HomeLamont Harrington's Blog
Thoughts on Technology, Life, and Other Ramblings…
COOL SAMPLE: Wikipedia Explorer built on WPF and Windows Azure
22 Jan 2009 
Dot Net Solutions recently released a new version of its Wikipedia Explorer application built on top of Windows Azure. The project is about visualizing relationships between documents within Wikipedia and features a cool user interface built on Windows Presentation Foundation.
To learn more about this great sample application, head over to Dot Net Solutions’ website. You can actually download and run the application (via ClickOnce) here.
P&P ships Composite Application Guidance for WPF
The Patterns & Practices team has recently released the Composite Application Guidance for WPF which provides guidance for “componetizing” the development of enterprise-class WPF applications across multiple development teams, with each team owning a piece of the application, and then seamlessly integrating these pieces into one homogenous application.
Included in the guidance package is a reference implementation of WPF application, CFI Stock Trader, that models this guidance, reusable library code (called the Composite Application Library), documentation, quick start tutorials and hands-on labs.
You can download the bits here or to learn more about what the guidance entails, head on over to the developer center on MSDN.
I can’t wait to try this stuff out!
New Library of Congress website launches on MOSS 2007
I mentioned in a previous post the work I’ve been doing with the Library of Congress. It has been a great effort and an excellent showcase of the power and flexibility of our platform. On April 12th, we closed another chapter in this unprecendented effort by officially launching their myLOC.gov website. The website has been architected and built on top of a platform consisting of SharePoint Server 2007, Silverlight, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Live ID. The launch of the myLOC.gov site on this past Saturday marked the culmination of 9 months of work to deliver a compelling solution that’s geared at reshaping how Americans view American History by literally bringing many of the historical treasures contained within the walls of the Library of Congress to life and allowing not only the American people, but the entire world to experience this great treasure.
The launch of the myLOC.gov website capped off a great week for the Library of Congress and Microsoft. As a part of the revitalized digital experience, coined the “Library of Congress Experience”, is also the launch of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)-based interactive touch screen kiosks that’s running within the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson Building in DC. There, US citizens, and people travelling to DC from around the world, will be able to enage within an immersive technology experience that allows people to interact with the Library’s historical collections in new and exciting ways. The myLOC.gov site takes this onsite experience and brings it to the web!
In the coming weeks, myself, in combination with our great partners, Portal Solutions and Schematic will be creating a “How We Did It” article (likely to be posted on the SharePoint Team Blog), in the same vein as the two-part article I published on another great effort with Conservation International, that’ll dive deeper into the overall solution architecture and cover specifics around logical and physical architecture as well as discuss implementation details of key features and functionality.
So stay tuned!
Library of Congress Video Case Study Posted on MIX Website
Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work on some really cool and unique projects. I’m proud to add yet another project to my portfolio, which is the current work we’re doing with the Library of Congress and the delivery of what they’re calling their “New Visitors Experience”, set to launch in the next month. As the Microsoft Solutions Architect for this effort, I must say that to date we’ve produced some compelling solutions around Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight. This work has been met with a tremendous amount of press but yet is only the tip of the iceberg of what’s yet to come. We’ve recently posted a video case study on our MIX website that highlights some of our efforts to date. Stay tuned for more from this blog regarding the Library of Congress project and the really, really cool things we’re doing around Silverlight, WPF, WCF, Windows Live and SharePoint Server 2007!
