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//InterKnowlogy/ Blogs Blogging the Art of Software Search Home About The Bloggers Danny Warren – Speaking Schedule & History Older posts The coolest Emerging Experiences WinRT application on CNN during the US presidential election By Tim Huckaby on November 8, 2016 Leave a comment Well, there’s this little thing called United States Presidential Election today. And because of that there is a group of totally overworked & stressed out InterKnowlogy folks in the CNN broadcast center in Washington DC. It’s estimated that 250-350 Million people around the world will be watching John King, Wolf Blitzer, and Anderson Cooper of CNN use the coolest Emerging Experiences WinRT application that we have built for them – The CNN Magic Wall. I’m told CNN will use the on air broadcast Magic Wall” application for 14 straight hours with just a couple commercial breaks. Yep, that means this monster of a C# / XAML / Direct X app doesn’t have an SLA of triple 9s; it has to stay up 100% of the time; 24/7. It’s not a surprise that ratings are through the roof for CNN. But, so are Fox’s and MSNBC’s and everyone’s. Never in the history of the US have both candidates been so vehemently hated which is going to manifest in the biggest voter turnout in the history of the United States. The people in the know tell me that we are going to see a huge millennial vote today. We have built some new features into the application specifically for this election night and you CNN junkies will notice them. Feel free to ping me if you need the PR stuff, Social media, contact stuff, etc. Share This Post Tweet Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment The first ever Emerging Experiences (EE) Track is at Dev Intersection, October 25-28 By Tim Huckaby on October 8, 2016 Leave a comment I am very excited to report that the first ever Emerging Experiences (EE) Track is at Dev Intersection , October 25-28, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV. I’m serving as track chair for the EE track. It’s taken months of planning. Here’s a little teaser Video with Richard Campbell and Giorgio Sardo talking about the keynote at the EE track. https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/The-DEVintersection-Countdown-Show/Giorgio-Sardo-and-Richard-Campbell-talk-Emerging-Experiences-at-DEV-intersection-Fall-Count-Down-Sho What are emerging experiences? It’s the intersection of machine learning and More Personal Computing, where magic is being created on a daily basis. It’s a MSFT driven term that encompasses everything cool and cutting edge: Hololens, Cognitive Services, Machine Learning, Kinect, bot fmx, Cortana, Band, SurfaceHub, etc. We have quite a lineup of sessions to be given by the best of the best at MSFT, and some 3d party RD & MVPs too. Bill Buxton himself is even speaking in the track! Anna Roth from MSFT Cognitive Services is speaking in the track. Lots more great MSFT EE expert / speakers are in the track like: Mat Velloso , Keith Harold and Pete Brown We also have a post-con calledMixed Reality Essentials: a concise course ” given by EE experts James Ashley and Dennis Vroegop where you can learn all this stuff in a more classroom like format. If you ever wanted to learn stuff like how to build unity apps for hololens this would be the conference to attend. Use the Discount code below to register: Share This Post Tweet Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment Keeping .NET app settings secrets out of source control By Scott Varcoe on September 22, 2016 Leave a comment Keeping .NET app settings secrets out of source control Whether your app is a desktop client app or a website, it’s important to keep passwords, connection strings, and API keys out of source control. In .NET, these settings are stored in a app.config or web.config file depending on the type of app you are building and those files would be checked into source control. I’ve done this in the past for many projects. Of course, I never committed production secrets, but it was still a big no-no, but I just never had the time to investigate the proper way to handle this situation…until today. A quick Google search returned this result: http://www.asp.net/identity/overview/features-api/best-practices-for-deploying-passwords-and-other-sensitive-data-to-aspnet-and-azure . Config files have a simple way of handling this by adding a file attribute to the appSettings section of the web.config file, like so appSettings file="secrets.config" add key="testSetting" value="not a secret" / /appSettings/ And the secrets.config file looks like this appSettings add key="secretTestSetting" value="very secret" / add key="testSetting" value="I will overwrite" / /appSettings This is the entire file, it is important that the root element is appSettings , otherwise you will get a compile or runtime error. Any new keys defined will be added and any existing keys will overwrite the value from the web.config . Overwriting values in the web.config is very useful for local development. Since the secrets.config file is never checked in, each developer can keep their own local app settings values without worrying about mistakenly checking them in and overriding the web.config default values. No more commenting out values in your web.config ! The same thing works for the connectionStrings section, except in this case the entire section is overwritten. In fact, the web.config can’t have any elements under it or you will get errors. The web.config will look like this connectionStrings configSource="connectionStrings.config" /connectionStrings And the connectionStrings.config will look like this connectionStrings clear/ add name="Database" connectionString="very secret" / /connectionStrings As long as your extra files have the .config extension, IIS will never serve them. Also, you should never add these secrets config files to your project to avoid mistakenly deploying them to your servers. Instead, your release process should deploy secrets files separately from code files. And finally, always add secrets.config and connectionStrings.config to your .gitignore and to get first-time developers setup with secrets, you could include these files somewhere outside of source control, like a file share. That’s all! Super easy way to keep all your secrets safe in both desktop and web applications. Find the code here: https://github.com/svarcoe/AppSecretsDemoProject Share This Post Tweet Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ASP.NET , CSharp , dotnet , WPF | Leave a comment InterKnowlogy’s Technology for the 2016 United States Presidential Election By Tim Huckaby on July 25, 2016 4 Comments Democratic National Convention Voting App Log in Background Since 2008 IK has been building software for The US presidential elections and for customers like the United States Library of Congress. In 2012 we delivered a cutting edge solution for capturing ballot voting results on tablets to the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) during the DNCC national convention. That reporting solution was one of many other app experiences we’ve created in the election and campaign space of civic technology. DNC Admin console – test data Technology at the Democratic National Convention Now, in 2016, we’re updating the DNCC app with a variety of new features including enabling real-time viewing of delegate voting by state on the convention floor. The data from the voting is fed to systems that report in to giant screens, updating the status of each state’s votes in real time for everyone at the convention (and the world for that matter because it’s covered by broadcast TV worldwide) to see. We take pride in our user interaction design; the delegates love the voting applications because the user experience is intuitive. Test data – The CA vote from the DNC admin console CNN’s on air Broadcast Software: The Magic Wall Throughout the year long process of selecting the next President of the...