The .NET Micro Framework team have made a Beta of the .NET Micro Framework 3.0 available to download from the Microsoft Connect Site.
"Targeted towards extremely resource constrained devices, the .NET Micro Framework enables faster development of powerful embedded systems that are smart, securely connected, and easier to manage. The framework is a managed code development and execution environment, which brings C#, .NET, and a Visual Studio-based development to the embedded development world. By supporting modern development tools and paradisms, .NET Micro Framework allows device makers to improve productivity by bringing innovative products to market faster and at lower cost."
The...
Microsoft recently announced at Gamesfest 2008 that anyone developing games over the XNA Game Studio Platform will receive about 70% of it's sales rights. It also stated that games developed this way will be submitted to rigorous quality tests and only then made available over the Xbox Live platform, where they can be sold from 2,5€ to 9,5€. This means developers could be making around 1,75€ to 6,65€ per game sold.
This new distribution platform will be available in the States, Canada and some European Countries by October, time at which Xbox Live will be updated. In 2009 more countries will be involved.
During a programmer's lifetime, a top priority when developing new software is performance. New architecture is good, new technologies are good, but lets not be hasty: in this domain, "easier" and "new" sometimes leads to "slower". The CompiledQuery class let's you optimise your entity framework query expressions in an easy way, and that's what i'll be showing in this article.
The ASP.NET Ajax 4.0 preview 1 is now available at Codeplex for all of you hardcore (and softcore) Ajax coders. This is what you'l find in this first package:
Client-side template rendering
Declarative instantiation of behaviors and controls
DataView control
Markup extensions
Bindings
Emoticon addicts beware... There's a new time-consuming tool on the block. On July 19th, Microsoft has launched a brand new and shiny website for Live Messenger users. It is called Minimise-Me and it's your new smiley factory. Users can now start creating their own content for Windows Live Messenger either by creating a new character from scratch or selecting from a gallery. There's even a Celebrity Gallery available.
Customizable parts are, for example, mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows, hair, skin color, beard, moustache...
Give Minimise-Me a try.
The Team Foundation Server team released yesterday the new version of Power Tools, for the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server.
The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools is a set of enhancements, tools and command line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience.
The following tools are installed with the tfpt.msi package:
Command line tool (TFPT.EXE)
Team Explorer IDE menu additions
Build Notification tool
TFS Best Practices Analyzer
Process Template Editor
...
In this article I'll be showing how to watermark a photo using .NET and, more specifically, GDI+ through the System.Drawing namespace. You can read the full article here.
I've recently come across a problem that I thought it would be simple to solve by using Entity Framework. I wanted to duplicate an object in order to make things easier for me, but I guess my assumption was incorrect. After some tests with reflection, google searches and a lot or brainstorming I've reached the conclusion that in Entity Framework there isn't a built-in or clear method that allows developers to clone objects and then persist the newly created object with some changes. In this article I'm presenting a solution to this.
Read article here.
Another great feature in c# 3.0 is Extension Methods. Extension Methods are created in a way that allow developers to inject them in other classes as being part of them. This article will provide an example of this.
Read the full article here.
Folowing the release of Hyper-V’s last week, Microsoft announced today the release of Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.1 (MAP) on the web frontend, also formerly known as Windows Vista Hardware Assessment.
For those of you that don't know it, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.1 is a network-wide agent-less tool to help quickly identify the locations of desktops and servers as well as auto-generate upgrade recommendations for multiple products and technologies including server, desktop and virtualization migration scenarios. "...is a tool that makes it easy for you to assess your current IT infrastructure for a variety of technology migration...
One other interesting new feature in C# 3.0 are partial methods. Have you ever crossed a partial class with something like partial void MyMethod() in it? Lets see how this can be done and, by using reflector, check out the compiled result.
In our partial class, let's supose we have this:
namespace Example
{
public partial class TestClass
{
public TestClass()
{
// Do something
}
partial void MyPartialMethod();
}
}
Notice the partial void method. This indicates the compiler that the MyPartialMethod() method belongs to this class, but it's defined somewhere else. So in our other TestClass partial class, we...
On the 18th June, Mozilla Corp. sent the long-waited e-mail that specfied the day for the download spree to take place. It was the day that we all hoped to be forever remembered in the Guiness Book of Records. Well, it did! We've all set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. The world came out united with one single purpose: to make history. And so we reached 8,002,530 downloads.
Here are some download stats. Check the Download Day 2008 website for more on this:
Portugal: 131,479
US: 7,734,930
Canada: 790,624
Spain: 824, 561
Russia: 353,314
You can now go to the Firefox 3...
As you may already have heard, Microsoft recently bought a Portuguese company called MobiComp, with headquarters in Braga, near Oporto. This is a smart move by MS, in which, by acquiring an open-source computing company that specializes in storage, backup and restoration of mobile data, MS will certainly get an important mobile development and knowledge unit.
No financial terms were released, nor did MS provide details on MobiComp's role at Microsoft, although Reuters reported Redmond plans to use the company as a research and development unit. Todd Peters, corporate vice president in the Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft, said that...
It seems that the Expression Team is currently working on a Team Foundation Server integration for Expression Blend and Expression Web.
In the current state of development we can see all the basic features TFS has to offer: add, checkin, checkout, remove. etc. It's all there. It's expected to have a complete integration, but we'll have to wait for the next version of these two applications to confirm which, by the way, is currently unknown.