Jesse Ezell Blog

There is a new version of the .NET Weblogs Archive up and running. We are transitioning from flat xml files to SQL server storage, which will allow nice things like full text search. The XML flat files where becoming too resource intensive and causing all sorts of problems with the large amount of traffic we were getting. This should provide more stability as well as a good foundation for adding more robust features.

Christophe has a preview of the Flex IDE work being done by MM and others.

So, right before Macromedia bought eHelp, eHelp acquired some technology from Articulate, which they turned into a product called “RoboPresenter.” Since I wrote the backend for Articulate's technology, I've been watching this quite closely. In any case, RoboPresenter is used to convert PowerPoint presentations into Flash animations. You can do all sorts of things like add naration, set slide timings, etc. However, Macromedia also has a product that does this now (Breeze), which they acquired from their acquisition of Presedia. So, the two overlap. The official word from Macromedia is that they will be killing the RoboPresenter line, which is pretty sucky for all of eHelp's customers. You see, Breeze is not only an inferior product, but it doesn't allow you to publish locally, you have to send your presentations out to a) Macromedia's hosted servers or b) a Breeze server at your site. Publishing locally, is of course a major reason why all these people chose a product like RoboPresenter in the first place instead of Breeze. Macromedia's solution is apparently to give out hosted Breeze licenses to ticked off customers, which hardly solves the problem. RoboPresenter is like $500, compared to Breeze, which is something like $50,000.  So, as soon as your Breeze hosted contract runs out, you wind up with having to choose between coming up with tens of thousands of dollars to renew your license, or going to some other product line. Understandably, there are lots of ticked off people out there, because eHelp just released RoboPresenter a few months ago and the assumption is that they are already abandoning it after promising continued support to all their customers. Interestingly, this whole deal works out good for Articulate, because they will probably wind up getting all of eHelp's (or should I say, Macromedia's) ticked off customers.

After a month or so of downtime, you can once again download shadowfax from gotdotnet.

“In the spirit of Michael's plea, I'm working on an upcoming article in which I'll compare what was promised for the .NET platform (er, framework), two and three years ago, with the current reality as it exists today...Over the next week or so, I'd like to have conversations with people on all sides of these (and perhaps other, related) issues. I'll be speaking with various folks privately, but here's a comment link (rss) for those who want to register opinions and/or provide feedback.“ [1]

Simon McLean pointed out in a comment that there is now a free version of ColdFusion being developed by New Atlanta. The project sounds pretty cool:

These guys have a schema you can use to add XSLT intellisense to your copy of VS.NET:

TheServerSide.NET reports: