Blogs

Silverlight Sidebar Gadgets in Vista

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

At Mix07 I asked the question, Can we write gadgets for Vista using Silverlight? The answer is yes, but nobody knew how to do it. Well Charles Sterling has a post today on his blog describing how to do it. Check it out here: http://blogs.msdn.com/charles_sterling/archive/2007/05/14/writing-a-windows-sidebar-gadget-in-silverlight-dead-simple.aspx

Goodbye Windows Server Longhorn

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Hello Windows Server 2008. Looks like the TechNet France web site spilled the beans. Microsoft is officially naming the next version of Windows Server, “Windows Server 2008”. I personally am going to miss the Longhorn code name. It has treated us well. The code name, as I understand it, came from the fact that Server 2003/Windows XP codename was Whistler (a mountain in Canada with great skiing) and the follow up version was originally called Blackcomb (another mountain in Canada with great skiing).…

Death to AJAX?

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Lately there’s been a slew of new technologies promising to kill AJAX once and for all. Those technologies include Silverlight, Flex, and JavaFX. The problem with this theory is that all three require the user to install a plug-in. You cannot expect that a user will have your plug-in installed, and you shouldn’t expect the user to install your plug-in just because you tell them to. Personally I dislike Flash web sites.…

What's going on with Windows Server Virtualization?

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Windows Server Virtualization (WSV) is a pretty cool technology. The ability to transform farms of thousands of servers into a cabinet of hundreds of servers would save not only on energy costs but also provide a solution to make maintaining servers much easier. So we were told that hardware virtualization is coming with Windows Server Longhorn. Then when it never appeared in any of the beta’s we were told it would be available as a separate product released within 180 days of Longhorn’s release.…

Mix07 Day 1-Session 2

Saturday, May 5, 2007

For the second session I decided to go to a talk titled, “Developing Data Driven Applications Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET.” I should have known better than to go to this. Every time someone from Microsoft demonstrates the “power” of a grid control, detail control, or similar control they use the most trivial example and make the rest of us look like morons because our apps seem to require hundreds of lines of code to produce results.…

Mix07 Day 1-Session 1

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Building rich web experiences with Silverlight. This session was presented by Joe Stegman. Joe is an excellent presenter and I’ve attended many of his web casts including the Digital Black Belt series that helped prepare people for security issues with web site design. Joe was presenting Silverlight to us using the go-live loving beta of version 1.0. He made it clear that he would show us some of the stuff the Scott demonstrated in his keynote, only using the now-defunct-yet-not-released-yet version 1.…

Mix07 Day 1-The Keynotes

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Today was the first full day at Mix 07. It started this morning at 9:30 with a keynote address from Ray Ozzie who said this about following in Bill Gate’s shadow, “There will never be another Bill Gates.” Ray also gave the high level vision of what Silverlight really is. It isn’t a Flash competitor, even though it will compete in that space. It’s really the third wheel assisting apps that cannot decide if they are desktop applications or web applications.…

Mix07 Day 1-Session 3

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Okay, for the Keynote and the first two sessions I learned stuff that I cannot use in my day-to-day programming because (and take your pick here): It’s not released yet The version that will do what I need it to do is the next version after the one we are currently developing I can’t get away from .NET 1.1, what makes me think I can do something in 2.0 or 3.…

You Just Can't Escape Silverlight V1.1

Thursday, May 3, 2007

From the Silverlight V1.0 Beta SDK, “[The] Silverlight 1.0 Quick Starts - Implemented with Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, the quick starts provides an easy way for developers and designer to get up to speed on creating web experiences with Silverlight 1.1 Alpha.” Um… no. The Silverlight 1.0 Quick Starts should be implemented in Silverlight 1.0 and should get developers and designers up to speed on Silverlight 1.0 Beta. Wow, if they are so in love with 1.…

Mix07 a 72 Hour Conversation

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

I’m in Las Vegas this week for the Mix07 conference. It is being billed as a 72 hour conversation but I’m learning that they want to sleep. It’s now 2:50 AM and there’s nobody left to converse with. I wonder if I should feel cheated… What’s in store for the week? Well it looks like it’s going to be three days of learning about Silverlight. Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Flash.…