Showing posts with label C#. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C#. Show all posts

Monday, June 23, 2008

Life around the RIA space and beyond

I know I've been out of public word for a bit of time lately - at least in the most extent use of the word (me blog) and have moved my frequency into the tiny world of 140 characters with my twitter voice as Samiq.

There are, though, a lot of great voices out there who have kept us informed and misinformed about what's been going on in the RIA world and surroundings in the time being - hence the necessity no to write and just go express my point of view in the comment spaces or around beers, whenever possible and whatever comes first.

Yet as direct results of these conversations, some people has asked me to come back to my blog and revive it a little bit - or revive it in it's full - bring that same voice I have had whenever there are beers, geeks and some good topic to convey, and make it public.

So here I'm bringing my word to the broad end of the world of bits with my Bits and adding a little flavor to the semantics of web - yes I know, a little cheesy but I have grown my opinion about it... so let's make it worth.

Summarizing a little bit and to create context to what's to come here is a couple of things that have happened in the past that will impact the way I behave in the future:

September 7th, 2007

Silverlight 1.0 gets released to web and with it a couple of applications I worked on made it to the official press release.

September 29th, 2007

Participate of Silverlight DevCamp Chicago with a session about Creating MVC-driven Applications using the Silverlight 1.0 bits.

October 1st-3rd, 2007

Max 07 happened and here I meet a lot of really cool guys from the Adobe community, although what made the trip worth was getting to know the Microsoft's UX Evangelists, lead by Chris Bernard.
November 2007 - January 2008 I work with a great team, on probably one of the most complex Silverlight 1.0 applications up today - yet it has not seen the ray of public light as of this writing.

February 18-20th, 2008

Along with my peers from LA, NY, Atlanta and Costa Rica, participate on a private Silverlight 1.0 & 2.0 training prepared by ourselves. Now call it knowledge sharing!

March 5-7th, 2008

Mix 08 happened and here I meet a lot of really cool people and had great conversations around the world of RIE - some of them I recorded in the form of video, yet to be published as a documentary. Got to see Ka, amazing show! Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 is released to web.

April 11th, 2008 I get a call
April 14th, 2008 I attend a meeting and get introduced to a cool project
April 15th, 2008 I go to dinner with probably 1 of the most brilliant minds in Costa Rica
April 18th, 2008 I quit Schematic as Software Architect and join Artinsoft as Technology Evangelist to its Research Division.
May 9th, 2008 I finish my work at Schematic, and with it I finish my pass with one of the greatest interactive agencies around the world.
May 19th, 2008 I start part time with Artinsoft and focus on the marketing strategy for Aggiorno Beta 2 with the team.
May 30th, 2008 Go on vacations
June 3rd, 2008 Aggiorno goes into Beta 2. New interim web site goes live.
June 9th, 2008 I start full time with Artinsoft and it's Aggiorno team.
June 12th, 2008 I fly to Seattle to join BarCamp Seattle and attend meetings in Redmond.
June 13th, 2008 Attend Thingamajiggr with Carlos, head of Artinsoft Research.
June 14th, 2008 Participate of BarCamp Seattle with two sessions: one on The Reality of SEO and Web Accesibility along with Chris Wilson from the IE8 team and Jermiah Andrick from the Live Search team; and the second one on a RIA Panel with Scott Barnes from the Silverlight team and Kurt Brockett, from Identity Mine.
June 16-20th, 2008 Tour Redmond Campus from building to building showing Aggiorno to different teams and getting lots of feedback and support.
June 18th, 2008 Visited Scott on his office and end up co-writing the first preview of a MVC framework for Silverlight 2.0. - those kind of things that happen just because, so don't ask.
June 23th, 2008 I fly back to Costa Rica and miss the first Costa Rican twitter get-together.
June 22nd, 2008 I start writing this while exploring ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 stuff for a freelance gig.

Ok, so now that you know where I've been during this time (at least the portions that are public), it's time to keep the fingers warm and shoot and connect directly to me head to start getting some word out of my thoughts, and make them happen!

So here it is guys! I am back baby!!


Thursday, December 06, 2007

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.


Friday, August 03, 2007

Uninstalling Beta 1 and getting Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 in afterwards

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

So here is to us both!

Cheers and enjoy the new bits!


Thursday, July 26, 2007

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 & .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 are out and with Go-Live License from Microsoft

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.

So, now lets go get the bits here.

Enjoy!

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.


Tuesday, July 10, 2007

No Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 nor Windows Server 2008 this year

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?

Full press release here.


Creating an Outlook look-alike with WPF and C#

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on Microsoft Educational Resources available on the web, this post in intended to recompile educational resources associated to Microsoft technologies, so that it will help jump start on some of its new stuff.

As part of this post I pointed to this hands-on lab, that Tim Sneath had previously posted, demonstrating how to create an outlook look-alike application using WPF and C#.

Since then I've seen people coming to this site looking for it and somehow Google have not done a perfect job indexing it, that's why I am giving it its own post now, so it will facilitate people getting here.

Link to the hands-on lab is here and files needed are here.

Enjoy!


Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,