Archetype’s CTO highlighted in the Microsoft Showcase

Luigi Rosso, Archetype’s CTO, highlighted in the Microsoft Showcase. In this video interview Luigi talks about Archetype’s experience with Azure and the benefits Azure brings to the company. View the showcase interview: http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/13affd50-5770-414e-881d-37e35c43065c

Real World Windows Azure: Interview with Michael Lucaccini, President of Archetype

As part of the Real World Windows Azure series, Michael Lucaccini, President of Archetype, talks about integrating the Windows Azure technology platform into the AMP system. Here’s what he had to say: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/02/11/real-world-windows-azure-interview-with-michael-lucaccini-president-of-archetype.aspx  

Archetype Teams with Microsoft as Analytics Framework Design and Development Partner

Last week at MIX, Michael Scherotter introduced the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework (MSAF), providing an extensible means for tracking user actions in Silverlight apps accross the board. Integrated directly into Expression Blend, the MSAF supports online, offline and out of browser Silverlight scenarios, offering web designers and developers a straightfoward and powerful means for adding analytics to web applications. 

Archetype is proud to have participated in the development and launch of MSAF, working closely with Microsoft on the design of the framework icons and splash screens, and serving as a design and development partner for the framework.

The Analytics framework can be downloaded from Codeplex at http://msaf.codeplex.com/ and can be used to implement behaviors from major analytics vendors into your Silverlight projects. The framework includes a growing list of analytics vendors, seven of which contributed components for the base installer of the framework available on Codeplex.

More about the Silverlight Analytics Framework:

Download the framework from:

http://msaf.codeplex.com/

Michael Scherotter’s blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2010/03/17/the-microsoft-silverlight-analytics-framework-released-at-mix.aspx

Archetype Creates innovative Associated Press Phone 7 Application, Showcased in MIX Keynote

As part of the keynote presentation at the MIX 2010 Conference, Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Windows Phone Program Management, showcased Archetype’s Associated Press News Reader Application. Taking advantage of the new Windows Phone 7 platform, the AP News Reader provides a next generation experience for accessing news content. The AP News Reader application allows users to browse articles, view images and play video through a rich and visually compelling interface. Through taking advantage of Windows Phone 7’s multi-touch capabilities, the application allows for intuitive gesture-based interactions like flipping through and resizing photos. The AP News Reader also ties into popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and supports dynamic ad placements, such as pop-ups, page takeovers and videos.

“We are very excited about the Phone 7 platform and the amazing opportunity that it brings our customers. Our partnership with Associated Press on the AP Phone 7 Application is a great example pushing the boundary of a new platform while engaging users in compelling mobile experiences,” said Danny Riddell, Archetype, CEO, Founder.

The Associated Press Application highlights the powerful capabilities of Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, as well as Archetype’s commitment to being at the forefront of emerging technologies. Through partnering with the Associated Press, and Microsoft’s Silverlight and Window Phone 7 teams, Archetype produced a compelling and useful application that demonstrates a new way to experience news, and provides AP’s constituent news outlets with a rebrandable and customizable platform for creating market-specific news readers of their own.

You can see the AP demo and the rest of the MIX keynote here: http://live.visitmix.com.

Archetype Talks About Agency Workflow at South by Southwest Conference

Archetype’s Danny Riddell, Mike Lucaccini, and Eric Anderson present on Interactive Agency Workflow, Design and Development Process at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin.

Session description: Today’s interactive agencies face an extensive amount of challenges in workflow and process. This session takes an in-depth look at the interactive process from sales and contracts through design, development and deployment. Archetype will have key employees talk about their roles and how they fit into the full interactive workflow.

Find out more about the session at www.sxsw.com

Archetype works with Microsoft to produce a set of learning applications for Microsoft.com/design

In tackling everything from community involvement and design challenges to better accross-the-board workflow and tooling support, Microsoft is working hard on rounding out, or beveling and adding a drop shadow to, its developer-centric image and offerings. One of the more recent signs of this shift can be found in the .toolbox area of microsoft.com/design site.

Articulating key design principles and techniques, the .toolbox site includes a set of Silverlight demo applications and associated curriculum centered around Microsoft’s tools and technologies. Archetype assisted in the production of this site by developing several of the demo applications, including Canvas, Slideshow, Weather, Mixer and Videos. Additionally, two members of our team, Eric Anderson and Guido Rosso, were officially drafted to be part of the .toolbox faculty. Take a peak at the apps and try to stump Eric and Guido with your questions. If you do, we’ll send ya a T-shirt.

Silverlight 4 Guitar Tuner

One of the cool new features of Silverlight 4 is raw access to the camera and microphone. This opens up a whole bunch of cool possibilities for software development. One of them which we explored was creating an online guitar tuner.

Microsoft unveiled a beta version of Silverlight 4 at PDC, you can grab it here if you don’t have it installed

I remember looking for something like this a few years ago when I couldn’t find my real guitar tuner. All I found were a bunch of tools which simply played back the right pitch, they would not analyze the actual recorded pitch from your guitar, which is what I was used to using. I found some shareware tools that would do this but I really wanted something quick that I could just browse to and tune my guitar, and not risk downloading some viruses or waste time installing something only to realize it doesn’t do exactly what I wanted.

With Silverlight 4, we can now do this. We simply calculate the spectogram of the frequencies comprising a short period of time (currently half a second) to find the fundamental frequency of the sampled sound.

My favorite tuner lately has been the one on my POD XT Pro, so we designed this to look like that.

To speed things up, we used a good FFT implementation found on CodeProject and simply adapted it to work with Silverlight.

We also added a little bit of silence detection which helps the Tuner show when there’s no input, ideally you’d have some settings for this and some more input feedback with something like a volume meter. This is disabled in the demo above, you can enable it at compile time. Grab the source here, and feel free to implement these things yourself!

Microsoft Publishes Case Study on Azure and the Archetype Media Platform (AMP)

Check out the case study here: Archetype Media Platform (AMP) Case Study

Archetype’s Chief Creative and Technical Officers Selected for Microsoft’s ONE.NET Campaign

Luigi Rosso (CTO), Guido Rosso (CCO), Archetype, and the Archetype Media Platform (AMP) are all being showcased on www.dotnetstories.com in Microsoft’s worldwide ONE.NET digital campaign. The campaign features Archetype’s use of .NET to build Rich Internet Applications on Azure. The AMP system will also be featured in online ads as part of a month-long campaign and are being showcased on various web properties like MS.com, Information Week, CNet.com, Engadget, and MSDN. For more information on Archetype’s participation in the ONE.NET campaign go to www.dotnetstories.com.