Feed: Channel 9 - AggScore: 75.4
Joe Stegman, Director of Program Management on the Silverlight team, joins us to discuss Silverlight 4's Out of Browser improvements (OOB means you can run Silverlight applications on the desktop, outside of, well, the browser...). Of note, you can now interop with COM objects in SL4's OOB. We also touch on the the future of Silverlight and clearly define the distinctions/differences between Silverlight and WPF. When to use SL? When to use WPF? Enjoy.
Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) released this week during PDC09. Rx uses Parallel Extensions for .NET (Px) for all of it's concurrent and parallel computing needs. How is it using Px, specifically? What's going on here and why? Stephen Toub, PM on the Px team, and Wes Dyer, developer on the Rx team, tell us all about this partnership the experience of collaborating on two very compatible technologies that, taken together, create something beautiful. Some many xs, so little time.
Enjoy.
We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders). We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday.
In Chapter 8, Functional Parsers, it's all about parsing and parsers. A parser is a program that analyses a piece of text to determine its syntactic structure. In a functional language such as Haskell, parsers can naturally be viewed as functions.
type Parser = String -> Tree
A parser is a function that takes a string and returns some form of tree.
You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain):
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Also if you missed it, check out Overview of SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010.
For more information on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 please see:
And please give us your feedback in the SharePoint Development Forums!
Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
One of the new features we're announcing today at PDC is the Outlook Social Connector SDK. This is a new way to integrate social networking data into Office Outlook 2010. Too busy with the @Ch9Live show to tell you too much more but check out the video. :)
During PDC 09 I grabbed some time with Stephen Walther to talk about some of the exciting new developments with the ASP.NET Ajax Library. There were a number of new things to talk about including:
- The ASP.NET Ajax Library is now in Beta
- Merging the Ajax Control Toolkit and the ASP.NET Ajax Library
- There is now a pure client-side version of the Ajax Control Toolkit as well as the server-side version
- Microsoft donating the ASP.NET Ajax Library into the CodePlex Foundation
- There is now full product support of ASP.NET Ajax Library from Microsoft (including Ajax Control Toolkit
We then walked through some demos of the ASP.NET Ajax Library that brings the following exciting capabilities to developers:
Power
-
Build data-centric web apps using advanced client-side data access libraries and controls
- Keep your markup clean and standards-compliant with imperative coding
- Make it easier to code using JavaScript intellisense in Visual Studio
- Keep loading and execution of your scripts simple with the Script Loader with advanced management and execution features
Performance
- Use the ASP.NET Ajax Library CDN for lightning fast downloads of ASP.NET Ajax Library and jQuery
- Reduce the number of requests to the server using script combining in the Script Loader
- Reduce the size of your scripts using the ASP.NET Ajax Minifier Tool
Interoperability
- Works across all browsers and any platform; ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails etc
- Explore the code and make modifications, it’s open source
- Use powerful jQuery selection syntax and Ajax Control Toolkit controls together
- Create your own controls by extending ours like the DataView
Check out my full blog post about the news here: http://www.jamessenior.com/post/News-on-the-ASPNET-Ajax-Library.aspx
Check out the docs and samples on the wiki here: http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary
Download the code from http://ajax.codeplex.com
For a good overview of SharePoint tools in VS2010, also check out Overview of SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010.
For more information on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 please check out:
And please give us your feedback in the SharePoint Development Forums!
Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community
Windows 7 is a landmark product for Microsoft with support for things like sensors and multitouch. With just months (which quickly turned into weeks) to go until the show, it was decided that the best way to accelerate getting the hardware to support these new features in the hands of the developers would be to gift them a laptop at PDC. The problem was that there wasn't a retail laptop available that supported everything we wanted you to have, especially in a price point that would allow us to give out thousands of them.
I'm happy to say I'm typing this up on one now, and it's an incredible machine. Built upon the Acer Aspire 1420P chassis, this convertible TabletPC has a Core2 Duo U2300 processor, Mobile Intel GS45 video, 2GB of DDR3 1066 MHz memory (supports up to 8GB), an 11.6" 1366x768 multitouch screen, webcam/mic, 3G WWAN, WLAN (supporting up to Draft-N), S/PDIF for digital speakers, 3 USB, 250GB HDD, card reader, and even an HDMI port.
In addition we had some other custom things added including a built-in accelerometer. You might notice this when you rotate the tablet and the screen stays oriented. :) All the hotkeys are supported through BIOS and firmware, there is a button for Flip-3D (cool!), and WWAN is supported by the WWAN stack built in to Windows 7.
In addition you've got Corel Paint It! Touch, Office 2010 (pre-beta), Windows XP Mode and Virtual PC, Microsoft Touch Pack, and the Windows Live Suite. This is a custom PC built on an unreleased (as of yet) machine, you can't get it anywhere else.
So PDC developers, go forth and populate the planet with awesome software. And please, if you make something cool - let us know.
Update: A couple things I forgot to mention. The PDC Laptop has HDMI AND a VGA out, as well as bluetooth. You might notice on the flight home that the battery life can be nearly 8 hours. And a tip for browsing the web while in Tablet configuration, you can hold it on each side and use your thumbs to alternate flicking the page up and down or both at once to resize with multitouch.
The IE team is busy working on the next version of the world's most popular browser. IE 8 is the most widely used browser on Windows. IE 9 is currently in the oven and the IE team is ready to talk about what they're working on. Here, IE GM Dean Hachamovitch leads us through the halls of IE (literarally) and takes us to meet graphics developer Christian Fortini and test lead Anjali Parikh. They're taking IE to a new level with all graphic rendering taking place on the GPU via the DirectX technology D2D. So, IE 9 will take advantage of the power of the GPU for all page rendering and, further, enable web developers to exploit this power in ways they already understand (CSS, DHTML, JavaScript). The increase in performance and smooth rendering is stunning as you will see in the demos that are part of this conversation. This is incredible news for web developers and web surfers. IE 9, surfing the GPU! Oh yeah.Enjoy.

Mike Taulty interviews Chris Lintott and Arfon Smith about the GalaxyZoo project. GalaxyZoo, hosted on GalaxyZoo.org, invites individuals to participate in Citizen Science and provides an easy to use interface for classifying galaxies.
Chris talks about the Galaxy Zoo and Citizen Science, followed by Arfon talking about the platform behind the project, and it’s migration from Rails/MySQL on Amazon to Windows Azure/SQL Azure.
The IE team is busy working on the next version of the world's most popular browser. IE 8 is the most widely used browser on Windows. IE 9 is currently in the oven and the IE team is ready to talk about what they're working on. Here, JavaScript engine team members John Montgomery, Steve Lucco and Shanku Niyogi give us an early look at the new JS engine that will ship with IE 9. As of the interview, it is on par with the latest performance numbers of the latest Firefox beta and making progress in catching up to Chrome's latest V8. Again, this is a really early look at where the JS engine is and where it's going (and what they've done, architecturally, to speed up IE's JS engine). Enjoy!
The IE team is busy working on the next version of the world's most popular browser. IE 8 is the most widely used browser on Windows. IE 9 is currently in the oven and the IE team is ready to talk about what they're working on. Here, IE GM Dean Hachamovitch introduces some of the key advances his team is making and leads us through the halls of IE (literarally) to learn from the engineers who are building the future of IE. John Hrvatin and Kris Krueger talk to us about where they are with improvements in IE 9's interoperability and standards support.
John Durant just returned from the Microsoft SharePoint Conference where a number of new SharePoint features were announced. In this episode he shares some of those features with us and describes how they can help developers in a variety of ways.
John will be doing a couple sessions at PDC09 which will also cover some of these features:
- Making a Killer Office Developer Demo
- Developing .NET Managed Applications Using the Microsoft Office 2010 Developer Platform
And here are some PDC09 sessions based on some of the other topics we discussed:
-
Developing Solutions with Business Connectivity Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
- Overview of SharePoint 2010 Programmability
- Document Assembly and Manipulation on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Using Word Automation Services and Open XML
Manuvir Das discusses the current state of Windows Azure. The last time we spoke was at last year's PDC when we announced Azure to the world. Here, we dig into hat's new today with Azure. How have people used Azure over the past year? What worked? What didn't work? Tune in. It's always great to chat with Manuvir and there's a lot of great info in this conversation.
Reactive Extensions for .NET, Rx, is here!!! Reactive Extensions team member and software developer Jeffrey Van Gogh shows us how to get started with Rx, how to install the bits, find the help documentation and add Rx into your visual studio project - all in 2 minutes!
