Month: November 2010

Feeling great :)

After giving my 1st Tech-Ed session ever!! so… I just can say this has been a dream for me over the last years as one of my personal & professional goals was to become a speaker of enough quality to talk into Tech-Ed.

This has become a reality this week and I have so many people to thank that I don’t know where to start… I guess I can start with my friends at the INETA Board, great hard working people, Starting with Damir Tomicic, Tomislav Bronzin, Sander Gerz, Dobrisa Adamec, Miguel Lopez, Christian Nagel, André Obelink, All.

Also many thanks to those that believed and proposed (and allowed) me to talk at their events, Bernardin Katric (Kulen Dayz) with a session regarding Silverlight 3, Andrej Radinjer at Mobility Days where I had the honor of giving two sessions on WP7 development that were originally assigned to Andy Wigley  – wow! also to Ankesh Mehta who invited me to talk at his User Group – thanks!

I could not keep on without thanking those that helped me getting started, concretly I am talking of such amazing people from Microsoft Spain’s team which first I can mention Alfonso Rodriguez (you rock!), José Murillo, Elisa, Isabel, Ethel, and of course two great persons & even better speakers, David Carmona & David Salgado!!! Of course thanks a lot to my MVP Lead, Cristina – for your continuous support & believing so much (sometimes more than me), thanks too to Antonio Gomez & Enrique Fernandez Laguilhoat – I know that I have probably left many more people that I know so – thanks everybody that has helped & supported me with even some kind words!! 🙂

Can’t keep on without thanking too to Paco Marin, Netalia chief editor & Aula Vulcan partner – and also a good friend, to Marino Posadas, David Nudelman, both good friends  & also to everybody that supported me in one way or other.

And there is even more – I joined in September a local Toastmasters association, Bcn-toastmasters with great people that have helped me grow by quite a lot during a very short time!! for those of you that don’t know, Toastmasters is an interantional organization with the goal of helping Speakers to become even better Speakers so it’s highly recommended!! check www.toastmasters.org if you’re interested!! I just can say it’s awesome 🙂

So, thanks a lot to MA Garcias, FAbulous speaker who dedicated me some time to help me prepare, Pilar de Obeso, Joan Fabregat, Cormac Walsh, … All Toastmaster’s Barcelona, thank you!! with special mention to my actual mentor, Celine Quissac who also helped & supported in an incredible way in the short time she was my mentor -only one week before TechEd… if she did this in one week I can’t imagine what will happen next – I’m looking forward to that!! 🙂

Also thanks to the delegates that came to my session and for the nice comments -best one is that he learned a lot in just 40’…

😀 – feeling great!

Silverlight’s 3D True power – from 0 to hero in 40 min.

Today, Wednesday, I’ll be talking at TechEd Europe 2010 about Silverlight 3D Actual capabilities and how to use them with the session named “Silverlight’s 3D true power – from 0 to 100 in a practical way”,  the time is 1:20pm and it will be at Hall 7.1c, Paris 1.

 

Why 3D? Because it is important for all of us, first we are made to interact with our environment in 3D, our interfaces have 3D tactile capabilities, our vision is 3D and 3D is natural to us (even we have been educated for some years to use 2D interfaces). But.. this is changing, all the industry is switching to 3D, starting by the gaming industry that started with the Wii and now is taking a new step with Kinect as a full body 3D scanner that allows us to interact with our full body with the Xbox interface & games, The Movie industry is also moving to 3D and the display & TV industry is doing so as well… so, it is clear that 3D is important and also the point is that any User interface technology must support this evolution & provide 3D capabilities, for creating 3D interfaces and hopefully in short time, to interact in 3D with them without any device. (So.. when a Kinect for Pc, Microsoft? J – I`m already on the Queue…)

On the session that I am proposing you, we will see the actual status of Silverlight regarding 3D, I’ll show you the basics & ABC of Silverlight 3D capabilities, we will see how do their PlaneProjection properties get along & implement some simple effects and see how we can improve them with Blend so they can shine.

Next, we will get into implementing an intermediate Interaction Design pattern that I love, the Carousel – I’ll show you how to do it from scratch and in full 3D and provide a basic animation so it can spin. Next we will improve its interaction providing it mouse interaction so it spins quicker or slower depending on how far is the mouse cursor from the center. Also we will add some control for when the mouse gets out of the interaction area, so it does not start spinning like crazy (I can bet you have seen more than one of these in production websites…).

Regarding the Carousel, you curious people can read more about it here: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/selection/carousel.html, here: http://ui-patterns.com/patterns/Carousel and here: http://www.welie.com/patterns/showPattern.php?patternID=carrousel and some more… http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Mobile_Design_Pattern:_Carousel , http://www.uipattern.com/carousel-design-examples.

Basically allows a user to select one item between a collection of items. This is good because it represents visualy the item (with picture, text & other iconic information) providing accurate understanding of the items to select & also a quick selection of them. This can be done in multiple ways, being one of the most famous the horizontal 2D carousel, the growing one that some OS have for its main function selection, the circular elliptic carousel is also very famous, but who does not know the “CoverFlow”? it is indeed a 3D representation of an horizontal Carousel – by the way, have you checked the Silverlight Booth Demo launcher? It is a nice implementation of this Interaction design Pattern, too! – you can see it at the Silverlight Booth or here: http://www.brainsiders.com//TEE2010/SLShowcase/default.html (note: it is meant to be run in full screen mode). I also implemented there an “auto” mode so I am happy with that, it is simple and efficient. Oh, and the full source code is here: http://showcaselauncher.codeplex.com/

Note that it uses some code from the Bouncing Plane Demo (Henry Han, Tim Heuer, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/henryh/archive/2009/03/20/mix09-the-gratuitous-graphics-demo.aspx ) and the for the Horizontal Carousel I’ve used the Flow Layouts Library, see http://slflow.codeplex.com/ from Simon Ferquel, awesome work both of them!!

Oops, almost forgot, For the circular animation I have used the smart technique conceived by John Bruin – http://www.johnbruin.net/index.php/category/silverlight/ – Thanks John!

 

Also, there’s still more, we will see what do we have apart from the core framework, showcasing two amazing components for providing full 3D, the first being Balder a pretty nice Open Source engine friendly with Blend & XAML based and the second, Silvermotion, a commercial component with awesome power, performance & ease of use.

And yes, all this in 40 minutes.

Sounds good? J

 

Session Code: WEB202-LNC

Session room: Hall 7.1c Paris 1

When: Today, 1:20pm

 



Don’t miss it!!  If you are interested in 3D, Silverlight and in learning how to implement 3D Interaction design patterns.. we will dedicate a whole 40 minutes to this!!