Demo Showcase Suite Launch

This blog has been a little devoid of content for the last few months.  It’s not because I had nothing to say, it was because everything I had to say, couldn’t be said.  The three letters a blogger hates to hear are ‘N D A’, non-disclosure agreement.  There are still a few things I can’t talk about, but by and large, the ban has been lifted.

This morning, at 9:00 AM Central Time, Allison Watson, Corporate VP of the Microsoft World Wide Partner Group, announced the release of Demo Showcase Suite.  

“Microsoft’s® Demo Showcase Suite is a collection of demonstration resources that includes the new Demo Showcase application for creating your own click-through demos as well as this community site to manage your demos, search for demos, distribute demos you’ve created and stitch different demos together to make your own. Sign in with Windows Live ID and take a look through this site and download the Demo Showcase application to get started creating your own demos that you can share through Silverlight or download as standalone executables”

For the last 9 months, I have been immersed in this project as the lead architect.  It’s the biggest project I’ve ever led, and a high water mark in my career.  With a small team of developers and QA’s, we turned out a product that we are all quite proud of. 

You can see what the app does by going out and using it.  I’m going to focus my next few blog posts on the architecture of the product, the history of the project, and lessons and technology we learned while doing it.  For those of you that can’t wait, here’s a brief sample of the technologies we used (in no particular order):

• Windows Azure
• Windows Live ID Authentication
• Unity Framework + Enterprise Application Blocks
• Entity Framework
• LinqToSql
• WPF
• MVVM in WPF
• Silverlight 2
• ASP.NET
• Test Driven Development
• Microsoft Geneva Framework
• ACS
• SQL Server 2008
• Custom ASP.NET Handlers
• Object Graphs in EF using QuickGraph.NET
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• WCF
• REST
• RSS Feeds
• Custom WPF Compilation Engine
• Log4Net
• ASP.NET AJAX
• Resharper 4.5

As you can imagine, things are still kind of hectic around here today.  I’ll try to update the blog this week with more details.  For now, go give the app a try.  If you can’t get to it because you are not a partner, please contact Microsoft Partner Group, and get enrolled today!