Anything They Can Do Why can't you?

1Feb/103

Pivot Adventure Works Database Collections

For the collections you need to open the Pivot Collection links in Pivot for them to work or you can download the zip files of the collections.

Collection with only the products that have an image other than "No Image" (place holder image in adventure works) (Pivot Collection) (Zip)

Collection with all products from the Adventure Works Database including the ones that have the "No Image" (Pivot Collection) (Zip)

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31Jan/100

SQL Saturday #34 Boston – Presentation Materials

Developing With SQL Azure

Pivot Data Visualizations

Also for those of you that are instrested in Pivot check out http://pivotcollectiontools.codeplex.com/ & http://pivotcollectionmaker.codeplex.com/.

15Jan/100

Live Labs Pivot Care Package

So the guys from Pivot sent me a care package for my presentation on Pivot in Boston on the 30th. There are 100 Invite cards (same that were given out at PDC 09) each of them good for 10 activations. Also included are two Pivot t-shirts that I will be giving out. Here is an invite code that you can use

4DFE 434D C255 927D
Pictures below.


2010-01-15 12.05.06

2010-01-15 12.04.48


2010-01-15 12.05.00

7Jan/100

Pivot Collection Maker

Computer Guy and I have been exchanging emails for a few weeks about Pivot and how to move forward with releasing a new tool to the general .Net community to make Pivot easy to work with. And thanks to a lot of hard work by Guy we now have the Pivot Collection Maker. Check out the source which is very well documented for the updated Pivot Collection Tools that is now using XmlWriter and classes based off the XSD files from the Pivot Team.

3Dec/091

Pivot Collection SDK (Beta) Release

I have just posted the first fully functional Pivot Collection Tools release over at CodePlex. This tool provides a great deal of automation. All you need to do on your end is mark your class with the attributes as demonstrated in the sample app provided. Then, populate a List and tell the tool to start building.

That’s right, it really is that simple!

3Dec/090

Facebook Collection Builder – Independent Demo

Manan from beingmanan.com was treated an early preview of my Collection Builder Tool. He was kind enough to put together an informative post about the app. If you would like to see Facebook Friends Collection in action, feel free to check out Manan's post, which also contains a video of the app in action.

3Dec/093

Facebook Friends – Collection Builder

So over the last two days I have put together a few videos for what you can do with Pivot and Facebook. I have gotten a lot of feedback from many people about the videos that I put together and most of them have the same comment they want to try it with their friends. Well now you can. I am posting a Automatic collection builder as well as a video that shows how to use it.

This requires .net 3.5 to run and I have only tested it on Windows 7 and Windows XP. It should work just fine for you and if it doesn't please let me know so that I can fix the bug.

This is the "Help File" for the collection builder.

Facebook Friend Dumper
Facebook Friend Dumper (Update to address issues downloading images)

Filed under: Pivot 3 Comments
1Dec/0912

Facebook Friends Live Collection

Yesterday, I presented you with a demo video of my Facebook Friends Collection for Pivot. Today, I have a live collection for you to play with. (Please note that Pivot is required)

Improved Facebook Friend Demo (I can't seem to get it to run on IIS as GoDaddy has it configured. This is most likely due to the inability to add MIME types. On the plus side, kudos to the Pivot team for this, as it makes it so a LAMP environment can easily serve it up.)

To make the application work, I have developed an easy-to-use method for turning almost any class in to a collection. This method was utilized in the example below, which shows the inner workings of Facebook Friends.

public class FacebookUser
{
  private List _books = new List();
  private List _activities= new List();
  private List _interests = new List();
  private List _movies= new List();
  private List _music = new List();
  private List _tv= new List();

  [PivotItem(IsName = true)]
  public string Name { get; set; }

  [PivotItem(IsDescription = true)]
  public string Desc { get; set; }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "Books", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true,IsCollection = true)]
  public List Books
  {
    get { return _books; }
    set { _books = value; }
  }

  [PivotItem( IsImage = true)]
  public string Image { get; set; }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "Gender", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true)]
  public string Sex { get; set; }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "Relationship Status", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true)]
  public string RelationshipStatus { get; set; }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "Political Views", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true)]
  public string PoliticalViews { get; set; }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "Birth Date", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true)]
  public string BirthDate { get; set; }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "Activities", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true, IsCollection = true)]
  public List Activities
  {
    get { return _activities; }
    set { _activities = value; }
  }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "TV Shows", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true, IsCollection = true)]
  public List Tv
  {
    get { return _tv; }
    set { _tv = value; }
  }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "Music", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true, IsCollection = true)]
  public List Music
  {
    get { return _music; }
    set { _music = value; }
  }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "Movies", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true, IsCollection = true)]
  public List Movies
  {
    get { return _movies; }
    set { _movies = value; }
  }

  [PivotItem(FacetDisplayName = "Intrests", FacetType = FacetTypes.String, IsFacet = true, IsCollection = true)]
  public List Interests
  {
    get { return _interests; }
    set { _interests = value; }
  }
}

In order to populate the collection, I do something like this:

PivotCollection friends = new PivotCollection();
<span>// </span>In this space, there are about forty (40) lines of code that pull the data out of the Facebook API from CodePlex
<span>// and put it in to an instance of the above class. Then I add the data to the collection as follows:</span>
friends.Items.Add(facebookUserInstance);
friends.CollectionName = "Facebook Friends";
friends.WriteCollectionToFileSystem("test1.cxml");
<span>// </span><span>Next, I run the two command line tools for converting my friends' pictures into deep-zoom images and voila! It is done!</span>

I will be posting the Project for how the above works once the source code is cleaned up a bit and I am able to provide better documentation.

If you would like a copy of it before then, feel free to ask. I would be happy to send it to you if you post  a comment requesting it.

1Dec/091

Pivot – Facebook Friends (HD)

It seems as though YouTube has finally finished encoding the HD version of my Facebook Friends Collection video.
This is a quick sample that shows Pivot and Facebook working together to form a nice, little mash-up app.

Filed under: Pivot 1 Comment
30Nov/092

Pivot – Facebook Friends

Today, I finished up a simple example of what you can do with Pivot from Microsoft's Live Labs. The concept is simple: Using the powerful data visualization tool that is Pivot, it is possible to visualize the wide range of information that Facebook tracks about all of its users and what is available to you regarding your Facebook friends. This demo is just the tip of the iceberg. Currently, it displays your friends’ places of employment, colleges, sex, wall post counts, “About Me,” name, profile picture, and birth date. I intend to have this app display much more information. I will be working on it over the next week or so in order to expand its potential.