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 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.
Ian Muir
