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: .NET Blog.NET on the Net May 1-7: Popfly gets some new tools
Microsoft has been quite busy trying to figure out what to do with the Yahoo situation, so there has been little in the way of news from Redmond. So, I’m taking this opportunity to point out some other recent Microsoft developments that might help you all out.
It seems that every developer I know, myself included, has some idea for the next great web application. Fortunately a few new things from the world of Microsoft development might be able to help. Popfly has added a game creator, which might help you budding game developers get a breakthrough. John Montgomery has some information about the new game creator.
If you’re not really sure what you want to make, then Cayra might be able to help out. It’s a mind mapping application; a tool to help facilitate brainstorming, concept mapping and other critical tasks for developing your brilliant software idea. While Cayra isn’t new, it has been generating a buzz recently and a nice example of .NET 3.0 in action.
Finally, Microsoft has been making some nice additions to their Startup Center. The site provides some good resources for writing a business plan and planning the various aspects of a startup.
Before you build that next …
.NET on the ‘Net April 24th-30th : Can we have that service pack back?
Well, today brought some interesting announcements about Expression, but that’s officially news for next week. Here’s what happened this past week. The one piece of news that will affect most of us is the delay of SP3 for Windows XP and the removal of Vista SP1 from automatic update. Since pretty much all of us ASP.NET developers are working on either XP or Vista, this is probably something worth keeping an eye on. While few details have been released, it looks like the service packs pose some compatibility issues and possibly some security problems.
The democratic party has chosen to use SilverLight to provide HD video content on the web for the Democratic National Convention. In addition to providing web content, Microsoft will also be providing software to help other aspects of the convention, such as voting and tracking delegates, run smoothly. Who knows, they might even be able to make the hours of discussion and speeches mildly interesting.
While this might not be considered big news, the .NET Framework team is looking for a few good developers. So, if you’re passionate about development and you’re interesting in joining up, check out Brad Abrahm’s post with details about the openings.
While I …
.NET on the ‘Net April 17-23 : Putting it all online
This post is offically quite late. A combination of hackers and the first nice weather in 6 months can be quite distracting.
Microsoft has made some big announcements this week around their web strategy. Microsoft’s Salesforce.com competitor, Dynamics CRM Online, launched this week. With this launch and plans to add more services under the Dynamics umbrella, this could mean that many of us will be integrating elements of these tools into our web applications soon. While I haven’t read any responses from salesforce.com, I have noticed that they’ve already purchased Google AdWords related to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It will be interesting to see if this new Microsoft toolset will catch on.
In addition to releasing Dynamics CRM, Microsoft announced details about the upcoming Live Mesh service. Live Mesh represents Microsoft’s next step in moving away from a desktop-centric model to a more web integrated software plus service model. Like the Dynamics Platform, Live Mesh could provide some interesting opportunities for integrating some office style features into you apps. It remains to be seen what developer tools will be available surrounding these services. I was hoping to post a quick first impression here, but my account is still pending.
The Visit Mix site has …
.NET on the ‘NET : Happy Birthday SilverLight!
It’s been another week, which means it’s time for another thrilling, or at least moderately interesting, .NET on the ‘Net post. This week, Silverlight celebrated it’s first birthday. At its current rate of half a million downloads a day, it’s still got a lot of ground to make up against Flash, but SilverLight has been doing better than a lot of people expected. I’m excited to see what happens when SilverLight 2 is released this summer. Microsoft released a preview of Dynamic Data on MSDN and plans to include it in a hotfix for .NET 3.5 later this year. Dynamic Data is a system that allows you to share functionality for similar fields across various databound controls across your app. Scott Hanselman has a good explanation on his blog.
The tutorials were a bit thin this week. Steve Orr posted a solid tutorial on creating Control Extenders in Visual Studio 2008. To go along with the Dynamic Data announcement, here’s a walk-through for using the Dynamic Data Wizard. Finally, Scott Gu posted a list of a tutorials that should help provide some new ideas to try out.
For those who haven’t heard a small search engine start-up announced some application tools a …
.NET on the ‘NET April 2 - 8 : All your Yahoo are belong to us!
The continuing story of Yahoo and Microsoft opened another chapter this week. Microsoft set forth an ultimatum regarding their acquisition offer [WARNING: Humorous Ballmer Photo] and Yahoo issued a response. I personally hope that this all gets resolved in a nice civilized manner. It’s become pretty clear that the acquisition will probably happen; at this point it’s in Yahoo’s court to decide how it goes down. On the MSDN blogs, Ashish Thapliyal laid out a roadmap for SilverLight 2.0. It looks like your SilverLight 2 Beta 1 apps won’t necessarily work in Beta 2, which should be out in the next few months, and we can expect a release of SilverLight 2 this summer. Finally, How Software is Built posted an interview with Brad Wilson regarding Codeplex and some general discussion about Open-source and Microsoft.
As for tutorials, Bob Familiar posted a good overview of some of the best SilverLight 2.0 tutorials around. Your Websites, Our Passion posted some resources for setting up IIS7 to cooperate with Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, which is key for those of us working on Vista. Custom server control developers can also get some help from Bipin Joshi, who provides a tutorial for creating custom …
.NET on the ‘Net March 25 - April 1: OOXML and IE8
Sorry this update is a little late, to make up for it I added a day to the week. There are some very interesting stories from Microsoft this week. The biggest story is the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard. While this isn’t directly web related, it’s been a pretty controversial topic and could have some wide reaching implications. With OOXML being adopted by both ISO and ECMA, it provides an open standard for MS Office Docs. Not surprisingly, IBM and a few others have some problems with the format, but this could be sign that Microsoft will work to publish more of their standards. I know that I would be happy to see some open standards related to RIA development.
The IE8 team released a document on MSDN that lists the CSS capabilities of the various versions of IE. This includes the IE8 Beta and the planned implementations in the final release of IE8. Looking through the document, it appears that all of the CSS2 pseudo-classes will be supported as well as the CSS2 specs for generated content, which have both been a bit buggy
Finally, Microsoft announced that it would be including a “desktop-grade” web browser in the …
.NET on the ‘NET March 18-25: New IIS7 Goodness and MVC opens up
Wyatt is a bit buried under work for a few weeks, so I will be your new source for Microsoft news and updates for a little while. It’s been a bit of a slow news week for .NET, so at least I get to start off slowly.
This week, the big story that most people are talking about is still the ASP.NET MVC project. While Wyatt has mentioned this a few times already, this past week the full source code was posted on CodePlex. There has also been a lot of buzz about MVC as people have started using it. Some of you Rails and Django guys might think this is old news, but MVC brings some nice things to ASP.NET such as running command line testing and having 100% control over markup.
Another rather big news item from the Microsoft camp is a batch of improvements to IIS7. The ASP.NET debugging blog has an overview of the changes, but the two that are most important are the new FTP Publishing Service and the CTP of the Administration Pack. The FTP publishing service provides support for IPv6, some new features for running shared environments and replacement of the IIS6 style metabase with …
.NET on the ‘NET March 10-17: SubSonic Rocks and MVC is Hawt
This is being posted bit later than “early in the week.” But then again, I got the fun job of migrating some PHP apps (unfortunately of my own nubile design so I cannot point fingers). I never thought I would miss the yellow screen of death until I hit the blank screen of death. No IIS7 so no FREB love, just lots of feeling around, print_r(), SQL Server Profiling and on the fly coding. I don’t miss the old days. And now on to dotnet . . .
The lead story is that Rob Conery has been very busy boy post-MIX. He released SubSonic 2.1 Beta 2 and launched a new SubSonic project site. Also, if you missed it, Windows Vista SP1 has been released. Roll the dice and upgrade today!
ASP.NET MVC is the new hawtness. And, while you are thinking hawt thoughts about MVC, you should make sure to check out Stephen Walther’s post on the Life of an ASP.NET MVC Request as well as Jeffery Palmero’s post on unit testing ASP.NET MVC Controllers. Finally, don’t miss Phil Haack’s MVC Routing Debugger.
There wer also some notable releases …
.NET on the NET March 2-9: MIX Hangover Edition
On the really off chance that you missed it, MIX08 has come and gone. I posted some reflections here and here. Definitely make sure to check out the webcasts [NB: install Silverlight 2 first] if you get a chance. Lots of great stuff was released to the web at the show—Matthew Podwyoski has a good list of the ASP.NET specific ones. Working around the release of IE8 Beta 1, the involved teams tell us about IE8 and IP licensing, Activities and Web Slices, IE8 and JScript, CSS 2.1 Testing, and the IE8 Developer Tools. A bit more mundane, but more important in my life is the torrent of releases from the IIS team. Highlights include IIS7 admin tools for XP, 2003 and Vista, configuration extensibility x2 and a very strong article on IIS7 diagnostic tools for developers.
Given that a rather significant hunk of the ASP.NET world was busy schmoozing and boozing in Vegas, there was not a lot of activity in the dotnetosphere. LINQ and other fancy, schmacy stuff has been all the rage recently, but Reamped.NET reminds us about our old …
MIXing It Up: Day Two
Sorry for the belated post—I got a bit tied up with, well, MIX and couldn’t even start pulling this together until I hopped on the plane. Anyhow, I survived TAO and the horrible dryness of the desert—I can’t sleep past 5:30 am in Vegas it seems—to make it to MIX day two. And what a day it was.
First post-bacon stop was an enlightening panel called “The Open Question” which turned into a very open and rolling discussion between Mike Schroepfer ,(Mozilla), Andi Gutmans, (Zend), Miguel de Icaza, (Novell/Mono/Moonlight), Rob Conery, (Microsoft/SubSonic) about how the world is pushing towards an open model and how intellectual property, developer culture and economics play into this. I can’t really do it justice in prose, you should really check out the webcast if you are at all interested in these sorts of questions.
Next up was a very, very, very interesting keynote between Guy Kawazaki and Steve Ballmer. No, there was not a fist-fight on stage, but Steve did almost smash Guy’s MacBook Air. And—before you ask—Steve did do Monkey Boy part 2. But, compared to Ozzie’s buzzword-laden soothsaying on Day …
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