‘OneNote on Cloud’ – First bits deployed on MESH

I have deployed the first bits of my OneNote application on Cloud. Currently I have created a very basic version with Pen / Text for writing the notes.

Overall the aim is to get the know how of Windows Azure platform including .Net Services, Mesh Enabled Web Applications (MEWA) and SQL Data Services.

 

I have already created the SDS Proxy WCF Service. So the next step is to configure and deploy it on Azure. Than finally to tie all the pieces together . . .

Accessing SQL Data Services from Silverlight

“OneNote on Cloud”…  This is something I have started exploring on since last couple of days. 
The idea is to have a OneNote type application experience on web, using Silverlight and SQL Data Services.

The first hurdle was to access SDS from silverlight. We can’t directly use the SDS from silverlight because of some known limitations. So the option that I thought of was to use some Proxy Services in between the Silverlight Client and SDS, which was also suggested by the guys who developed the Omega.SDSClient

Now there are few gotchas while developing these proxy services for silverlight client which I am listing below :

1. We need to Change the service bindings to ‘basicHttpBinding’ as silverlight doesn’t support any other bindings.
2. We need to set the AspNetCompatibilityRequirements attribute to ‘Allowed’ for all the service implementations
   
(If we add the services using the ‘Silverlight-enabled WCF Service’ template than the above changes are done automatically.)
 

3. The last thing is to add the cross-domain policy file at the root of in case of IIS hosted services it should be on the root of the mapped directory. 
   
    
   
   The important thing to note in this file is the SOAPAction headers which are required to be enabled for SOAP based messages transfers from silverlight.

Getting started with ‘Microsoft Surface’ development

This week I went on a roller coaster ride of formatting & configuring my laptop for Surface development. I will just brief out the steps that I had to do before installing the Surface SDK 1.0 :

• Install Windows Vista Service Pack 1
  (If you get any errors while installing SP1 than first install the System Update Readiness Tool for Vista and than try installing the SP1 again. My machine just crashed after installing the SP1 and I had to repair it using the boot disk so be prepared for this.)
• Install Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
• Install Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 2.0
• Finally installing the Surface SDK 1.0 . . . . 

(You would need a monitor that is capable of 1280 × 960 screen resolution or a widescreen monitor that is capable of 1440 × 900 screen resolution to start the Surface Simulator)

Now lets build our first surface application using Visual C# 2008 Express Edition :

1. Under the Create New Project you should be able to see couple of VS Templates for surface apps:
   
    
   
2. Select the Surface Application (WPF) and you would see the default template as below :
   
   
   
3. The First interesting control to look at is the ScatterView control.
   (The ScatterView control is the control that you should use when you have one or more UI elements that you want users to be able to move, rotate, or resize freely within a fixed area)
   
   
   
4. Once you build the application first open the Simulator and than press F5 to run the application and it would automatically get displayed on the simulator . . .
   
   
   As you can see I have added multiple fingers on the screen so you can use your mousepad (on laptop) and your external mouse as two fingers and than can stretch or rotate the images . . . .

Enjoy Learning !!!