PDC '08: It's all about the Cloud

Wow, the first day went on with a lot of new stuff announced in the cloud space and the cool parts are still to come.

Yesterday Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure, a Serviced Based Operating Environment that is set to drive Microsoft Cloud strategy on and which is set to define the bar high for a lot of services that are already on increase demand.

A key changing strategy in Microsoft’s horizon

From distributed storage with SQL Data Services, access to Live Services, SharePoint and CRM to your own set of .NET Services; this platform was build to grow to internet sizes, following Microsoft’s previous efforts in the personal and enterprise computing.

Build to scale and expand, Microsoft’s offering differentiate from any of its competitors by providing a set of familiar tools that build on the maturity of C# and Visual Studio together, enabling the wide range of Windows and Web developers out there to take advantage of Cloud services after a small curve of learning the basics.

A foundation to extend

I am looking forward to today’s announcements. Even though Azure is a hint at what is coming in the years ahead, today Microsoft will announced their strategy into Mesh, the more personal approach to cloud services and the one who, avec Live Services, should help drive the more consumer-oriented adoption of these new models.

Windows 7 looks like it’s taking shape quite fine and for the first time in this decade it seem Microsoft is getting its act together and it time will tell if they will be able execute as we hope.

These are interesting times and a new revolutions is building up... will Microsoft be able to take the lead?

Let's wait.

Welcome PDC 2008

Today is the day where all the geeks in the world turn their looks to Microsoft for a sneak peak at the future of all things Microsoft and the coolest part of all? I am here to be part of it!

Got to tell you, the pre-con experience couldn’t been better. Activity in the Cafe lounges was exiting and relax at the same time. Having access to great minds a la carte and been part of great talks are pretty much priceless and I expect a lot of those to go on during this week.

Party with Palermo was one of the events I got to attend last night, and even though I was expecting a bit more, it was a good source to network and see friends I haven’t seen in a while. I hope this will be the rule for the PDC evenings this week and starting today I am in full motion!

Now, let’s the games begin and kudos to all the teams that have made it happen thus far. I’ve had the chance to glimpse at some of the stuff been shown this week and I am eager to be able to talk about them in the public.

Cheers!

CS4 is out… now let them come in!

Indeed it’s has been a great week for RIAs and it seems like it goes non-stop. This time coming from the guys across the lake: Adobe.

Creative Suite 4, which just got announced a few weeks ago, was released today and has started shipping all across the world.

From all the new stuff coming, I am really exited about the new features the guys from Flash put together in their latest release. For the first time in a long time myself, as a creative developer, am eager to get my hands on these bits.

Trials are not yet available but you can sign up to get notified once they do. Trials are up for download now and as the bits downloads, I would recommend to head over to Lee Brimelow’s TheFlashBlog for a good run on tutorials and overviews of what’s in box for Adobe’s Interactive Tool.

Lot’s of great news this week and I don’t see them stop anytime soon, Microsoft PDC is just around the corner and Adobes own MAX follows right thru…. cool times for been a geek.

Happy Learning!

P.S. Don’t you think it’s about time to get your hands into Aggiorno and save some precious time out all the web coding you do? I know you could use that time on learning some of these cool stuff :-)

Update: Mike Chambers just published a list of articles and tutorials you go check to get started in this new release.

Update: Trial bits are up for download, go get them here

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Technorati Tags: CS4,Adobe,Flash,RIA,RIE

Silverlight 2 final bits are out… come get them!

Just as I blogged earlier, Microsoft went public today with the final bits for their Rich Internet Platform, Silverlight 2.0, and well here the bits are now out for you to go grab them.

• Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK
• Deep Zoom Composer
• Expression Blend 2 SP1
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Silverlight 2.0 Plug-in 

Now back to keep up updating a little app I’ve been working on lately… hopefully will be released to beta later in the week.

Cheers!

P.S. Thanks to Brian Henderson for the heads up in twitter.

Update: Even though the Silverlight Tools for VS reads RC1, it seems like it’s just because of a typo, so go on and rock on!

Update: Now that the news are out the Gu and Tim Heuer have a couple of amazing posts describing the news.

Silverlight 2 announced with plans for development support on Mac and Linux

It was a year ago when I took the stage at the Silverlight  DevCamp in Chicago with my white MacBook and a beer in hand. I was set to talk about building MVC driven applications in Silverlight 1.0.

At the time I was working on a project for WWE and even though the project was secret, I got to show some of the tech we build behind the scenes for such project: A MVC approach to manage data visualization and an small framework to orchestrate its functionality.

My History with OS4SL = Aptana + FireBug + Blend

I started my career on Silverlight using Visual Studio and the Expression Studio, although in the middle of a development sprint a bug in the dev tools made me go shop for an alternative other than rebuild my dev machine… time was a constrain. I found Aptana and stick with it for the rest of my Silverlight 1.0 experience, Firebug did what it did for debugging of JS and Blend, well… let’s be honest, there is nothing like Blend for XAML authoring.

People was shocked to see me use open source technologies to build on Silverlight. Heck, I even got Larry Clarkin and Chris Bernard to twit about it (here and here). Things were good though.

Silverlight Dev Tools for Visual Studio have gone a long road since then and they are in a State of the Art sort of thing. Since those days Silverlight has embraced full support for the CLR and a mature architecture aroused from all those initial CTPs and long run Betas.

Delivering on a Promise for Better RIAs using .NET

Today Microsoft delivered on the Rich Internet Platform promise and made public its official release of Silverlight 2.0 along with a set of Open Source initiatives that not only will allow us access to a big set of controls source but also the ability to build Silverlight apps outside Visual Studio and even outside of the Windows Platform… now things are getting interesting in the RIA world.

Eclipse4SL

As part of this big announcement day, Microsoft made public its partnership with Soyatec, a French company that will take Eclipse up to support development of Silverlight applications, including C# editing support, a XAML WYSIWYG editor and debugging tools. 

Such an effort goes by the name of Eclipse4SL and it’s first preview is available now for Windows. With support for other platforms coming along in the future.

Silverlight Control Pack

And finally to put the cherry in the pie, Microsoft will also be releasing a bunch of complex controls under the Silverlight Control Pack umbrella, also available is their source code which you can modify, rebuild and reuse.

The reason behind this is to not only provide better support for the already set of controls shipping with the runtime, but to serve as an example for the community on how controls should be build, setting a standard that both people and companies could take as reference point when building their own.

Exciting Times

Exciting times no less for the RIA world this next 5 weeks will be, with PDC just around the corner and with Adobe MAX following just right after with all the goodies from Flex and Flash 10, the ecosystem for better and greater experiences on the Web is nothing but starting… and I am thrill to be part of it!

So go ahead and get up to speed with the learning curve as there is be a lot to be digested in the weeks ahead.

Now ,that’s just another reason to give Aggiorno a try and get all those time consuming tasks we all go thru while web developing, automatically fixed. That way you can put that time to better use.

Cheers!

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Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Open Source,Flash,Flex,Microsoft,Visual Studio,Eclipse,Aptana,Firebug,Blend

A Better Place

I know I've been absent for the last couple of weeks heads down working on the release of Aggiorno 1.2... but as I get back my grip into blog again I wanted to share this.

Today, I ran across this site called Better Place, focused on making reality a plan on renewable energy sources for the world itself, with the mission of decoupling ourselves from oil and into a better world.

Now, here is what I have to say!

Do you have something else to say? then come join me!

Cheers!