Demos & Betas

We held a 2.5 hour presentation about .NET Core at the Betabit office in Rotterdam on March 29th. Where ‘we’ means my colleague Oscar van Tol and myself. We ended up having way too much content for the evening. We decided to host a hands-on workshop for those interested. At that workshop we will not only show .NET Core, but also enable you to have a go at it yourself. The location will most probably be the Betabit office in Utrecht because it’s located more central. Stay tuned for more info on the details of the workshop.

Earlier this week the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit was held. On 10 was on the scene, and has a nice movie about the Sphere. For the entire article @ on 10, have a look over here: https://on10.net/blogs/laura/Sphere-multi-touch-computing/.

This morning I found a mail in my inbox telling me I was invited to Live Mesh. That’s a nice start of the weekend, so thanks Jan! The Live Desktop user interface looks pretty cool, and it almost feels like a real desktop. But that part of Live Mesh is pretty much like Live SkyDrive: a big online disk for you to put stuff on. Lots of stuff. 5 Gigabytes worth of stuf… 😉

The TED website actually explains for me why you should watch Stephen Lawler’s talk on Virtual Earth{.}:

Why you should listen to him:

Microsoft’s Stephen Lawler offers a tour of Virtual Earth that not only reveals the power and potential of the software itself, but also gives a global glimpse of the new virtual frontier of digital globes, the 3D Web and the metaverse.
Lawler also explores the enormous effort it takes to create the fluid blending and shifting between the multiple views and resolutions of Virtual Earth. From the satellites and airplanes that gather photo data for a top-down view to the ground vehicles and headgear-wearing pedestrians who canvas the ground for an eye-level perspective — all of it represents a monumental effort of logistics and mechanics.

I already stated it at Paul Gielens’ post about the SQL Server 2008 CTP: software (development) is about to hit puberty, if it hasn’t done so already. Looking at the rate (big!) new things are coming our way, you have to agree we’re entering a new level in software (development). Take a look at things like AJAX, the upcoming entity framework combined with SQL Server 2008, Acropolis, the upcoming versions of the .NET framework, Microsoft Surface and many, many more. Probably just like lots of you out there, I’m just happy to be in this business at these (exciting) times.

I tried using Windows Live Writer as soon as it got out, but because of proxy settings at the company I was working publishing posts wasn’t possible. I only now got time to try it at home, because I’ve been at home ill the past days. I’m still not 100% well, but I’ll keep quiet to get well soon. So maybe it’s better if I go and rest now…

Google added another cool search to their labs: Google Code search. Find code written in almost any language, and under almost any license. Have a look at advanced code search and see the possibilities. If the codebase that is searched is big enough, this might be a good step into getting developers to use Google if they’re looking for a piece of code (when they’re that not doing that already…).

Today I stumbled upon the Dutch Microsoft blogs and found an interesting post at the blog of Robert Fransen: the IE Developer Toolbar beta is available! The Toolbar offers you lots of handy features:

If you’re interested in Visual Studio 2005, and especially ASP.NET 2.0, visit this site: https://beta.asp.net/ It’s an official Microsoft beta site running ASP.NET 2.0. Including forum, a control gallery, tutorials, starter kits and many more!

Microsoft has released a beta for the program codenamed ‘Acrylic’. According to some people this might be Microsofts attempt to compete with Adobe, because it is said the program is the ideal combination of vector based graphics (Illustrator) and pixel based graphics (Photoshop). Is this Microsofts answer to the domination of Adobe in the graphics department?

Last friday Chris Wilton posted about IE7 Beta on the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog (IEBlog). The two most important features for IE 7:

• Support for the alpha channel in PNG images.
• CSS standards compliance!

Furthermore, it’s nice to know not only Visual Studio 2005 will be released this summer…