Aggiorno, the web developer add-in for Visual Studio, just hit Release Candidate 0 this week and packed with bug fixes we are also making available 3 new aggiornings.
In this first incarnation, Aggiorno lives as a Visual Studio 2005/2008 add-in, assisting Web developers in accomplishing complex tasks in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.
The following video shows the new aggiornings in action, making required fields for the script and textarea elements a snap to fix.
Following a similar experience as the Add alternate text to images, this 3 new aggiornings will guide you to add the missing script type and column and rows properties to your textarea elements which are required per compliance with the XHTML standard.
Last week I told you guys about the changes that have undergone in my professional life as in the last months, and one big part of the change was joining the Artinsoft Research family and the chance to work with the Aggiorno team for a start.
In its first incarnation Aggiorno lives as a Visual Studio 2005/2008 add-in that assists Web developers in accomplishing complex tasks in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.
As you can see in the following video, we put, famous blogger, Nikhilk Kothari's Web site into a test and show you how by just executing a set of aggiornings (this is how we call our smart refactorings) we were able to bring the Web site to almost full compliance and improved its accessibility.
Since developers can leverage their knowledge of the Visual Studio user experience, Aggiorno’s learning curve is gentle providing results right out of the box.
Getting your Web ready for the People and the Engines... all of them
Standards compliance and accessibility seats at the core values of what the team is doing and they want to help make it a reality to all web developers out in the wild.
But now that you are into making things the right way, Aggiorno can also automate the following tasks for you
Fix Deprecated Elements For XHTML Compliance
Replace CENTER Tag By Inline CSS
Replace FONT Tag By Inline CSS
Update Deprecated Attributes
Update Other Deprecated Tags
Fix Syntax Errors For XHTML Compliance
Fixed Malformed Entities
Replace Characters With Entities
Make Tags Lowercase
Make Attributes Values Quoted
Use Default Attribute Values
Fix Tag Structure For XHTML Compliance
Just like that, right click on your pages, click Aggiorno, choose the aggiorning you want to run and let Aggiorno do it's magic and your Web site is nearer to its nirvana of accessibility and compliance.
Here is a teaser on how it works.
Oh and one more thing... Aggiorno works on XHTML, ASP.NET and even PHP source code, so go call it for a wide of options.
Under the covers
Aggiorno was born as an initiative to provide means of productivity and reliability to the masses in a straight and user friendly way. It's tag line is "Improving the Web one tag at the time" and the team perform to make it a reality to the thousand of web developers out there.
Aggiorno is powered by the same technology that Artinsoft has used throughout its more than 10 years of experience transforming businesses code source from different platforms like Java, PHP and Classic ASP into the .NET Framework in both simple and quite complex scenarios.
The Sky is the limit
The cool thing about Aggiorno is that because of they way it is architect, it provides the team with the necessary flexibility to integrate Aggiorno's core engine with different platforms, having a straight separation between the engine and its presentation layer, allowing the team with the chance to come up with different form factors, therefore providing with its power to a wide variety of audiences.
Now what?
So now that you are so out of your mind with what Aggiorno can do for you, here is where you can go and learn more about it and let's us know what do you think about.
Today Microsoft Live Labs announcedMicrosoft 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.
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.
As of 20min ago Silverlight 1.0 is out on the wild for everybody to download and start experience next generation of Rich Internet Applications.
You can download it from here or if you have the RC installed it will update the next time you visit a Silverlight enabled site, check out the new WWE player, it's awesome.
Based on a twitter post from Microsoft's Scott Barnes, and the official press release from Microsoft, Silverlight 1.0 is also extending its support to Linux, this is wild!
I also want to extend my congratulations to all Silverlight team and of course Miguel de Icaza and his team, this all because of you guys!
Resources here:
Silverlight 1.0 download, here Microsoft Press Release about Linux support, here WWE Video Experience, here
Yesterday a new release of bits was released from the Acropolis team under the August CTP label.
This time with a refreshed to support Visual Studio Beta 2 and with a couple of new features in its box it keeps building as the next generation baseline for Smart Clients.
The team has also posted new samples for this new release that you can download from here. Some resources can be found at:
Ever since I bought my mac, I've been in the quest for a good alternative to Microsoft Project, specially if it will manage MS Project files.
So far I haven't found one application that fit my needs - although there's been one that seemed interesting: OmniPlan from the Omni Group, same makers of the so famous OmniGraffle... although it also comes with a shortage of features and a $149 price tag, which for the moment I can't afford myself for something I already have for Windows.
Anyhow, on Twitter today I found a great new tool called OpenProj from Projity that might have done my day.
OpenProj is an open source alternative to Microsoft Project, sporting a similar User Interface and features, which supports Windows, Mac and Linux, thanks to its implementation in Java.
I installed it from the web alas click once, using the Java Webstart installer, and within a few seconds I had it setup in my Windows Vista laptop as in my MacBook as well.
Its performance is pretty good, and in top of it, it allows to open and export Microsoft Project files (*.mpp and *.mpx) as well as Project XML-formatted docs.
I will be giving it a try this days, but from an early test run I think I will be using it quite a lot. In the mean time here are some resources:
Gosh! It's been a few days I don't come around this bits and it's due to a lot of stuff going in my head, laptops and life... which can be translated into great stuff!
Getting back to my virtual life after a long weekend of vacations by the beach with my friends, I had the chance last Tuesday to install the new version of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 on my Vista laptop and XP desktop.
Both installations went fairly painless after expending a good 5 minutes around the web reading other people's experiences.
It took me about an hour to get Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 out of my system, although I would like to point out a couple of tricky things:
If you installed .NET Framework 3.5, before installing VS.NET Beta 1; by the end of the uninstalling the applet will ask you for those installers, so as a workaround here just cancel that, and it will end the installation without the .NET Fx 3.5. After this happens just uninstall the .NET Framework from Add/Remove Programs normally and presto.
Now, before you call it for the day and go in and install the new bits you will have to uninstall the Web Authoring Components, this is a small library with an icon of Office in the Add/Remove Programs, go and remove it.
Ok now this is it, this is what it took me to have successfully uninstalled the beta bits.
Now to the new ones, it took me about another hour to do this: here is a workaround I found to the issue of not being able to install from a remote place.
The only reason Visual Studio .NET won't install from a remote location is because .NET Framework 3.5 won't do it, so go ahead and install the Beta 2 bits separately (this is a download of about 118MB) and after this is done, kick the install bits of Visual Studio with out having to copy the 3.5GB to your local machine.
Once you get this done, you are almost done with the install - what? yet there is more to do?! : yes there are two more things:
Go to this post from ScottGu and download and run a small batch script that will fix a bug with the Binding Policy of System.Web.Extensions.dll and ASP.NET 2.0.
And, optionally, in case you had a previous version of Orcas running on your system (the one you just uninstalled before) you will have to run devenv /resetsettings from the command prompt located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ this will reset the settings so that it won't mess with the previous settings and upgrade to the new ones.
Ok, Done! After all this manual work you and I have a working copy of Visual Studio .NET 2008 Beta 2 on your machine.
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...
Just got back from the beach and I found in my mailbox an email from Adobe Direct telling me the big news that the final bits of ColdFusion 8 had just been shipped!
Just today Microsoft made available its latest updates to its family of Platform Development with the refresh to the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 they are getting the Beta 2 label.
As part of this update Microsoft has also grant its Go-Live license to such products, allowing people to do production development and releases based on this bits, which will be a great step further to see production ready web sites using Silverlight and LINQ technologies.
Note: Remember that the final launch for this products is expected for February 2008. So we are still some good 7 months away from that state.
Based on this new evolution on Microsoft Development Technologies the company is renewing its statements associated to the mission they see this products playing in our dev shops:
Visual Studio 2008 enables developers and development teams to rapidly create connected, secure and compelling applications on the latest platforms, including Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Office System and the Web.
As new community previews will raise along the year, we will see improved performance and better work flow with the ecology of tools like Expression Blend for creating compelling experiences that will allow the user to get immerse in usable worlds excelling its productivity... plus encouraging for the Software + Services worlds that Ballmer and Gates have been taking about during the last couple of weeks.
Update:ScottGu has a great post here, including some quick overview of this release and some post-installation notes as to make sure everything will work as expected.
Update2:Channel9 has a great video here with an interview with Soma and ScottGu talking about what's new and what is there to expect with this new release.
Update3: Here are my experiences getting this bits installed just as well as couple of tricks to get Beta 1 uninstalled.
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 ScottGucheering 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.
As the Silverlight team gets ready to the lunch of Silverlight 1.0 RC in a couple of weeks, Tim Sneath et team want to make sure that before it hits the road, and the masses, you will be prepared and will make the changes to your application so that it won't break once its out... why is that?
Well, as Microsoft's Joe Stegman points out in this post, there are a few changes in the Silverlight 1.0 RC API that might make your application break, although rest assure that moving forward this API is locked so you won't have to go thru this process again.
Even though there is no preview of the RC release as for you to go and test your applications as of now, this guys have put together a small zip file with some reference material and resources, based on Tim Sneath's post, this package includes:
A new silverlight.js file that detects both the beta and the RC version;
A breaking changes document that highlights differences between the beta and RC;
An updated Visual Studio template that demonstrates the correct way to embed the new control;
A EULA that governs legal usage of the above items.
Which pretty much will guide your way between the RC bits hits their way out the oven.
Today and as part of the Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference @ Denver, Microsoft unveiled the official dates for the joined lunch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.
From the press release:
In anticipation for the most significant Microsoft enterprise event in the next year, Turner announced that Windows Server® 2008, Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 will launch together at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008, kicking off hundreds of launch events around the world.
From this, Microsoft expects to grow its revenue base out of Windows Vista during the 2008 fiscal year, given the slow adoption from the corporate and public sector who still keeps ordering Windows XP computers.
So here you go guys... let's keep waiting and playing along with CTP's and Beta bits, anyone for a Beta 2 or even 3 of all of theses products? Or should we follow AS3/Flex3/AIR in the mean time?
As I am getting my home win-dev-machine back on track after a month or so of been asleep at a friend's house, I found out today that a refresh to the SDK that shipped with Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 has been out for a bit more than a month and there was not that much said about it in blogs; I even went back to ScottGu's blog to see if I missed the news anywhere but somehow it wasn't that important of a preview given the lack of coverage.
As part of this new SDK release, an update to the .Net Framework 3.5 has been put out there as well as a refresh for the for ADO.NET Entity Framework, both sporting the June CTP postfix, even though their release mark is on July 2nd.
I'm getting the 3 of them installed right now; what has changed or improved in each of the installed base are as follow:
Orcas SDK June CTP:
The Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” SDK June 2007 CTP targets Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" Beta 1. The Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” SDK June 2007 CTP is intended to let customers work with “Orcas” Beta 1 extensibility features.
This CTP adds and updates the following features:
Run As Normal User (RANU) - when the Visual Studio SDK is already installed on a computer, a user with non-administrator permissions now can create a package by using the wizard, and then press F5 to open the new package in the experimental hive.
Changes to DSL Tools include new path editing. In DSL Tools, paths are used in a DSL definition to specify diagram element maps and explorer behavior. This CTP adds richer path editing to the DSL Designer, in the form of a drop-down tree control. You can now either type the path syntax, or you can display a tree view of all the valid paths from the current starting point.
Release month, for example 2007.04, is removed from the SDK folder structure and “Microsoft” was added to the VS SDK shortcut and root folder name.
.Net Framework 3.5 June CTP:
According to the release notes, the June CTP features several enhancements including:
Increased integration of Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
Improved ASP.NET AJAX support
New web protocol support for creating Windows Communication Foundation services (AJAX, JSON, REST, POX, RSS, ATOM, and other web service standards)
Full tooling support for the Windows Communication Foundation and the Windows Presentation Foundation
New base class library classes
ASP.NET Entity Framework June CTP:
This CTP contains updates to the ADO.NET Entity Framework since the Visual Studio Codename "Orcas" Beta 1 release, including changes in Object Services, Query, Entity Client, and the Entity Data Model Wizard in Visual Studio. Some of the new features include IPOCO, detaching from long-running ObjectContext instances, multiple entity sets per type, support for referential integrity constraints, span support, transactions, serialization, no more default constructors in code-generated classes, improvements to stored procedure support, access to the underlying store connection, directory macros in the entity connection string to support hosted scenarios, native SQL read-only views, UNICODE support in Entity SQL, query plan caching, and canonical functions in Entity SQL.
In case you guys haven't heard, several geeks are on the run as of now driving on a Rock Star bus touring the states while presenting the all new AIR development platform and helping spread the word out on Adobe's revamp development goodies.
Now if you happen to be like me and find yourself thousands of miles away from any of this cities or the country itself, you can always turn your sight and time to follow up the guys using the many ways our fellow social networks have created... this guys even took it further and came out with an API for the bus - how geek is that?! I'm amazed - so you can follow up the bus using a Yahoo! Maps mashup, a live video feed and for those with not that great of bandwidth using a photo feed... any way go ahead and let the AIR flow!
Even though this site ain't new (it has been live for a couple of weeks now), I somehow forgot to blog about it here... so today is the day!
If you follow this link, you will find my first real world Silverlight-enabled site. It was brought together as a branded showroom and career page for Schematic as it was presented as Platinum Sponsor for the Microsoft's Expert Zone event for Latin America.
This site was made in about 2 days between me and a fellow designer / animator, using Expression Blend and Visual Studio... the hows will come in a separate post Monday, so I will update here once is up.
Just wanted to let you guys know about it... cheers!
Just a few minutes ago I came a cross a Digg post referring to some blogger - link is in Spanish - who claimed have gained access to screen shots of the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 Alpha version; so I went in for a sneak peak... and this is what I found:
Now, even though these are fakes shots they do bring some interesting ideas to the User Experience arena that, if looked from a partial view can take us back to the drawing surface and give us something to play with.
First of the things that comes to my mind when I these shots, is how cool would it be to have a context-based browsing experience; just as Office 2007 have provide us with access to several of their buried gems, a context-based browsing interaction can serve as framework for free applications and services, that are already available in the wild.
Imagine that you go to YouTube or any of the many video sites out there and have the browser intuitively allowed me to add the video to my iPod, iPhone or Zune; or why not to my iTunes, Winamp or Windows Media Player Library; be able to subscribe the RSS of a any interesting website to my preferred RSS Reader, or Podcast client, or just flag for a later read / listened (this one comes from one my work mates, Aaron, who always struggles to have a store point for Have-to-read-later-things)... this kind of approach ain't something that people will overlook at... we have Real already betting of this ground... plus hundreds of services out there serving the world.
I know currently there are several alternatives that can live up to this kind of requests, Grease Monkey is one of them for Firefox, Netscape and AOL have tried themselves too, but nobody has done one truly Rich Internet Application that is as intuitive as the iPod or Office 2007, and that allows for everyone to excel the productivity of the Web in their desktop in terms of experience.
Open the infrastructure, provide some usability guidelines and provide a gallery where anyone will be able place their service or widget and let the world built the next greatest contextual browser!
Anyone interested on getting in this wagon with me?
Update: as a replay to this post and some of the comments I've seen on the net I couldn't resist and write something that could state my feelings, so after this one read up here.
Today the Acropolis team @ Microsoft released a new build for Acropolis. This new and improved version of this promising smart client framework is available for download here.
Based on a post on the Acropolis Team blog, included in this build there are
Transitions animations improvements
Better design time support
Better custom theming support, and
Various bug fixes driven from community feedback.
For those of you who are new to Acropolis:
Acropolis is a set of components and tools intended to make it much easier to build modular, business focused clients applications on the .NET Framework.
Acropolis lets you divide your application into various functional pieces - components - that each encapsulates some specific pattern, strategy or piece of business or presentation logic. Acropolis then provides the ‘glue' to let you easily recombine these components to make a fully functional application.
This modular approach improves the chances that if you write a component that encapsulates some specific piece of functionality, you'll be able to re-use it in more than one application. Then, you can build your next application more quickly, by re-using your existing components, leaving you to focus on your new application's specific requirements.
The modular approach also improves the chances that if (or rather when!) you have to change your application, due to new requirements, additional functionality, new business process, new business opportunities, etc, you'll be able to do that more easily by adding or replacing components.
For more information related to this release follow this link.
A week after the service went public I got an invite for the so already famous Pownce social network. I've 3 invites to give away to readers of this Blog and 3 more for the readers of Samiq Bits en Español... so if you guys want one just drop a comment with your email I'll be glad to add you as a friend in my network.
Pownce comes to fill the blank space left by the already crowed social network services and allows its users to communicate thru a cross platform Rich Internet Application (implemented using Adobe AIR, formerly known as Apollo) that empowers people to post messages, links, events and files to their friends or in a privately manner to just a few... this is just like what everybody would have loved Twitter to be... at least this is how I feel about it.
On their own words
Pownce is a great way to send stuff to people you know. Add friends, then send them big files, invite them to upcoming events, share great links, and whip off a note to anyone, everyone, or just a few people.
