, it was now cool to talk about the BPEL support externally. He and I then booted up Meeting Space in Vista (if you've not used it, check it out, it's quite cool), and he stepped me through how it works.
Having spent alot of time with customers and partners last year, I regularly heard requests for BPEL support. The implementation is very clean, very straightforward, with capabilities to import and export BPEL. BPEL 1.1 wil be supported in the March CTP, and 2.0 will be supported after it is ratified by OASIS. I think people are going to be happy with it, it's very cool stuff - hats off to Alberto and team!
Just about a year or so ago, I was down in Tulsa working with the good folks at Dollar Thrifty Auto Group, who were doing some great stuff with WF and WCF. If it sounds familiar, I chatted about what they were doing in an ARCast wit Ron Jacobs, and Ron also did an interview with them from Tulsa. (both recordings are available over on http://channel9.msdn.com or http://www.skyscrapr.net.)
Earlier in the week I was talking to Jim Arrowood, a friend and architect at Dollar, and he asked how I'd like a free trip to Tulsa. A s I told him, there are no free lunches in life, and I'm sure no free trips to Tulsa. It turns out there's a CodeCamp event coming up (http://www.tulsacodecamp.com) and was curious if I might be interested in speaking.
A couple hours later I had a ticket to Tulsa and was slotted in for two sessions, an hour in the afternoon and the closing keynote.
I'm looking forward to it, as codecamp is focused much more on code. Last year ,when I was speaking at events, I had to spend a good amount of my sessions doing intro stuff. With the framework having been released for awhile now, I'll be able to dive right in and show some cool stuff I've been working on. If you've seen my previous sessions, expect all new content for this.
The timing of the event is literally days before the release of the updated WCF: Unleashed and I should be wrapping up the Understanding CardSpace and Information Cards book.
If you're going to be in Tulsa and there are particular aspects you're interested in, let me know and we'll see if we can squeeze it into the sessions.
Going through my email this morning, I received my official Mix07 confirmation. Last year, I had a number of customer commitments so was really not in the loop on Mix, this year, though, I've had some overlap with some of the things I've been working on and have had a chance to get involved in various aspects of the event.
Earlier this year I went to another web conference(which shall remain nameless), and was so dissapointed I left the conference (and Vegas) a day early. (Me, leaving Vegas early? unheard of, I know).
Mix, though, is a different story. From what I've seen of the sessions, this is actually an event I'd pay out of pocket to go to. It's got a good mix of folks from MS, as well as from third parties. I may or may not be delivering a session, that's something that'll get decided in the next month or so, but will be onsite either working in certain areas of the event, or attending sessions.
One of the great things about conferences is that I get a chance to meet up with former colleagues and people I've chatted with via email and blogs. If you're going to be in Vegas the 29th - 2nd and want to chat about WCF, CardSpace, Mashups, or whatever - shoot me an email and we'll make some plans to sync up.
When the first version of the WCF book was posted up on Amazon for pre-sale, the title was different than agreed to and there were some concerns about the editorial text. They were shortly fixed, and the real title 'Windows Communication Foundation: Hands On (Beta Edition)' and appropriate text was posted.
A few weeks back, I announced that Windows Communication Foundation: Hands On (Beta Edition) was being renamed (and over 200 pages added) as Windows Communication Foundation: Unleashed.
I've been talking for awhile now about a book I've been working on related to CardSpace and information cards. Like with the first book, the title posted to Amazon was different than what I'd initially agreed to do and the 'about the author' was written when I proposed the book (while working on another team at MS) last year.
Thus, I've not really said much about it, other than referring to it as the 'CardSpace book'. CardSpace is the client-side technology that provides the identity selector and personal sts. While the book covers CardSpace, a large focus is also on the information cards used there. From creating cards, to consuming cards on the web, integrating card-support into ASP.NET membership, consuming cards or requesting them via services, to a simple card issuance system, the book is more than just CardSpace. Fortunately, after talking with my publisher, we've reached an agreement on the new title "Beginning CardSpace and Information Cards: From Novice to Professional".
This book was written by a guy who buys alot of books, and the structure of the book reflects that. When I buy a book, I'm either
(a) Investigating - I'm interested in a high level overview and examination of a technology, the rationale for that technology and the competitive landscape. Ideally, this is at a level where the content is accessible to my team - be they architect, dev, or manager.
(b) Topic Learn By Doing - Just as with the 'Hands On' book, I think there's value in not just reading and then doing simple samples. Let me roll up my sleeves and do some coding and learn by doing.
(c) Prototype Acquisition - A book may have a functional prototype of something (i.e. workflow activities for card creation) that I either want for a demo or to build for real. For $30-$50, the book is a steal to get that.
So that's what I wrote. It's been a long process, but it's due out in April. While the title's not updated on Amazon yet, it is now available for pre-order here: http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Windows-CardSpace-Novice-Professional/dp/1590598075/sr=8-1/qid=1170952106/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-5507602-4763836?ie=UTF8&s=books
One of the interesting things about writing a book on an emerging technology, is that you rev the chapters several times before they're released. With the WCF book, this was because we were dealing with CTPS where the object model was changing, with the Information Cards/CardSpace book it's a much better reason. The industry is coming together and collaborating in a most excellent way.
One chapter I'm happy to update this week is the one that looks at information cards outside of Microsoft.
If you haven't heard, some signficant announcements came out of the RSA conference.
#1 JanRain, Microsoft, Sxip and Verisign will collaborate on interop between OpenID and CardSpace
As reported on Kim Cameron's Identity Blog:
JanRain, Microsoft, Sxip, and VeriSign will collaborate on interoperability between OpenID and Windows CardSpace™ to make the Internet safer and easier to use. Specifically:
- As part of OpenID’s security architecture, OpenID will be extended to allow relying parties to explicitly request and be informed of the use of phishing-resistant credentials.
- Microsoft recognizes the growth of the OpenID community and believes OpenID plays a significant role in the Internet identity infrastructure. Kim Cameron, Chief Architect of Identity at Microsoft, will work with the OpenID community on authentication and anti-phishing.
- JanRain, Sxip, and VeriSign recognize that Information Cards provide significant anti-phishing, privacy, and convenience benefits to users. Information Cards, based on the open WS-Trust standard, are available though Windows CardSpace™.
- JanRain and Sxip, leading providers of open source code libraries for blogging and web sites, are announcing they will add support for the Information Cards to their OpenID code bases.
- JanRain, Sxip and VeriSign plan to add Information Card support to future identity solutions.
- Microsoft plans to support OpenID in future Identity server products
- The four companies have agreed to work together on a “Using Information Cards with OpenID” profile that will make it possible for other developers and service providers to take advantage of these technology advancements.
Dick Hardt, Sxip Identity
Kim Cameron, Microsoft
Michael Graves, VeriSign
Scott Kveton, JanRain
http://www.identityblog.com/?p=668
#2 Ping Identity has released an open source module for Apache:
Ping Identity Corporation today announced the immediate availability of an open source module that allows Apache-hosted applications to use Windows CardSpace Information Cards for authentication. The Apache Authentication Module for CardSpace can be downloaded from http://www.SourceID.org, the open source federated identity management site sponsored by Ping Identity.
The Apache Authentication Module for CardSpace allows applications using an Apache Web server to use Information Cards as an additional authentication mechanism. It allows LAMP-based Web applications written in Perl or PHP to act as CardSpace relying parties (RP) by means of simple configuration. The module is responsible for decrypting the token submitted by the CardSpace identity selector, retrieving the claims and making the claims available for the application’s use.
http://www.pingidentity.com/about/show/165
This is important as it will increase the potential universe of sites secured with phishing-resistant mechanisms and provide a consistent user experience for consumers in CardSpace.
Between some exciting day job work, updating WCF content for the WCF Unleashed book, and writing 15 chapters for the CardSpace book (this time as a sole author) things have been pretty hectic. Mix in the storm that flooded the first floor of the house, and it got even crazier.
The blog has been fairly dark for awhile, but that's about to change. In a few weeks, the CardSpace book will be handed in, and I can start focusing on other activities. In addition to weekly updates here, I'm also going to be starting a sister blog to this one, more details on that in the weeks to come.
So what's coming? Lots of stuff.
Like what?
I talked with the good folks at APress (my publisher for the CardSpace book), and I'm going to be able to release some of my code from the CardSpace book early, and put it into CodePlex. This will include ASP.NET controls that integrate with membership. This will also include Windows Workflow Foundation activities and some utilities for creating managed cards. These will hopefully be in CodePlex, which will include source, so you'll be able to get source and enhance them as you need to. I need to stress that these are from my book written as my 'night job', these are not official controls from Microsoft and should not be viewed as such.
I've actually been pretty busy on some other stuff during the day, and we're looking at what we can release of that (unrelated to CardSpace) to CodePlex as well.
Plus.. I've written about 6 labs in the past couple of days for an internal event. I'm looking to release those as well, likely with the launch of the sister blog to this one.
Oh, and some InfoCenter Controls may just find there way into CodePlex as well (and if not, I'll release them as binaries from my blog). And I might just include a reference app that shows how to snag podcasts for your Zune
Anyone else going to WebBuilder 2.0 in Vegas in December? I've just confirmed If you're going and want to chat about anything from InfoCenter to WCF to CardSpace to Mashups, send me an email: mmercuri@microsoft.com
It looks like the migration by the hoster is now complete. I'll have a chance this weekend to modify the look/feel. Expect to see a post Monday/Tuesday next week announcing it's been re-launched.
I should have more details on the status of the InfoCenter portal (InfoCenter.tv) on Monday. There were some additional delays in my hoster's migration, but it sounds like it should be right around the corner.
When the site goes online, you'll see that the guide will now be driven by the audience. I'm looking at doing something like 'Digg' only with workflow and some oversight. On a related note, I'm seriously thinking of releasing InfoCenter 2.0 (based on .NET Framework 3.0) into CodePlex as a shared source project.
As you're likely aware, we've had a new RC1 release of Vista, and along with it a RC1 release of .NET Framework 3.0.
I've gone ahead an updated the code for several chapters from the book WCF: Hands On to be compatibile with RC1 changes
You can find the code for Chapter 5 on Reliable Sessions, Transactions, and Queues here:
05CodeRC1.zip (226.14 KB)
As you're likely aware, we've had a new RC1 release of Vista, and along with it a RC1 release of .NET Framework 3.0.
I've gone ahead an updated the code for several chapters from the book WCF: Hands On to be compatibile with RC1 changes
You can find the code for Chapter 7 on interoperability here:
Code.zip (295.39 KB)
If you've read the blog for awhile, you'll know that I moved over to the incubation team in Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group back in August.
My old team is still looking for my replacement, and they're now expanding their search. if you're passionate about CardSpace, Windows Communication Foundation, and Workflow Foundation and working with large Enterprise customers you might be interested in this.
In addition to working with some great technologies, you'll be surrounded by a great group of folks on the Longhorn Server evangelism team, many of whom are authors (or authoring) books on .NETFX 3 or other topics.
James has the full scoop on his blog, check out the link below for details:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jamescon/archive/2006/09/19/761696.aspx
As you're probably aware, I separated Information Center from my main blog to www.informationcenter.tv. In addition to providing a portal for adding more feeds, etc., part of the rationale was that the downloads of the August CTP pushed me over the download limit with my hoster. As this is a personal side project, I went out and found a separate 'free' hoster to handle the bandwidth challenges. Going through my email over the weekend, you can imagine my surprise when I ran across the following:
"I don’t know where to start to share with you the joy and fun on running upgrade!
We are still running testing on our mirror environment. While we think we are getting closer, a few buggy issues pop up and we are still debugging. If everything goes well by EOD tomorrow, then we will start upgrading our production environment next week.
What does it mean to you?
<hosternameomitted/> will need to be out of service for about a week. Our schedule down time is
September 18th 8:00am PST till September 24th 11:00pm PST
If there is any specific information you’d need to pull off from the production environment, please make sure you do that before next Monday."
The hoster has had very little downtime in the last year, which is why I chose it, but they're upgrading all their servers to Office 2007 B2 TR. I've heard they could be online sooner than a week, if so, we'll get it posted sooner.
Watch this space for announcements.
InformationCenter.tv will be going down for a couple of days, it's being moved to a different hoster. It will now be in a hosted Sharepoint server. For those not using Sharepoint, there are a number of great features that I think will make it much easier to modify/maintain. It will also allow me to utilize workflow to handle public additions of new blogs not currently in the directory.
I'll post a note here when the site is back online.
Cheers,
Marc
The blog has been quiet this past week, as between the new job and the new book (Understanding CardSpace), I've been incredibly busy. The next release of InfoCenter has been pushed, it will now be out on Sept. 18th. Now that IE7 has gone to a release candidate, I'm strongly investigating taking a dependency on the RSS functionality provided by it and have it in the next release (hence the long interval).
By leveraging the work those folks have done there, there are three direct benefits - (a) by going with platform componetns for RSS, it removes a disconnect between the InfoCenter stored feeds and the RSS platform stored feeds, (b) the code underneath the RSS functionality has a dedicated group of developers/testers behind it, and (c) it will allow me to focus on some of the next-gen functionality much sooner (i.e. information dvr, community, etc.)
If anyone is strongly opposed to taking a dependency on IE, I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Also, I'm investigating moving parts of this over to CodePlex as a shared source effort to have InfoCenter move along regardless of my personal schedule. Is this something you'd be interested in participating in? If so, let me know (and let me know what your coding background is in)
Cheers,
Marc
People have been asking about Icons to use on their sites for Information Center. Specifically, if you'd like to expose your podcast on your site such that it will launch Information Center. Also, you may want to share a Mix that was created in Information Center.
I spent a few minutes in Photoshop and whipped up the following:
I'd ask you not start using these until the next drop, as the current CTP is very much a alpha/preview where the next drop is something that is more inline with a beta quality CTP.
I spent some time working on Information Center this weekend. I'll be working 1:1 with some folks who've offered to test some of the features that I can't reproduce here (i.e. web proxy issues), and look to post up a new drop late this week.
Splash Screen removed
Non-full screen mode (screen resizing - see screenshot above)
Backward/Forward buttons (see screenshot above)
Integrated Feedback
Integrated Update Notifications
WebProxy Support Added
Change Location of Subscription File/Mix File storage
Current Channel Media Player Enhancements
Modify button and list controls to Left Justify (in anticipation of new layout to debut in September)
Display descriptiion / last published / title on mouse-over in the list controls.
Resolve configuration save issues.
Create RSS feeds for downloads area.
Based on the feedback re: InfoCenter on multiple-monitors and a number of resolutions, I'm going to do a quick rev of InfoCenter this weekend that address the resizing issues, as well as a couple of other tweaks. Expect to see a link here soon to a new drop.
Also expect to see www.informationcenter.tv to expand to allow you to recommend new podcasts for inclusion in the directory, support for feedback/feature requests, and start to become more of a portal.
I'll also be sharing a mix or two so you can see what can be done with mixes (not to mention see some very funny content)
I'll also be adding more channels to the guide, if you've got some suggestions that you think should be in there, definately shoot me a note at mmercuri@informationcenter.tv.
Cheers,
Marc
The August Community Technology Preview of Information Center aka InfoCenter is now available for dowload.
It should be pointed out that this is a CTP - not a released product/project. It's still rough in spots, but it's more than functional enough for people to start using it and deriving value from it. The work on categories (searching), media syncing, more media management, rating, and some other bits is coming next.
I've pre-stocked the directory with almost 200 channels, so there's plenty of content. I will be adding even more channels this weekend, and you can always add your own channels via the 'Manage My Subscriptions' area of the guide.
As I mentioned when I first started talking about this, it's free. If you like it, great - if you think there are opportunities to make it better, definately let me know.
I will be working on an updated version very soon (likely this weekend) that will alert you to updates, as well as allow you to provide feedback / report issues directly through InfoCenter itself. Until that next drop, if you send me an email a mmercuri@infocenter.tv or mmercuri@microsoft.com, I'll make sure to review the issues.
It should be pointed out that InfoCenter does take a dependency on certain things. While it's very flexible, if you download a podcasts in the .MOV format (Quicktime), it will require Quicktime software to play it. You can download Quicktime from here (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html). If you already had iTunes installed, then you've got quicktime, if you don't - you'll probably need to install that via the link.
In addition, if you want to play videos from YouTube, they use technology from Macromedia. Chances are this is already installed on your machine, but if for some reason you don't have it installed, you can install it from here (http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&promoid=BIOW)
The downloadable file can be found on http://www.informationcenter.tv
Enjoy!
-Marc
While I can't FTP from within the corporate firewall, I can blog. One of the ideas I think is fresh in Information Center is the concept of 'mixing' and sharing RSS content.
The following set of screen grabs step you through how this works.
(1) Navigating through content, I see an item that I want to add to a mix, in this case Episode 58 of Diggnation.
(2) Click the Add to Mix button, and the 'Add to Mix' dialog appears. Select the Mix name you want to add this to.
So far this is similair to a playlist in a music player application - but trust me, it gets better.
(3) As I browse, I add other items to my mix. In this case I add the August 21st Dilbert cartoon.
(4) You may have noticed there's an item titled 'Manage Mixes' in the guide.
Clicking on this shows list of mixes you've built, and clicking on a mix shows you which items are there.
You can remove items from a mix, you can remove a mix altogether, but most importantly, you can share a mix.
(5) Clicking Share Mix, brings up a mail dialog (mail server setup is in the config section).
I enter the information and click send. My mix is then sent to the recipient, in this case that's me at my microsoft address.
It's important to note that what |