Windows .NET Blog

IIS 6 is Tops in Server Survey

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:31:43 -0500

Port80 Software develops security and performance tools for Microsoft IIS Servers. It released the results of a recent survey of server usage in Fortune 1000 companies, which states that IIS 6 passed IIS 5 for the first time as the leading web server platform, with a ranking of 36.5 percent. This also puts IIS 6 ahead of the Apache server, at least among Fortune 1000 sites.

Petzold Consulting on WPF for Wintellect

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:30:16 -0500

Training and consultant services firm Wintellect has announced that noted author and sometimes U-Haul driver Charles Petzold is consulting for the company, working with clients on Windows Presentation Foundation projects. Charles' latest book, 3D Programming for Windows, was released in July. He's worked with the company previously, delivering the keynote at Wintellect's Devscovery conference last May. Visit Wintellect's site for more info on its collaboration with Charles.

Cubicaller Add-in Products

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:08:24 -0500

The Cubicaller cubicle door bell gives your workmates a way to announce their presence at your desk. (It also gives the manufacturer a way to announce that it was able to talk you out of $12.) I see the Cubicaller market really taking off after I invent the Cubi-Bag-of-Flaming-Dog-Poo.

Silverlight Talks in SL and RL

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:07:37 -0500

Amanda Silver, Lead Program Manager for Visual Basic (and 50 Cent fan) is giving a talk in Second Life, Tuesday, July 31, 4 p.m. Pacific Time (which is also Second Life Time). The talk is being held on Visual Studio Island (Here's the SLURL). Amanda will be speaking in the Visual Studio Theater. Come early to get a good view -- the theater only seats about 60 avatars.

If you miss today's talk, Brad Abrams, GPM for the UI Framework and Services team is giving a talk on the Island on August 30, at 3:00 p.m. Brad will be discussing ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight. If you're new to Second Life and want more info before signing up, check out www.visualstudioisland.com. Also if it's dark out when you get to the island, you can always Crtl-Shift-Y to force the sun to noon. For more online Silverlight training check out Dr. Dobb's Sparkleball tutorial.

As for Real Life training, Tim Sneath has posted a healthy list of Silverlight and WPF training courses happening in RL all around the globe. The courses are being held throughout August and September by Microsoft partners, including Wintellect, Dunn Training, Developmentor, and others.

IronRuby Pre-Alpha released

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:26:16 -0500

Microsoft's John Lam announced the 0.1 Pre-Alpha release of Iron Ruby at the OSCON 2007.
IronRuby is an .NET implementation of the Ruby programming language and is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL), which allows users to view, modify, and redistribute the source code for either commercial or non-commercial purposes. JOhn also announced that they're inviting any interested parties to contribute source to the IronRuby libraries (although not to the compiler proper just yet).

You've accepted XAML into your Heart!

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:34:48 -0500

For all the true XAML believers, Debreuil Digital Works has created The Converted, a SWF to XAML conversion tool. The Converted processes swf files containing vector-based animations and sound, converting them into XAML code. Note that it does not process ActionScript events or embedded video. The full program is $249.00 and a "watermark" trial version is available too.
Of course, there is also the SWF2XAML tool that Mike Swanson created last year, but Mike's converter does not support audio export. Mike also created an Illustrator to XAML converter.

Silverlight Sparkleball Tutorial

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:47:45 -0500

Dr. Dobb's launched a Silverlight tutorial microsite that walks you through the creation of a breakout-style game called "Sparkleball." The tutorial requires Silverlight 1.1, Microsoft Expression Blend, and Microsoft Visual Studio Express or 2005. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be adding new demos and tutorials.

GOA Winforms in Silverlight and Flash

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:36:27 -0500

Last week NETiKA Tech announced the release of GOA WinForms 2.0 a collection of over 40 WinXP-style .NET System.Windows.Forms controls that you can use in Silverlight 1.1 and Flash 8 and 9 apps. The free version of GOA WinForms includes treeview, combobox, XamlCanvas, draggable and dockable toolbars and more. The Professional version, now in alpha, also includes a DataGrid control and other more-advanced controls. GOA WinForms for Silverlight is designed for Visual Studio 2008 (support for VS 2005 in the Pro version only).

Legacy VB6 and the Interop Form Toolkit

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 01:14:08 -0500

In Scott Swigart's latest video tutorial,Build .NET Controls for VB6 Apps, he shows how the Interop Form 2.0 toolkit lets you build .NET controls that are usable from within VB6. Scott builds a simple ping control in .NET that asks for an IP address to ping and then displays the results in a text box. After compiling the the user control, Scott, builds VB 6 form that seemlessly hosts it.

Improving the .NET 2.0 Collection Library

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 01:16:18 -0500

The .NET 2.0 Framework includes a standard collection library in namespace System.Collections.Generic (SCG). In their article, The C5 Generic Collection Library, Niels Kokholm and Peter Sestofttake a look at some of the missing features and limitations of the SCG. They designed the open-source C5 collection library to provide advanced functionality and support future forms of collection classes. The C5 collection library, works with Microsoft .NET 2.0 and Mono 1.2 and is available www.itu.dk/research/c5.

TechEd: It's Showtime!

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:42:41 -0500

If you're not in Orlando this week for TechEd, you can catch some of the keynotes and talks on-line at Virtual TechEd.
Mark Russinovich's talk on Windows Vista Kernel Changes is already available. Other videos available include the Monday keynote with Bob Muglia and an interview on the show floor with Microsoft�s Joe Marini about the new Visual Studio Shell. ~~On DotnetJunkies, Paul Mooney has also posted some of Scott Guthrie's TechEd talks.~~ Update: Paul's videos have been taken down, but you can read Scott's blog post about his Lap Around Silverlight talk at TechEd.

Video: Charting with ReportBuilder

Tue, 29 May 2007 20:25:11 -0500

In Scott Swigart's latest video tutorial, he shows how easy it is to add reports to your apps with the ReportBuilder control. Scott shows how you can access any ODBC data source, in this case Access. He builds a data query using querybuilder, customizes it to refine the results, then designs a report with charts.

Free Webinar: Bringing C++ to Vista

Wed, 23 May 2007 12:22:53 -0500

Sign up for a free webinar in June called Bringing C++ to Vista. Girish Ramakrishnan and Naren Karattup from Trolltech software will talk about some of the problems of getting the best features of Vista in your C++ =based apps. After the presentation attendees can interact with Girish and Naren.

WinHEC Keynotes

Tue, 15 May 2007 22:50:10 -0500

At the first-day keynote of WinHEC 2007, Bill Gates announced "Windows Server 2008" as the official name of Longhorn server, now in Beta 3. He featured some currently available technologies, such as Windows Rally wireless networking, in the first half of the keynote.

The second half focused on a few R&D projects and a look ahead at coming trends. Bill predicts that 64-bit processor will reach 100% market penetration in the server, desktop and mobile markets in the next couple of years. He also pointed to Microsoft's heavy investment in natural user interfaces such as voice and handwriting input. Microsoft is positioning itself to extend the traditional business and home computing networks to include cell phones in a variety of ways. See the whole day one keynote webcast archive.

Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich will be delivering the Wednesday keynote: "Windows Server Platform Internals", along with Mike Nash and Bill Laing. A live stream should be available Webnesday morning at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/default.mspx.

WiX Video

Tue, 08 May 2007 19:30:30 -0500

Check out Scott Swigart's latest video tutorial on the Windows Installer XML project. WiX is an open-source toolset for building an .msi file based off of a definition in an XML document. Scott explores some of the advantages and disadvantages over the typical setup project found in Visual Studio. For more on the WiX toolset see: http://wix.sourceforge.net/.