After much ado, we finally launched TweetCraft, one of our new Coding4Fun applications. Shout-outs to the other members of the TweetCraft team - Gabor Ratky, Mike Sampson and Lincoln Anderson for building a kick-ass v1.

TweetCraft Overview

TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft. TweetCraft has two major components:

• Windows client - A Windows client utility that sends/receives messages from Twitter & TwitPic
• Warcraft Addon - A Warcraft AddOn that sends/receives messages from Twitter

Key Features

• Send/receive Tweets in-game
• Upload in-game screenshots using TwitPic
• AutoTweet Warcraft achievements
• AutoTweet when you log in, enter an instance or change zones
• TweetCraft is also extensible so that AddOn authors can build custom AutoTweet messages

More Information

• Blog/Twitter friendly URLs: http://ch9.ms/TC or http://ch9.ms/TweetCraft
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Getting Started Guide
• Coding4Fun article on how TweetCraft works
• Extending TweetCraft

Screenshots

WPF Client

TweetCraft In-Game

TweetCraft Client Close-up

Hey folks, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for the world to download and here's your cheat sheet of links you'll want to know about

• Download: Visual Studio Team System Beta 1, Web installer, VSTS Beta 1 ISO, .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 
• Readme: VSTS Readme
• Installation Tips & Tricks: Be sure to watch Brian Keller's 10-4 episode on how to download & install VSTS Beta 1  
• Key Features: If you want to see what features are available in Beta 1, check out Jason Zander's VS Beta 1 blog post for tons of screenshots or watch previous episodes of the 10-4 Show on Channel 9 for everything you ever wanted to know about VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.
• Support Forums: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1
• Bug Reporting and Suggestions: Visual Studio 2010 on Connect
• Training Materials: Drew and team have posted the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit that works with VSTS Beta 1. This includes coverage of:
• New language features including VB, C#, F#,
• .NET Framework features like: Parallel extensions, MEF, WPF, WCF
• Data features: Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services
• Web development with ASP.NET 4.0

Top Two Installation Questions 

Q. Will it work side-by-side with VS 2008? 
A: Yes, Visual Studio 2010 will work side-by-side with VS 2008

Q: Will it work on Windows 7?
A: While installing on Windows 7 Beta is not a recommended scenario, installing on Windows 7 RC is a tested scenario.

One thing to remember is that VS 2010 is not feature complete and hasn't been optimized for performance. While the move to a WPF-based editor is pretty sweet, there are some scenarios where you may feel a little bit of latency with your commands.  You'll see perf improvements on this over time. 

Today we announced TwitterDrive, a free, open source application that will revolutionize cloud storage and cloud applications as we know it.  Here is an interview with the TweetDrive creator, Brian Peek with the full details.

What is it? 
TweetDrive is a .NET application that enables you to use Twitter as a cloud storage backend to share files, musics, photos, anything

How does it work?
TweetDrive serializes your file into BASE64, splits the file 140 characters at a time and uploads each file chunk to Twitter.

Does it really work?
Yes! Here's an example Tweet from my TweetDrive account, DanielfeDrive

v6Ld6nEc7w/kXepotrAlOWo984Ob3M6+tJNaNpzpZtQ5Rp5zV99RsnL7NroXvLeNKbdQVWIdizYpqPdJqJR9JFBeIVoO5rwoNITw2J/oKW/FlWjf0aaDJLENCGgYNW5Tpvfu

about 18 hours ago from web

Why use TwitterDrive?

• Infinite Storage -  There are no limits to how many Tweets you can have on Twitter
• Leverages Network Effect - Before TwitterDrive, sending files across the network was just from user A to user B. Now communication is open and linked in a social graph. Social file sharing is the future
• Open Protocols - Since Twitter has an open API, all data is accessible via XML which means developers will be able to build applications on top of this communication stack.

Evolution of networking
I think what you'll see is that Twitter is the next evolution of message protocols. Traditional communication protocols are point-to-point (TCP/IP request between you and a Web site) and totally closed (the exchange is designed to be private between users, outside of packet sniffers).

It's not just TCP/IP that is closed, other communication protocols or applications like email, FTP, HTTP, file streaming are closed systems. Twitter is the future of a communication protocol, it's not only completely open, it's a protocol that is social by design.

I suspect that academics will be re-writing networking books to include Twitter as the fifth and perhaps final layer on top of the TCP/IP protocol.

The Future
This is absolutely just the beginning. Imagine how many applications can be built on top of a totally free, distributed, and social computing cloud. It won't be long before we see the next BitTorrent client or a full blown Web site running using Twitter Cloud Storage. I won't be surprised if the next cloud operating system is distributed and run directly from Twitter.

Available now on Amazon.com for $26 (34% off!)

Our Coding4Fun book, Coding4Fun 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, World of Warcraft, YouTube, and More officially released to the world last week. Unlike your typical .NET development book, Coding4Fun is about learning how to use your developer skills to do fun, cool projects (see below for the full list). All of the .NET projects are in VB and C#, with the exception of the XNA chapter as XNA only supports C# at this time.

I wanted to send a big thank you to everyone who helped write, edit, and review our book's content, especially Laurel Ruma from O'Reilly publishing for all of her work and for being a great advocate for our book!

Coding4Fun: The People

Brian Peek - Brian authored several of the chapters in the book and he's been a regular Coding4Fun contributor, he's a C# MVP, he built the Finalizer, the .NET Battlebot, and he's the developer of the ever-so-popular Wiimote and Wiifit .NET Library. Brian wrote the Alien Attack XNA game, Windows Home Server Mail, Wiimote-Controlled Car, Holiday Lights chapter, and contributed to the Twitter and Wiimote Whiteboard chapter.

Johnny Chung Lee - Johnny was a PhD student from Carnegie Mellon University that became Internet famous by showing how you can use the Wii Remote's IR tracking capabilities in innovative ways. His YouTube videos have been seen by millions and were ranked amongst the top rated YouTube videos of all time. Johnny was also named one of the 2008 Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review and is joining Microsoft as a full-time hire. Johnny co-authored the Wiimote Whiteboard chapter (watch video).

Gabor Ratky - Gabor is the Lead Developer on AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft, a tool that brings a Visual Studio-like experience to building World of Warcraft addons including a visual designer, rich editor, and fully-featured project system (100K+ downloads). Gabor co-authored the World of Warcraft RSS Reader chapter.

Clint Rutkas - Clint is the Content Strategist for Coding4Fun and he's built some pretty impressive projects including the Disco Dance Floor and the Segway Skateboard. Clint co-authored the TwitterVote chapter.

Dan Fernandez - And of course me. I worked on the InnerTube, PeerCast, Lego Soldier, Warcraft RSS Reader, and TwitterVote chapters.

Coding4Fun: The Projects

Alien Attack

Create a 2D clone of Space Invaders with XNA, including how to build for the PC, Xbox 360, and Zune.

LEGO Soldier

Create a 2D side-scroller game with Popfly Game Creator and custom LEGO characters built with LEGO Digital Designer.

World of Warcraft RSS Feed Reader

Building an in-game RSS Reader that synchronizes feeds from your PC to World of Warcraft.

InnerTube

Download, convert and sync hundreds of YouTube videos to iTunes and Zune.

PeerCast

Stream videos on your home PC from anywhere in the world without special hardware using Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PnRP).

TwitterVote

Create custom online (Silverlight) polls for Twitter.

Windows Home Server Mail

Read your email remotely from Windows Home Server without needing Exchange Server.

Wiimote-Controlled Car

Hack a remote-controlled car so that you can control it using a Nintendo Wii Remote.

Wiimote Whiteboard

Create an interactive virtual whiteboard using a Nintendo Wii Remote's IR tracking.

Holiday Lights

Synchronize your holiday light display with music to create your own light show.

For more information on our book and/or for links to the code for each of the projects listed above, visit www.c4fbook.com.

With PDC just about a week over, it's about time I finally got around to blogging about it. Here's the random list

Windows Azure: Ray Ozzie launched Windows Azure and Microsoft's Cloud Strategy (video here). Charles on Channel 9 did a bunch of videos on our Cloud services. If you want a no nonsense explanation of Windows Azure, check out the interview with Manuvir.

Manuvir Das: Introducing Windows Azure

For a great recap on the Windows Azure, check out Dare Obasanjo's blog.

Windows Azure

Azure is that for developers building public-facing Web sites, this is a no-brainer, assuming they get the monetization story right.

Cloud-in-a-Box?

That being said, a number of enterprise customers that I spoke with at the conference said that the primary workloads they're doing are within the firewall and hosting data/computation outside of that is a non-starter. This is especially true with customers with sensitive data (government, financial vertical, biotech,etc). While I have zero knowledge of what the teams are actually working on (read: I know nothing), if Microsoft can either release software or partner with HP/Dell/etc, having a Microsoft Cloud appliance or Cloud software license would definitely be a big hit for that segment of customers. This isn't too far fetched as you're seeing teams discuss providing mutliple tiers of service where you can either pay for software as a service (Exchange Online, SQL Server Data Services) or host them yourself (buy a product license and run it yourself).

Language Parity

The other interesting aspect in looking at the PDC announcements is the difference in strategy amoungst VB and C#. Instead of having each language be good at certain scenarios (VB for Office interop for example), since the language teams have merged and the goal is to have feature parity. This is interesting in that many of the new features for VB were features that already existed in C# (collection initializers, auto-properties, etc) and the reverse is also true (C# gets VB features like optional parameters, named parameters, etc).

Service Bus

While Dare jokingly referred to this as "boring enterprise stuff", the killer feature for me is that Service Bus enables Point A to talk to Point B easily even if both clients are behind firewalls (NAT firewall traversal). One of the chapters in our upcoming Coding4Fun book is PeerCast which lets you stream video from one PC to another PC using PNRP. The problem with PNRP is that in many cases it won't work because you can't see the global seed cloud or your router doesn't support it amongst other troubleshooting issues. If Service Bus "just works" and it has both low-level and high-level APIs to exchange data between peers, then it's definitely going to be of use to Windows developer.

BI in the Cloud is coming

While not currently available, SSDS is going to add business intelligence (analysis services, reporting, data mining) to the cloud and that is going to be a killer feature. If you like Google Analytics, imagine having Google Analytics on steroids for every piece of data your company captures. I'm definitely looking forward to this given that it's very difficult to find a hoster that provides BI solutions from *any* vendor today. It will be interesting to see how Sun (MySQL), IBM (DB2) and Oracle respond to this.

"Pure Evil" = Win

Brian Keller and I got called out as "pure evil" by Scott Hanselman in his excellent .NET Framework 4.0 Overview session at PDC for our now infamous prank on This Week on Channel 9 where we asked our viewers to vote up adding MMO features to BabySmash! (who doesn't want baby vs baby).

Massive video backlog

The great thing about PDC is that all of the videos are available online (streaming + download) from. This of course means that I have a massive backlog of video content to watch.

Our C4F Session: Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo's Wiimote

You can watch our Coding4Fun session online with with Clint Rutkas, Brian Peek, and Scott Hanselman here. I have the C# version of InnerTube up and I'll have the VB version up soon too.

The People

One of the best parts about going to PDC is getting to see old friends or people I've only met through email/forums/twitter in person. Shout-outs to everyone who stopped by the Channel 9 & Coding4Fun Lounge.

Codeplex Meetup @ PDC

Speaking of people, Sara Ford hosted a Codeplex meetup at PDC that I think we'll be posting the video

PDC 2009

Mark your calendars, PDC 2009 is coming back to Los Angeles Nov 17-20th!

As Sara mentioned in the CodePlex blog, we're having a CodePlex meetup at PDC on Wednesday from 1:30 - 2:30pm where volunteers will be able to show off their Codeplex projects and you'll be able to check out demos of new CodePlex features and give the CodePlex team feedback on what they're delivering.

 Full details on the CodePlex blog:

Want to showcase your CodePlex project or your favorite CodePlex project at PDC? Channel 9 and CodePlex are sponsoring a CodePlex Community Meetup  in the Channel 9 lounge area. We’re looking for volunteers to give 5 minute demos of their projects or how they are using their favorite projects.

After the demos, the CodePlex team will be demo’ing new features and collecting feedback, in a town hall / open space format.

We’ll have prizes to give out, and thank you gifts for those who demo projects.

If you can’t make it to the get together, we’ll be at the CodePlex booth towards the back of the Microsoft Pavilion hall on the left-hand side as you enter the Partners and Sponsors section all week. Come by and say hi. We ::heart:: our users.

Since I'm a Visual Studio fanboy, I love hearing about the future of Visual Studio, now officially named Visual Studio 2010.  While the team is taking a measured approach to disclosure, something they haven't done in VS 2005/2008, I did get the scoop on the future of Visual Studio Team System with Norman Guadagno, the Director of Product Management on what the key themes are for this release.

There's a lot more coming and Brian Keller from Channel 9 has a ton more videos coming this week with demos all week long on the Channel 9 Visual Studio site.

Video Schedule

Architecture Day (Tuesday, September 30th):
- Overview from Cameron Skinner
- UML designers
- "Top-down design"
- "Bottom-up design"

Business Alignment (Wednesday, October 1st):
- Overview from Lori Lamkin and Stephanie Saad
- Agile project planning and reporting
- Enterprise project management

Software Quality (Thursday, October 2nd):
- Overview from James Whittaker
- Test Case Management
- Manual Test Runner
- Historical Debugger
- Impact Analysis

Team Foundation Server (Friday, October 3rd):
- Overview from Brian Harry
- Branching and merging visualization
- Enterprise Team Foundation Server Management
- Team Foundation Server Setup
- Migration & Synchronization
- Team Build

While the team is primarily discussing Visual Studio Team System now, as Norman alludes to, you can expect to hear about a whole slew of new features at the Professional Developer's Conference in October, and some more at TechEd Europe 2008 in November.

What about bits?
Unfortunately the team hasn't released any public bits that you can play with to try these features hands on.

Today we officially announced that PDC is the first time Microsoft will be discussing Windows 7 in-depth.

The big announcements are that:

• Steve Sinofsky will keynote on Tuesday at PDC
• There are 21 sessions on Windows 7 at PDC on everything from kernel, audio, graphics, networking, and more.
• All PDC attendees get a pre-beta build of Windows 7 on a custom 160GB external USB drive

Nice!

Congrats to the Popfly team for moving Popfly Game Creator from alpha to Beta and adding a bunch of handy features. For the full rundown, check out the Popfly Team Blog. 

Here's a few of my favorite features

Inserting images into a game

• Alpha (before): You had to manually build XAML and manually upload images for an actor and make sure the URL is
• Beta (after): Native support for adding images to an actor

Playing Audio

• Alpha (before): Popfly let you play built-in sounds with no code, but if you wanted to play a custom sound clip required custom JavaScript code
• Beta (after): No code to play custom sounds

Testing Different Scenes

• Alpha (before): You had to manually play the game to get a scene or add a custom keyboard shortcut to load a scene
• Beta (after): Built-in support for previewing any scene

Customizable actor collisions

• Alpha (before): Your actor "hit box" (the area for actor collisions) was either a square or a circle and you could *not* make it smaller
• Beta (after): You can drag and drop the hit box and make it larger or smaller

All-in-all, lots of good, meaty features for Game Creators.

Scott Hanselman recently blogged about "Ninjas on fire" as a way to describe being overwhelmed at work, here's a snippet from his post on the origin:

Jesse asked me how I was doing yesterday and I replied "Ninjas on fire, man." Four years ago when Halo 2 was coming out it was described like this.

"Halo 2 is alot like Halo 1, except it's Halo 1 on fire going 120 miles per hour through a hospital zone chased by helicopters and ninjas. And the ninjas are all on fire too." -Jason Jones

For me and some of my compatriots, it also become a phrase that referred to our current workload, like:

"How's work?"

"I'm being chased by ninjas."

"Are they on fire?"

"Not yet."

"Oh, so it's Tuesday. You wait."

The short-hand just became "ninjas on fire, man" as a response to when you're totally overwhelmed with deadlines and work.

Scott and I taped This Week on Channel 9 earlier to day and I was telling him how our old team came up with a similar version of "Ninjas on Fire" as we just had *so* many projects to be working on and so little time that we continually had too many things to handle. To illustrate the overworked advisory system, I've added this helpful graphic which is of course ripped off from the US Government's Homeland Security System.

My current level is:

And no, you don't get to know how the criteria is set :)

For World of Warcraft developers looking to build AddOns, a BETA version of AddOn Studio is now available! Here's an interview and demo with Attila Kisko and Gabor Ratky on AddOn Studio.

 There are some bugs and some content that still isn't available, but we're working on it :)

 All of it is made possible of course by the power of the Visual Studio Shell

Hey folks, if you've built some cool project, the Non-Pro team wants to hear from you! Send them an email!

Kudos to the Popfly team for adding new features in their July update. My favorite features are the pre-loading of assets which will pre-load images, audio, video before a game starts so it doesn't lag out and the High Score service. The full list of features can be found on the Popfly Team blog.

Crayon Cannon

If you haven't played this game, stop what you're doing and give it a try. It reminds me of Crayon Physics Deluxe in its simplicity and addictiveness.

Play Now

Woohoo! From Joystiq, Bioware has officially spilled the beans that they are building a MMO based on the Knights of the Old Republic game. The first KOTOR game was amazing, clearly one of the best Xbox games ever and an amazing twist at the end...in short, a masterpiece.

Hotness!

 Here are the notes from the Future of MMO's panel in February at GDC that included Ray Muyzka from Bioware

Yes, it's Bill's last day, here's a collection of videos for your viewing pleasure:

• Channel 9: Bill Gates: Transitioning into the Future
• Channel 9: This Week on Channel 9 with Jeff Sandquist and Bill Gates stories
• Channel 9: 'Softies share their Bill Gates stories
• MS PressPass: Bill Gates Looking Backing, Moving Ahead
• CNN: Bill Gates Slideshow narrated by Bill Gates
• MSNBC: Tom Brokaw interview with Bill Gates

You should also check out the Bill Gates Retirement Party on Gizmodo and Bill Gates Day on Engadget

There was a company meeting today at 9am to say goodbye to Bill with Bill and Steve. MSNBC wrote an article on the meeting, here's a quick snippet:

On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present.

...

..He was introduced to fellow freshman Ballmer by a mutual friend. On their first date, they went to the movies to see an unlikely back-to-back showing of "Singing in the Rain" and "A Clockwork Orange."

Ballmer, who has famously danced and jumped around stage at conferences, described a similarly silly and uninhibited Gates that evening.

"So we come back from the movie, we're kind of dancing, we're both kind of playing Gene Kelly, and some guy wrestles me to the ground in our dorm," Ballmer said. It fell to Gates, who hardly qualifies as burly, to fend off the fellow student.

Bill, you will be missed :(