Random Rants & Raves

PCQuest has just published 3 of my articles in their current issue. It was actually supposed to be 4, but the one on ASP.NET 4 got lost in the mail and a resend was received too late for this issue. You can read these articles here:

• MS Office 2010 Preview
• Silverlight 3 LoB Apps Part I (new series)
• Windows 7 Development Part I (new series)

I’m also going to try and compile a list of articles I’ve written in PCQuest over the last few years and link to them here.

I’m currently working with the .NET RIA Services SDK with Silverlight 3 for getting and modifying data from the server using LINQ. Now there are a ton of samples and blog posts available that show you how to work with data from the server. However, one thing in common with all these posts is that they usually work with only one table at a time. What if you want to show the result of a join on the table? This is where a relatively unknown feature called the IncludeAttribute comes in. Let’s take an example for this to explain it in detail.

More...

SilverLight 3.0 has just been released to the web. And there is now an even more important reason to start using this great technology – running apps written for the browser can now be run as a standalone application from the user’s desktop as well. This post takes a detailed look at how you can start using this new feature. More...

Well, after a ton of delays and discussions, the Indian Premier League Season II has finally kicked off in South Africa. The IPL is rated as the biggest and most expensive Cricket league in the world and is watched by not only most Indians but also by most of the cricket playing countries as well.

It was great to see that the IPL official website not just contains all the latest news and live match scores, it also has the matches streamed live as well as archived highlights. And the best part is that the video is shown to you through the Silverlight player.

The player allows you to watch high definition video with almost no buffering and gives an extremely smooth playback. I’m really glad to see that Silverlight is being used in such a way and in something that will ensure that a lot more installs of the Silverlight runtime.

Whether you are a designer or developer, Silverlight is something that you should be looking at seriously. With an established set of credentials (the Olympics, Obama’s presidential inauguration, and many, many more), Silverlight seems to be the future for both Web and Windows based applications.

Update: Added new links and a screenshot of the interactive Silverlight player.

Watch out Google Apps, Office “14” is coming to the Web – and unlike the Google version, it works with the offline rich client as well as mobile devices to give a whole new set of features.

Some salient points:

• Office 14 is going to be available in the normal rich client version
• The Web version will be included into the applications
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote are the apps that will be available in the “cloud” :)
• Seamless syncing of content between the desktop, Web and mobile will be possible
• Multiple people can work on the same document in different media at the same time and see changes in real-time
• The Web version works on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari
• If you have the Silverlight 2 plugin installed (in any of the above browsers) you get an even richer experience than the Ajax based one which mimics the rich desktop client almost exactly
• The rendering engines in each application is the same as the one in the desktop version and hence the document you view in your desktop will be exactly the same as the one the Web!
• You get all the rich features – charts, tables, WordArt, SmartArt etc. on both the Desktop and Web version – YAY!

Check out the video over at Channel9 for a quick cool demo.

Just saw a story on the heavily biased Slashdot about comments Miguel de Icaza was supposed to have made during his session at Mix which criticized the MS/Novell Pact. This is typical Slashdot/Linux FUD against anything Microsoft. I was there in the discussion and even asked Miguel specifically about these topics. I posted a reply to the article at Slashdot (quoted below since Slashdot has a way of making pro-MS comments vanish):

This is simple, absolute FUD - typical of Slashdot. I was there and Miguel never said any of those things in the _public_ presentation.

But if slashdot, you want to even appear fair you should also report the other stuff he said.

Things like "Linux on the server is boring", "We open source commies...", etc. In fact I asked him specifically about the GPL and its effect on the MS/Novell/SL/Moonlight stack. His comment was that the GPL is quite irrelevant since most Linux vendors are going to be fighting with each other (he gave an example of 'committee for freedom of  Judea' and 'Judea freedom commitee' fighting with each other instead of for the actal freedom).

There were enough comments from him to "prove" that he thinks Linux sucks royally (if you were there and saw his Termnial font change problem comment, you'll know what I mean). But we know he doesn't hate linux. So again, a comment made by him aobut the deal doesn't mean he doesn't agree with it and endorse it. He might have personal opinions which he puts out in a private group - that shouldn't be taken as him hating the deal.

Slashdot - at least report the full facts / comments and try to be fair.

Hopefully, (although I don't think so), Slashdot will correct their story. If any of you were there and want to add to this, please do so.

So sitting over at Mix '08 in Vegas, I've been seeing all the talks on SilverLight 2 and XAML and Ajax. But what really makes me very, very excited is actually two announcements that were made - a little too quietly then I'd have wanted them to be.

The first one was mentioned in the keynote in the part about SilverLight being available on mobile devices. That is of course a great step forward, but what really made me excited is the availability of SilverLight on Nokia Phones! Higher end Nokia phones running the Symbian Series 60 will be able to run SilverLight apps directly. Which means you can create rich web applications in SilverLight that will run on a good 80-90% of the phones out there. Since Symbian and Windows Mobile together will make up at least that much. The next place to go would obviously be the iPhone - especially given the opportunity now that Apple has basically discounted the nearest competitor to it.

The other major SilverLight impact would be the availability of MoonLight - the SilverLight port to Linux. This basically means that SilverLight can become an ubiquitous "standard" for Rich Internet Applications very quickly - and one that runs on an extremely vast variety of hardware and software platforms - truly a Web that can be thrown wide open!