I am happy to echo the announcement of Live Search API 2.0 Beta being released for general use. There's a lot that’s new in this version:

• We now offer access through new interfaces: JSON, and XML over HTTP. Of course, you can still use our SOAP interface. But now you have options.
• You said you were spinning cycles parsing out non-web results that had been shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all response structure, and we heard you.
• The new API is strongly typed and offers access to seven different types of results (web, news, images, phonebook, spell-checker, related queries, and Encarta instant answer).
• We’ve opened up our Terms of Use, eliminating the pre-set usage quota. We do require that you use this API for user-facing applications only. But that’s reasonable, right?
• We’ve retained the popular capability to batch as many SourceTypes as you want into a single request with a single query string.

To me this is really exciting as it shows Microsoft’s commitments to evolving the API for its top services and supporting standards for interacting with them such as JSON or XML.

Generally I believe that search is a very key resource for any web project and as Live.com APIs improve and allow greater monetization this has the potential of evolving into a key competitive advantage for our platform. After all folks, its not all about Live Mesh :).

Thank you to everyone who attended my Live Framework presentations in both NJ for the User Group and CT for the Code Camp. I had a really great time presenting this topic and hope everyone left my demos knowing a lot more then when they walked in.

Slide decks:

• NJ .NET User Group Slides
• CT Code Camp Slides (more complete presentation, recommend looking at this)

Feedback, corrections, criticism (or praise) is always welcome!

The other day I finally did something I’ve been wanted to do since I heard the awesome announcement at PDC: Windows 7 can run on a Netbook. This was terrific news and something I was really hoping to hear. Windows XP to me is a dead operating system, for all its glory its time to move on, yet I worried with the rise of Netbooks if this was possible without a “light” version of our newer Windows releases. With Windows 7, my wish came true.

Build

The build that I am installing is the one which I believe got handed out at PDC (rev. 6801). I didn't go to PDC so it was obtained from the official Microsoft network share for full time employees.

The Install

The install itself was fairly painless, in about one hours time I was able to:

• Boot my Mini from a USB harddisk
• Delete the existing partition
• Begin the install
• And finally, be booted in Windows 7!

Windows 7 had enough drivers to boot the device without an attached network connection, so this is good news as well.

Once Booted

Once I finally logged into Windows 7 I noticed right away a perceived performance increase! Yes this was super excited enough to use two exclamation points in this one sentence!

Clicking around  randomly and right-clicking on items seemed much faster. Booting was quick to begin with and opening applications like the included chess game and IE 8 Beta was very smooth. I have to say while happy with my Dell 9 before in terms of performance, this really does optimize the experience.

Great job Windows team!

Memory Use

After playing around launching various applications I decided to close down everything and check the memory footprint. With nothing running I was now at around 650megs of memory use, from my total 2gigs.

Rebooting the machine and checking again revealed that from the start it got close to 600megs, but still very friendly, leaving most of my memory to applications.

Drivers

Unfortunately though I did notice in device manager a bunch of missing drivers and unknown devices. While enough to boot I don't seem to have enough out-of-the-box to have all my devices working.

Wireless Driver – Works of Dell’s site

I downloaded the latest wireless driver from Dell’s support website and was able to connect to my wireless network. This will give me a chance to see later this week if I can use Windows update to fix my driver issues. More on this later.

Ethernet Driver – Dead in the water

The biggest concern right now is that the wired Ethernet adapter while installed does not seem to start (error code 10? hmm). I just hope a newer version of the driver is released soon or Windows 7 fixes the issue somehow, it would be horrible not to have a wired connection.

Conclusion

While its not perfect my overall experience is very positive and I simply cannot wait to see this operating system go RTM! I will continue to post on my experience as this story evolves, so stay tuned.

This weekend I will be speaking at the Fairfield / Westchester Code Camp. I am very excited to present at this large event and definitely encourage people to come down (or up) to it. The event will cover topics like Cloud Computing, MVC Framework, Silverlight, AJAX, SQL/BI, Speech Recognition and much more. See the official website for all the details and information about all the great prizes.

For speakers this event taps into some of the best and brightest from both within Microsoft and other companies. Names such as Peter Laudati, Richard Hale Shaw, Bill Zack, Don Demsak and others should definitely draw a great audience. With such a diversity of speakers and topics there will be something for everyone, so register today!

The details about my particular session are below.

Details

Where: The 2nd Annual Fairfield / Westchester Code Camp!
When: Saturday, November 8, 2008 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM

Title: Developing Applications using Live Framework
Details: Live Framework brings together previously separate Live Services under a common API to enable developer to build applications that can easily interact with people, data and devices. This exciting new platform releases the developer from dealing with difficult low-level problems such as data synchronization, contact management, disconnected state and much more. Instead, developers can focus their engineering talents on building rich experiences and solving business problems. Come to this session to learn all about the  Live Framework, how it now encompasses Mesh Services, and the new role of Silverlight 2 applications within the Mesh.

For all the details and to register visit: http://fwcodecamp.net/

(Note: Formally this was going to be an Internet Explorer 8 session for Developers. We decided to change the track in response to all the excitement and confusion around PDC Cloud Services announcements)

The Problem: Cannot installed Azure CTP without SQL Express 2005 or 2008

The other day I tried to install Azure CTP on my machine but during the install got a fatal error:

“The SQL Server instance ‘.SQLEXPRESS’ could not be found. Please verify that SQL Express is installed and running” was the message as seen above and it stopped the installer in its tracks.

I quickly realized I must have missed a dependency so I looked in the read-me (located in C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\RelNotes.htm) file and sure enough here was what it said:

SQLExpress 2005 or 2008

Either SQL Express 2005 or SQL Express 2008 is required to run the development storage services.

Funny enough I have the full version of SQL 2005 Developer edition installed on my laptop but I guess its simply not designed to work with it out of the box.

(Its also worth noting my laptop is running Windows Server 2008)

To make thing simple I decided to download/install SQL Express 2008 and not try to get the CTP working with the Standard edition.

SQL Express 2008, not so fast cowboy

Thinking this would be a quick and painless install I jumped right into it, but another dependency error would again stop me in my tracks. Windows PowerShell seemed missing and required for the installer to continue as seen below:

I did not see this as a big deal, if its needed why not install it. Without even stopping my SQL Express installer I went to the PowerShell download page after a quick live search but realized I was taking the wrong approach, PowerShell for Windows 2008 server that my laptop runs is not a separate download, but instead a feature I simply had to turn on.

I quickly went to “Turn Windows features on or off” and installed PowerShell. I then went back to my SQL Express installer window, hit Refresh and everything PASSED!. The install then continued without further issues.

Azure Install – Attempted #2

Now that PowerShell and SQL Express 2008 were in place my Azure CTP installed great. The installer found the Express instance and prompted me to create the assets needed for the “Development Storage” simulation.

Up and Running

After the install I was able to create a new ASP.NET Cloud website using the “Web and Worker Cloud Service” template. I am very excited to finally have this running on my machine and seeing what I can do with it for future demos and my own personal web development efforts. Its really an amazing time to be a developer!

Don’t Forget: Run as admin

Just don’t forget, to start debug you will need to start Visual Studio as “Administrator” by right-clicking on its icon and using the “Run as administrator” option or you’ll get an error.

Here are some screenshots:

Visual Studio Templates: Cloud Service
Development Fabric Running
System-tray icons

For those of us developers addicted to our computers 24/7 and unlucky enough not to have made it to Microsoft PDC 2008 the mood can still be exciting as we do our best to follow the event online and on Twitter. Its really great that Microsoft is making all the sessions available online for free through Channel9 as the week goes on (yes all sessions not just the Keynotes!), this really makes it possible to “be there” when the time or money doesn't let you visit California.

If you didn’t even know that the sessions are being posted online, well they are. The first two days are already published and by weeks end I'd expect everything to be posted. To find these sessions simply visit the official websites session timeline page, click on the session you want to view and hopefully you’ll see a “View Session Detail” button that goes the Channel9 where the actual videos and PowerPoint slides can be found.

Make your own mini-PDC!

But lets face it, while many people probably watched the flashy keynotes live or as recordings its hard for many people to watch the actual individual sessions where the real value is hidden.

This brings me to one of my main (ambitious) points of this post: Encouraging you to make your own mini-PDC happen at your company! The idea is that by next week all of the sessions should be posted online, so it is fully possible to take your colleagues, setup 1-day next week, buy some Pizza and watch those sessions most relevant to your companies development future.

Why do this? The answer is a simple list of benefits:

• The team will have a great chance to bond
• The team will learn about technologies that can one day benefit the business
• Developers given a chance to think about technology and get away from the “Day-to-day” will get inspired about the future. This inspiration will lead to more creative problem solving and even potential costing savings for the company! ( bit hopefully of me? Yes, but hey it could happen!).

The list  can probably go on, but these points alone will hopefully be enough for development shops centered around Microsoft technologies to buy into the idea. I really hope those who read this post will the idea a shot at their your company, it might be a great day, because the future really is delicious (and hopefully so will be the Pizza)

Today I had one of those moments when while working I opened some random link from a Twitter post that seemed interesting. What I saw literally blew me away.

The screenshot above shows a clip from a Channel9 video posted on Adam Kinneys blog, yes you’re seeing the original Quake but what's really impressive is that its running inside a browser using Silverlight 2!

Wow, thats just freaking cool. So the credit here goes to Julien Frelat, a 31-year old French developer with experience in game development who ported the Quake engine to C# and then rendered its UI using Silverlight 2 with simple use of images.

In the video if I caught it correctly the game is running at around 14 FPS, which seems plenty for the original Quake. I cannot wait to try this myself when its finally released as its currently not published.

To see the video and a lot more info visit the original post for yourself:

• Adam Kinney’s blog post with details and video http://adamkinney.com/blog/374/default.aspx 
• The Channel9 video page for QuakeLight QuakeLight Preview.