General

Microsoft just announced that it has shifted a million Kinect units within 10 days! It seems that it is not hard for Microsoft to achieve its sales predictions upwards to five million by the end of 2010. Especially, by Chirstmas time, Microsoft is hoping to sell Kinect in 38 countires and Kinect is going to be the hottest gift this season. For Singapore, we are counting down to the Xbox 360’s event of the year - “X10” Kinect for Xbox 360 launch event! 17 to 21 November @ Plaza Singapura! Exclusive pre-sale for DBS/POSB cardmembers starts on 17th November @ 12noon onwards. Sales will be available to all other customers from the 18th November,10am onwards. We are excited and we …hope to see you there! For event details, you could check out here. Dance your way to Big Prizes at Kinect X10 Event! Lastly, watch how New York’s famed Times Square went controller-free on the Kinect launch day in US. NYC, as the Crossroads of the World was transformed into a dancing, singing, A-list celebration for the launch of Kinect for Xbox 360. A full day of demos, star-studded appearances and a massive, choreographed dance routine culminated in an excited line of thousands of fans eagerly waiting to take home the future of home entertainment. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blkV4KH8zxo&feature=related[/youtube]

So here is how the story goes… we have a winner for our “Guess what she is smiling about” contest and here are the top 3 entries that we think are the most creative! In 3rd place… “I guess the lady is saying about having an application that knows whether the guy she adores likes her based on his heartbeat rate.” -Lin Liyi In 2nd place… “She wants an app that lets her share what her boyfriend sings to her.” -Anuj Bheda and the winner of our KINECT… “She needs an app that can detect the peak frequency of laser emissions coming out from someone so she can plan her counter attack accordingly..” -Jocelyn Villaraza Big ‘Thank You’ to all who have participated, Re-Tweeted, shared this contest and congratulations to Jocelyn for giving us such an entertaining and creative answer. Jocelyn’s app would really come in handy in the future, when all of us carry around our laser guns and light sabres ready for a showdown anytime, its like the wild wild west 2.0! By the way, did I mention that the 2 runner ups gets super awesome limited edition WP7 stickers? Yes… WP7 stickers, you will get, hmmm. ...

Dear Javascript fans, Don’t miss this monthly meet up group. Beers provided! http://www.beermatesjs.com/ Current Meetup Happening 4th November 2010, Thursday Hackerspace SG, 730pm The mighty JS function (Timothee Groleau) How I got started in Javascript (Lim Chee Aun ) Got Joose? (Kenny Shen ) Register at http://www.flickevents.com/beermates

This post is written by Michael Sync, a Microsoft MVP. More information could be found here. How are you doing? guys.. I’ve been so busy with both Windows Phone 7 development and Silverlight development lately and I couldn’t able to update anything on my blog.. Sorry, guys! As we are sharing our code base between Silverlight and Phone 7, there are a lot of interesting things that I wanna share with you guys. I will write about it in different post later but I gotta tell you that it’s not that simple to share the codebase between two platforms. :) As of now, I like to share some screenshots of our Windows Phone 7 application that we submitted around Oct 4th. I like to tell you guys about what we are doing and etc first. We are developing Silverlight and Phone 7 applications for Brain training games. We already developed around 20 games in Silverlight and all of our games support both English ( memolife.com ) and Norwegian (hjerneklubben.no). We started working on the version 2 of our application a few months back. When we heard about Windows Phone 7, we are very excited about it and decided to support the Windows mobile platform for our applications as well. Chris Ismael from Microsoft Singapore helped us to get the prototype version of Windows Phone 7 device (LG) so that we can use it for developing our application. (Thanks, Chris! ) Our application is called “MemoGenius Lite”.. It includes two brain training games and one course. You need to finish the “Flash Course” in order to unlock our brain training games. We added “Share” button in our application so that if you like to share about our application with your friends in facebook, you can simply click on that button to share… ...

I presented Silverlight technology at Rich Media rocks 2010 event on Oct 25th 2010 in Singapore. And here is a recap of some cases I showed yesterday. For more examples, you could visit here. For more information, you could contact me at yanmf@Microsoft.com, Or follow my twitter @mingfeiy. The presentation slides could be downloaded here. Demo One: Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/?src=homepage_memobox_headergraphic Hard Rock Cafe is the haven for true rock n’ roll fans, offering a full rock experience through our cafes, hotels, casinos, memorabilia and music venues all over the world. They have a lot of collections of artists displayed in hard-rock cafes, hotels, casinos and etc, from Madonna’s gloves worn on The Girlie Show tour displayed in Hard Rock Cafe Cayman Islands to Queen’s “Red Speical” Guitar displayed in Hard Rock Cafe in Vegas. There is a special item in this collection to demonstrate the power of Silverlight Deep Zoom technology. It is the 13th item on the fourth row. You will see one envelope there with four letters. That’s Item 043311- Paul McCartney - The Beatles Letter from Paul and Beatles autographs. Below are the screen shots of zoom-in effects. You could zoom till you see the last picture displayed above. Deep Zoom technology is very different from traditional zoom-in. It will bring in new level of details while you zoom into the pictures. It brings users brand new experiences! ...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COeOEvd0ioY[/youtube] Guess what she (the lady below) is saying and get creative to stand a chance to win a Kinect! Update: Here are the winners for the limited edition WP7 notepads! To receive your notepad, email us your mailing address: innovativesg@live.com @Metabaron @Luke2375 @vitcott @anuj89 @jont87 @xsurycx @JeffWeber @icelava @xxkyzerxx @GaryPretty @tanjohnny @vertongen @flazm @trydis @chillfire @luxurytravelled @umay @oscarprawata @paramitta @limguohong @sebng @oysts @JLancaster3 @KayJayThwaps @TMGaming @gbmutley @MissDMeaner @michaelsync @VeryKross @swfdougherty @ivonnelestarti @ferrygun @pinkrody28 @jordanclark @ginatan28 @DANGO547 @tikrung @alvintangsc @supersuf @oscarprawata @everlasting86 @benjaminhuang @dreamtcs @jordan_clark Terms and Conditions: ...

We conducted our 1st Application LifeCycle Management (ALM) Solution Briefing on the new Visual Studio 2010 on 22nd Sep in Microsoft Auditorium. A total of 110 attendees across various disciplines such as architects, application programmer, developers, tester & project manager attended the talk. We invited 3 speakers to deliver the ALM message. The general poll from the evaluation feedback form indicated that we have delivered a well balance content which has helped to elevate the use of ALM as a tool to help improve productivity in the daily work of a developer. As the opening keynote, Mr Steven Sim who is the Microsoft Regional Developer Tools Sales Lead shared on “VS2010 Your ALM Solution”. Steven shared the definition of a well-managed Application LifeCycle and how VS2010 can be leverage to address some of the common challenges encountered during development cycle. Did you know that - “Based on time, budget, and delivering specified functionality 68% of projects never made it into production or were canceled”. Check out Steven’s slide to find out more on Microsoft ALM Solution. ...

Hi guys! Developers here in Singapore are also hard at work in polishing and getting their games and apps published in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Here’ a quick glimpse at some of them. Be sure to check out their links as well! Armor Valley – Combat strategy game ported from Xbox (Indie games). Included in the Xbox Live games on Windows Phone Dino Parade – tower defense-like game with dinosaurs, penguins, toasters, gatling guns, and UFO’s! ...

In this tutorial, we will move a existing static websites onto a Razor syntax-based dynamic webistes with a product database. That’s a case often happens. For instance, a bakery shop hires a designer for designing a online bakery shopping website. However, after a while, the shop owner decides to add in more products dynamically through database. And here, I will show you how to do it through WebMatrix in a easy and fast way. 1. Firstly, download html-based bakery online shopping cart web project here. Unzip it onto your hard disk. 2. Open WebMatrix and select Site From Folder. Select files from folder where you unzip Bakery_Final. After clicking ok, you will see all the files laying out in the left corner. 3. Click on Default.html and click Run. You will see the Fourth Coffee pages showed as below. There are three pages here: Home, Our Products and About Us. Noticed that the headers and footers of all sites are the same. And product information are all static. Next step, we will try to move all the duplicated parts into one single file. 4. Click on New on the menu bar and choose cshtml. Name it _Layout.html. Noticed here we use _ before the file name. It indicates that this file can’t be used to browse directly. This is similar to master page in ASP.NET. 5. Copy all the code from About.html to CSHtml. Remove code block showed below. This is the content part varies for each page. 6. Replaced the code block above with the following code: (Razor Syntax is case-sensitive. So please be careful of the upper-case). [cc] ...

What’s Razor Syntax and Why WebMatrix? Microsoft wants to provide a simple and light way for students, hobbyist, inline script developers or web developers in general to develop websites fast. They will be able to start webpages from scratch or from some open source templates, such as WordPress or Joomla. WebMatrix is a stack under 50 MB, if you have .Net 4 installed, it will be under 15 MB. And you will get ASP.NET Razor Syntax along with WebMatrix. We want to give people an alternative to develop webpages in a lightweight and low-concept way. WebMatrix is composed by four parts: ...