John Mandia's Points of Interest

Silverlight 2 RTW out tomorrow - October 14th!

John_Mandia — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:32:00 GMT

In my last points of interest post I mentioned that an announcement was going to be made today. I thought it would either be a release date announcement (if they were going to miss the PDC) or that Silverlight was actually released. Well it appears it is not out now but will be by the end of tomorrow.

Looking forward to it.

Thanks to Ken Cox for spotting this first.

Press Release available from here.

John

Points of interest #11 - Silverlight, Open Source

John_Mandia — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:54:00 GMT

I've decided to restart my "Points of interest" posts. To get the ball rolling I'll start off small:

Open Source

Old news but Jitterbit 2.0 was released in August. http://www.jitterbit.com

The Jitterbit Integration Solution combines intuitive integration design with robust functionality and scalable performance. Jitterbit is designed to handle the most complex integration challenges between legacy, enterprise and On-Demand applications, including Business Process Fusion, ETL, SaaS, and SOA. The Jitterbit Solution enables organizations to unite their independent applications and data in record time and for the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.

Not specific to .Net but may prove useful for those looking for a way of performing an integration between multiple systems without having to create something yourself or purchase a licence.
In September Solr 1.3 was released. http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, a web administration interface and many more features. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat.

Again not specific to .Net but very useful. Was just thinking about the possibility of a database (whatever your preference), Jitterbit, Solr and a Silverlight front end.........talking about Silverlight.............

Silverlight

Big news coming this Monday about Silverlight!!

Can't remember the source (sorry! please add it as a comment and I'll add your link) but someone mentioned that he monitors Microsoft's press pass releases and came across this:

Microsoft Corp. will hold a teleconference with Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft. Guthrie will make a significant announcement related to Microsoft Silverlight.

Now this could be that Silverlight is released or a date is announced. I'm not 100% sure on it being a release announcement as it has only been a few weeks since RC1 came out and people are still busy updating their beta 2 projects. I hope if it is a date announcement it isn't something along the lines of December 08 (or Mix 09 :D). I assumed it would be released at the PDC but if they are running late then this would make a date announcement essential in order to manage expectations. Out of the two options I think I would prefer it to be an announcement that Silverlight is now live. The argument for that is that they want to make sure other PDC announcements do not get drowned out with news that Silverlight has been released.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-10GuthrieSilverlightMA.mspx

That's all for now.

RIA and Search Engine Optimisation......Adobe leading the charge

John_Mandia — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:51:00 GMT

I've often commented on my wish for the Silverlight team to focus a little more on Search Engine Optimisation (and printing support....but that's a topic for another day) as I feel that this is one area that could put off a lot of business users (yes you can argue that it is an application and if your application is content rich then possibly your application should be built in asp.net with occassional use of Silverlight to add "islands of richness"). There are ways of having a search engine friendly Silverlight application (my plan was to have something more solid by now but life has been busy...it is however still on my todo list :D) but I was/am hoping that it does get some attention either now or in the near future. Looks like Adobe are aiming to do this ...(read more)

Tip for those of you using CruiseControl.Net (CC.NET) with Perforce - error: Request too large

John_Mandia — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:29:00 GMT

I use CC.Net quite a lot now with Perforce and ClearCase and I was recently asked to help out a team who were having some problems. A CI project had been setup on CC.NET and it "seemed" to be running fine. Someone would checkin the file and the project would detect the changes. Unfortunately the files on the build server were not actually being updated :S Checking through the logs led me to this error message: error: Request too large (over 200000); see 'p4 help maxresults'. This post covers this issue in more detail, suggests a possible fix and describe how this fix can be applied as a CruiseControl.Net Plugin. John ...(read more)

Spoiler (Perhaps) - Silverlight to run on Symbian phones!

John_Mandia — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:17:00 GMT

Microsoft is working with Nokia to get Silverlight running on Symbian mobile phones. Would this help influence your decision to use Silverlight for UI over other technologies. It seems like the build up to mix is starting to happen with more and more news coming out as we get closer to the event. ...(read more)

For those of you on the lookout for more information about MIX 08 and Silverlight, IIS or MVC

John_Mandia — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:41:00 GMT

Now I usually aim to have either my own content or a collection of links (a points of interest post) instead of a single link to another site but I know a lot of people are on the lookout for anything they can find out about Silverlight 2.0 and Mix so I thought I would post this links. DNR have just done a podcast with Scott Guthrie (well the first part is with him) where he provides more information about MIX (sounds like SL 2.0 will also have a calender control etc).......(read more)

Sandcastle January 2008 Release Available

John_Mandia — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:36:00 GMT

It looks like Sandcastle has now moved to codeplex.

http://www.codeplex.com/Sandcastle/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=9921

I've been looking at CI (primarily using CC.NET) a lot over the last few months and have been encountering issues with NDoc (given that it is no longer developed and there was never a proper .Net 2 release). I looked at Sandcastle a while back and wasn't happy with it (it seemed like it needed too much work to get working and it was slooooooooow).

I tried the last release and thanks to community projects like Sandcastle Help File Builder was able to easily hook it up to CC.NET. I ran it against a codebase that took 4 hours to generate documentation and that time was cut down to 20 minutes (so some definate improvements on that end).

Some things that still cause me some pain (could be Sandcastle Help File Builder):

It doesn't like interop assemblies (fails on my setup)
It requires your projects to have xml generation on (not a big deal I know but can be to some people)
Dependencies list (I wish there was an option to automatically detect this)
Speed (It still seems slower than NDoc)

Anyway haven't tried this latest release so let's see if things are even better (Msft have introduced a GUI in this release but mention it is not intended to compete with community projects).

John

UPDATE: Sandcastle Help File Builder (http://www.codeplex.com/SHFB) are coming out with an update for the latest release on the 22nd. I've not tested the latest version of Sandcastle yet (waiting on SHFB as the old version isn't compatible with the January release) but I hope that the BuildAssembler.exe improves as right now it is using up 837MB of memory and 50% CPU utilisation on a build server as I write this!!

Silverlight SEO (Search Engine Optimisation / Search Engine Optimization)

John_Mandia — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:45:00 GMT

One of my new resolutions was to look at Silverlight more closely, especially with regards to search engine optimisation which is something I raised back in May in my "Points of interest #6" post.

What are some of the things I like about Silverlight (this is not a complete list but some quick points in relation to this post):

The browser / browser version is taken out of the equation (to a degree). I should hopefully no longer need to worry about html, css and JavaScript support across different browsers and different operating systems. If something looks good on IE 6 on XP it should look and behave the same on Firefox on the Mac.
Easily enhance the user experience (I know Ajax and Flash can achieve this as well)
Develop every aspect of your application with C# (or any other managed supported language) - yes I eagerly await Silverlight 2 Beta 1 (although I know you can still achieve a lot with Silverlight 1).

Now this is a reduced list (there are many posts out there explaining the benefits Silverlight 1.0 / 2.0 will bring) but point 1 and 2 add a lot of value and if you are not sacrificing seo then you are onto a winner (although in cases where you are building a pure application e.g. an insurance quote application seo plays a lesser role).

I thought I would gather links, posts and my own stuff under a custom domain so I bought http://www.silverlightseo.net and just before the new year (30th December) I knocked up a Silverlight page and uploaded it to see if I could get it indexed by the search engines.

Less than a week later I am glad with the initial results:

Search Term	Google	Yahoo	Live
silverlight seo	no 2 out of 408,000	no 12 out of 3,210,000	not yet indexed
silverlight search engine optimisation	no 11 out of 95,000	no 46 out of 482,000 (not as good)	not yet indexed
silverlight search engine optimization	no 42 out of 782,000	no 14 out of 481,000	not yet indexed
silverlight search engines	no 65 out of 215,000	no 43 out of 855,000	not yet indexed

Now it surprised me how quickly I got in there (initially I added http://www.silverlightseo.net to my signature for my forum posts on asp.net/silverlight.net and recently I added a link to my blog and posted about it but other than that there are no links pointing to this site that I know of) but I'm glad to see that the approach was accepted and the content indexed.

Now two useful posts about SEO and Silverlight are Michael's October post where he talks about using xslt to extract the content from Xaml and put it into html and Nikhil's May post (I know there are more out there which I will be adding to www.silverlightseo.net as time goes on).

When I did this test I had the following in mind:

If I generate content (at the moment it is a hard-coded text) where should I store it in the generated Xaml or the host html page?

- I selected to have the content rendered in html and have Silverlight extract the rendered text from the host page.
How would a search engine view what I was doing (am I trying to show one thing to search engines and something completely different to users)?

- The content that is rendered on the html page (in the future by asp.net) is the same content that is displayed within the Silverlight application (consider Xaml as a different form of CSS. CSS can be used to style html tags and Silverlight is providing a style and displaying it using xaml tags).

- Now you wouldn't want to display the same text twice so I altered the Z index of the Silverlight control and made the height and width 100% (I thought I might get my hand slapped for that but it isn't being used for keyword stuffing or anything sinister so I would hope it continues to be accepted).
Should I go Silverlight all the way or look for a hybrid asp.net/silverlight solution (now by this I do not mean an asp.net app with a silverlight control e.g. a slideshow or video player?

- Since Silverlight is so new I would say start off with a hybrid approach and take the lessons you learned developing asp.net sites and see if you can apply them to Silverlight. Now since this was a demo I haven't decided what I think the best approach would be (I've also not looked at Silverlight in enough depth to even pretend to know what the best approach is when Silverlight is concerned) but I am considering trying the following approach:

a) A Xaml file per view (instead of having everything within one file) that loads additional pieces of xaml (controls) if and when required.
b) For each view render the content in html and have Silverlight intelligently extract it. At the moment each textblock calls a JavaScript method that checks the host page for any content with the same id as itself (Loaded="contentdisplaycontrol_loaded").
c) Use either the new ASP.NET MVC Framework or Castle's MonoRail to navigate around the Silverlight Application/Site.

I've not tried this out fully yet but intend to in order to see if the hybrid approach presents the best of both worlds (yes moving from one view to another means a page load but you can still have a nice user experience for view related actions and it could still look very slick).
What about accessibility or printing?

- Screen readers will be able to read the html text and as far as printing is concerned hopefully there will be a printing solution for Silverlight 2.0 but until then you can style the html text via css to look nice when it is printed in Firefox (I've not done that yet so it looks unsightly). Unfortunately IE print preview shows a skewed picture of the Silverlight content.

Now the Xaml/Javascript can easily be pulled from www.silverlightseo.net if you want to look under the covers but the description I've given covers the concept.

If you have any Silverlight / SEO related content please let me know and I'll look to add it when I have the site fully up and running.

John

Happy New Year

John_Mandia — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 23:59:00 GMT

Goodbye 2007, Hello 2008!

2007 had its ups and downs but it will always be considered a great year as 2007 was the year I became a dad.

Things to aim for in 2008:

Learn Silverlight (I've had a quick play and read books but I really want to learn it by building an app or site of some kind).
One of the ways I'll be aiming to learn Silverlight is by looking at Silverlight and it's impact on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation/Optimization). I'll aim to do this through a site focused on that subject http://www.silverlightseo.net
Learn LINQ and WCF
Perhaps look into Iron Ruby or Iron Python to complement my C#
Continue to focus on CI
Spend more time with my family
Run twice a week, swim at least once a week
Catch up with old friends more often than I managed in 2007
Try to learn a new language (not code related)
Restart my POI (Points of Interest) posts

Happy New Year to you all.

John

Merry Christmas Everyone

John_Mandia — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 16:30:00 GMT

Hi All!

Just wanted to say Merry Christmas to everyone. I know l stopped blogging about 6 months ago but the reason behind that was I became a dad for the first time and little Sofia came into our lives.

Now everyone says this and I can vouch that it is true, when you do have a kid it is fantastic (yes there are sleepless nights although we have been very lucky in that respect) and you put many other things to the side.

I'm manage to squeeze in some time to stay up-to-date on the latest .Net tech (and some non .Net related things) but haven't had the time to keep my Points of interest posts going (possibly in the new year).

I've been following Silverlight with great interest and I'm glad it has been rebranded as Silverlight 2.0 as 1.1 didn't sit right. I'm also glad about the extended feature set but hope they include some of the features I feel would ease adoption (printing support [add your vote] http://silverlight.net/forums/t/516.aspx etc).

.Net 3.5 is out which is great (just need to find a project where I can actually use it) and I've been following the Fran's posts (http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/) about Linq to LLBLGen Pro with interest. I've used every release Fran's has put out but feel he is going to gain a much bigger audience when he has a friendlier way of utilising the code LLBLGen generates.

Anyway have to keep this short and sweet as I'm at the in-laws for Christmas dinner in Denmark.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

Roll on 2008.

John

Points of interest #10 - Ajax, Silverlight, WPF, P&P, Firefox and SharePoint

John_Mandia — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:06:00 GMT

A slight change this week. POI titles will now include the main topics covered in each post ("Other" and "Learning" will usually be included by default so they won't be mentioned in the title). Here are this week's points of interest:

Ajax

Google announces Google Gears. Their framework for allowing applications to work online and offline. - With Adobe and Google offering online/offline capabilities is this something you'd like Silverlight to support?
The Help.Net blog lets us know that a new release of Script# is out.
Discovered an ajax pattern website called ajaxpatterns.org.
Another link from Help.Net - talking about Bitjuice an ajax bitmap api.

Silverlight/WPF

P&P

Came across an old document based on CAB and SCSF (Last year's release). Worth reading over to get an idea of how it can be used - this links directly to the pdf.

Firefox

SharePoint

Learning

Other

Have a good week!

John

Points of interest #9

John_Mandia — Sat, 26 May 2007 20:21:00 GMT

Well this week was a nice rest, most of it spent relaxing with my wife. So it was a non-coding week but a range of links did catch my interest:

Silverlight/WPF

Open Source Related

Al Nyveldt posts about the relases of BlogEngine.Net
I came across Watin - A .NET equivalent of Watir (a way of testing your web applications). I had looked at Watir but ended up using the web testing tool created by Thoughtworks. This does look interesting though.
WatiN Test Recorder (A tool for recording interactions with your web application and saving them in a Watin format).
Need to create RSS / ATOM feeds? Came across this project on codeplex: Argotic Syndication Framework.
Andrew lets everyone know that MBUnit 2.4 has reached RTM.

Ajax

P&P

Other

Commercial

Note: If I come across a link which I think may be interesting but also has a commercial benefit (i.e. Products that have promotions to raise awareness etc) then I will add them under a Commercial heading to make it clear.

StyleSpread - StyleSpread is a CSS tool. Now you have TopStyle, the css editor within VS and in other tools such as Expression Web and Dreamweaver so you may be thinking why would you need another (which is what I thought as well). Now I haven't used this tool so I can't comment on whether or not it is more usable than the others but the video clip looks interesting and may be worth a watch. Now if only they offered the option to integrate it with VS (you could always say open file with and select the tool) or Visual Web Developer Express. Competition is always good so it will be interesting to see how StyleSpread does. For bloggers interested in the promotion they can find out more here.

Have a good bank holiday weekend (For those of you in the UK)!

John

Points of interest #8

John_Mandia — Sun, 20 May 2007 12:16:00 GMT

Another week has shot by. Didn't have any time to look at Silverlight although I have managed to download the Orcas Beta and get everything set-up so I'm good to go (whenever I find a spare moment).

Links that have caught my interest this week are:

Silverlight

Learning

Other

Lawrence blogs about some new Moss templates.
Benko lists a set of Moss Webcasts
Blaine announces the May 2007 release of SCSF and on a comment on a related blog post Ohad announces that he is currently updating his SCSFWPF project (Allows you to create an application that is 100% WPF) so that it supports the May 2007 release. I wonder if SCSF will ever support Silverlight based applications :D
~~Nauma~~ Nauman announces an updated version of the Code Share Addin for Visual Studio 2005
Bruce talks about the windows workflow foundation web workflow approvals starter kit.
It looks like ThoughtWorks are about to release an Application for managing Agile IT Projects: Mingle - free for opensource projects and non-profit companies.

That's all for this week.

John

Points of interest #7

John_Mandia — Sun, 13 May 2007 09:04:00 GMT

Wow this week went quickly.

On the Silverlight front I've managed to watch a few more Mix sessions and even though I still have been harping on this week about the need for reach and search engine optimisation I saw a mention of persistent links within Silverlight so I'll be looking at that to see how that can be used.

Links that have caught my interest this week are:

Open Source Related

A .Net opensource charting library - Zed Graph
http://www.jitterbit.com/ - looks like a very solid integration tool
http://angrypets.com/tools/rdos/ - stop those spammers (a .net library to aid in the fight against spam)
http://quartznet.sourceforge.net/index.html - an opensource scheduling library

Unit Testing

http://www.adapdev.com/zanebug/index.aspx - A tool for running / extending your unit tests. I come across this tool from time to time but keep forgetting to add it.

Alpha/Beta/CTP

Steve Clayton points to Windows Live Folders (password protected online storage - site seems to be down at the moment)
The Synchronizer points out that Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET have just hit Beta 1: Runtime & Documentation
Dan talks about Microsoft Shared View and the fact that it is now in beta (allows you to and up to 14 others collaborate together.

Learning

Gene Webb posts some links to SQL Server Webcasts
http://windowsclient.net/ launches - providing information related to winform and wpf apps.
Frank Koch blogs about the english release of Powershell course book material
If you want to learn about Windows Workflow this Microsoft page is a good starting point.

Silverlight

Other

That's all for this week!

John

Points of interest #6

John_Mandia — Mon, 07 May 2007 21:47:00 GMT

Yes it has been a while once again :D

But I've just installed Live Writer and it seems very cool (well lets see how this post goes first).

A lot has happened since my last Points of Interest post so some links may be a bit old but still useful.

Silverlight

I really want to like Silverlight but it's still too early to tell if I like it or not. As a developer yes it's cool but from a business perspective it is still a way off (i.e. the benefit of a Flash Solution is that you can guarantee most consumers have it and a lot of corporates allow it to be installed).

I think Silverlight will really start to be installed once 1.1 is released and I think it would be in Microsoft's interest to get some of the more popular sites using it (luckily Microsoft own a few of them) to encourage installations. Will Silverlight appear as an optional download on Windows Update? We'll have to wait and see.

I've seen a few posts and viewed a few of the mix sessions and it seems like the question of whether or not linux would be supported has come up. It seems Microsoft won't be supporting Linux yet as there doesn't seem to be a real business case behind it (Windows and Mac have the majority market share) although it was mentioned that if things changed they would support it. It looks like the Mono team have decided to take this forward which is good news. I hope Microsoft give them support as it only adds to the business case for using Silverlight. It would be good if the Mono team then went onto create a version of Silverlight for the Symbian OS (I've heard Microsoft will be tackling the Windows Mobile OS next) so that you have total mobile and desktop coverage (now there's an arguement for using Silverlight).

I don't know the numbers but I have a feeling that there would be a case for supporting Silverlight on Windows 2000, ME & 98. At the moment there are lots of corporates and people (I know family members who are still on ME) on one of these operating systems. Since Internet Explorer and Firefox work on these systems and Silverlight is a plugin for these browsers (and does not require the .net framework to be installed) I would say there was a case for this. Yes having people/corporates remain on these operating systems is less than ideal (and everyone should be on XP/Vista) but there are a lot of people who are happy with their PC and don't want to change. Why cut these people out when you have Adobe supporting them via Flash (especially if you wish to light up the web for everyone)?

Anyway to sum up the above paragraph - help the Mono team add Linux support and look at adding support to your older operating systems (i.e. any operating system that supports Internet Explorer 6). It will allow everyone to see how Silverlight can light up the web!

My next thought (again from a business perspective more than a developer one) when I heard about Silverlight was: If I develop an application for Silverlight how will it be indexed by the leading search engines?

For people without large budgets (or even those with large budgets) SEO is an important factor since there is no point having the best site in the world if no-one can find it and you can't afford to promote it.

Macromedia/Adobe have/had (not played with Flash since Flash 4) this problem and I see Silverlight having it as well. Please please please consider Search Engine Support as a main requirement!

I've not looked at WPF in any great detail (yet) but I guess the ideal would be that google/add your favourite search engine here would index the xaml as it would html and silverlight buttons/links would allow search engines to follow it (and people go to the relevant view when they clicked on the search engine result).

A possibility would be populating divs with indexable content related to the current Silverlight view, associate the view with a url and perhaps have a http module that translates this url to a Silverlight view. This is just some late night rambling but what I'm trying to say is make it easy to have your site/application indexed by the major search engines as it will make selling Silverlight that much easier.

Anyway, I digress; here are some of the links that have caught my interest over the last few months:

I didn't wish to add any other Silverlight links (apart from the Mono one) as there have already been lots of blog posts about it. I'm sure there will definately be posts about it in the future though :D

John

Technorati tags: Silverlight, WPF, Mono, .NET, Blend, SCRUM, Cardspace