Windows Phone Mango introduced Background Agents. This are a really exciting feature that allows applications to run in the background either as a Periodic or as a Resource Intensive tasks and perform certain actions. One of the things that I needed to implement for my application was a synchronize task that would connect to the current user Live account and perform some synchronization and management tasks. This feature promised exactly what I needed and with the recently released Live SDK that included libraries for Metro and Windows Phone applications it looked like this would be really straightforward to implement... How wrong I was !

Created on 15/12/2011

Gesture recognition is a hot topic these days. The recently released SDK libraries for Kinect have made it really easy to develop solution that leverage this peripheral and implement new ways for users to interact with applications. In those scenarios, one of the first thing that we will try to achieve is to allow users to use specific gestures to perform certain operations or events. Unfortunately the SDK at this stage does not include any support for gesture recognition and we will have to build this ourselves. In this article, I will try to explain the approach I have used to recognise simple gestures using an algorithmic based approach and a set of supporting classes that will make adding new gestures to our gesture set a very simple task.

Created on 07/12/2011

Last August 25th there was my last Sharepoint Irish Usergroup meeting. This was the last meeting I hosted before my departure to Madrid and I handed over the role of responsible for the usergroup to my colleague Colin Byrne. It was a very nice session with pizzas and beer and I talked about Claims Authentication in Sharepoint that included a demo that showed how to configure a Sharepoint Site to allow users to authenticate using Live and Google credentials by federating with Azure Access Control Services v.2.0. It has been really a pleasure to prepare sessions for the Irish Sharepoint Usergroup meetings last months and I hope I will still have the opportunity to participate as a presenter if invited !

Created on 31/08/2011

Lately I have been posting a few articles related to how the new Sharepoint Logging database worked and how to configure it to store the ULS logs. In these articles we have seen how the ULS Trace tables are populated by a diagnostics timer job and also how was the data stored in the different partition tables. The reason why I have been interested in this topic is because I have been working on a tool to surface the ULS data stored in the database in a administration page accessible from my Central Administration. I thought it would be a great idea to share it so feel free to download it if you also find it useful.

Created on 13/06/2011

With the new Sharepoint Logging database we now have the possibility of storing ULS trace logs in tables in this database. The responsible for this process is a Sharepoint Job that periodically moves ULS logs from the files in every Sharepoint Server to the database (follow my previous article on this topic for more info). But how are the logs actually stored in this database? Recently I have been involved in a project for extending this logging platform and I had the opportunity to review how this database works.

Created on 02/06/2011