• The MSDN folks have a utility for creating custom help files from the online MSDN library. I didn’t realize MSDN even had a content service. This is tres useful.
• Jeff Atwood explains how error-filled the web is and how error-tolerant modern web browsers are. I’ve often argued that one of the keys to the rise of Visual Basic was because it was tolerant of sloppiness. It’s hard to argue with Jeff’s conclusion that “forgiveness by default is what works”.
• BizTalk Labs shipped an update to the Connectivity Service. It “now supports simple publish and subscribe eventing. This allows multiple clients to subscribe to a service and receive notifications.” Steve Maine has some details and a link to the MIX session he did with Don.
• Larry O’Brein is happy about IronRuby, but was hoping to see a new Ruby/C# hybrid language. Even though it’s his “#1 administrative programming language”, he specifically hopes for a new language so would “have the flexibility to evolve the language.” But Larry, MSFT already had an dynamic administrative language that it can evolve! It’s called PowerShell…
• The XNA folks have shipped a bunch of new content, including the Racing Game Starter Kit.
• Machinima is growing up fast. I just discovered iClone, a real-time 3D animation filmmaking tool. You know, my birthday is coming up later this month…

Dare Obasanjo had an insightful post on copyright and how it works a few days ago. Typically, I would simply dump this into my del.icio.us favorites and FeedBurner would dutifully insert it into my RSS feed. However, I’m calling it out on my blog proper because I loved this analogy:

Pointing out that copyright infringement doesn’t meet some 17th century definition of the verb “steal” because the original property isn’t changing hands is like arguing that calling your ex-girlfriend a slut isn’t libel because you only said it to people over IM.

The cross platform CLR isn’t the only big news out of MIX this week. Other big news includes:

• The Dynamic Language Runtime, an extension to the CLR that implements typical dynamic language features. According to Jim Hugunin, this will make it “dramatically easier to build high-quality dynamic language implementations on .NET.” Also, it works with Silverlight’s CLR. And we’ll be releasing the source, like we do with IronPython.
• We’re building four dynamic languages on top of the DLR: IronPython v2, JavaScript, Visual Basic “10″ (aka VBx) and IronRuby. He-man Programmer John Lam has a screencast demonstrating these the languages interoping on Silverlight. You can get an alpha of the new IPy which includes the DLR bits.
• Expression Studio is available, as is the first preview of Blend v2, which allows you to target Silverlight. There’s also a Silverlight targeting Media Encoder preview available.
• Projects Astoria and Jasper are two new data access incubation projects. Astoria is for exposing your data as data services for consumption by other clients (think mashups) while Jasper is for quickly writing code that access databases. Both appear to build on the new ADO.NET Entity Framework that’s shipping in VS Orcassometime after VS Orcas.
• Windows Live has a new Contacts API, Spaces API and Feeds, a media hosting/streaming service for Silverlight and simpler terms of use and pricing model based on the number unique users. “Sites or Web applications with fewer than one million UUs pay no fees.”
• All the MIX sessions are getting posted in very quickly – about a day after the session. The sessions are available for download a WMV or to view using a Silverlight based viewer. Nice.

A few quick thoughts on these announcements:

• On the subject of dynamic languages, IronRuby is probably the biggest news since we already have various implementations of the other languages. I wonder how well it will support Rails? ASP.NET already has a model for dynamic language support that I would assume IronRuby will plug into eventually. Between that, rumblings of MVC support for ASP.NET and Project Jasper, you’ve covered most of the surface area Rails covers. But I would assume many folks would like to see RoR proper running under IronRuby on ASP.NET.
• I wonder what the hosting model for the Silverlight CLR looks like? According to the “essential architecture“, Silverlight includes the .NET Framework, the Core Presentation Framework and the Browser Host. But can you host somewhere other than the browser?
• Astoria sounds like web service based ODBC. While there are scenarios where that makes sense, I’m not sure I like the idea of delegating control of my data outside the service like that. Udi Dahan is also skeptical of this approach.

Update: The ADO.NET team recently announced that Entity Framework will ship “during the first half of 2008 as an update to the Orcas release of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio”. (h/t Tomas Restrpro)

While I was crusing the zoo with the family on Monday, everyone else was focused on the big announcement coming out of MIX. Short version of the press release: the next version of Silverlight contains a small, cross platform CLR. As you might imagine, this is somewhat significant. Check out reaction from TechCrunch, Sam Gentile and Scott Hanselman.

A year ago, I wrote “Where else should the CLR live?” At the time, I was talking about XNA (which had just been announced) though I was aware of the plans around what I think is now officially called CoreCLR (got the name from Scott’s post). The first time I heard about this, it literally floored me. Part of me is surprised that in the year since then the news didn’t leak and no one figured it out. I mean, doesn’t it seem sorta obvious, in retrospect, that a Silverlight should run on CLR? I mean, if we can shrink the CLR down to fit on a watch, getting it into the browser seems like a no-brainer. On the other hand, it’s such a huge departure from “Windows, Windows, Windows” that I wonder if most people had (have?) a hard time wrapping their mind around it.

(Actually, in searching for CoreCLR, I discovered this post from last summer basically confirming “the CoreCLR team working on the Macintosh version of the MiniCLR that’s going into WPF/E”. So it did leak, but it seems to have been met with significant skepticism and didn’t make much news. )

Now that you know all about Silverlight and CoreCLR, go back and re-read my Virtuous Cycle of Virtual Platforms post. Especially the last paragraph (complete with the bad grammar):

If the end user isn’t committed to a virtual platform like Flash, then who is? The developers who build software for that virtual platform. This is Virtuous Cycle of Virtual Platforms between the platform and developers instead of the platform and users. In the old model, developers go where the users are. In the new model, users go to where developers are. And developers go where they can be most effective.

Silverlight vs Flash looks to me like the next big platform war competition. It’s just getting started, so you can’t say with any certainty which platform will be “most effective”. But early Silverlight reviews are pretty impressive. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote that Silverlight “makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy”. That doesn’t erase Flash Player’s head start in the RIA space, but it certainly makes catching and surpassing Flash sound feasible. I suspect most people didn’t think that sounded at all feasible last week.

Of course, while catching Flash may sound feasible, Microsoft is a long way from achieving that goal. While the point of my earlier post is that that market penetration doesn’t provide much advantage in the virtual platform market, Adobe does derive significant advantage from shipping nine versions of Flash while we haven’t quite shipped the first version of Silverlight yet. Also, while I’m fairly sure the number of .NET developers far exceeds the number of Flash developers (anyone have hard numbers?), I would also expect that the number designers using Flash far exceeds the number of designers using Expression (given that MSFT only just shipped Expression on this week). I believe an important facet to the Silverlight / Flash platform competition will be a race to woo the competitor’s core constituency. Can Microsoft woo more designers with Expression than Adobe can woo developers with Flex? We’ll see.

I’m also curious to see how people’s perspective of Adobe’s Apollo project changes in the wake of the Silverlight/CoreCLR announcement. From my perspective, both Microsoft and Adobe are trying to unify web and desktop development. Not surprisingly, each is trying to unify around the model where they’re stronger: Apollo takes the web development paradigm (Flash, HTML, AJAX and JavaScript) to the desktop while Silverlight takes desktop development paradigm (WPF, CLR) to the web. I’m sure you can guess which paradigm I think will be more successful, but how will the market react? Again, we’ll see.

Obviously, there’s some fairly big news coming out of Las Vegas this week. I’ll get to that either later today or tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s what I did with my parents this past weekend.

• My parents arrived Thursday at the same time Patrick has to be dropped off for school. My office is fairly close to his school, so Julie dropped him off with me on her way to the airport. He and I ate lunch together and then I took him to school. Always fun to spend extra time with the kids.
• Friday was Take Your Dad to Work day – at least it was for me. We had a team lunch out and he sat in on a couple of meetings. He’s spent quite a bit of time on IPv6 recently, so infrastructure discussions like my group’s are right up his alley. According to one of my team’s PMs, my meeting behavior is “much better” when he’s around.
• Saturday, we went to the Museum of Flight. I don’t know who was more excited, my son or my father. Dad’s favorite plane is the Blackbird, so he really enjoyed sitting in the SR-71 cockpit. It was raining the last time we went to the museum, so this was the first time I had seen Air Force One and the Concorde.
• Sunday, we watched the Mariners beat the Royals. It’s been three long years in the basement for M’s fans, but they have been slowly getting better year over year. Not sure they can make the playoffs this year, but maybe they can at least finish over .500.
• Yesterday, we went to the Woodland Park Zoo. My parents are members of FONZ and my kids love the Zoo. We had fun, though after three and a half days of “go go go” with my parents the kids were a bit worn down. The gorillas were very active, banging on the glass and running away – sort of the gorilla version of ding dong ditch. Another highlight was getting to see the tiger cub.
• My parents flew home last night on the red eye, and everyone is very sad to see them go. It had been about eight months since we had seen them. Here’s hoping it won’t be that long before the next visit.