The World Bank’s first API offers 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos. We are releasing this API because we believe this information can be mapped, visualized and mashed up in an unlimited number of ways that will help develop a better understanding of trends and patterns around key development issues.

HERE

Visualize the Data with PowerShell and NetMap

I posted on Microsoft Research .NetMap and PowerShell. This script visualizes countries by Income Level, Lending Types and Regions.

param($category="incomeLevel")

. .Show-NetMap

$wc = New-Object net.webclient
$url="http://open.worldbank.org/rest.php?
method=wb.countries.get&per_page=250&api_key=<your api key>"

([xml]$wc.DownloadString($url)).rsp.countries.country |
  % {
   if($_.iso2code -and $_.name) {
    new-object psobject |
     add-member -pass noteproperty source ($_.$category.‘#text’) |
     add-member -pass noteproperty target ($_.name)
    }
  } | Show-NetMap -w 250 -l F

Income Level

Lending Type

Region

• Lawson’s Smart Office - check out the video. Maybe Microsoft should hire these chaps to write a WPF shell for windows
• MVVM
• MSDN Magazine:
  • Patterns For Building Composite Applications With WPF - nice article on Prism
  • Create Data-Centric Web Applications With Silverlight 2 - SOAP is dead, long live ADO.NET Data Services
  • Understanding Routed Events and Commands In WPF
  • Unhandled Exception Processing In The CLR
  • Service-Driven Apps With Silverlight 2 And WCF
  • Confidence in the Cloud - interesting read on Amazon and clouds

So I finally joined the crowd and installed Google Chrome. The application shortcuts are a very nice feature. I suspect the Microsoft IE group have had a few things to think about over the last few days - process separation, performance etc

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) continues its quest for low latency with the launched of Exchange Hosting. Back office latency/transaction throughput is often in the quest for low trade latency.

“Thinking differently about problems" is available for free.

Parallelization of functional programs

Imagine that we’re writing a computer game and we have a list of characters controlled by the computer. In a single step of the game, we want to remove all characters that died since the last step and we want to calculate new state of the game character (such as new location). Also a character can perform some operation with the world (for example picking an item from the world).

Imperative Solution

List<GameCharacter> dead = new List<GameCharacter>();

foreach(GameCharacter ch in Characters) {
  if (!CharacterIsAlive(ch))
    dead.Add(ch);
  else
    ch.PerformStep(this.World);
}

Characters.RemoveAll(dead);

Functional Version

  1 Characters = Characters.Filter(CharacterIsAlive);
  2 Characters = Characters.Select(PerformStep);
  3 this.World = Characters.Aggregate(this.World, ModifyWorld);

1. Filter out dead characters
2. Calculate new state for each character
3. Calculate new state of the world

icomasoft is providing, in beta, VI PowerScripter which provides users with an unprecedented ease-of-use and simplification of many administrative tasks around VirtualCenter ESX and i3.

• Reduction of required resources for administrative tasks
• Easy monitoring and analysis of the virtual infrastructure behavior
• Mass configuration and individual configuration can be executed with one single script
• Almost unlimited extension of the basic functionality of VMware infrastructures and free ESXi

We’ll continue to watch the PowerShell management Library for Hyper-V on CodePlex currently at 66 cmdlets and counting.

Finally it sounds like somebody at Microsoft has seen the light, with Prism 2.0 offering Silverlight support. More interesting is the hint that binary compatability between WPF and Silverlight is on the cards -madness if this doesn’t happen. “We’d like to get to the point where views, styles and themes can all be re-used across WPF and Silverlight” - so would we all! “Code that is shared is linked between two projects so that it is automatically compiled into each target” Painful!

Silverlight Spy

Out of the box the tool supports some great features. One feature is the support for automatic layout of the vertices like Circular, Grid and Sinusoid Horizontal to name a few.

Interactive features I like are the ability to drag the resulting nodes around on the drawing surface and clicking on a node to highlight the edges in and out of the node.

Excel Integration

A unique feature is the VSTO component for Excel. In a spreadsheet you can specify Vertex 1 and Vertex 2. The associated task pane lets you read the spreadsheet and layout the graph with different options.

PowerShell Integration

I worked up a few PowerShell scripts so I could produce graphs from different sources by:

1. Importing a comma separated values file
2. Importing an Excel Spreadsheet
3. Running commands against the system

Here’s are the commands and their results. The csv file and excel file contain the same vertex information for the graph.

Contents of test.csv

source,target
a,b
a,c
c,a
d,a
e,h
f,i
g,j
a,f

Import-Csv test.csv | Show-NetMap

Same graph as above. Clicking on node “a” highlights all in and out edges.

.\Import-ExcelSheet -File test -SheetName Test | Show-NetMap

.\Graph-Object (Get-Process powershell, moe*)

.\Graph-Object (Get-Service net*p*)

Notes

• Import-Excel is a wrapper a around Lee Holmes Invoke-SqlCommand found in his book Windows PowerShell Cookbook
• Graph-Object is re-worked from two sources
  • My post on PowerShell + (GLEE - Graph Layout Execution Engine)
  • Jeffery Snover’s great additions Graphing with Glee

Download Here

Commerzbank is in the final stages of negotiating the acquisition of Dresdner Bank from the German insurance giant Allianz

C# CTP is available here, Solver Foundation here:

“Solver Foundation is a framework of solvers and modeling services enabling planning, risk modeling, and scheduling for .NET developers. It is integrated with the full power of the NETfx 3.5+ platform including LINQ for declarative binding to enterprise databases. Solver Foundation is delivered in a single, compact, CLS-compliant library. This managed code library may be used from any modern CLS-compatible language (F#, C#, C++, IronPython, etc.). It aides quantitative analysts, modelers, and programmers in making feasible, near-optimal, and optimal decisions in business critical settings via applications or Office-based solutions. Solver Foundation ships with several production grade solvers and provides easy third party solver integration.

A Solver Foundation program is a declarative model embedded in familiar NETfx design patterns and development environments (Visual Studio 2008). The model is solved by application of numerical and symbolic solvers, meta-heuristics, constraint processing algorithms, and advanced local search techniques. Included in this release are model pre-solve and validity checking. These Solver Foundation services may be leveraged by any of the solvers and provide a rich set of tools to aide to modeling, solving, and post-optimality analysis. Solver Foundation provides these scalable and performance-driven solvers and services while supporting integration with industry standard modeling and serialization formats. This permits users to leverage existing modeling investments directly within Solver Foundation-based solutions.”

You might also want to buy F# for Scientists

A fundamental part of Don Syme’s day.

Our aim here is to put nothing between you and your ability to explore a problem space with F#.

The new F# CTP is available at the Microsoft F# Developer Center.

By my reckoning we are due for Silverlight 2.0 RTM sometime shortly given that beta 2 was released in June. Having played with beta 2 I still think Microsoft has some way to go to catch Adobe. Specifically I think they need to consider the following for vNext:

• More controls - at a mininum the equivalent controls that are available in Flex 3 e.g accordian
• Full commanding support
• Better parity with WPF
  • Triggers
  • Richer data-binding
  • 3D support
  • Bitmap Effects
  • FlowDocument
  • Better rendering control (e.g. WPF SnapsToDevicePixel)
• A sensible push service in IIS, not this silly polling implementation! Think Lightstream, Liberator…..
• DataGrid and LINQ select anonymous types in your queries support

Interesting Silverlight reading:

• How to Scale your entire App and its Elements to your Browsers Size
• ViewModel Pattern
• SLUnity
• Silverlight Behaviors

Off-topic stuff:

• iPhone GUI PSD
• 10 Futuristic User Interfaces

Microsoft is offering a free full day dive into Silverlight.

Register Here

More details HERE and agenda to follow.

I got an email from the Microsoft Surface team today with an attached Surface order form which would allow me to order a commercial surface hardware in metal, black or white for $12,500. Developer hardware and software costs $15,000 and includes five SDK licenses. Shipping specified continental US only

We all know that latency matters in a trading system. Jim over on the GigaSpace’s blog has an interesting posting that fully rams home the latency issue. If Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales, imagine what latency could cost db autobahn or BARX. Autobahn appear to have the lead today in the SDP space, hence I wonder what 100ms latency does to the Deutsche bank e-trading revenue? 1% of $1bn?

Mathematica's .NET-Link technology allows Mathematica and .NET programs to interoperate seamlessly. Moreover, Microsoft's new functional programming language F# provides many familiar benefits to Mathematica programmers:
The marriage of Mathematica with F# can greatly improve productivity for a wide variety of tasks.

The single most important reason for this speed boost is the specialization of the F# code compared to Mathematica's own general purpose term rewriter. ... Moreover, the F# programming language also excels at compiler writing and the JIT-compilation capabilities of the .NET platform make it ideally suited to the construction of custom evaluators that are compiled down to native code before being executed. This approach is typically orders of magnitude faster than evaluation in a standalone generic term rewriting system like Mathematica.

I see there have been a number of postings recently on the subject of managers. kintya explores how to become a manager. Over on the TechLeaders blog, Brad has some advice for new managers - listen, communicate. Izzy is also spot on about letting go when you become a manager.

This posting made me smile given certain projects I’ve come across over the years…

• FlexUnit is now out in Open Source land. Hopefully Adobe can begin to provide more enterprise development tools. The one downside of FlexUnit is that there appears to be no console mode, which is unfortunate is your running on an enterprise build plant
• No surprises in this list of Silverlight RIA applications. It’s unfortunate that the RIA I was instrumental in building last year isn’t in this list
• Oslo insights
• Looks like Steve had to pull the BWM surface video :(, but at least there are a number of other Vectorform Surface video’s still online - Mercedes-Benz etc
• REST with WCF - way to much REST in my life these days
• C++0x: Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup
• With Amazon continuing to add to the cloud, one has to ask if Oslo will provide the Microsoft Cloud?
• NVISION 2008 has some impressive video’s. CPU’s continue to play to “financial market analyses”
• Are Panamaps (A Multi-Layered Map) useful in finance?
• Moth on Make Object ID
• As blogged elsewhere, Photosynth is Released.
• Kind of cool to see that Linden is rolling out Mono servers
• Google mojo?

If you have hangs, performance, memory issues, exceptions or crashes in Silverlight applications you can debug them using windbg and sos just like you would if the issues occurred in other .net applications.

http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/archive/2008/08/21/debugging-silverlight-applications-with-windbg-and-sos-dll.aspx

Maybe this works with Automated Debugging using WinDbg and PowerShell.

e-Book available here

Joel and Ted have release a draft of Shared Source CLI Essentials.

Australia has it’s first.

Here

3D rendering in the cloud. City Space is very cool. OTOY + iPhone + real time fiancial data = …