Flash content to be SEO on Google and Yahoo... Not Live Search

So the news just broke, Adobe will be providing Google and Yahoo with a special Flash player that is optimized to look over the content of your SWF's and crawl its content as if you were the one clicking buttons and navigating within.

What does this mean? well pretty much Adobe is empowering some search engines to see your flash/flex based applications in a similar way as they see your HTML markup, pretty cool isn't it?

In the up run of the news is that your Flash/Flex based RIA's contents will be discoverable by the engines, those same engines that you use daily - or almost all of them - providing with business value to them just right out of the box, as per Ryan's post, there will be no need for changes of what you already have.

On the low run, Google and Yahoo will get to dictate the way they will get to use this player, which means that from now on developers will have to understand and play nice with the rules this guys propose, hopefully following similar approaches... but hey maybe just as Aggiorno exists for XHTML and ASP.NET sites today, there will be similar tools to help you tune up your RIA's for SEO in the future.

As up to today people has been struggling with work-a-rounds to get their RIA's into the engines: hacks as SWFObject and SWFAddress have been in place for sometime helping minimize the pain of SEO in such cases, but then again, what about dynamic views?

Silverlight's ways of embedding itself in pages are very similar to the way SWFObject works, it will pretty much replace the contents of the div element specified in the load method, take in count this happens only if the engine executes, which in the case of an engine spider reading the page will get to consume what ever exists inside this tag, which can be a SEO friendly copy of whatever the users sees. Same applies to SWFObject. Other wise everything is as defined by the markup.

There is still no word out on how long it will take for the engines to start taking advantage of this partnership, yet this is are great news on the way RIA's will become more ubiquitous and set the basics for Silvelright similar technologies to start their engines on, if it is not that they are already on the run!

Now, not to take down the news a bit, but where is Live Search in the list of search engines set to take advantage of this special player?

Update: Adding some links where you can find more points of views

Serge Jespers
Ted Patrick
TechCrunch
InsideRIA

Update: Google talks about how the Flash indexing will work.

Update: here is a follow up to this post, SEO for RIA: the status a few days later.

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Technorati Tags: Flash,RIA,RIE,SEO,Silverlight

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!!

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Technorati Tags: Nexus,C#,Silverlight,Samiq,Ideas,ASP.NET,MVC,RIE,RIA,MAX,MIX,SilverlightDevCamp,BarCampSeattle,Schematic,Artinsoft,Aggiorno

Welcome to the Singularity

So it is public now, and hence I am allow to blog about it.

Singularity is here!

Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world, and you can be part of it.

This year, over 100 of the most influent minds on the web will be discussing and modeling what the future of the web will be like... of course after this year's MIX and MAX.

This conference is planned to take place in the cloud between October 24th and the 25th - so you won't have to go thru all the pains of booking flights, hotels, nor submitting expense reports, which makes it not only great, but greener.

The conference is being organized by multitasking Aral Balkan, which most of you people will know him for his work in the Flash Community, and his talking bunny.

The world as we know it is more interconnected now than ever before, twitter has become essential part of it and we even feel lonely when its service is down - well not everyone, but yes! there are people; and having a web conference on the web, and by the people from the web, will really set the roots for the kind of world we are all working to make reality.

Aral is still picking up on presenters, although there is already a list of really compelling people making in the elite. If you think you have what it gets to get people talking about the future or a service that can revolutionize the way we convey our life in the matrix, go ahead and mail them your idea - who knows you might end up being one of the stars on one of this year's best conference.

More info here.

Later.

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Technorati Tags: Conferences,MIX,MAX,Singularity,Web,Web2.0,Aral,Design,Development,RIA,RIE,Events

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 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 RTM is Out

I've been out during the last couple of months working heads down on the second phase of a great Silverlight video player that will be released early next year... but in the mean time I need to keep up with the news.

Last night the Visual Studio Team released its newly refreshed Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha matching the Visual Studio 2008 RTM bits, this way those of you who were waiting for it in order to upgrade to the latest version of the IDE, have no excuse as to move on.

Features match those of the previous version and were only upgraded to work with the final bits of Visual Studio. More features are yet to come as part of the next preview of the Silverlight 1.1 runtime, later this year.

So now, go ahead get the RTM bits installed and get the tools from here.

Enjoy!

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Technorati Tags: Silverlight,.NET,Microsoft Expression,RIA,RIE,Microsoft,Visual Studio,Orcas,WPF

Where have I been? Part II

Funny enough not that so many post ago I started out a blog named similarly... and yet it's been a while longer since I haven't got to write, at least for this blog; which to me had become my singular place to be online... with my rants and all.

Along this time, lots of interested stuff has happened around the world and in my world itself, and so I am taking some time here to introduce to you guys what's going on...

Twitter

First off, I want to start by saying that during this past weeks twitter has become kind of my confident and life tracker: Who needs time tracker when you have twitter on hand? - sometimes I whish I could do a mix of both, maybe I should...

Silverlight

Twitter also brought me the news of Silverlight 1.0 being released, this news came from somebody from within Microsoft who twittered it from Australia; but then, I also realized by this same character that one of the projects I've been secretly working on was published to an early buggy build just hours before we had planned to publish the final version - that for sure put some pressing in our shoulders to wrap up QA and get the latest version online before the rest of world would wake up...

Happy though, as a direct result to this, I can also report that one of our first "commercial" Silverlight teasers was published as probably one of the coolest strategic partnerships Microsoft got together with the media industry - got to say that Microsoft has done a terrific job as getting so many early adopters to put up to their technology.

Past, Present & Future

But then, what is a teaser without a big, real thing following their steps? Well, that's where I am sitting now with my team, we are all working on phase 2, which will become a really cool thing once out, so watch out for what is coming, in the world of media entertainment.

RIA & The Game Ahead

An interesting thing to note though is that during this past month or so, we have got a variety of new breed of applications, architectures and ecosystems approaching prime time, and the development and design communities are rapidly waking up to this great phenomenon by joining discussions and better yet creating the next generation of Rich Interactive Experiences... I just can't handle more all that RIA-wording-war that I like my own better - sorry guys!

And as the base of all these we have Microsoft and Adobe who are putting their best at work by creating great tools that will enable, all of us in the commercial world, to create greater opportunities than ever since the dot Com era.

Coming up next...

Now, even though it is our work to live the day ahead as the rest of our coworkers, we cannot be blind to reality and the today of most of our businesses; that's why next week Adobe will be embracing over 4000 enthusiasts from all over the world in its Max Conference in Chicago, to show us both sides of this dreamed worlds: what can we get our hands on today and what can we expect for future experiences... all this will be up to us.

And for the today: there are a series of conferences happening all across the world in technologies such as Silverlight, one of which I will be getting the chance to talk at, this is the SilverlightDevCamp Chicago, just the day before we get together to celebrate Adobe's best of the best... so if you happen to get to town earlier just drop by, here is more info about it.

Ok, so it's getting late now, and if you are still reading this, then thank you! Great things are coming to this shores and let's mark this as my revamp to blogging again!

Cheers and hope to see you all in Chicago next week!

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Technorati Tags: Adobe, Events, Flash, Flex, MAX, Microsoft Expression, RIA, RIE, Rich Interactive Experiences, Silverlight

Silverlight 1.0 is out and with Linux support

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

Flash Player 9 to support H.264 on its 3rd update

Just a quick note to point out last night announcement from Adobe... Flash Player 9 in its Update 3 will provide support for the H.264 codec, allowing playback support for HD videos.

If you remember it was first the YouTube announcement to be encoding on H.264 to support the iPhone, and now a bit later than a month Flash provides the platform to distribute such content based on its own platform both web as in the desktop as this updates also rolls out to AIR.

If you want to find out more, here is an excellent post from Ryan Stewart along with some extra resources; the official Adobe Press Release here, and a really complete FAQ from Aral here.

Enjoy and happy encoding! 

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Technorati Tags: Adobe, AIR, Flash, Flex, H.264, RIA, RIE, Video, Quicktime

Acropolis August CTP is out with support for VS.NET Beta 2

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:

• Acropolis August CTP download, here
• Acropolis Samples, here
• Acropolis Web Site, here

Enjoy! 

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Technorati Tags: Acropolis, Smart Clients, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, Visual Studio, Microsoft, RIA, RIE, WPF, WinFX, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5

ColdFusion 8 Shipping!

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!

Along with this great release from Adobe, Adobe's Ben Forta has came out with a great series of posts regarding resources associated to this big step in Adobe's Server Framework.

Go check it out!

ColdFusion is here - on the comments side there's been a good discussion between early adopter users and a full hand of Product Managers from Adobe.

ColdFusion 8 Performance Brief

ColdFusion 8 IDE Extensions - a source of resources to integrate CF8 with your favorite development environment.

ColdFusion Developer Articles

Technorati Tags: Adobe, ColdFusion, ColdFusion8, Scorpio, RIA, RIE

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.

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Technorati Tags: .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5, Ajax, Atlas, Microsoft, ASP.NET, C#, Development, Programming, Expression Blend, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, Visual Studio, WinFX, WPF, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL, Silverlight

The Adobe Interactive Wall and its usability problems...

Last Friday Adobe launched a new advertisement campaign @ the heart of New York City itself.

Located outside the Virgin Megastore in the 14th St and Union Square, Adobe setup an interactive wall that lets users handle a slider control located in the lower portion of the billboard, which in turn manages the animation being displayed in the wall.

I got to this news thru an internal email from a fellow Schematitian in NY, encouraging the guys from our NYC office, located just around the corner from the ad itself, to go check it out... I even twittered encouraging people passing by to go check it out themselves.

Some of our fellows from the UX department went in a corporate field trip, I love this kind of activities; and came back with their own opinions about it... but again given that I am thousands of miles away I just couldn't live with those statements and whish for a trip to NYC within this month to go check it out myself... but then: no need for a trip when you have Gizmodo to recorded - which Schematitians in it and all - for yourself entertainment and Stewart to let you know about it...

Now, as a geek as I am, lets do a simple analysis out Adobe's approach.

1. Check out the video, would you?

• Where did your attention went while looking at the wall? 
• Was it at the amazing graphics being shown in the billboard or in the little unicolor slider that people chased in the bottom of the screens?
• Was that the same element that caught people's attention in the video?

2. From looking at the people interacting with it:

• Do you get some idea of what the message behind this interaction is?
• Did you learn anything new about Adobe's Creative Suite or how easy it does your job as a Photographer, Designer, Programmer or Media Producer? - remember NYC is full of geniuses artist in all fields.
• Would you go buy a box of CS3 after being in front of such a billboard? - this last one was a real question that got ask to one of my mates while in the field trip by a camera guy.

3. Now lets show a different video, a video of a different interaction wall - bare in mind the technical's approaches are similar... here it is (choose one): Windows Media, Real Player or QuickTime.

• How different the approach is in the second video? - I'm not trying to point which one is better, I just want to make sure you see differences between the two models.

4. How different would you have designed the Adobe's wall? - if you want post your thoughts in the comments area, you never know what can we get out of think tank activities...

Mine?

Well, given that I have some sort of past experience with the people involved in the Accenture one, I would keep the slider so that it can gets people's attention as they passes by - having Schematic worked with Accenture designing the UX for this wall one gets to learn that some how this was one of the key things they found difficult after it went live: how to make people approach the wall in JFK and O'Hare and get them to interact with it.

So, after the slider hooks people off and gets them in front of the wall I would:

1. Lock the slider and bring in a CS3 showroom and let people interact with the different feature sets and videos of the products being used - like their current product navigators in their website.

2. Allow for multiple users to play along... given that the UX is build in Flash, pretty much anything visual rich and interactive is possible.

3. Make people love your products!

4. Make them have fun while learning!

5. Keep them hooked!

4. Ok, so they go that means that after some time of idleness I'd resume the playing demo and unlock the slider and go people-fishing again.

... now let's see what you guys think of it!

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Technorati Tags: Adobe, Design, Findability, Interaction, Interaction Design, RIE, RIA, UX, Usability, User Experience, Interaction Wall, Advertisement

Silverlight 1.0 RC is almost out... but before it hits the road be prepared!

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.

More info in Tim Sneath's post, here.

Enjoy!

Update: Fixed the zip file reference.

Technorati Tags: AsP.NET, Silverlight, Microsoft, Web, Web2.0, RIA, RIE, Microsoft Expression, Expression Blend, Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2008, Orcas

ColdFusion 8 GMC and a hint to a final release date

It was just a couple of days ago when I received an email from the Adobe Prerelease Team telling me about the Scorpio GMC release, and today Ben Forta writes about the Adobe User Group hosting an official event lunch for ColdFusion 8 on July 31st in Washington DC.

From the email, it actually looks like these guys are almost ready to lunch and are asking people to test their applications under this new release and log any issue as soon possible, being flag as a must for people running production-like applications on previous versions of Scorpio.

This prerelease version will allow to run full steam for an extra 30

days (or August 31st, what ever comes first), after which it will fall back to the Developer Edition limitations - by then I assume final release will be there for you to go pay the bucks... not July 31st though, as Ben Forta himself makes the disclaimer.

Anyway, if you happen to be in town you can RSVP here and be part of the first dudes go get access to the final bits... plus, if not enough, the opportunity to enter a raffling for an iPhone... pretty sweet, isn't it?

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Technorati tags: Adobe, ColdFusion, ColdFusion8, Scorpio, RIA, RIE

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.

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Technorati tags: Microsoft, Visual Studio 2008, Orcas, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Vista, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5

MAX 07 is just around the corner and getting better as we approach to it!

With more than 200 sessions already scheduled, Adobe MAX is getting ready to roll in Chicago later this year.

From September 30th to October 3rd people will get access to all new stuff Adobe has put and will be putting out for the development crowed, going from ColdFusion 8 and Dreameweaver to Flex 3 and AIR.

Accommodated with Inspirational talks from people like Jesse James Garret - also known for his Elements of User Experience book; and several startup companies that have relayed on Adobe's technology to deliver the best experience to its users; you will get access to people, ideas and knowledge that combined together might be the best thing that could happen to you this year.

With some new concepts being put in place for this year's event, Adobe strengths its position towards the community, adding to the great work that Mike Chambers and Ted Patrick have done as ambassadors of its technology providing access and buzz into AIR's and Flex bits than anyone I've seen before in similar grounds.

As time approaches to the D-day Adobe will keep announcing changes and great new stuff to the even, to keep updated put an eye their blog, here.

Cheers and hope I'll see you guys there!

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Technorati tags: Adobe, AIR, Apollo, Flex, Fireworks, Macromedia, MAX, RIA, RIE, Web2.0

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!

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Technorati Tags: Microsoft, .NET3.0, WPF, Outlook, Orcas, WinFx, C#, RIA, RIE

Visual Studio Orcas June CTP has bee out there for a bit more than a month... sleeping

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:

1. 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. 
2. 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. 
3. 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:

1. Increased integration of Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
2. Improved ASP.NET AJAX support
3. New web protocol support for creating Windows Communication Foundation services (AJAX, JSON, REST, POX, RSS, ATOM, and other web service standards)
4. Full tooling support for the Windows Communication Foundation and the Windows Presentation Foundation
5. 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.

Now the links:

• ADO.NET Entity Framework June 2007 CTP, here
• Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" SDK June 2007 CTP, here
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 June 2007, here

Enjoy and happy upgrading!

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