I’ve been involved for quite some time now with a new Microsoft project codenamed “WebMatrix” but couldn’t say anything about it since all the info was under NDA. Today though, the public availability of the Microsoft WebMatrix Beta was announced, so I guess I’m no longer bound by the NDA agreement and can let you in on a few things. So first let me clarify a few things, and to do that I’m going to use an excellent explanation from David Ebbo’s blog. WebMatrix: a stack and a tool Let’s start with WebMatrix.  The term is actually...

Since I’ve started talking about Sliverlight and analytics yesterday I thought this is probably the best opportunity to mention Silverlytics (Silverlight + Analytics). Built by Location3 Media an interactive marketing company, Silverlytics is a multitenant Windows Azure-based analytics service that uses Microsoft Live Labs Pivot for its data visualization.  All of its data is collected from Service Oriented Analytics behaviors in Silverlight applications.  The Windows Azure platform is perfect for web analytics because of its scalability and global reach while Pivot provides a very cool way to slice, dice, and understand the data.  Location3 Media is...

A common misunderstanding and argument I get, for not building web applications using Silverlight technology, is often, the lack of a way to keep stats of your application traffic. So I thought this worth a blog post in order to put a few things right and let people know that there is actually a solution they could use. This solution is Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework is a codeplex based open source Extensible Web Analytics Framework for Microsoft Silverlight Applications. It addresses the challenges of tracking Silverlight applications by enabling it in a number of scenarios like the...

This weekend I got the chance to speak about IE8 and the future (the next version IE9) in a different event from the ones I’m used to speak, MediaCampAthens. MediaCampAthens intends to bring together new media enthusiasts, explorers and professionals to share the current state and their visions for the future of the web, arts, new media, interactive advertising and marketing throughout one day. MediaCampAthens hopes to unlock the potential of new opportunities within the new media industry in Athens. Topics may include - but are not limited to – Web 2.0, entrepreneurship,...

A few months back I’ve started working with Giorgio Sardo on a Facebook IE8 Web Slice. In fact there were a few people that already were aware of that and have been bugging me for the download link ;-) since my TechEd 2009 interview and my IE8 talk at Microsoft Dev Days where I’ve shown just a glimpse of it. Well your wait is over, yesterday Microsoft officially released a set of very useful IE8 addons that target Facebook at the IE addons site that include the Facebook Web Slice. I can’t...

Wow these are great news, I’m going to participate at TechEd Online TechTalk series this year. I’ m going to be interviewed be Giorgio Sardo on how to build an IE8 Web Slice. The official description of the talk is Are you interested to light up your site on IE8? The MVP Konstantinos Pantos will share his experience building a web slice; we will also talk about some handy tip and trick for building compelling accelerators and visual search providers for Internet Explorer 8. Pretty excited about that, can’t wait…

So it’s time for me to reveal what I’ve been up to for the past 6 months. As some of you may already know, I moved to a new start up company about six months ago, called Metadata (I know the site isn’t quite ready yet, but we focused on the product instead of the site), where I was assigned the task of designing and building a solution for Content Management. The company business strategy required a product that would satisfy the needs of every possible client ranging from small companies that need simple websites to large news portal organizations...

Most of the people I meet have this idea that they have to either buy or find an open source third party component, or (even worse) use flash, when it comes to drawing graphs for a web application or site. So I’m guessing that most people don’t know that the Data Visualization Group within the SQL Server Reporting Services Team has created stand-alone ASP.NET and Windows Forms Chart Controls for the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, similar to what has been already available as built-in chart functionality in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. There are...

My hosting provider is located at Germany which has always made it kind of difficult to communicate. I selected a long time ago cause it was cheap and now I don't want get into the whole process of moving everything somewhere else. So whenever I have to ask them something I always use a translation service to understand what they're saying (yes I don't know German and yes they always reply in German :-)) Today though I've read that the Windows live messenger translation bot was released. For those of you that haven't worked with live bots before, these are...

Just a few days after Microsoft released IE8 Goggle retaliated by releasing their browser, Chrome. After installing it my first impressions are: Extremely clean and streamlined UI Nice source view and developer helpers Nice download manager Extremely fast page loading Great JavaScript performance What's missing (in my opinion): Grouped tab browsing Web Slices Accelerators To conclude, I thing IE8 is a more feature complete browser according to my standards and although it's beta has more rendering problems than chrome has at the moment, I'm sticking to IE as my default browser. UPDATE: It doesn't support Silverlight...

Yesterday I had the chance to talk at a DotNetZone event about Building Rich Internet Applications using Silverlight 2.0. It went very well, people seemed to have an active interest on this new Technology and anxiously looking forward to build real word applications (like this healthcare one announced yesterday by Tim Sneath) with it. My session was quite long (2.5 hours - thankfully no one slept during it ;-)) so I had the chance to talk about almost all of Silverlight's features and give a lot of demos, after all events like that, where you speak to developers, is...

Microsoft announced a bunch of cool new features in Silverlight 2, in this year's Mix  conference. One of the most exciting new features is the Deep Zoom one. Deep Zoom allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.  The simple zooming interface allows users to explore entire collections down to specific details in extreme close-up, all with fantastic performance and smooth transitions. What you probably won't know...

I like trying new software, so I usually install and try all betas I find interesting. Thus I've downloaded and installed IE8, without no second thoughts, as soon as it was announced at this year's Mix conference. What I haven't thought was that since I had previously installed Safari beta 3 and Firefox 3 beta 3 I would end up not having an RTM browser installed on my machine. And although all of them seem to work in general, they all do have a few bugs and quirks that make me switch from one to another just to access...

Having some free time durring the Christmas holidays gave me the oportunity of doing a couple of things to myFacebook gadget. So except from the necessary bug fixing ;-) version 1.2.1 of myFacebook contains three major updates: First I've removed the verb "is" from the user status as Facebook finally listened to all the users that complained about it and removed it from its platform as well. Remember that you're now expected to fill in the verb yourself. I've also noticed that my friends' status feed contained entries that were a lot older than the ones I expected to...

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak in front of a large audience about Microsoft's Live Services, available to developers, in a Microsoft hosted event called "The Next Web Now". Although I had to write this presentation twice, as I lost my first one with my stolen laptop, and had to prepare the second one in just a few hours, I was glad to do it as I always enjoy speaking and communicating with other developers. In general I believe it went well, even with all the computer related problems Panos' laptop had ;-). The event's sessions were video recorded so they're...

A lot of people have been complaining on not being able to login to MyFacebook gadget and I really didn't know what was going on as I followed Facebook API's authentication instructions to the letter. So I've decided to change it's authentication method. It now uses the same authentication method Popfly uses in its Facebook Data source block. To login you'll have to click on the first page link in order to get an authentication token, then you'll have to add that token to the gadget settings page. Note that if this is the first time...

Wow...two barriers have been broken... I din't see it earlier hut I've broken the 100 blog posts barrier. I guess I missed it because of all the fuss with myFacebook gadget and Popfly screencast MyFacebook gadget has just been downloaded over 2000  times and in just 2 days time... I couldn't be happier... glad you like my work...

Working with popfly for the 2007 elections silverlight graph gave me a fare ground of understanding on using and developing with Popfly. So I thought why not  share this by making my first official screencast. I'm glad to say that it's now complete and you can see it from here: Video: Create Rich Web Content Using Popfly I need to apologize for the video quality, but this was the only way I could publish it. I'm still looking though for other places where I could post the high quality screencast (If you know a place please contact me). So stay tuned...

I'm one of those that have already installed and use Visual Studio 2008 beta side by side with Visual Studio 2005 on a machine and without any serious problems so far I might add. As you may already know .NET Framework 3.5 gets installed together with the new studio, so my machine contains that too (which is cool by the way, linq, Expressions, lamdas etc are probably the next big leap on programming languages). Yesterday though, while trying to compile a .Net 2.0 web site I've stumbled across the following exception: The base class includes the field 'InformationTBody', but...

My friend Panos wrote today about Nikhil Kothari's Facebook.Net framework (hosted at Codeplex) as well as Steve Trefethen's starter kit as various tools you could use to develop Facebook applications using .Net. I'd like to add to those The Facebook developer toolkit that evolved from the Microsoft - Facebook partnership. Although this download comes from the Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions product line (as you may notice) nothing stops you from using it with Visual Studio. Furthermore (if you're willing to play with cutting edge technology ;-) you could give Popfly's Facebook blocks (which are products of the same...

If you've ever developed a web application or site you've surely have stumbled on the layout problem and I bet you've finally decided to use tables in order to avoid the pain of coding your layout with CSS. For a large variety of reasons though CSS based layouts are the way to go as they use less code, they are more customizable, they support various effects that aren't possible with tables, they run faster in modern web browsers and most importantly they comply with the semantic web principles (markup should not be confused with content). The problem? They are...

It's been four months since I received my Popfly invite but haven't really been able to do anything on it due to lack of time. Looking for Silverlight applications yesterday though I happened to bump into it and remembered that I already had an account so I decided to check it out. Well it seems that a lot have changed since the last time I've used it although the project is still in its Alpha phase. First of all the user interface is completely revamped. It now loads up much faster and resembles more an office application than a...

I hadn't given too much attention to all those social networks that have developed over time as I thought that they were mainly for people looking for dating and this sort of things. A recent friend invitation for FaceBook though, proved me wrong and opened a new world full of potential for communication, collaboration, play and so on. So from know on you can catch up with me through my Facebook account...

As always this time of year I begun thinking on all the things I want to read, listen, view and code during my summer vacation free time, even though I never get the chance to do all the things I plan to ;-). So I've already bought my PSP extra memory (2GB) and plan to fill it with podcasts, webcasts and videos so I can watch on my free time. Technologies and products that I'm especially interested this summer include : Silverlight, WPF, WCF, Visual Studio 2008, Astoria, Jasper, Linq, .Net 3.5, C# 3.0 etc. I've already begun searching for those but...

If your interested in incorporating all or some of the new cool Windows Live technologies in your web site then you'll find Windows Live Quick Applications very useful. Currently there are two samples available Contoso Bicycle Club (code) which Connects membership organizations with the content, information and communities they care about using Rich media experiences, Sharing and storage, Communication, Find and locate (maps) Windows Live Technologies. and Contoso University (code) which is intended as a University sponsored site for students and staff to connect with the university events and social organizations. This demo uses quite a few cool things, like the Contacts...

I know that many of you will argue on the need to put all these technologies to work together, after all they are intended for different sides of the Internet cloud (ASP.net on the server, Ajax on the server & client and silverlight on the client). My experience though has shown that nothing is carved in stone when it comes to software development. Imagine for example that you have a nice GridView control (ASP.NET) containing data that you need to update without refreshing the whole page (Ajax) and at the same time display a nice graph of these data using an...

When all Greek channels yesterday, were either re-running ancient Greek movies, having long boring political debates or playing some b-movie I was able to: (This is why TV is sentenced to death...) Watch LIVE EARTH concerts from all over the world Listen to Artists I love to hear Make my pledge to save Earth Make a subscription to stay connected with the climate crisis news and TO DO's from Liveearth Watch Artists video and photo galleries Download LiveEarth...

Have you tried Apple's new Safari browser? Well if you have, you'll notice that most of the sites (not just my site ;-))won't display correctly, it takes forever to start and has a number of crashes (at least had at my PC). As for the claimed browser speed, it's obvious that if you decide to ignore half the elements, styles an other objects other browsers render, you'll render faster. Even though running my tests on various sites, I didn't see the performance difference they claim their browser has. So I can't help being skeptical, how did they came up with...

As promised I've created a silverlight video of my interview at Microsft's innovation day event. I've used clackerzone's super Live Writer addin that enables you to encode (uses Expression Media Encoder) and upload your video directly from Windows Live Writer with a few simple steps. var livewriterapp0Wrapper = document.getElementById("livewriterapp0Wrapper"); CreateSilverlight(); Enjoy...

This week I had to install a couple of web applications that used Microsoft Ajax on ISS7 for the Innovation Day event. Unfortunately there were some backwards compatibility issues that made me use the backwards compatible Asp.Net application pool and not the new default app pool. Although the web apps loaded ok I kept getting a Sys not defined javascript error and as you can probably guess (Sys is the root namespace for Ajax javascript libraries) there was no Ajax behavior on these apps. After investigating for a while it turned out that if you're planning to use IIS7 to...

 I've spoken a couple of times about innovation in Greece and I'm glad when I see other people talking about it too. So when I was invited to show all the things we're building at www.dol.gr at Microsft's Innovation Day, I was thrilled. Luckily there was WiFi netwrok availableso here are some snapshots from the event. Stay tunned more will come later...     Special thanks to Panos for the pictures

I usually check my email boxes before leaving home to see if something interesting is there and today there was. The popfly invite, I had to wait for a couple of weeks, had finally arrived. Unfortunately I had to wait again in order to get to work before being able to give it a go. Once I've started playing with it though,I found out that it was worth waiting after all. Popfly is indeed a great tool for developing cool mashups and gadgets quickly and easily. And although it's rather unstable at the moment (a couple of my mashups did not work...

  For those of you interested in finding out what silverlight really is as well as develop silverlight applications... bits & bytes Get silverlight Telerik RadControls – 3d virtual rooms using control based framework DLR & IronPython Silverlight developer reference “poster” Forums – installation, troubleshooting Electric rain harmony (coming summer 2007) – flash to silverlight converter Silverlight 1.0 Beta QuickStarts Silverlight 1.1 Alpha QuickStarts Silverlight 1.0 QuickStart Using Blend 2: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93839 New Silverlight Online Documentation: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=88945 New sites Main Microsoft site.  Community site.  Mix conference experiences & demos Getting started with silverlight - Scott Guthrie demos how to build an app from scratch "How Do...

What... you haven't thought about it yet? Well I have two suggestions for you. IOS island from 2 to 3 of June for the Greek Blogger Camp and Budapest from 11 to 12 of June for Microsoft's Remix07 I don't know if I'm going to be there, but even if I'm not, it still is a great opportunity ;-) to learn, meat and communicate with colleagues but relax and have fun at the same time. t? sync p??f?? µ??

Having been to Mix06 I knew that there were going to be a lot of cool things coming out this year too. So I've been following closely Mix07, although I didn't manage to go this year and I must say that I'm pretty excited with all the things announced (although some were expected ;-) ). One of the coolest demos I've seen so far is the Silverlight Airlines application posted by David Anson. I just hope that it will work for Europe as well as USA soon. Check it out.

When I did my presentation on WPF/e (SilverLight) a few weeks back everyone kept asking about the tools and the controls they could use in order to develop silverlight applications. Unfortunately at the time there realy wasn't anything ready they could use, so I kept saying that in the future control vendors will startpublishing tools for it. Thankfully control vendors are indeed starting to build software (tools - controls) to support SilverLight, Telerik leading with its RadControls (Button, Cube, Media & StripLayoutPanel). At least next time I will have some examples to give when presenting ;-).

Finally the project I've been working for the last year has gone Live. The project had to do with the semi-automatic digitizing of newspapers and magazines from their raw form (PDF or postscript files) into rich fully decomposed digital content and the creation of new services that would consume this content. Two of these services have gone live, specifically www.tanea.gr and http://digital.tanea.gr, but more are going to go live soon. I feel congats are appropriate to everyone that participated in the project. As for the future services I really can't say more, except that the engine is so powerful and the content so...

As promised, I'm publishing 1.3 minutes (I couldn't post more as they get pretty large pretty quick) of video footage from each developer session (sorry Marios I didn't have enough tape to get your session too, I promise I will be more prepared next time) of the Live the web developer's day event. Web 2.0: Breaking news session part 1 and part2 WPF/E: Impress the Web session part 1 and part 2 AJAX-enabled sites? Piece of cake! session part 1 and part 2 Enjoy!

For those interested on how did my first presentation go, it went really well despite my initial stress and nervousness. I really enjoyed it and now can't wait till the next time I'll be given the opportunity to speak in front of an audience ;-).You can find out what I talked about by downloading my presentation slides and demo source code (which includes the video ;-)).I'm also going to post some video parts of the presentations (yes I had my camera with me but run out of film) when I find time to download and encode them from my camera (Panos is also in ;-)).

One of the things I enjoy, is talking with fellow developers on new technologies passing on things I know. So I was thrilled with joy when I was given the opportunity to talk to a Microsoft event next week. So this Tuesday on the 27th of March I’ll be talking about WPF/e on Microsoft’s Dev Day Live the Web season 2.0.I was so happy about it, that I’ve emailed everyone I know about it telling them to register for the event. If for any weird reason you were left out, don’t wait, seats are filling up, register now. I’ll be...

I don't know if you're into web and/or web development but even if you're not, you're surelly going to find this list of sites offering Web 2.0 features at least interesting. I myself found a couple of sites I wasn't aware of... (can you believe that :P)

Now that is something worth blogging about, Patrick started his blog. Glad to see you on board Patrick.Subscribed of course.

I’m a huge fan of dilbert cartoon so when I found out that there is a Daily Dilbert Vista Sidebar Gadget I raced and installed it. Why isn't this posted on http://gallery.live.com? Kudos to Quartz…

I recently developed two gadgets for my employer, a Newspaper Stand (gadget showing the front pages of Greek newspapers) and a Custom Calendar that displays information about TV Shows, currently playing shows, events etc. from the Greek portal www.in.gr. The problem I faced during development was that I had no way of daily refreshing the content assuming that the user didn’t turn off the computer e.g. computer was put into sleep or hibernation mode during inactivity. The MSDN gadget development reference did not mention anything that could help me resolve these issues, so I ended up checking manually for date changes...

Several events occurred this week making it a truly WOW week: Microsoft’s much awaited, new operating system, Windows Vista, was finally launched. British Library published a great WPF application that presents old historical books. The user experience is so rich that you think you’re actually holding the book. I think I had already seen a demo of this app on Mix06, but nothing compares with the real thing. A few days after the final release of Microsoft’s Ajax library, MS opened up its Source Code under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL). Microsoft released a new version of its browser enhancement module that enables browsers to...

It happens to the best of companies as well ;-) ...

The Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting library is an encoding library designed to protect ASP.NET applications from cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. This library differs from other encoding libraries in that it uses the the principle of inclusions technique to provide a high degree of protection against XSS attacks. For those of you that build Web Applications this is a library that should always be used.

My Site and blog content has begun to grow, making search for a particular piece of information pretty difficult, so I have decided to live search enable it.So from now on you will be able to search both my site and personal blog using Microsoft’s search engine.For those of you interested, all you have to do is, register your site at http://search.live.com/siteowner?mkt=en-us and then put a piece of html/javascript to the place you want the search box to appear.

Over the years I’ve seen and/or participated on quite a few interesting projects but VisualWebGui is probably the best work I’ve ever came across. VisualWebGui is a project that tries to unify the development model of Web and Windows Forms development. So with VisualWebGui you can create a new project, design forms like you would have done for any windows forms application and run it on the web. The Guy or guys behind this (I still haven’t found any references on who’s behind this) have made most of the window form controls not only...