Welcome to the Singularity

So it is public now, and hence I am allow to blog about it.

Singularity is here!

Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world, and you can be part of it.

This year, over 100 of the most influent minds on the web will be discussing and modeling what the future of the web will be like... of course after this year's MIX and MAX.

This conference is planned to take place in the cloud between October 24th and the 25th - so you won't have to go thru all the pains of booking flights, hotels, nor submitting expense reports, which makes it not only great, but greener.

The conference is being organized by multitasking Aral Balkan, which most of you people will know him for his work in the Flash Community, and his talking bunny.

The world as we know it is more interconnected now than ever before, twitter has become essential part of it and we even feel lonely when its service is down - well not everyone, but yes! there are people; and having a web conference on the web, and by the people from the web, will really set the roots for the kind of world we are all working to make reality.

Aral is still picking up on presenters, although there is already a list of really compelling people making in the elite. If you think you have what it gets to get people talking about the future or a service that can revolutionize the way we convey our life in the matrix, go ahead and mail them your idea - who knows you might end up being one of the stars on one of this year's best conference.

More info here.

Later.

---

Technorati Tags: Conferences,MIX,MAX,Singularity,Web,Web2.0,Aral,Design,Development,RIA,RIE,Events

Microsoft Volta as a Declarative Web Distributed Computing Toolset

Today Microsoft Live Labs announced Microsoft Volta. Volta technology preview is a developer toolset built on top of .NET to further excel the development of software+services applications enabling you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns.

Supporting the lines of the Live 2.0 roadmap, Volta is presented as an experiment for the community to work around and provide feedback on how this declarative architecture enable Architects to tune, alas Grid-computing, the way its application behave and distributes their processing load across several tiers.

It is no surprise that more and more our every day applications are becoming all interconnected. Most of our collaboration tools live somehow in the cloud and it's their connectivity and ability to mash up what makes them valuable, but just as this connectivity grows it makes the process of architect decisions a complex and almost imperfect task, getting us to continue tune its distribution to match the execution availability sometimes stretching the boundaries of quality and availability in or to pair up the ever-changing business needs.

With Volta you architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together.

Given that this technology is in an experimental mode you can foresee changes in the way of how the toolset will evolved, but for us architect-geeks it is a great way to starting trying new models of architecture applications and get tips towards how we build our future business models.

If you want to learn more about this new model, go on a check out their technology site here.

Cheers!

G.

Update: Here is an amazing post from Erik Meijer who is part of the team, talking a bit more of what Volta is and how it came to be.

---

Technorati Tags: Volta,Microsoft,Microsoft Live,Live Labs,.NET,Distributed Computing,Architecture,Experiments,Software+Services,Web,Ajax,WinFx

Silverlight 1.1 is now Silverlight 2.0 and more to come...

Today will be moved to history as the day Silverlight 2.0 feature set was made public along with the road map of what Microsoft feels like is the future of ASP.NET 3.5.

Just a week after Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 were released to manufacturing, ScottGu's team keeps working fearlessly in the next round of features that will mark ASP.NET and Silverlight as big contesters for the future of both the Web and the RIA world.

Silverlight 1.1 moves to be Silverlight 2.0 and will go into Beta on Q1'08; such release will ship with a GoLive license allowing companies to build upon it and move applications to production.

ASP.NET will see itself upgraded with an Extension Release that will sport a set of Framework Extension excelling manageability in the way we build applications and improvements to current technologies like AJAX, Silverlight integration, and Dynamic Data consumption.

Last but not least important, IIS 7.0 will present a new deployment strategy for applications residing both in single or over web farms that will allow version, deployment and roll back of features both from the command prompt or thru the management shell; all of this as part of the release of Windows Server 2008.

A lot of traction has gone into twitter during the last half an hour and I guess this are great news that we all welcome. Let's keep our eyes open to the future and how it all behaves.

Microsoft, and specifically the Visual Studio team has been doing a great job during this decade, sometimes even pushing the boundaries of the technology itself towards the developer community and the digital world itself. Keep up the good work!

For more info I encourage you go check ScottGu's blog post here.

Cheers!

G.

---

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,.NET,Microsoft Expression,RIA,RIE,Microsoft,Visual Studio,Orcas,WPF,ASP.NET,XAML,IIS,Windows Server 2008

Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 RTM is Out

I've been out during the last couple of months working heads down on the second phase of a great Silverlight video player that will be released early next year... but in the mean time I need to keep up with the news.

Last night the Visual Studio Team released its newly refreshed Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha matching the Visual Studio 2008 RTM bits, this way those of you who were waiting for it in order to upgrade to the latest version of the IDE, have no excuse as to move on.

Features match those of the previous version and were only upgraded to work with the final bits of Visual Studio. More features are yet to come as part of the next preview of the Silverlight 1.1 runtime, later this year.

So now, go ahead get the RTM bits installed and get the tools from here.

Enjoy!

---

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,.NET,Microsoft Expression,RIA,RIE,Microsoft,Visual Studio,Orcas,WPF

MAX Day 1

So I am seating right now at the Adobe MAX keynote, where Kevin Lynch has taken the stage and is currently showing the intranetworks application, a social gathering for the geeks and freaks here at MAX.

As the day passes by I will be blogging experiences of the conference, great things has happen already so I will recapping those as I get time to do it, in the mind time follow me @ twitter where I will be blogging live from the event!

Cheers!

Silverlight Template for New Projects

I am at the SilverlighDevCampChicago right now where I will be talking a little bit later about a Model View Controller hack for Silverlight 1.0.

As planned for this presentation I will be using this template of project, which Jon and I came out with during our initial testing on Silverlight.

For those who are here in the room with me please go ahead and download the Template from here.

Update: the files from the second part of the conversation with the video player component implementation, here.

---

Technorati Tags: SilverlightDevCampChicago , Silverlight , Templates , RIA , RIE , How-to , Microsoft , Visual Studio 2008 , Expression Blend

I'll be presenting at the SilverlightDevCampChicago this weekend

Just as I reported thru twitter a couple of weeks ago, I will be presenting at the SilverlightDevCampChicago this coming Saturday the 29th, just before I join the extreme 4 day rally at Adobe MAX 2007.

I will be talking about using the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern with Silverlight 1.0 as to implement reusable components following an object oriented approach similar to the one we have all come to love or hate in managed code.

If you happen to be in town over weekend do not think twice and join us. To get a feel of how it is Adam Kinney got this video recorded for Channel 9 from the later event @ San Francisco, check it out here.

More information about the event can be found here, as well as following the event's tweet here, I will try to be twittering live from the event as things roles up.

Cheers and hope to see you all there!

---

Technorati Tags: SilverlightDevCampChicago , Silverlight , Microsoft , .NET , JavaScript , Channel 9