Ernst Kuschke

SaDeveloper hosted a developer-session on Saturday on Developing SharePoint Solutions and Office Business Applications (OBA) using .NET at Microsoft Cape Town, which was very well received. It's the first of a series of in-depth enterprise-related sessions you can expect, and because of the length of these, they will take place on Saturdays. (The session received excellent ratings and in general it seems that events on Saturdays might become more popular than some might have anticipated).

Thanks to Zlatan Dzinic and Schalk van Wyk for an excellent session; I have no doubts that many hours were devoted to preparation! The slides for their presentation can be found here.

Microsoft just released the training kit with material based on the DinnerNow! scenario. Get more info here.

Podcamp is coming to South Africa! Join us at PodCamp Cape Town by registering on the wiki. Discussions will happen through the Facebook Group.

What is PodCamp?

Started in Boston, MA, USA in September 2006, PodCamp was born.

In the same style as BarCamp, PodCamp is a community driven UnConference for anybody and everybody in New Media. Whether you create and/or consume content by podcasting, listening, blogging, reading, producing video, watching and anything else that is New Media.

VeoTag really puts existing technology in the hands of users. Tagging multimedia files in this way has always been possible, but not as easy as the VeoTag software makes it.

The video in the player on the right has been tagged - you can see the Tag hierarchy on the right of the video. Clicking on any of the tags will immediately take you to this location in the video - similar to the menu on your favourite DVD movie. This is cool, but it gets better.

VeoTags are converted to absolute URL's, which means that clicking it will take you to its exact location in the video clip - here's an example of such an URL: http://www.veotag.com/player/?u=zmrclsghvq&tid=446a4711-4045-4af0-bb6e-3215a6a19933

My favourite is that videos now become searchable! The text in tags will be indexed by search engines, and search results thus become more universal by being more than just text - you can now be taken right into a video-clip's location that is relevant to your search!

Google is also undertaking a monumental project of returning universal search results, but VeoTag might just bring this ideal a bit closer to reality.

I just had to share.

Seems to me that people have mixed feelings about the iPhone. For me it's a clear decision: *if* I buy the iPhone, I'll wait for the next model. Let's look at the Apple marketing strategy on the iPod (which is a cool device!) - a new model is released once a year, and Jobs says that to stay current, you'd have to upgrade once a year. I think we can expect the same strategy for the iPhone, and I do hope that the next model will include all the currently missing (basic) features.

For the iPhone:

1. Multi-touch screen (that SO! rocks)
2. It errr..... looks cool (I had to find at least one more point *for* the iPhone's!)

Against the iPhone:

1. No replaceable battery
2. No 3G
3. No Video Capture
4. No memory card slot
5. No File transfer via Bluetooth
6. Only 5 hours battery life (talk time)
7. 2 mega-pixel camera (WTF?!)
8. It's massive!
9. No non-proprietary software

This dude sums it up pretty well too, and he makes me laugh!. (I must add that many of his points aren't really valid).

[UPDATE: Seems that Apple is already planning the next iPhone]

Rick Strahl accurately sums up how I feel about the iPhone hype. Nuff said!

Search Optimisation for Flash sites?! It ain't pretty, but it has been done - here's how. On the other hand, you could just use Silverlight ;o)

Microsoft Mediaroom is what you've been waiting for if you wish to consolidate all of your media: XBOX360, DVDs, home movies, holiday photos, radio, TV, Pay-per-view, you name it. I can't describe it as well as Scott did in this post. South Africa is one of the few listed supported countries:

Another interesting fact is that the site utilises Flash, and not Silverlight!!

Stumbled upon musicovery today - this is a great way to find music that suits your mood - a music search engine! You can shift a pin between four mood extremes, and filter out certain genres you don't enjoy. In fact, it's best explained with a screen-shot:

Very visually appealing! I am not sure how their algorithms that classify music work, but it seems accurate. It allows you to customise the mood for each of the genre-filters too, for instance I can select blues to be somewhere in between Positive and Energetic (which could have mighty interesting results :P) In addition, I can filter out certain eras, like the 80's, of course.

I am once again confirmed as an MVP in Visual C# for the next year! (woohoo!) 

This affords me the opportunity to work very closely with the Product Teams at  Microsoft Corp., so that I can help where I can in getting knowledge across to software communities. MVPs are also the "voice" of the community to Microsoft, and Microsoft takes MVP input very seriously when designing products, in my experience. As most people know: we do have to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements with Microsoft. Nonetheless, keep your eyes on this blog for news from Redmond.

I'm truly stoked :-)