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A confession: I'm really bad at tipping. It's not that I'm deliberately ungenerous, but simply that I never know how much to give. The UK isn't really a nation for tips: outside of restaurants, it's not something that's particularly expected, which means that here in the US I'm a complete novice at the art. The result is that sometimes I lavish cash like Sinatra on surly and unhelpful staff, while at other times I completely blow an opportunity to recognize excellent service. To my embarrassment, I've only lately realized that it's polite to tip housekeeping staff at hotels. I determined to rectify my error this week while staying at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas for an event, and so I dutifully left a small amount on my bed when I left for the day. To my surprise, when I returned to my serviced room, I noticed that my toiletries had been "upgraded" from the uninspiring generic items that first adorned my room to some rather impressive high-end replacements. Next morning, I Read More...
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I'm going to be "live blogging" the Steve Ballmer keynote this afternoon at this URL. Keep this blog post bookmarked and start hitting "refresh" shortly after the keynote starts at 1pm Pacific / 9pm GMT. Or simply tune in to the webcast ( 750kbps , 300kbps , 100kbps ) and watch it live yourself! 1:04pm - Ray Winninger (my boss!) is on stage to announce MIX09, taking place here at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas between March 18th-20th, 2009. No - registration hasn't opened yet! 1:07pm - Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer are now sitting in comfy chairs, ready for Q&A. 1:08pm - Guy: why do you want to buy Yahoo? Steve: we've shown tenacity around advertising. Search is the killer feature for online advertising. You could say that we're not where we'd like to be, but we're very committed. Yahoo seems to be a way to accelerate that because of the required critical mass. "What's the current state of the offer?" Steve: We've made an offer - that's all I can say! Read More...
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I mentioned yesterday that the Hard Rock memorabilia application was live already at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com . The AOL Silverlight-based mail client is not live yet, but they've just opened up their pre-registration site for testers who want to be the first to try out the new application, in just a few weeks' time. You can sign up here: http://ria.mail.aol.com/ . In case you didn't see the demo of this application either at the keynote or online, it's cool because it shows how Silverlight isn't just about flashy gradients or animations, but it's emerging as a solid RIA framework for building web-based applications that have the performance of a desktop application. It's not that you can't build a mail client in AJAX, obviously, but having client-side compiled .NET code, isolated storage for caching and a powerful rendering engine that supports control templates means that you're not relying on a chatty back-and-forth with a high latency remote web server. I've been using the application Read More...
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We're already starting to see some cool samples that use Silverlight 2 really effectively. Prior to MIX, we had a small private beta running to get some early feedback on the builds that we were producing, and a few folk made really good use of this time to build some interesting ideas out. This one is one of my favorites: TextGlow is a Silverlight 2 application that reads Word .docx files. The Open XML format is an ECMA-ratified standard, and having a web-based runtime with the power Silverlight makes it possible to accomplish something that I don't think you could do easily with any other technology. TextGlow downloads Word documents asynchronously, opens them as ZIP files, parses them with LINQ-to-XML and then renders them using the WPF-based text and graphics APIs. This is a big deal, and not just because it's a cool Silverlight sample. In years gone by, if you wanted to share a document on the web, you'd typically have converted it to PDF format (assuming you had the full version of Read More...
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Here's a consolidated list of all the key downloads you'll need to update your developer workstation to the latest and greatest technologies announced this morning: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 (x86) Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 (x64) Windows XP (x86) Windows Server 2003 SP2 (x86) Windows Server 2003 SP2 / Windows XP (x64) Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Runtime Silverlight 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 and SDK Expression Studio 2 Beta (contains Blend, Design, Encoder, Media and Web) Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 A couple of tips: The Silverlight 2 Tools release (third item above) includes Silverlight 2. You don't need to install the runtime separately first: just run the tools installer and you'll have everything you need. The Visual Studio extensions don't work with the Express editions - make sure you've got the full Visual Studio 2008 installed before attempting to install them. If you installed Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, uninstall Read More...
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I'm going to try to keep up a live blog this morning through the keynote to provide folk with an Engadget-style blow-by-blow account of proceedings. Keep hitting refresh on this entry to see the latest news as it comes. 9:30am - Ray Ozzie is on stage promptly. In a few minutes, we'll show you IE8 and Silverlight 2. Wanted to first spend some time framing the big picture so that these individual releases don't seem random. Advertising is the economic engine that powers the Internet, and it's innovation in experiences that provide the fuel. Online advertising is predicted to increase from $40bn to $80bn over the next three years. Microsoft will do our part to ensure a vibrant ad ecosystem on the web. 9:35am - Three core principles driving our strategy: Firstly, thinking of the web as a hub of our social, technology and personal experiences. Linking, tagging and sharing will become as commonplace as File / Open and Save. The quaint concept of one PC or device per person will give way to a Read More...
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At last, the mad rush is over. The run-up to a conference like MIX is always frantic: for me, the first three weeks in February involved a constant juggle of competing priorities. With the exception of one last-minute firedrill, the worst was over by late Friday afternoon. Now it's the calm before the storm; it's too late to fix bugs, to rewrite labs, to rearrange the schedule! Instead, it's a perfect time to write a few blog entries. I'm looking forward to meeting a number of you at the event (do stop me and say hi if you see me!), but I know that the vast majority of folk reading this aren't able to join us in Las Vegas for various reasons. It's therefore my goal over the next few days to relay as many of the highlights as schedule permits. So what's worth looking out for over the next day or two? Firstly, if you haven't seen Scott Guthrie's blog over the last week, you should check out his two most recent posts on Silverlight 2. I never understood how Scott managed to write such in-depth Read More...
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The MySpace Developer Platform is now online, sort of. Hats off to these guys for shipping, although at this time, you can only play by invite only, which they are hand picking, according to their blog . The other slightly frustrating thing Read More...
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Just wanted to remind folk to register for MIX08 ! Registrations are coming in thick and fast, and last year we sold out unexpectedly quickly, leaving a whole bunch of folk battering down the doors to try and figure out ways to get an exception granted. The fire marshals impose strict limits on attendance (the importance of which was brought home by the recent Monte Carlo Hotel fire ). Scott Guthrie has just trailed some of the announcements from MIX08 in the second part of a Channel 9 interview , but there's a huge quantity and depth of content that we're holding back for the conference. Of course, you'll be able to download all the software we release after the event even if you're not physically there, but you'll miss all the ancillary activities and depth content that makes an event like this worthwhile. Hope to see some of you there! Read More...
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Have you seen Flotzam ? It's a fun mash-up that Karsten and Tim put together that aggregates a bunch of different data sources: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and indeed any general RSS feed. You can install it either as an application or a screen saver, and it's a nice way to see what's going on out there on the "tubes". Karsten has coined the term panopticon to describe it (from the Greek, meaning all seeing ); to me, this feels like it has the potential to form the first step of a project to build the ultimate, pluggable, modular social networking client. Being a WPF application, Flotzam can be easily restyled. From the enter/exit transitions for new items to the overall visual look and feel of the Flotzam interface, you can do almost anything you want just by tweaking the XAML mark-up. And with MIX08 selling out quickly (hope you've registered), the team thought it would be fun to put together a little contest that gives you the chance to experiment with WPF by creating Read More...
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It's been gratifying to see how much excitement there is out there about Silverlight. We've barely started the engines yet, but we've already had a number of big sites launch their first Silverlight experiences, and of course plenty of stuff underway that we'll be revealing over the coming months. Many .NET developers are naturally interested in the next release, which is when we'll introduce support for C# and Visual Basic development based on the .NET Framework. Although we haven't released any new major updates to the alpha developer preview of this functionality since MIX07, we're opening the kimono a little today to provide a bit more transparency in our schedule. Firstly, we're announcing today that we're renaming Silverlight 1.1 to Silverlight 2.0 . As we've been building out the feature set for Silverlight v.Next, it's been becoming increasingly clear that this is a big release. Adding together the Common Language Runtime, Base Class Libraries, Dynamic Language Runtime, the UI Frameworks, Read More...
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