This week there were also some interesting developments in the ongoing saga of Microsoft and Yahoo. While Microsoft has decided that they’re no longer interested in Yahoo, at least publicly, there is a key investor at Yahoo looking to put a new board in place to take another shot at the Microhoo merger.

For any open-source fans, you might be intested that the Mono team has released the first source code of Moonlight. At the moment, you have to build it with your own video codecs and it only supports SilverLight 1.0, but it’s a critical step towards SilverLight support on Linux. Miguel’s blog also proves that Linux developer’s blogs are just as ugly as the Microsoft guys.

Those MIX 08 videos I mentioned last week have already been updated. New versions have been posted with a nifty SilverLight player that plays the slides and a video of the speaker side by side. I personally recommend Scott Hanselman’s session on MVC. It’s informative and pretty funny. Otherwise, I had some other posts set aside that looked promising, but after going through them, they’re all links to other older posts, so rather than just link to a bunch of old posts, I thought it would be more worthwhile to post links to a few useful sites that I use to keep up with what’s going on.

• http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/
• http://joeon.net/
• http://wiki.asp.net/
• http://adamkinney.com/
• http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/

While I couldn’t find a humorous Microsoft story to wrap up with for this week, I did find this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL4hyATkQ74. I’m not entirely sure of what to make of it, but it’s definitely good to know that Ballmer has always been crazy.

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 great web app, you’re going to need some skills, so here are this week’s code examples and tutorials. If you’re looking for an easy way to pull Flickr images into your app, a new version of the LINQ.Flickr library was released on codeplex. Brad Abrams wrote a solid tutorial on leveraging several ASP.NET providers with SilverLight. Finally, 13 videos from MIX 2008 were posted over on asp.net.

That’s all for now; stay tuned next week for more.

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 only have 2 articles to post for tutorials and code samples, one of them is a Scott Gu link post, which should count for extra. This round of links includes lots of great resources for ASP.NET AJAX and MVC as well as an especially geeky song about SilverLight. I’ve also found a neat tutorial on doing some lazy loading tricks for the TabContainer allowing the addition of some nice ajax features.

Finally, for Xbox 360 owners, GTA IV was released this week. If you’d like to kill some random video game characters while also killing your productivity, this game is a great way to do it. You may even be able to get away with playing at work as long as you check-in at one of the in game internet cafes.

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 posted an interesting series of videos called Startup – a – Week. The videos are a kind of web-based reality show about a group of developers given one week to turn a startup concept into a reality. The series has 5 episodes posted so far which provide a few code examples and demonstrations about building a Facebook app with Visual Studio.

In the land of tutorials and code examples, there were a few items worth pointing out. Phil Haack has been posting some solid articles about working with the Microsoft MVC framework in IronRuby. While I don’t use IronRuby, it’s nice to see some alternatives to Rails. Brad Abrams posted two solid tutorials for SilverLight. The first is a step-by-step tutorial for building a data-centric SilverLight UI, and the second focuses on communicating with Flickr via REST APIs. While the code in the tutorials is good, please disregard the horrible red to blue gradient that has become a staple of SilverLight tutorials.

Finally, if you live in New York, San Francisco, San Antonio, or Atlanta, you should head down to your local AT&T store and play with their new Surface computer. I had a chance to play around with Surface at MIX and it’s pretty darn cool. Hopefully this pilot program with AT&T will lead to more computers evolving into big-ass tables.

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 few months ago. This week Salesforce announced plans to integrate with Google Apps and Chris Capossela from Microsoft had a few things to say. While I think his tone is usually a bit elitist, I’d have to agree that the average Salesforce user would likely prefer better Office integration over better Google integration.

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 type editors.

In news completely unrelated to the web, Microsoft will be working with Alpine and other manufacturers to bring Sync to the masses. My wife’s car has Sync and I’m personally pretty excited to see it in something a bit faster than a Ford Focus, though I am disappointed that you can’t configure it to use the HAL 9000 voice from 2001.

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 next version of Windows Mobile. The browser will support Flash and Silverlight and is yet another sign that web designers and developers have to start considering mobile devices when building web applications.

As with last week, here are a few new tutorials that might pique your interest. Betrand Le Roy has written a good tutorial on improving accessibility of the UpdatePanel and Mike Snow has written a series of tutorials on developing games for SilverLight.

That’s it for this week; I’m off to play my Xbox 360 Vintage.

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 the new XML based configuration.

In addition to the new developments, there have also been some good code examples and tutorials released over the past week. Chris Pels posted a solid video on adding JavaScript event handlers to server controls. For SilverLight developers, Shawn Burke created a tutorial on building templated Silverlight controls and Scott Morrison has posted a walk-through for the SilverLight DataGrid Control.

Finally, if you haven’t checked it out yet, the Hard Rock Café Memorabilia system is up and running. It’s probably the best SilverLight example out there and is a great tech demo of the new Deep Zoom system.

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 this week. Miguel de Icaza announced the release of MonoDevelop 1.0. The Telligent crew has also released Graffiti CMS Service Pack 1. And Jonathan Cogley & company over at Thycotic have released SecretServer 4.1. In the “not so much a release as a really neat product I just discovered” column check out LINQPad for your random LINQ tasks. It is exceedingly slick tool that can speed the discovery cycle.

On the “handy code to understand” front, we have a pair of submissions. First, Will Smith shares some handy ViewState extension methods. Second, for those of you undergoing painful PayPal integrations, see Anthony Grace’s solution.

In the “not so technical but still good to know category” make sure to take a gander at Kyle Baley’s post on human generated IDs. While computers are cooler, it is an unfortunate fact of life that the humans are paying your salary and the software must work with the wetware.

Back to tournament basketball. Go Terps.