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Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Morning Coffee 154

Did you see yesterday's Dilbert cartoon? Classic.
MIX isn't the only Microsoft conference this week. It's also time for the annual MS Research TechFest conference. It actually started yesterday, with a keynote from Rick Rashid and Craig Mundy (available on demand). I'll be heading up there later today and will blog everything I saw that is public, like I did last year. In the meantime, you can check out some cool MS Research projects on the TechFest video page.
Speaking of MS Research, they've published the Singularity source code (for academic and non-commercial purposes) on CodePlex. Singularity is research OS "focused on the construction of dependable systems". I've wanted to play with this, but I've never had the time. Frankly, that hasn't changed, but now that it's available to the community, I'm hoping I can live vicariously thru other people hacking around with it.
Some announcements coming out of MIX won't be a surprise to anyone:
- The IE Team blog has been discussing IE8 quite a bit of late, and the folks of LiveSide are reporting the IE8 Readiness Toolkit is already up ~~(download links aren't live yet)~~. There are also a bunch of developer whitepapers on Code Gallery. Update: the install links are live.
- Scott Guthrie already announced that Silverlight 2.0 would go beta at MIX, and Neo @ SilverlightExamples has all the links for the runtime, docs and the SDK.
- Scott also already announced a new preview drop of ASP.NET MVC, which you can get from the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions download page.
Here some primarily "new" news from MIX:.

I'm not sure which team owns it, but I'd say the biggest previously-unannounced news was SQL Server Data Services (aka SSDS), a "highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services." In other words, SQL in the sky. There's a free beta sometime this month you can sign up for. Very cool, though no word on what it's going to cost. If you're interested in this, I'd keep an I on the Data Platform Insider blog.
John Lam announces the Dynamic Silverlight extension that lets you run DLR languages on Silverlight. Given that they talked about this last year, I'm not sure it's really "news", but John provides lots of gory details so it made the cute. But are they really using "DSL" as the acronym for this? Guys, that acronym's already taken.
Mary Jo Foley has a scoop on Silverlight for Nokia Symbian mobile phones.
There's a new beta of Expression Studio 2 as well as a separate Expression Blend 2.5 preview for Silverlight 2. Soma has the details. This isn't really a surprise, but I hadn't seen any news on new versions of all the Expression Studio products.

Posted By Harry Pierson at 11:27 AM Pacific Standard Time

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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Morning Coffee 125

So I wasn't quite as close to the end of Dead Rising as I thought I was. Those who've played the game thru will understand.
After their promising start, the Capitals lost yet again. At the 20 game point, they're now 6-13-1 for a league-worst 13 points. I think we're at the point where they need to fire Glen Hanlon. Nothing personal Glen, but it's not getting done. The only problem is who you would replace him with? Bob Hartley? Uh, no thanks. I think most Caps fans want Dale Hunter, but I think he's too involved with the London Knights - he's co-owner, president and head coach. But if we could get Dale, I'm guessing Glen would be gone in a heartbeat.
The XNA team blog announced that XNA Game Studio 2.0's beta has released. The download is available from Creators Club Online. The big new feature in this release is network support, and they've shipped a new starter kit to get you started.
In addition to shipping VS08 & .NET FX 3.5, a new CTP of SQL 2008 shipped yesterday. I couldn't find a good overview of what's new, but the SQL Express team has a post on what's new in just their corner of this release. (via Jesus Rodriguez)
In more "I know it's Thanksgiving week, but we're shipping anyway" news, the Ruby.NET folks have shipped v0.9 - the first release since transferring control to the community. Does it run Rails? Not yet, but apparently they're "close to getting Ruby on Rails to run successfully". One thing that caught my eye is that it includes VS integration. Nice.

Posted By Harry Pierson at 8:53 AM Pacific Standard Time

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