Archives
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Moonlight (AKA Silverlight on Linux) Release Schedule Update
Fresh on the heals of the Silverlight 2.0 announcements, Miguel de Icaza of Novel has some of his own:
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Silverlight 2.0 (formerly known as 1.1) Announced
ScottGu dropping the news as usual. Most interesting feature, IMO, is the upgraded communication support:
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WPF is Ugly by Default?
Erik Sink thinks WPF is ugly by default:
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Is Adobe Really Playing the Lock-in Game With Flash Video?
So, you aren't going to be locked in to buy On2's codec... but looks like despite the fact that they are using an open standard, if you want to intelligently stream the video you will be locked into buying Flash Media Server:
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Silverlight Forcing Macromedia to Rethink
Many Flash developers have been complaining about the choice of On2's codec over a standard like H.264 for years. Interestingly, Adobe is finally adding support for some standard video codecs in the next version of Flash. The question is, how much did Silverlight have to do with this decision? The timing sure makes it seem like a reactive decision. In any case, it's good news for video on the web.
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MLB.com + Silverlight
MLB.com is using Silverlight for their video. Big win for Microsoft, I'm assuming the first of many big wins considering how awesome Silverlight is on the video front.
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Windows Forms for Silverlight
When every new technology comes out, there is someone that will go ahead and implement the old tech on top of the new tech for those lazy bastards that refuse to learn anything new. In this case, it might actually be useful, since Silverlight doesn't contain a lot of built-in controls on it's own. Check out Netika's WinForms controls for Silverlight:
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First Pretty Silverlight Site Spotted
Via Tim Sneath:
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Silverlight on Linux Already
"The open-source Mono project will show off an early version of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in running on Linux later this week.
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Flash: Now Slowing Down Your Multi-Core PC
"As I mentioned in Flash Player Update 3 we finally realized that multi-core CPUs are here to stay. So why not follow the times and take advantage of it? As most of you hard core Flash developers know, rendering is a huge bottleneck. I've seen a couple of blog post complaining that their second core/CPU is not doing anything when they run the Flash Player. Well people, this is about to change in this update." [1]
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Safari on Windows
One less reason to buy a Mac for testing. Go download the beta:
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Expression Blend: First Impressions
So now that Expression Blend is up on MSDN, I figured it was ready to take for a spin. First impression, it's very cool. For creating user interfaces, it easily beats the Flash IDE... with one exception, no code editor. Give me a break. Who's the retard that made that decision? Maybe there is some way to get a better experience, but when you want to add 2 lines of code to an event handler in the default install is beyond horrible, it just shells to my .cs file editor. Come on... you seriously couldn't provide a even a basic code editor in the IDE itself?
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Microsoft's Secret Project
Is revealed
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Java FX: Sun Wants a Piece
"The demand continues to grow for secure, interactive content, applications, and services that run on a variety of clients. To simplify and speed the creation and deployment of high-impact content for a wide range of devices, Sun is introducing JavaFX, a new family of products based on Java technology designed to enable consistent user experiences, from desktop to mobile device to set-top box to Blu-ray Disc."
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Silverlight on Linux
Ryan Paul is claiming over on arstechnica that Miguel (aka. the mono guy) is planning on bringing Silverlight to Linux:
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Flash + JVM = Smiles
At its JavaOne conference, which kicks off in San Francisco on May 8, Sun is promising a major technology unveiling, code-named "Project Indiana."
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If Adobe was Smart...
They would merge the Flex team and the Flash player team, and truely support things like MXML in the player. Why in the world do you need 2 entirely different ways to build applications in Flash? Why doesn't the Flash player itself understand Flex MXML? Why must Adobe's resources be split trying to build, promote, support, and refine two entirely different experiences for application developers? IMO, collapsing the teams into a single team would be the way to go with the introduction of Silverlight, especially considering that just about everyone on the Adobe side touts Flex as the real competitor to Silverlight, not the Flash IDE... yet all the big bucks are behind Flash, not Flex. It seems to be a given that the Flash IDE itself is needlessly complex and horribly inefficient when trying to do anything other than animation. With the push away from animation to more useful tasks, how can Adobe be missing this important step?
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Silverlight vs. Flash: The Developer Story
First off, let me explain my background for those of you who may not know. Way back in the day, when Flash 4 was the latest and greatest, Macromedia decided to “open up” the Flash file format. They released documentation (which was poor at best) and an SDK (which was horrible at best). I saw the potential here. Finally, the format third party developers could unleash their creativity and usher in all kinds of amazing tools. Unfortunately, the documentation was full of errors and the SDK was so riddled with bugs that you spent more time debugging it than using it.
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Silverlight Class Map
Damn. Flash is dead.
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Finally Some Patent Progress
SCOTUS found KSR's arguments convincing, ruling that the Federal Circuit had failed to apply the obviousness test. "The results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court. "Were it otherwise, patents might stifle rather than promote the progress of useful arts."
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Props to Adobe
Flex is going to be open sourced!
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Vista Died Today
All of the sudden Vista just broke. I can't connect to the internet. Initially, the DHCP client just refused to start. I resolved that problem by granting some permissions and setting a registry key, but I still can't use the internet.
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WPF/E = Silverlight
One of the reasons WPF/E is going to give Flash a real run for it's money is the video story. Unlike Flash, Silverlight (the new name) will support DRM, it supports the industry standard VC-1 codec used in HD-DVD and Blueray, and it can take advantage of the built-in media streaming capabilities of IIS. The video story is better just about any way you look at it with Silverlight as far as content providers are concerned. It's cheaper, it's faster, etc.
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Who Needs ORM, I've got SQL 2005
One of the coolest features of SQL 2005 is the XML support. With the recent enhancements to the FOR XML option, you can really get a lot of mileage out of SQL. A common task in a lot of applications involves retrieving an item with many children. Due to the way a lot of systems are built, this usually ends up resulting in a lot of extra queries. For example, suppose I have a customer entity like so:
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Tray and Play: ClickOnce for PC Games
Console'ish load times for PC games on first run coming to a PC near you:
http://blogs.ign.com/MGS_HiredGun/2007/04/05/51370/ -
JD Confused
JD is confused about the statement made in a MS presentation with don and chris:
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Frans on ORM
Frans has finally pulled the discussion out of SOA land back to DB land. With his post "Why change-tracking has to be part of an entity object."
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Information Software and the Graphical Interface
Excellent paper that you should not pass up reading. If you read one thing this week, it should be this: "Information Software and the Graphical Interface"
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Udi On SOA (Part 2)
Udi, continuing the SOA discussion, suggests a solution to the transaction issue:
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SOA and Updates
Andres and Udi are having a discussion about disconnected applications that has overflowed into the topic of service oriented architecture.
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Microsoft Deepfish: Goodbye Crappy Mobile IE
Very slick technology coming out of live labs lately. The latest is Deepfish:
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Articulate Guru Awards
We just announced the winners of our first Guru awards at Articulate. Head over and take a look:
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Who's The Best?
"I have analyzed the vulnerability disclosures and fixes for Windows Vista and examined the results in the context of its predecessor, Windows XP, along with several other modern workstation operating systems including Red Hat, Ubuntu, Novell and Apple products to try and answer that question.
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My First Vista BSOD
If you are installing vista after installing Daemon tools (in my case, I was upgrading the factory home edition to ultimate from MSDN ISO) and you start getting a blue screen after crcdisk.sys loads, the problem is most likely a file installed by Daemon tools. To solve the problem, launch the recovery console at boot menu, open a command prompt, and delete <WINDOWS>\System32\Drivers\sptd.sys and restart and the install should continue without bluescreening.
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Marc on Apollo
"When will Adobe/Macromedia learn? Why would someone want to lock themselves into a proprietary, closed platform - like Apollo? Unfortunately none of the (so-called) analyst, experts out there plugging Adobe - has brought this up yet. I’m not sure why they think that desktop based apps - connected to the Internet - are so new or different - or why locking yourself into an Adobe platform is smart, but both Scoble and Arrington seem to love it. One could argue that by enabling developers to easily connect media, web and the desktop together - that they’ll be able to get further faster - but would someone please mention to these poor schmucks who swallow this pitch that if you’re hopelessly locked into a proprieary platform - that the owner of the platform (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, MySpace) can do ANYTHING they want - at any time and discard you as fast as - well as fast as Macromedia ripped of Laszlo. So if history is any guidance, the ONE company who you’d NEVER trust - as far as you can throw them - is exactly the people shoveling you this Apollo crap. What open standards does Apollo support (besides http, HML and tcp/ip?) How could it have been done better - open? How many young companies have they already ripped off, stolen their IP or made promsies to - which they’ll break? I can’t believe nobody is calling them on this atrocity of a platform? Well I am. Everything Macromedia ever did to try and provide an integrated platform for developers - has failed. Why do you think Jeremy Allaire had to leave Macromedia to go do Brightcove? Well anyway - the platform sucks, stay away from it. But it gives me an excuse to use one of my favorite acronyms - YACP"
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WPF/E Faster than Flash?
Been busy launching a new product for the last few months (http://www.articulate.com/products/articulate-online.php), but getting some time to hit the blogs and noticed this tidbit: