Paul Mooney

Getting Ready for CES

CES...Here We Come!!

CardSpace on GeekSpeak

MSDN Webcast: MSDN geekspeak: CardSpace, Why Should You Care, Who's Using It Today, and How?    

Wednesday, January 02, 2008 12:00 PM PST

In this installment of MSDN geekSpeak, Michele Leroux Bustamante discusses real-world implementation considerations around Windows CardSpace. If you have a question or comment you would like us to address during the webcast, visit the GeekSpeak blog.

SQL Server 2008 Are You Ready?

Get a head start on establishing your skills and credentials in SQL Server 2008 technologies.
Microsoft Learning offers a complete set of training resources and streamlined certification paths to help you stand out in your field.

Additional Microsoft Learning resources are added on a regular basis — bookmark this site and check back often.

Robotics Studio Christmas

The Box

Nice gesture, a Robotics Studio Christmas. Just last week I got to see a Lego Mindstorms project kit at our XNA and Robotic Studio Madness Event in Malvern PA.

Visual Studio Team System 2008

Visual Studio Team System 2008 is an integrated Application Lifecycle Management ALM solution with tools, processes, and guidance to help everyone on the team improve their skills and work more effectively together. Visual Studio Team System enables members of your team to:

• Collaborate and communicate more effectively with other team members and business stakeholders.
• Ensure software quality using advanced quality tools at every step of the application lifecycle.
• Gain visibility into project activity and priorities to make informed decisions based on real-time data.

Download Visual Studio 2008 Trial Editions to evaluate what’s new.

Parallel Extensions Fun

Using Parallel Extensions from F#

A couple of weeks ago saw the release of the CTP of the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework (download), This is one the major technologies currently under development at Microsoft for parallel and concurrent programming and provides a great mix of core technologies such as the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and highly expressive programmer devices such as PLINQ. Over the coming year I expect we'll be seeing this library used very widely from F#, and we'll eventually be using the TPL as a key underlying technology for F# asynchronous workflows.

TPL excels at CPU-intensive parallelism and exploiting multiple cores, especially in conjunction with functional programming. This makes it ideal for use with F#. I plan to give a number of examples here in future blog posts, but to get started, I'd recommend you take a look at Juergen van Gael's recent blog entry on using TPL for a parallel matrix multiply.

Multi-core, multi-threaded, new frontier.....  

Physics Videos

At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star

A true Web celeb Prof. Walter H. G. Lewin of MIT brings joy to learning.

The MIT Department of Physics has been a national resource since the turn of the 20th century.

The MIT Department of Physics has been at the center of the revolution in understanding the nature of matter and energy and the dynamics of the cosmos. Our faculty - three of whom hold Nobel Prizes and 21 of whom are members of the National Academy of Sciences - include leaders in nearly every major area of physics. World leaders in science and engineering, including 10 Nobel Prize recipients, have been educated in the physics classrooms and laboratories at MIT. Alumni of the MIT Department of Physics are to be found on the faculties of the world's major universities and colleges, as well as federal research laboratories and every variety of industrial laboratories.

Visual Studio 2008 E-book

It must be holiday season at Microsoft Press too. They have just released an e-book on Visual Studio 2008 technologies and are giving it away for free. The e-book includes excerpts from three recent book releases and provides a wealth of information and insights from top experts:

• Introducing Microsoft LINQ by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo
• Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX by Dino Esposito (Solid Quality Learning) by Dino Esposito
• Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 by Laurence Moroney by Laurence Moroney

You can see the first chapter of these books for free. When you register, you'll be able to download a lot more content of those books, packaged as an e-book. Merry Christmas everyone!

Software Spiral

Windows Server Hyper-V

Windows Server 2008 RC1 Enterprise is now available with a beta version of Windows Server Hyper-V, a key feature of Windows Server 2008 that will be included in Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter x64 editions. An earlier Customer Technology Preview CTP of Hyper-V, is also available for download with Windows Server 2008 RC1 Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter x64 editions.

 Windows Server virtualization page 

XNA Game Studio 2.0

XNA Game Studio 2.0

The release of XNA Game Studio 2.0 is now available to Download Now

XNA and Robotic Studio Madness

Come on out this Saturday to Malvern, Pennsylvania as Nick Landry, Mitch Ruebush, and Lindsay Rutter show you all the ins and outs of game and robotics programming. 

ADO.NET Data Services CTP

ADO.NET Data Services CTP Released!

Announcing ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview including ADO.NET Data Services AKA - Project Astoria. Download Now.

More information on the Data Platform Developer Center and the Project Astoria team blog.

Jonathan Carter has an 8-part article on ADO.NET Data Services.

N3UG Meeting WPF

Tonight N3UG Meeting and Visual Studio 2008 Loadfest

The Windows Presentation Foundation WPF is the user interface subsystem of the .NET 3.0 Framework. Its architecture requires you to rethink how to design and develop in the presentation layer. In this presentation we will explore the exciting new UI framework, learn what capabilities it has, and examine some tools used in WPF development.

Josh Smith has been developing desktop applications in C# since the .NET Framework was first released. He was awarded the Microsoft MVP and CodeProject MVP titles in 2007 for his work in the WPF community. Josh is currently working for the New York Times on their fantastic Times Reader application, which uses WPF for the presentation layer.

Marc Orchant 1957-2007

Rails 2.0

Rails 2.0: It's done!

Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that’s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish. We’ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean.

Waiting to hear from John Lam about the RubyCLR 2.0

Blog Council

Big Business "Blog Council" created, business world yawns

Note that the Blog Council was launched last week with an old media Press release and no RSS feed....

The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.

Every major corporation is struggling with the question of how to use blogs and engage the blogosphere the right way, - Sean O'Driscoll, GM, Community Support Services, Microsoft.

PDC08

October 27–30, 2008 - Los Angeles, California

The PDC is the definitive Microsoft event for software developers and architects focused on the future of the Microsoft platform. Mark your calendars and save the date. More information coming soon.

IE 8

Internet Explorer 8

Bill Gates discussed IE8 at the Mix ‘n Mash event on the Microsoft campus yesterday. Bill was talking to some bloggers about IE.Next and called it IE8, the same way they do on the IE team.

There’s a paradox about disclosure, which is when you’re far away from doing something you’re super open; when you’re very close to doing something you’re open; when you’re making your cut list of what you can do and not do, then particularly because — well –

...it sets expectations and that causes trouble?

Yeah, and so I don’t know where Dean is in terms of if he’s willing to commit what’s in IE 8 and what’s not in IE 8. In terms of standards support, he’ll see that it’s a glass half full. It adds a bunch of new stuff we didn’t have before, it doesn’t add everything that everybody wants us to do. - Bill Gates

FeedSync

The creation of FeedSync was catalyzed by the observation that RSS and Atom feeds were exploding on the web, and that by harnessing their inherent simplicity we might enable the creation of a “decentralized data bus” among the world’s web sites. Just like RSS and Atom, FeedSync feeds can be synchronized to any device or platform.

Previously known as Simple Sharing Extensions, FeedSync was originally designed by Ray Ozzie in 2005 and has been developed by Microsoft with input from the Web community. The initial specification, FeedSync for Atom and RSS, describes how to synchronize data through Atom and RSS feeds.

Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter

Silverlight Firestarter

On December 15th Microsoft's Malvern, PA Office is hosting a FREE daylong Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter Event.

Silverlight 1.0  is a cross platform browser plug-in that enables easy development of media rich web sites. 

Register here , I already have and hope to see you there!