Aggiorno: improving the web for you

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.

Aggiorno is currently in public Beta, which translates to: out of the box Aggiorno can assist you with

• Adding Alternate Text To Images
• Assign Tab Index
• Converting Text To XHTML Lists
• Converting Text To XHTML Paragraphs
• Extracting And Merge Inline Style

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.

• Learn more about Aggiorno and how it works
• Access to the Aggiorno channel in blip.tv and see how it works
• Subscribe to the team's blog to learn more about standards, accessibility and to have access to Aggiorno news at once

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Technorati Tags: Web,Visual Studio,ASP.NET,XHTML,Standards Compliance,Accessibility,Refactoring,HTML,PHP,Aggiorno,SEO

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 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

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!

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Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1, C#, .NET 3.5, .NET 3.0, Microsoft, ASP.NET

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

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

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

Channel 8: A new member to Microsoft Channel Family

A couple of days ago Microsoft launched to the public a new technology channel targeted to college students around the world. With this new channel, called Channel 8, Microsoft complements the technology-driven channel triad joining the already known Channel 9 and on10.

As part of the content that will fill up this new on-line channel, there will be information regarding the Imagine Cup, which is a world wide coding tournament targeted to College Students, swapping places around different cities across the globe every year, this year it is time for Seoul-Korea to host the event.

If you want to know more about this new channel and its future go on and watch this video where Joe Wilson introduces everybody to the new concept and what to expect from its different sections.

And to keep an eye on them here are the RSS feed and Video Podcast that you can easily add to your iTunes and sync your iPhone or iPod Video for offline watching.

Enjoy!

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Technorati Tags: Channel 8, Channel 10, Channel 9, Microsoft, Channel, Video, Video Player, Education, Imagine Cup, College, Computer Science, Programming

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

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

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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Technorati Tags: Microsoft, WinFx, Silverlight, .NET, .NET 3.5, Orcas, Visual Studio, ASP.NET

Regarding my previous post & why do you have to hate every single approach from Microsoft

I see lots of hate for Microsoft in everything this guys do as if by doing this people will look more intelligent or revolutionary - I ain't no microsoftie I just like things to work the way they should, and don't make me feel stupid.

People tend to talk about how crappy Microsoft's products are but I don't see much of talking about Firefox being such a crappy thing on a Mac as it is (well at least Scoble made it public), but sadly as it is Safari is even worst so we are sticked to it... or how pathetic the tab management is... Firefox is just a good browser as IE used to be, with IE7 Microsoft tried to get its act a bit together but there is still lots of room for improvement... as there is for Safari (sorry Steve, this ain't as good as you told us it was) and Firefox (with all its plug-ins and even Grease Monkey, which I have to say is quite good)

Regardless if the screen shots on my previous post are a Microsoft thing (I think we are sure they are not) we should be looking farer than our hand and look on what an oppotunity this might create for the community... this shots might have been the Learning Paint 101 project for some kid, but it also brings some good ideas into how raw the world of the browsers is.

Have you guys put into mind that the browser is just a regular window that renders somehow a bunch of text and images (yes and some rich stuff thanks to 3rd party plug-ins)... Rather than play word games like little kids we should be asking for more functionality, more interaction... we ain't in the 90's no more, and some how we haven't moved that far from the Netscape days...

IE 8 Fakes that might bring something innovative to the UX crowed and eventually the world

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.

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Technorati Tags: IE, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Browsers, Web, Web2.0

So you want to suite your application for the iPhone

So you want to suite your web application or service for the iPhone?! Wonder no more, Apple has just posted a set of guidelines that will explain the basics of what you need to know to take advantage of the new interactive model they are bringing to the world with its famous gadget.

Between the bullet point that do you want to follow in order to provide the best experience in the iPhone you will:

• Understand the capabilities of iPhone.
• Follow established design practices for the web.
• Adopt iPhone-specific design principles.

One of the points that really calls my attention is the differentiation they do between multi touch interaction and the regular mouse-driven single point interaction built into the device.

Similar to this approach, people should take some of this guidelines and back port it to similar interaction approaches in mobile devices, even though it will probably not be 'til the end of the year that will see alternatives devices like this popping out in the wild, it can serve as a good design practice for current models using pens and ink as means of interaction.

Cheers!

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Technorati Tags: Apple, IPhone, RIE, RIA, Web, Web2.0, Multi Touch, UX

I'll be hosting Ask the Expert for Microsoft eXpert Zone Latin America

Hi guys, just wanted to write really quick to let all know I'll be hosting a couple of sessions for Ask the Expert on the Microsoft eXpert Zone event for Latin America on going this week...

The first session was held this afternoon and I answered questions regarding WPF and best practices for data binding, the designer and developer role and a bit on WCF integration with WPF.

The second session will be next Thursday @ 11am CST, if you would like to join that session  please follow this link.

Apart from this 2 interactive sessions, on Thursday my Webcast on Rich Internet Applications will be available for on demand viewing here. I think Microsoft will roll this Webcast later on for anytime watching, but for now it will be available only on Thursday as part of this event.

Cheers!

Real Player Revamped!

Since earlier today Real Networks made available its new player for a public beta, and you can go on and download it here.

During the past few weeks this new revamped media player has brought lots of attention back to Real as in brings the Internet Video experience closer to its users, allowing for download of clips from several online services including the recording of streams being fed on the web... plus it will let you burn those videos so you can watch them on your living room in the peace your HDTV... as per the lack of an Apple TV or Media Center box.

Scoble has a good post here where he interviews Jeff Chasen, VP of Real Networks as part of his ScobleShow @ PODTech... go check it out for a preview of most of its features and its new look and feel.

Go get the beta here.

Enjoy!

Microsoft Educational Resources for the Future

So I've been with not that much to do during the last couple of days and so I started to reach around the different Educational Resources I've seen lately around the web for Microsoft Technologies, specifically WinFx and Silverlight related stuff.

Update: I will try to maintain this bit as updated as possible.

First in the list is the Lynda.com set of tutorials available free for Blend and Design. The Blend set was taught by Lee Brimelow from thewpfblog.com and the Design one was done by Ted LoCascio. Between these two you guys you will find over 10 hours of video tutorials.

Next, Tim Sneath posted today about this Hands On Lab that will guide you on creating an Outlook-look-alike application based on WPF. With this lab you will go thru a bit more than 90 pages and by the end of this tutorial you will have a resemble of Outlook plus a vast experience in putting together a fairly complex application yourself using this new presentation framework.

- BTW Files needed will be found here.

Moving towards books, a few weeks ago I saw Chris Anderson published a new book on WPF called Essential Windows Presentation Foundation. From that book SearchVB.com is hosting Chapter 1 which I think serves as a really good introduction to this new way of building user experiences, I think this will go handy before the Hands-on 90-page-thing.

Anyway, I went also yesterday thru the Quickstart for Silverlight 1.0 (currently in Beta), I found it really nice and easy and holding a good structure as to guide you thru what the possibilities are with this first approach to building Rich Interactive Experiences on the web, with all its limitations and bugs, moreover I think it serves as a good ground base moving forward to the more powerful Silverlight 1.1 Quickstart (currently in public Alpha), which will be the more natural approach to all of us C# coders.

Celso Gomes, an interactive designer @ Microsoft, has also made available his website nibbles, which on his own words, it is a series of snack tutorials for hungry designers. Here you will find a good set of tutorials for creating both WPF and Silverlight applications using Expression Blend.

I also found this post from Tim Sneath on a series of training for Microsoft technologies going over this summer across the states, so if you happen to live near by any of this stops (they are quite a lot) then you might have the opportunity to attend one or more of those.

So here you have, a good set of resources to entertain yourself for a few days and get some new stuff in your Microsoft box of knowledge,

Cheers!

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 Run