Nokia + Microsoft ?

This morning BBC breakfast announced that Nokia was going to make a big announcement, possibly that they are going to work with Google on their next range of phones....

1 hr later I get to work and in that time Uncle Steve (Boom baby thats what we are talking about) Ballmer announces that Microsoft and Nokia are forming a strategic alliance.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukmsdn/archive/2011/02/11/windows-phone-and-nokia-enter-strategic-partnership.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/feb11/02-11partnership.mspx

I like the nokia handsets, the OS has been getting increasingly out of date, so I moved to windows phone 7, as a developer the plan was to build some apps and get rich and famous.
I haven't done any of that, but I have realised that MS is onto a winner with their mobile OS, I thinks it really good and possible even better than the competition.

But what does this alliance really mean for the day to day phone user?
Probably not much unless you are a symbian OS developer, maybe more flexibility and choice as Nokia do make cool handsets.

WIll be interesting what Nokia say later on today.

Open Space Code - a good day out

I spent my saturday with a group of programmers form around London taking part in the 2nd openspacecode event, I had never heard about these types of events before but it seemed like a great idea.

As a sole developer it can be really hard to 'see' what is going on in the industry, especially when all of my projects are based loosely around the same technology and 'patterns & practices'.

The day started with a short group planning session, where everyone is given the oppurtunity to put forward topics to discuss.
Following a brief democratic process we had our morning topics inplace - I was off to learn about BDD - Behaviour Driven Development

Thanks to Ian Cooper for filling us in on BDD, the topic was covered well and I got 2 main things out of the 2 hours or so.

1- I need to spend a fair chunk of time learning more about testing
2- I should probably take some time out to move some of what I do to c#

We then all headed off to lunch at Nandos!

The afternoon started with a quick planning session to decide what was going to be discussed over the afternoon session - I went a long to the DSL - Domain Specific Langauge talk.
Which although is probably not something I will be doing in the near future it is defeinitely a part of software development that I will have to use.

The day finished off with everyone back together to discuss the day, pros and cons etc.

Then something I have been looking to do for quite awile - I got to play on one of the few 'Microsoft Surface' devices in the world!
This is a cool piece of technology, if I had a spare £12k I would really like one, not sure what I would use it for, but there would never be a shortage of conversation starters (for those who haven't seen/heard about Surface, this one was an interactive coffee table with brains).

Special thanks to Alan Dean for organising a great event and to cochango for letting us use their really nice offices and allowing some of us to play on the Surface!

If you are a software developer and live in London and are keen to see how other developers do what they do, these events are what you are looking for!

ciao to microsoft

I spoke to a guy from ciao.com yesterday at the e-commerce expo in London (uk) and he mentioned that Microsoft had just bought www.ciao.com?

Apparently the wheels had only just started moving so he had no idea of what the merger/acquisition would mean for us in the real world, but they had been informed MS would be looking after the data center side of things and investing into the infrastructure, interesting for MS to go into paid user based reviews?

This will be interesting as they will now know (before anyone else does I suppose) what the average person thinks about just about every product around, nice info to have if you are looking to launch your own.....?????

microsoft.co.uk - live to code?

I check the microsoft site regularily, but this morning i went to http://microsoft.co.uk and something big had changed....


This may be a DNS problem, but the live to code thing is part of channel9/Josh holmes' world.
Its an interesting move by microsoft, or maybe bill is playing a joke on them as he leaves?

any ideas?

new microsoft surface is here!

I saw this in development via the web about three years ago, and now out of (seemingly) nowhere microsoft launch it as "Surface", based on the silverlight platform, it is the next step in the 'flas' type platform where web/interfaces are now multimedia rich applications, the surface platform just adds the touch sreen world to this and combined makes my job as a web developer tough (I am not complainin though).

No more will people be happy with flat, no media websites, they will want by default a feature rich site that works on all browsers with embedded video, sound, moving living information.

To be honest I am happy, the 'web' at last can break free from its static life (I am not a great fan of flash as its not SEO friendly, silverlight is written in XAML (text) so can be 'read' by search engines) and move into the realms of desktop software where everything is live now not waiting for a click of a mouse etc.

It may be a while before Surface and Silverlight make it into everyday websites/stores, when it does it will definately change the face of both highstreet and web experiences and bring them so much closer.

live.com - mashups

I was at a microsoft event last night in london (in the swimming pool), the event was about live.com/maps.live.com and mashups (bringing disparate information together in one place).

As an ex-surveyor type I found the advancement of mapping (maps.live.com) on the web a real buzz, the ability to add your own maps and layer them on top of the microsoft virtual earth is really good, see awslive.com for more info and technology previews.

live.com is a great idea its not just a web portal in the old fashioned way, its a place for (I know it sounds like I have been brainwashed, maybe they put something in the coffee?) people to re-brand the way the internat works nad how we use it.

I heard about rich user interfaces about 2 years ago at the launch of the .net framework, and finally it is starting to make its way on to the net, with the help of ajax (atlas.asp.net) and loads of developers and companies like microsoft and google heading the forefront of this we can look forward to a really heavy user interface for web sites. By this I mean your browser window will be used as a container for a fully blown application like paint. No download (maybe a plugin but no installation on your PC) but a fully interactive application you can turn off and come back on someone elses PC or maybe on your phone?

Have alook around labs.live.com or research.microsoft.com if you are interested in where technology going, you will be amazed.