DLR & Silverlight

Microsoft Feast Gift: 3 FREE MS Press Books (LINQ, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight)

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:50:06 GMT

Today is the primary day of Muslim's ADHA (Sacrifice) feast. I'm enjoying it with family activities in my grandmother's house and few hours later my uncle's house. Thanks God both have wireless Internet connectivity. This how I could still check my Google Reader items (see shared items), while showing my profile pictures to my uncle's little daughter and other kids from the family!

Then I noticed that the feast has a great gift, coming from Microsoft this time. I found that Microsoft has opened 3 MS Press books completely FREE for public.

The books are:

Introducing Microsoft LINQ by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo (ISBN: 9780735623910)
This practical guide covers Language Integrated Query (LINQ) syntax fundamentals, LINQ to ADO.NET, and LINQ to XML. The e-book includes the entire contents of this printed book!
Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX by Dino Esposito (ISBN: 9780735624139)
Learn about the February 2007 release of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0, including an overview and the control toolkit.
Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 by Laurence Moroney (ISBN: 9780735625396)
Learn how to use Silverlight to simplify the way you implement compelling user experiences for the Web. Discover how to support an object-oriented program model with JavaScript.

Download your feast gift FREE from Microsoft.

Note: Thanks to Sreenivas Mogullapalli, a fellow GWB guy, for spreading this gift news.

Technorati Tags: FREE,book,ebook,Microsoft Press,MS Press,LINQ,ASP.NEt AJAX,Silverlight

More Details on Coming .NET Web Products Roadmap

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:23:41 GMT

Yesterday I referred to Scott Guthrie's post about the roadmap for coming .NET web related products, highlighting Silverlight 2.0 and ASP.NET MVC framework especially.

Now, Mohamed Tayseer (my current team mate and complement in development!) sent me link to a detailed post by Roger Jennings, with many discussions and references related to these products. A must read for anyone who read the previous post.

Read the post.

First ASP.NET MVC Framework Preview Next Week & Silverlight 1.1 Now Silverlight 2.0

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:37:42 GMT

Yeah, finally the long awaited preview of ASP.NET MVC Framework will be available, Yeah, I'm tired like you all of seeing so many sample codes without a way to touch them or try other things out.
Also Silverlight 1.1 will keep on evolving and now has the versionning it deserves, Silverlight 2.0, which is not just a name of course, but comes with broader support of WPF and rich controls and many other features.

These are only few of many super interesting announcements that Scott Guthrie [MSFT] posted earlier today about .NET Products Roadmap for Web Development. Other interesing stuff to come includes more AJAX extensions and ASP.NET Extensions in general.

Read the announcement.

Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Tools for Visual Studio 2008 Updated for RTM

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:57:19 GMT

Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 have just been updated to work with the final version (RTM) of VS 2008.
It's not yet available on the Silverlight official community website, but the announcement and download link are already available on Scott Guthrie's weblog.

Dear Silverlight...

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:11:53 GMT

Quote from Microsoft Australia MSDN Flash Issue for Monday, 10 September 2007:

Dear Silverlight,

What do you say to a son who is all grown up and has finally hit the big wide world? This being your week for RTW (Release To Web), I thought it appropriate to write you a letter telling you just how proud your mother and I are of you.

I know uncle Scott has written extensively about your coming of age, but I thought I'd express my thoughts in this letter.

Thanks to you WMV and VC-1 content will now be liberated online forever. Our friends and family can now enjoy high-def content that performs amazingly well, just look at your cousins Halo 3, Discovery Asia and MLB. Even aunty MacPhee with her lazy eye can now watch high-def online video content thanks to you.

Your mother and I even got a note from our neighbor, Tafiti, telling us that she is having a great time experimenting with you and she even built a very innovative front end to her existing live search capability.

We also heard that you've finally told everyone that you're working with some guy called Linux. Is this true? We think it's great that you're embracing everyone around you. We've always seen that side of you, but now others can too.

Ohh, and before I forget, your brother Windows Media Encoder sent us a note, has also gone out into full release too. Now folks can build great looking Silverlight video apps and encode all with this great addition to the Expression Suite.

And before I close off, I thought I'd remind you that your genius uncle Mike has finally released all of the videos from Remix Australia. There are also a bunch of videos from Virtual Tech.Ed which have just gone online too.

Ok, I should sign off. Good luck out there and we look forward to see what others are doing with you.

Lots of love, dad

Ruby soon (Well, maybe!) - What are the chances anyway?

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 14:27:00 GMT

Since Rails, everybody has turned to see what Ruby looks like, why was it the language that had such a great framework built in top of. For most .NET developers including me, that wasn't so easy, while we are already surrounded with new stuff coming to our paradigm.
Now that everything is almost stable, .NET 3.0 has turned into a normal part of our applications in certain situations, C# 3.5 seems to be getting the final touches and so is .NET 3.5/VS2008, I tend to believe it's time for checking different areas. Enterprise level design patterns (like Dependency Injection), new interesting tools/development stages (like Silverlight), cool 4rd party platforms to integrate with (like Facebook Applications platform) as well as scripting languages (like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PowerShell) are the clearest examples.

I'm clearly focusing on developer oriented scripting languages here (so, Powershell is off the scope of this post, as well as JavaScript for Silverlight cause that's strictly tied to it, and, Silverlight as whole, also Facebook Applications, are all off the post scope).

From a Microsoft targeting developer perspective, the implementations that would interest me are Managed Jscript, IronPython , and IronRuby. Managed Jscript has a few problems though for me: I already know about it ! (that was one of my topics in DemoDay II), it's sort of late than ECMAScript 4 standard, it has no focused community or any updates since initial release (although JavaScript in general has a big community. I'm not saying it's diing or so). IronPython also although has the best community and is the big gamer in the DLR is kind of unfriendly to me. The fact that the language is so depending on white space (indentation) just pits me . Besides that I do not expect good IDE support (intellisense, debugging) soon from VS for it soon for the same reason.

So, who's left? Oh yeah, IronRuby . As with IronPython, I pretty much like the guy standing behind the language. I used to say that the syntax is weird for me and feels "flipped", but it's not weird enough to feel bad about it. It's in it's early stages too but I expect it to evolve quickly. Actually, it's a good thing that the it's still in early stages cause it has a more open policy when it comes to community participations of the language implementation source code (more on that later in the same post). I don't have time of course but I think I'll try to devote any possible free time (when I'm not spending it on a concert of course ) and have the honor of a single line of code in the main repository. Yeah, I know it's also supported in Silverlight 1.1. I also didn't forget that this will mean I'll soon be able to look at Rails as well!
Actually, what inspired me to write all this is that John Lam [MSFT], the guy behind IronRuby has just posted a very simple screencast on how to get started by having repository up on your machine, and compile the language source code (they do not provide binaries now cause the language is still in early stages I guess, so, u have to build the source code to get them)

The source code is hosted on RubyForge. They're using SVN. Watch the screencast and it'll tell you about it. You can also keep updated through the offical site www.IronRuby.NET or John Lam's Weblog.

Silverlight 1.0 Released, Silverlight for linux announced, Silverlight 1.1 Updates

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:54:34 GMT

These all are Scott Guthrie [MSFT]'s announcements. Check them out!

Quotes from the announcements post:

Silverlight 1.0:

Some of its features include:

Built-in codec support for playing VC-1 and WMV video, and MP3 and WMA audio within a browser. The VC-1 codec is a big step forward for incorporating media within a web experience - since it supports very efficiently playing high-quality, high definition video in the browser. It is a standards-based media format that is implemented in all HD-DVD and Blueray DVD players, and is supported by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, XBOX 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Windows Media Centers (enabling you to encode content once and run it on all of these devices + Silverlight unmodified). It enables you to use a huge library of existing video content and provides access to the broad ecosystem of existing Windows Media tools, components, vendors and hardware.

Silverlight supports the ability to progressively download and play media content from any web-server. You can point Silverlight at any URL containing video/audio media content, and it will download it and enable you to play it within the browser. No special server software is required, and Silverlight can work with any web-server (including Apache on Linux). We'll also be releasing an IIS 7.0 media pack that enables rich bandwidth throttling features that you can enable on your web-server for free.

Silverlight for Linux:

Over the last few months we've been working to enable Silverlight support on Linux, and today we are announcing a formal partnership with Novell to provide a great Silverlight implementation for Linux. Microsoft will be delivering Silverlight Media Codecs for Linux, and Novell will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called "Moonlight".

Moonlight will run on all Linux distributions, and support FireFox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers. Moonlight will support both the JavaScript programming model available in Silverlight 1.0, as well as the full .NET programming model we will enable in Silverlight 1.1. Below is a screen-shot of the Silverlight 1.1 Flight-Picker application I built in my keynote at MIX running on Linux using Moonlight;

Silverlight 1.1:

Silverlight 1.1 will include a cross-platform version of the .NET Framework, and will enable a rich .NET development experience in the browser. It will support a WPF programming model for UI - including support for an extensible control model, layout management, data-binding, control skinning, and a rich set of built-in controls. It will also include a subset of the full .NET Framework base class library you use today, including support for collections, generics, IO, threading, globalization, networking (including sockets, web-services and REST support), HTML DOM, XML, local storage, and LINQ.

You'll be able to use any .NET language to develop a Silverlight application (VB, C#, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Pascal, and more).

Resources:

Visit the www.silverlight.net community site to learn more about Silverlight and how to get started with it (and visit the Silverlight video page for free short videos on how to develop with it). You might also want to watch this new Channel9 video from today with me talking about Silverlight:

You can use any text editor to build Silverlight applications. If you have VS 2008 or the free Visual Web Developer Express 2008 edition, you can download this library to get JavaScript intellisense for Silverlight 1.0. If you are building .NET applications using the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, you can download the Silverlight Tools for VS 2008 Alpha and Expression Blend Preview.

Few Silverlight Resources

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:23:13 GMT

Tim Sneath - Musings of a Client Platform Technical Evangelist
WYNAPSE.com
- Silverlight Article Links
- Silverlight Articles
- Silverlight Tutorials
- WynApse Blog - Technical Musings
POKE 53280,0 - Pete Brown's Blog
Liquid Boy - AKA AdvertBoy

Update:

Silverlight Rocks - Silverlight Community
Silverlight Games 101 - Blog, Silverlight 1.1/C#
Index of Silverlight Games - Most with Source

IronPython 2.0 Alpha2 Released

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:33:36 GMT

The new release of IronPython 2.0, which is alpha2 sounds to be mainly some restructuring and fixes. Not bad anyway. The work they state have done sounds like it's DLR wide, that'd be really great if true! Why? For other people waiting for IronRuby and people like me interested in Managed JS of course .
However, no Silverlight integration, no ASP.NET version, still single engine instance, and, as Alpha 1, no Visual Studio SDK project/item template samples .
Anyway, read more and download.

SilverKey Demo Day 2 (SKDD2) FREE Registration - The 07/07/07 Event

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:59:40 GMT

Yesterday we started accepting FREE registration for the 2nd Demo Day. If you remember from the 1st one, Demo Day is an event we love to hold being our way to expose knowledge and most importantly excitement regarding the latest pre-release technologies to the developer community in Egypt, mainly focusing on technologies bound to Microsoft, as our chosen method of getting things done, plus other technical inspirations that we'd think most developers would benefit from, at least as a new way of thinking.

Last Demo Day we talked about C#3.0, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX (ATLAS by then, that was my session), UI Design, and Agile project management. This year we are planned to include: (Note: links lead to speakers' blogs)

Jasper (Based on Entity Framework fundamentals, and how RAD that is)
IronPython (vs. C#3.0 - A debate between static and dynamic languages supported by MS)
Silverlight (Introducing Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 - including Architecture and showing inner power)
CLR By XAML (From WPF, to Silverlight, to MS Surface, the common language)
WCF (Answering the BIG question "What's SOA?", and how to apply it using WCF)
3D Game Development on Windows Platform (Using Torque game engine)
JavaScript (Deep into the language not various implementations, also includes Managed JScript) - By me
WF (A look at the practical scenarios, not the typical demos)
LINQ For XML (A master insight on how to approach maximum data processing productivity without pain, even with XML!)
Software Testing (Using Open Source .NET Tools)
SEO for Programmers (What web developers should "get" for ) - By me
Un-conference Session (An open mic session for open discussions on future technologies)

The conference this time will be in the International Conference Center (Arabic: قاعة المؤتمرات), Mankaure Hall (Arabic: قاعة منقرع), on July 7, 2007. Yeah, that's 07/07/07

check the conference website: http://www.demoday.us/ for more information about the sessions and speakers.

Also that's where you need to go in order to get your FREE REGISTRATION.

If you have been to our 1st Demo Day, you might also like to check its history page.

See you there

Update [Saturday, June 23rd, 2007]: