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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

HTWWO: Rich Interactive Experiences

These past days the world has witnessed a mirage of applications and services targeted to the development of Rich Internet Applications and Alternative Media. 

Some how these new comers have put me to think why we haven't evolved from using plain old html pages rather than using cool, nice looking, desktop applications... should it be because of the easy of access and navigation, or, might it be just the fact that pretty much everybody can create them easily and anywhere... which defines that by offer everything lives on the web today! 

The browser, as we know it, has allow for information to be at the reach of everybody's fingers since day 1; no need to install, configure or waiting for applications to load - sometimes slowing and even crashing the entire system: the browser has been good... it's been good until today! Today it gets revamp and becomes in way cooler place to be!

Let's go backwards a bit, with Mix07 Microsoft unveiled Silverlight 1.1, successor to what was previously known as WPF/E or version 1.0 of Silverlight.

Silverlight comes as a direct response to Adobe's Flash - with one small difference, Silverlight has a built-in CLR that is cross platform (Mac OS X and Windows) and lives in a 2MB install in the cloud; which means: cross-platform support for .NET is in the house!- I know this sounds corny, but it is quite amazing...

During the same keynote, the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) also made its debut as the base for all dynamic languages to build from, shipping with IronPython, Dynamic VB, JS, and Ruby; DLR is open for anyone who wants to create its own dynamic language with .NET support. The codebase is available on Microsoft Codeplex with full modification rights...

Now on the other side of the road is Adobe, who had released Apollo a few weeks prior to that, introducing a light weight platform to run Flex and Html based applications on the desktop, providing access to OS level functionality previously not available on web-based app's. - I wonder if we will get to support embedded Silverlight some day!?

Anyway, with Flash 9 Adobe has set the rule as the platform for deployment of Rich Internet Applications on the browser, with support for video and a good sandbox for both designers and developers, Adobe lays the ground for today's next generation of applications running on the cloud... but now, this time we have got here with roommates! Now set ur ideas run free!!

I've got to say that Adobe and Microsoft have done a terrific job putting together their Creative and Development suites to work as one, empowering the whole modern UX workflow to rise and take off from the oblique normal websites of yesterday; those that we all have come to love with some boring pain - at least I have.

New times are yet to come, and as a colleague of mine put it the other day, we have set the base for incredible things, now we just have to make them happen!! - I am exited to live it myself!

Cheers!

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Technorati tags: HTWWO, WPF/E, Silverlight, Microsoft, Adobe, Flash, Flex, User Experience, RIA, RIE, Rich Interactive Experiences, Web2.0, Products, CS3, Orcas, Apollo, .NET, DLR, CLR

Visual Studio Orcas March CTP is out now

Work has been really hard on me the last couple of weeks, but I just found some time today to read down my rss feeds and found out that Visual Studio Orcas has been refreshed with a March CTP just as I wrote this.

It's been released both as a VirtualPC image and as a selfextracted file, I recomend to go witht he VPC one since in that way u won't have to mess your current system.

Be aware that this release is quite big, near the 6GB of size so be patient.

Any way, I have to go back to my emails, I leave you here with the links to the download and to a post that Scott Guthier wrote introducing some of the new stuff shipping with Orcas CTP.

Download VirtualPC Image
My "First Look @ Orcas" Presentation by ScottGu

Expression Blend Beta 2 is Out

I know I have been out for a while. Sometimes things don't go as you might expect in your day to day life, but then you have to recover and keep going... so here I am.

I have a few posts waiting in the baking room, though wanted to bring this one early since I just realized that Microsoft has silently released Expression Blend Beta 2.

For those of you out of the picture Expression Blend is the professional design tool to create engaging web-connected experiences for Windows; meaning that this is the WPF oriented application for Interactive Designers to go wild with their ideas and designs and come out with the next generation of inmersive applications for both Windows XP and Vista.

So go ahead, the following are some resources you might find interesting:

Expression Blend @ Microsoft Expression

Download Expression Blend Beta 2 @ Microsoft Downloads

Beta Overview @ Eric Lam's Blog

Yahoo! is going WPF

As we approach the lunch date for Windows Vista (Jan 30th, 2007) products based on Microsoft's new technology will start surfacing the earth showing us how great the big M's investment behaves as the new generation platform for software development; specially for those really nice looking applications...

Anyway, with the sarcasm aside, Yahoo! just went public with their new Yahoo Messenger for Vista. This new app is developed using .NET 3.0 technologies and probably the first thing you will notice is the fresh slick UI that was accomplished by using WPF.

As a developer and end user, I'm looking forward for this new wave of applications that will start hitting the market with remarkable looking user experiences and how the customer will start pushing the bar higher and higher from what we have been used to, 'til now...

Go check it it looks really nice!

WPF on Windows XP / 2K3 vs Vista

A question that should have gone around people's head already (it has for me and my team for a while) is how different the application performance between WPF-based applications running under Windows XP / 2K3 from those running in Windows Vista, is.

So for those such a people (me) Tim Sneath just posted a brief on this and given the fact that there is no data support from benchmarked tests, it at least gives a some-how-clear explanation on what to expect from the point of view of what Vista implements that is missing from Windows XP; even though it is the same code base for both OS's, Vista features a set of support enhancements to some of that technology (i.e. vector based rendering vs bitmap rendering across accessibility and remoting tools and of course the DWM and WDDM-class display drivers for a smooth experience in 2D and 3D) .

So go for it and give it a try, at least it will guide your test a bit more than going with no information at all...

North Face In-Store Explorer in a store near you!

Ok, so Vista hasn't gone live to the main stream public yet and the first retail application has shipped to the public (hands).

As some of you know - people that have been tracking Vista and the WinFx over the last months (and years); the North Face Explorer has been one of the most coolest applications being marketed along side with this technologies.

Developed by the people @ Fluid, a Digital Production company based in San Francisco, this guys have gone live with the application we all saw demoed during the PDC '05 conference.

Darren David, tech lead for this project has blog about it here, so for you guys out in the US soil, go to the nearest NF store and check it out... for those like me, that only go to the states once or twice a year or that live abroad, here is cool excerpt from the guys over Channel9 who have the snipped from the PDC demo for a re-run.

Talking about technology Microsoft published a white paper last year that talks about NF proof of concept and even has some demo code that comes in handy when talking 3D, image management: you know WPF in general.

Ok, so I'll let u guys to go explore and keep enjoying life in this new 2007! Happy coding everyone!

What u should have to do WPF

As I've been blogging before I am working with WPF for a personal project. This has nothing to do with my 8-5 job, but is a nice thing to be doing in my spare time; anyway, the reason of this post is that by looking around I found this entry by Tim Sneath, who is part of the team @ Microsoft that takes care of making people to know Vista as a development platform.

This post regards to the essential stuff you might need if working on WPF stuff; the post is called Building a Perfect WPF Developer Workstation so you might get the idea...

Go ahead and play on it :) Later...