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May

31

Windows Phone helps parents work smarter

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

Due to either my role on the marketing team or my brief stint as a wannabe mommy blogger, Brian and Michael invited me to post occasionally. (Ok, so probably only 10 people ever read my blog, they were all related to me, and neither of them were Brian or Michael. But I do work full-time at Microsoft and have two toddlers at home). And recently we’ve seen a lot of interest in our phone from women – especially moms. Not just because the Windows Phone UI looks kind of “pretty” (although we do get that a lot), but because the phone can help you save time and stay organized—a top priority for busy moms, dads, or anybody trying to balance multiple priorities.

Just this weekend, People.com posted an article Windows Phone 7: A Smart Cell Phone for Busy Parents and we recently hooked up with Harris Interactive on a survey to see just how far people would go to reclaim a few precious minutes.

We found that 90% of moms say they would be happier if they could get just ten minutes back each day. And most would give up sex, alcohol, TV or chocolate to get that extra time. Combine that with the fact that 70% of moms say that keeping track of schedules and to do lists is one of their biggest time hits and coming up with smarter ways to use a smartphone starts to make a lot of sense.

So with that in mind here are some ways I use my phone to keep myself a little more sane:

May

31

Who’s That Guy On The Springboard Deployment Page?

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

Today’s post is from Adam “Bomb” Carter.

A few months ago, when Jeremy Chapman moved from the Windows Product Management team to the Office team, someone needed to take over ownership of the Pilot and Deploy Windows 7 pages on Springboard.

That’s when my face popped up on there, which may have led to a few questions, like:

Here are some answers to these Not-So-Frequently Asked Questions (NSFAQs).

Q: Who is this guy?
A: My job title is Technical Evangelist, which is a funny way of saying my job is to make sure that I’m giving IT Pros info on the latest technologies that are relevant to them. I’m part of a team, and we split up the technologies we look after, and I focus on the desktop stuff – pretty much everything Windows client and Office, including Office 365.
I’ve been doing desktop deployment and management stuff pretty much my whole career at Microsoft, starting in Microsoft Consulting Services working with SMS and helping develop and implement an offering we used to call Enterprise Desktop Lifecycle Management (EDLM) which later became Business Desktop Management (BDM) which later became the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT).
When I was in consulting and then later in sales as a Technology Specialist, I was generally working with just one or a handful of customers at a time. Now in Evangelism, my job is to get the word out to as many people as possible – I do this by speaking at conferences, creating content that I give to training partners and user groups to re-deliver, and by putting stuff out on the web through a little site called TechNet Edge.

Q: Why is he the face of Windows 7 deployment now?
A: Mostly, because Stephen Rose asked me to. But he asked me to because I’ve been doing so much around Windows 7 deployment. When we got ready to launch Windows 7, I realized I didn’t really need to evangelize the product– it was so good it did that work itself. But after talking to customers, I heard that we weren’t doing a good job educating people on the great deployment tools available, so I focused on those. I created a 2 day Windows 7 Deployment Workshop, and trained up a bunch of trainers around the world who took that content and redelivered it to thousands of people around the world. I delivered presentations at events like Connections and Tech Days on deployment. I also developed a Windows XP – Windows7 migration/app compat guide that lives right here on Springboard. And there’s a whole bunch of Windows 7 content on Edge, much of which I put there.

Q: Why hasn’t he done anything to update the page since taking it over?
A: Well, there’s a couple reasons. One was I was just busy – I was managing a bunch of stuff Edge was doing at the MMS and TechEd conferences. I’ve also been struggling to decide what I would change up here. There’s lots of good content, and not much of it has changed lately, with one obvious exception – the fantastic Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) was just announced a new beta release. It’s relevant to Springboard because it now has features for assessing readiness for Office 365 and IE9 migration. Now that there’s something new to talk about, I’ll make an update. I predict over the next several months there will be lots more new things to talk about and new updates to make.

Q: Is he as cool as Jeremy?
A: That’s a tall order; Jeremy is pretty cool. He drives a Jaguar with a Windows 7 computer in the dashboard. I’m not sure I can compete with that, but I’ll commit to making sure that the content here is relevant and timely. If you and I end up in the same city at the same time, we’ll meet up and do something cool. Does that work?

Q: Why does he sometimes go by Adam Carter and sometimes by Adam Bomb?
A: Probably the most common question I get. When Edge first launched, I wasn’t sure how I felt about being plastered all over the Internet, so used Adam Bomb when I posted, which is a nickname had a for a while(it’s also my Xbox Live Gamertag), so I had some separation between my private life and my work. The problem was, people within Microsoft would want to put stuff on Edge, but couldn’t find out who this Adam Bomb guy was, so I had my entry in the internal address book updated with both. Now, both names get used interchangeably.

Contacting me:
I think I’m pretty easy to reach. Mention me on twitter, I’m @adambomb00. You’re welcome to follow me, too – I do occasionally tweet work related stuff. You can find contact details for me via my page on Edge, or my about.me page. I also have a blog that’s desperately in need of a dusting off and update, you can contact me via that, too.

May

31

IE9 for Windows Phone Mango in the Spotlight

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

This week in New York, Andy Lees introduced Windows Phone “Mango” to the world, which includes IE9 Mobile. This announcement and associated demos built upon last month’s MIX11 conference, where Joe Belfiore demonstrated our latest progress on bringing Internet Explorer 9 to Windows Phone during his keynote address. IE9 Mobile represents a huge jump forward for us on the mobile platform, effectively unifying our underlying code base for the browser with the desktop version. In this post, I’d like to outline some of the main principles we’re following as we build IE9 Mobile.

Hardware-Accelerated HTML5 and Graphics

As Joe (or “JoeB”, as we like to call him) showed during his keynote, we’re taking advantage of the hardware available to us on the phone to ensure a high-performance experience for the user. We’ve also incorporated our brand-new “Chakra” JavaScript engine, which provides another level of performance boost to your Web applications.

This bump in performance means that you, as a Web developer, can create great sites for the mobile Web that perform like native applications and give users a rich, immersive experience. We expect that mobile HTML5 applications are going to build on this foundation and deliver game-like interactivity and movie-quality graphical richness to the user experience. We built IE9 to anticipate the rise of these modern, high-performance Web applications by using the phone’s hardware to accelerate all the graphics and text that gets drawn on the screen.

Joe’s demo showed that we’re already off to a great start in the area of performance, and we’re excited to see how developers will use this great performance to drive the mobile Web forward.

Great Support for HTML5

Speaking of HTML5, it is clearly quickly gaining traction, but nowhere is that happening more quickly than in the mobile arena. In a somewhat ironic twist thanks to the relative youth of most modern mobile browsers, it’s much more likely that a mobile user’s device will have the capabilities to support many of HTML5’s features, and IE9 on Windows Phone is no exception.

As Joe showed in the keynote, we’ve built in great support for HTML5 Audio, Canvas, and Video. Just like native applications, our audio stream will continue to play in the background when the browser is not the front-most app. We’ve even integrated support for HTML5 audio with the phone’s volume and playback controls, giving the user a nice integrated experience that they expect on Windows Phone 7.

But we’ve also paid close attention to the under-the-covers stuff, like DOM Local Storage, the DOMContentLoaded event, support for the new semantic markup elements, etc. that you need to make your Web pages sing in the HTML5 era.

Same Markup

We’re focused on the principle of “same markup” – that is, you shouldn’t have to write a whole bunch of custom code to get your mobile Web sites to look and work well on IE9 on WP7. By using established modern standards such as HTML 4/5, CSS 2/3, and ECMAScript 5, you can create mobile-optimized Web sites that work great on a variety of browsers, including ours.

To accomplish this, we are implementing accepted Web standards that are stable and site-ready inside of IE9 Mobile. In places where specifications are incomplete or ambiguous, we are looking to other implementations. This is very similar to how we approached CSS2.1 in IE8 – we delivered a high quality CSS implementation by sticking to the standard, and we are going to continue along this path to make mobile HTML5 applications easier to write and maintain.

Even in cases where a Web site has not been tuned for the mobile scenario, it will still look and work well on IE9 Mobile, given our increased support for standards and the work we’ve done to provide great rendering experiences for desktop sites on Windows Phone.

Support for Key Mobile Features

Of course, we also have to focus on the fact that IE9 on Windows Phone has to function well as a mobile Web browser application and developer platform. To that end, we’ve included full support for CSS3 Media Queries, support for using GPS when working with Geolocation, and some mobile enhancements for layout (like controlling text scaling) and the Viewport. We’ve even changed the way we render our form elements to look more like native “Metro”-styled controls to ensure that users have a consistent experience across native applications and Web sites.

The browser user interface has changed too, in order to devote more of the available screen real estate to your sites. We’ve collapsed the URL edit field and refresh button down into the Application Bar, which allowed us to get rid of the top status bar and allow your sites to really shine through.

MIX was Just the Beginning

Now that we’ve shown what IE can do when a great team of developers puts it on a phone, we’re looking forward to seeing what you can do with it. We’ll have much more information to release soon - tools for the next version of Windows Phone will be available shortly, and we want to hear your feedback. It is our goal and mission to make IE Mobile a great Web developer platform, and you are a key piece of that puzzle. Our inbox is always open – send us feedback, let us know what you like and would want to see improved, and tell us about your sites!

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