What u should have to do WPF

As I've been blogging before I am working with WPF for a personal project. This has nothing to do with my 8-5 job, but is a nice thing to be doing in my spare time; anyway, the reason of this post is that by looking around I found this entry by Tim Sneath, who is part of the team @ Microsoft that takes care of making people to know Vista as a development platform.

This post regards to the essential stuff you might need if working on WPF stuff; the post is called Building a Perfect WPF Developer Workstation so you might get the idea...

Go ahead and play on it :) Later...

ASP.NET 2.0 app_offline.htm

Found this morning in my daily RSS reading a post in the ASP.NET Daily Articles that shows how to bring an application down for maintenance or upgrade without even getting to open IIS and stop the service.

It seems that ASP.NET supports a feature for routing requests to a special singleton file (called app_offline.htm), making the rest of the application unavailable for serving those requests. Allowing webmasters to work behind the scenes on the maintenance of the site or application (just make sure u set enabled=true in the httpRuntime tag)

I know that for most of us this feature will come handy during those days of build release and critical fixes.

For more information here is a list of related posts:

• Scott Guthrie on App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature
• John Peterson on Taking an ASP.NET 2.0 Application Offline
• msdn on Deploying an ASP.NET Web Application Using XCOPY

Fireworks 9 Beta

Just this morning got an email from the Adobe Team in charge of Fireworks 9; it seems I got accepted in the Beta User team to start trying out the new peace of software this guys are working on.

I've been using Fireworks since the MX version for prototyping and web mockups and got to say it's a really cool tool, and has allowed me to do really great things in the web arena.

Lately I've been using it to do some prototyping and wireframes for a WPF application I'm currently working on and has fit the bill just ok. There are things that need improvement, that is for sure, but as it's getting better and better is shaping itself as the prototyping tool for anything visual u need.

Due to the DNA I won't be able to post screenshots nor talk about its functionality thought I will try to crawl the web for resources associated to it and make them available as they show up.

For now there is a nice article published by the Edge magazine last month that talks about some new features.

The guys over Brand Spanking New have put a good post over some of the new and existing features and the way they work in the new version and how they have evolved from previous versions, go check it.

In the mean time for those new to Adobe Fireworks go check the Development Center @ Adobe.