You can use Visual Studio (C++, C# and VB.NET supported) and get quite interesting results.

Here are a series of links below which will help you get started.

1. Download and install the Kinect SDK
2. Download and install Quickstart Samples and Slides (zip file)
3. Understanding the Kinect hardware
4. Setting up your Dev Environment
5. Understanding the basics of skeletal tracking using the Kinect sensor
6. Understanding camera fundamentals
7. Understanding the audio fundamentals
8. Playing with the Coding4Fun Kinect toolkit and seeing how one can build cool apps such as:
• Kinect Paint (which uses skeleton tracking)
• Kinect Mouse which uses your hands as the mouse cursor

Keep and eye out on the Coding4Fun Kinect blog.

Check out the quick demo below to see what it is capable of and read up on the guide on how to use it.

The description would be something like:

Log Name:      System
Source:        NETLOGON
Date:          27/05/2011 08:53:17
Event ID:      5719
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      YOUR-Full-Qualified-Computer-Name
Description:

This computer was not able to set up a secure session with a domain controller in domain YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME due to the following:
There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request.
This may lead to authentication problems. Make sure that this computer is connected to the network. If the problem persists, please contact your domain administrator. 

ADDITIONAL INFO
If this computer is a domain controller for the specified domain, it sets up the secure session to the primary domain controller emulator in the specified domain. Otherwise, this computer sets up the secure session to any domain controller in the specified domain.

Here is a screenshot (on Win 7) showing a (filtered) view of the same event.

More related details on Dustin’s post - WCF scales up slowly with bursts of work.

One thing to be careful – make sure you are using the same version of the Task Manager (or Sys Explorer) as the process. For example if your process is x32 (and you are running on a x64 system), then make sure you are using x32 version of Task Manager and not the x64 as that will cause issues.

• Automated deployment (of interfaces)
• Automated testing (regression and functional where possible)
• Automated configuration management (across various environments – development, various testing, pre-prod and of course prod).
• Coordination with AppFabric?

These cover a number of the features and essentially have everything to get a developer quite comfortable with the stack. In some areas they go a little deep as well. I think its an excellent way to come up to speed.

Here is a quick example of the topics covered in some of the tracks:

• Win7 – how to use the Taskbar, Multitouch, Ribbon, Sensors and Location, Session 0 Isolation, etc.
• Azure – Azure Overview, Azure Storage, Deployment, SQL Azure, etc.
• VS 2010 and .NET 4 – F#, ASP.NET 4, Parallel Computing, ALM, etc.

Update: The official TED video below is quite cool and in addition to the one above, also adds more interesting features such as video – check it out.

I was looking for something else and came across this post form Paolo which explains in a lot of detail how does one go about extending and customizing WCF adapters. If you don’t know anything about WCF the first part explains that in general before going in to the BizTalk specific things.

• parser_optimization="complexity"
• allow_early_termination="true"
• early_terminate_optional_fields="true"

This got me thinking more and wanting to understand what does changing these attributes mean under the covers. Below is what I found out on each of these.

On parser_optimization:

• Setting the parser_optimization to complex essentially generates a more complicated grammar (it uses both a top down and bottom up parsing); this grammar is then used to parse the FF.
• The complicated grammar is better when parsing records with more optional nested options – however it still cannot handle all the layout conditions and can still break in some situations.
• And given the runtime is doing more things, this will be slower than the other option called ‘speed’ (yeah no kidding Sherlock!).
  • The reason the ‘speed’ option is faster is because it uses top-down parsing only.
• In addition you should also set lookahead_depth to zero (more on this below) to avoid validation failures (against a schema) when there are many optional nodes in the same group/record.

Changing the lookahead_depth itself is trivial but you need to be a little more aware of what this means:

• This essentially tells the parser when making a parsing prediction how far ahead to look in the token stream.
• Setting this to Zero essentially means ‘infinite lookahead’ which in turn means more memory will be consumed.
• Depending on how busy your BizTalk servers are and how much memory pressure you already experience processing various files (and their sizes), this might be an issue.

Basically, the FF parser is a streaming parser and implemented as a leftmost derivation which takes in a CFG. Essentially when we change the lookahead_depth to zero we change do not restrict this and the parser can recognize tokens using DFA perhaps (of course we don’t know the real implementation).

For those old school like me, and have played with yacc – that is a LL(1) parser – essentially parse the grammar with one token lookahead.

On allow_early_termination="true":

• When working with FF’s BizTalk expects that every line is of the same length (either because of the data contained padded with spaces). However if it finds a newline (CR + LF) character then it breaks and you get an error something along the lines of “Unexpected data found while looking for: \r\n”.
• Adding the allow_early_termination setting helps fix this. Read more here.
• Also note that only the right-most positional field is allowed to early terminate.

Lastly, the early_terminate_optional_fields attribute enables early termination of optional trailing fields. A couple of points to note on this:

• If your schema does not have this annotation and you open that in the BizTalk editor, then it will automatically add this annotation explicitly and set it to the default value of False.
• This only takes affect if you also have the allow_early_termination annotation set to True.
• More details on this here.

And in case you were wondering this is a supported option by Microsoft as shown in this KB article.

In any case, if you also want to add the a PIN on boot up then you can use the following command in a command prompt or power shell (with admin privileges) to enable this. Of course replace the “c:” with the drive you want to do this for.

manage-bde -protectors -add c: -TPMAndPIN

I wish I could talk more about some of these – maybe after PDC when most of these are out in the public domain and the NDA’s are relaxed – until then all the links are only to material already in the public domain.

1. Windows Server 2008
2. Windows Server 2008 R2
3. SQL Server 2008
4. Windows “7”
5. Office “14”
6. Visual Studio 2010 (“Rosario”)
7. “Red Dog”
8. “Strata”
9. “Zurich”
10. “Oslo”
11. .NET 4.0
12. “M” and “Quadrant”
13. Mesh
14. SQL Server “Kilimanjaro” and Project “Madison”
15. “Dublin”
16. Exchange “14”

Sigh, so much to learn/play-with and so little time!

Update: Added #16

• Live Mesh is now available in all English-speaking countries (not just the U.S.)
• Removed the User Account Control (UAC) requirement when installing and using Live Mesh with Windows Vista SP1
• Index for Desktop Search now works with Live Mesh folders
• Fixed bug where an underscore in a Hotmail account name returned an "Invalid Hotmail Address" error
• Fixed bug with Silverlight 2 Beta 2 failing to load in Silverlight Media View
• Fixed bug where the notifier tool-tip incorrectly indicated that Live Mesh Remote Desktop was unavailable for a computer running in non-admin mode
• Fixed bug where the Live Mesh folder icon was not displayed in the e-mail inviting someone to share a folder
• Fixed one of the bugs that caused Live Mesh to fail to start
• Fixed problem with Live Mesh returning errors when waking from sleep/hibernate

Yeah OK; so why do I care? Well, most people won't but there are situations where this will cause unexpected behaviour and even lead to Out of Memory exceptions.

Essentially each thread created takes 1 Mb of stack space. Say you are creating a server app and spawn a different thread for IO and if are running on a 8-proc Win x32 box, with this change your application will cap out now at 2000 threads (8 x 250)! With each of them taking 1 mb that is a total of 2GB – which is the total addressable space in Win x32! Ouch!

Of course you can change this – for a web app this is a simple change to the web.config file; however if it is not a web app then this does require a change to the code albeit simple. So, if you suddenly start seeing out of memory exceptions, with nothing really changing, then this might be the cause.

The runtime for this is responsible for mapping parallelism expressed in an application to the actual capabilities of the underlying hardware of multi-core or multi-processor machines. The runtime determines at runtime the number of threads to create. It also monitors this to tweak this and see if any more or fewer threads are needed. The runtime also scales up as more cores become available without any change to your application.

Microsoft also says "Because Parallel Extensions exploits multiple processors, we recommended that you install this directly onto an OS. Using virtualization technologies is not recommended due to restrictions on the maximum number of processors supported by today’s common virtualization technologies." [sic]

There are several approaches you can use to expresses parallelism. Here is a brief from the documentation on these:

1. Declarative Data – Parallel Language Integrated Query (or Parallel LINQ) is an implementation of LINQ-to-Objects that executes queries in parallel, scaling to utilize the available cores and processors of the machine. Because queries are declarative, you are able to express what you want to accomplish, rather than how you want to accomplish it.
2. Imperative Data – Parallel Extensions also contains mechanisms to express common imperative data-oriented operations such as for and foreach loops, automatically dividing the work in the loop to run on parallel hardware.
3. Imperative Task – Rather than using data to drive parallelism, Parallel Extensions enables you to express potential parallelism via expressions and statements that take the form of lightweight tasks. Parallel Extensions schedules these tasks to run on parallel hardware and provides capabilities to cancel and wait on tasks.

Now, I just need to take out the time to play with this; does anyone know how I can rar up some hours in a day and squeeze in a bit more?