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.

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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.

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

Silverlight SEO Test

Jonathan Ramirez, a colleague of mine @ Schematic and whit whom I have done most of the Silverlight work lately, is conducting a test on Silverlight SEO. 

For such experiment he has published a really simple page hosting only a Silverlight control in it, part of the test is to get Google to index the word SilverlightSEO out of it for which there are no current results in it.

The page has not metadata nor text other than the control itself and the xaml file containing it - I am sure this post will get indexed but we want to get this post as an entry point to the test itself.

Now let's wait and see how long does it takes to get indexed if so happens...

We will keep you guys posted!

Cheers!

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Technorati Tags: Silverlight, Microsoft, SEO, Indexing

IronRuby is in the wild as a pre-alpha with its own source code freely available

It's been some busy and interesting days for me lately as I am on board learning a new wave of tools, languages and architectures.

One of this newly -for me at least- dynamic architectures surrounds is Python; and as I'm opening my mind to the "think dynamic" I found ScottGu cheering up for a different, yet quite impressive, dynamic language making it to the .NET family: IronRuby.

Just as there is a current heavy-duty wave of applications being surfaced in LAMP-like environments, powered by Python, Ruby and tens of RAD Frameworks being built in top of them, Microsoft has not stop playing and hence has brought its own flavors of dynamic seeds with one subtle difference, this seeds are supported by the strong power of the .NET CLR and its API.

As ScottGu states on his post

Today's IronRuby drop is still a very early version, and several language features and most libraries aren't implemented yet (that is why we are calling it a "pre-alpha" release). It does, though, have much of the core language support implemented, and can also now use standard .NET types and APIs.

...

The end result will be a compatible, fast, and flexible Ruby implementation on top of .NET that anyone can use for free.

Part of the samples being made available on the web with this release is a WPF hello world application written in IronRuby showing the strength of what would be enabled once it gets feature complete.

If you want to start playing along with this set of bits John Lam has a post showing you how to download and build your this preliminary release.

Also, if you are interested in what the world of ASP.NET dynamics looks like check out this video on ASP.NET Futures (May 2007) showing IronPython in action with Dynamic Data Controls.

Enjoy guys!

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Technorati Tags: IronPython, IronRuby, ScottGu, ASP.NET, .NET3.0, .NET3.5, WPF, Microsoft, Visual Studio, Web2.0, WinFx, Ajax, Dynamic Languages, DLR, CLR

Apollo is a new AIR

Just as I reported back on Saturday, Adobe had some new releases under its sleeve and today it came out playing drums for what it is a big set of announcements in the Rich Media world, first one to get it was Adobe's Ryan Stewart here.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is the official name for what we have come to know as Apollo. A new beta release has been made public today along with integration plug-ins for both Adobe's Dreamweaver and the Aptana IDE, for those of you who want to start kicking the HTML on AIR approach.

Following along with this release another beta made its debut today, as providing greater support for AIR, Flex3 is becoming the first iteration release since Flex was made Open Source earlier this year.

To end this morning of great news a refresh was announced for the Flash 9 Runtime providing hardware acceleration to video playing when in full screen, boosting the capabilities of the client... as to date this is the first time Adobe adds any kind of support for Hardware acceleration to one of its Flash based product... so great things are up to expect out this new approach.

Following links will provide you with the meat of this great morning:

• Adobe AIR SDK and Runtime
• Adobe Flex3 Builder Beta
• Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver
• Developing AIR with Flex3 and Flash

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit just got upgraded

ScottGu posted this morning about the new release the team over the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit put together.

This release comes with the release number 10606, and as with previous released versions it is available both in its binary format as well as its source code, the later which you can extend and modify accordingly to your needs.

For this release over 125 bugs were fixed plus animation support for some extenders, event support across the Toolkit, a Script combiner for reducing Toolkit scripts' download time, Dynamic context support for controls using Web Services, fixes to make ASP.NET Validators work with Toolkit extenders and Accessibility improvements.

On the ASP.NET website there are over 39 free videos with "How-to" and Tutorials showing you how to leverage Ajax technology on your web applications and more.

Enjoy!

How-to: Virtual Earth & Atlas

During the last weeks I've got meself into working in a mashup application for a friend of mine, essentially is a Real State website that will enable my friends to post the properties they have up for sell and rent, as well as to be the first point of contact for the company.

Part of this work I've done is to choose a mapping techonology to be used throught the application, as of now I've gone thru Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps and Microsoft's Virtual Earth. I currently live in Costa Rica and as u might suppose we don't have that much of support as the guys @ the US, UK and other big cities around the world in terms of address match and mapping options, other than satellite imaginary; which in terms of usability I need a service that provides the best support in terms of me contry and those where my friends offer their services, which right now are Nicaragua, Panamá and Chile.

I pretty much have tried all three though in terms of setting up the mash up there is one that offers better support for techonologies like ASP.NET and that is, of course, Virtual Earth. Eventhough in terms of API all three expose pretty much the same functionality I found this screencast posted by the guys @ Federal Dev Blog, where they show in 20min how to come out with a really complete and clean Virtual Earth mashup for a website using the AtlasVE control and a couple of methods exposed thru webservices.

If u find urself in a similar situation as I am, where u need to come up with a quite fast and easy to mantain mapping mash up, go ahead and take a look at this boundle work put togheter by this guys.

Will be nice, though, to have the Atlas or Toolkit's teams to come up with a similar control both for Yahoo! and Google maps proposals, I know it won't be that hard once they have finish up the VE one.

Update: For those guys out there who thinks VE is not their right choise the same guys that put togheter the screencast on VE and Atlas, have a Part I to the same proposal using 100% Ajax techniques using jscript and plain html, which in terms of porting to any other API is quite easy.

Update: Just crowling the internet for something more I found this step by step tutorial by Jonathan Hawks, out from msdn blogs, for those who want just to copy paste whatever is in the videos.