Microsoft has decided to bundle jQuery with the next releases of Visual Studio.
Today, the Expression Blend team have released a preview of Expression Blend 2 Service Pack 1 that allows you to create content for the release candidate of Silverlight 2. You can download the Service Pack
here.
Today, the Silverlight team released the first public Silverlight 2 Release Candidate. Althogh there are some bugs to be fixed before final release, this earlier release will enable developers to start updating their existing Silverlight applications in order to be ready for the final version, and the green light for their websites to go live.
You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it
here.
I've been reading some info on the next release of Team Foundation Server, codename "Rosario" (if anyone knows the origin of this please let me know) and aside from technological advancements an improvements there are some budget and platform considerations to think about as well.
The Microsoft F# research team recently released the September 2008 CTP of F#.
F# developed as a research programming language to provide the much sought-after combination of type safety, succinctness, performance, expresivity and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system. This combination has been so successful that the language is now being transitioned towards a fully supported language on the .NET platform. Some of the reasons for this move are that F# gives you:
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succinct, type-inferred functional programming,
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interactive scripting like Python and other languages,
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the foundations for an interactive data visualization environment,
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the strong type inference and safety of ML,
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a cross-compiling compatible core shared with the popular OCaml language,
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a performance profile like that of C#,
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easy access to the entire range of powerful .NET libraries and database tools,
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a foundational simplicity with similar roots to Scheme,
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the option of a top-rate Visual Studio integration, which is usable with the freely available Visual Studio 2008 Shell
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the experience of a first-class team of language researchers with a track record of delivering high-quality implementations,
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the speed of native code execution on the concurrent, portable, and distributed .NET Framework.
You can download it
here.
Today is a great day. I love when new technology emerges to help us on our daily tasks, then massifies, and you can see people getting real value from it. Specially when governments are the ones to implement it in order to gain more service-efficiency. I got my brand new Citizen Card, and all the services deriving from it, and I'm going to describe what's this all about.
Devart, formerly known as Core Lab) just released a new version of their ADO.NET providers, now with full support for .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. From what I've read, they are the first to do so!
Devart is a software development company specializing in native connectivity solutions and development tools for the most popular databases, including Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, InterBase, Firebird, and SQLite.
Check their announcement here.
According to Steven Sinofsky, senior vice-president of the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, there will be no roles on Windows 7. With Windows Server 2008 role usage, we've all assumed roles not to be discontinued, but according to Steven, "We’ve seen scenario or role-based setup as a very popular feature for Windows Server 2008. In the server environment, however, each of these roles represents a different piece of hardware (likely with different configurations) or perhaps a specific VM on a very beefy machine, and also represent very clearly understood "workloads" (file server, print server, web server).
The desktop PC (or laptop) is different because there is only a single PC and the roles are not as well defined. Only in the rarest cases is that PC dedicated to a single purpose. And as Mike in product planning blogged, the reality is that we see very few PCs that run only a specific piece of software and in nearly every study we have ever done, just about every PC runs at least one piece of software that other people do not run. So we should take away from this the difficulty in even labeling a PC as being role specific."
I'm glad Microsoft (Steven) is choosing priorities. I believe Microsoft is placing a good bet here, by getting the out-of-box experience for Windows 7 just right.
Just posted an
article on Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition using the .NET Framework.
Early this year Microsoft made a promise that let everyone with full hopes for six months, specially the entire web standards community. Regarding the new Internet Explorer 8, they said that it will "use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default.".
Well, now that the beta is out, we are now finally able to check for living proof. And, sadly, may pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. Microsoft kept this option hidden deep in the Configuration Panel, under "compatibility View". You can see that the option "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" is checked by default, thus leaving the standards View clearly away from promises made...