Developers and designers converged at The Venetian in Las Vegas this week to hear more about Microsoft's Web technologies. The eclectic crowd at this hip (as far as conferences go) gathering is an interesting "mix" of creative and technical people with a common goal: building state-of-the-art Web applications.
During the opening keynote on Wednesday, Scott Guthrie talked about new Web server technologies and tools, including the highly anticipated Silverlight 3 which is now in beta with a final release expected later this year. The beta doesn't have a GoLive license.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 03/19/20091 comments
Microsoft offered more details about its developer strategy for Windows Marketplace for Mobile this week, announcing the business model and resources on its
Windows Mobile developer portal
.
Turns out Microsoft's strategy is a lot like Apple's -- right down to the percentage of sales revenues for Marketplace app developers. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery in some parts of the world (like China, maybe) but not Cupertino.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 03/12/20090 comments
With Silverlight 3 bits expected at MIX09 in a few weeks, I voiced a commonly held Microsoftism in Tuesday's RDN Express blog, "
Silverlighting the Workplace
":
"Conventional wisdom has it that it sometimes takes Microsoft until version 3 to get it right."
Needless to say, RDN readers expressed some passionate views about the (sometimes painful) evolution of Microsoft's cross-browser plug-in for rich Internet applications.
"I can say that your statement about version 3 is dead-on," wrote Bob, who is in the early adopter program for Silverlight 3 and the Alexandria (business) framework. "This release will approach application development ease for quick LOB apps that rivals what we used to be able to do with Microsoft Access (before macro security and digital signatures got in the way). That's about all I can tell you. Stay tuned."
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 03/05/200912 comments
Conventional wisdom has it that it sometimes takes Microsoft until version 3 to get it right. And as it happens, this month the first public bits for Silverlight 3 are expected at MIX09.
Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's corporate vice president of the Developer Division, has blogged about the upcoming media (H.264 video) and graphics (3-D) enhancements, data binding and new controls planned in version 3. Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express tooling will also add support for data binding and "a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight," he said.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 03/03/20090 comments
At
VSLive! today in San Francisco
, Microsoft's general manager of the Visual Studio Team, Jason Zander, talked about helping developers do more with less.
He opened the conference with a keynote entitled "Visual Studio -- Your Development Happy Place." Zander discussed useful functionality in VS 2008 and pointed to code navigation, testing and debugging improvements in VS 2010 all aimed at making developers' lives a lot easier.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 02/24/20090 comments
A week or so ago, I visited my local video store and rented a few DVDs. I couldn't remember the last time I set foot in Hollywood Video -- it had been well over a year, maybe even longer. Instead, I'd been "renting" movies on-demand by sitting on my couch with my remote control. Despite the somewhat generic selection from Comcast, it was immediate and just easier.
Microsoft training company AppDev started to offer on-demand courses in December. The Minnesota-based company has focused almost exclusively on instructor-led training for Microsoft dev tools and platforms since 1995. The on-demand learning libraries offer developers a lower price point for anytime online access to instructor-led courses that also include reference materials like coding exercises, sample code and exams. For $995, developers can access up to eight courses on Visual Studio 2008, or for $295, eight courses on Visual Studio 2005. The new delivery model has proved popular, representing 33 percent of AppDev's sales in December and 49 percent of sales in January.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 02/19/20090 comments
The big news for developers from Barcelona this week is the official word that Windows Marketplace for Mobile is coming soon. Windows Mobile developers have asked Microsoft for months to come up with an answer to Apple's App Store.
During the World Mobile Congress 2009 keynote yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Andy Lees, the senior vice president of the Mobile Communications Business, delivered the new "Windows Phone" strategy. For now, it's built around the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, the new Microsoft My Phone sync service and Windows Marketplace for Mobile, which will appear on the "Start" menu of the upcoming OS.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 02/17/20099 comments
Document imaging company Atalasoft released version 7.0 of its flagship toolkit DotImage for .NET in January. Last week, the company launched a SharePoint plug-in based on the new functionality in the latest SDK.
Atalasoft used DotImage v7.0 and Visual Studio 2008 to build a document viewing app called Vizit SP on top of SharePoint. Vizit SP enables SharePoint users to annotate documents (PDF, TIFF, .DOC), quickly view thumbnails, and index and clean up document images.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 02/12/20092 comments
New details about Microsoft's plans to integrate new services with its smartphone strategy emerged over the weekend.
As ADTmag.com Editor Jeffrey Schwartz explained in his article "Microsoft Readies MyPhone Service," the folks in Redmond plan to offer a service to Windows Mobile 6.x users that would allow them to store their contacts, calendars and the like and synchronize that data via a password-protected Web site.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 02/10/20090 comments
Code analysis is gaining a lot more attention these days, especially from Microsoft. Most people are well-acquainted with FxCop and PREfast. But the folks in Redmond are looking at code analysis as a key feature of Visual Studio (VS) 2010. Some of the preview functionality evidenced in the early CTPs includes rule sets -- Microsoft All Rules, Microsoft Security Rules, Microsoft Minimum Recommended Rules -- a gated check-in policy and more advanced dataflow rules, some specifically targeted at preventing SQL injection.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 02/05/20090 comments
When Microsoft announced in October 2007 that it was introducing a modeling platform for application developers that would permeate almost all of its products and services, some people tried to parse the vague references from company spokespeople to figure out what was to come. Others didn't bother to conceal what amounted to a collective yawn.
Advancing the concept of modeling requires more than having espresso machines at the ready. Getting developers excited about any type of modeling is a hard sell -- especially to enterprise veterans with a "been there, done that, don't really see the benefit" attitude.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 02/03/200911 comments