I have become a big fan of using Twitter. You can follow my tweets by choosing to follow @joswalt on Twitter. For those that may not know what Twitter is, Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? There are numerous applications out that will allow you to create your Tweets (posts).

There are desktop applications such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twitterrific (Mac) to perform your tweeting. Browser addons such as TwitterFox connect you from the browser. You can even keep up to date with your friends on your mobile device through apps such as Tiny Twitter and GPS Twit.

After using Twitter for quite a while, I found myself searching for old tweets from my friends that contained links or information that I was interested in but didn't write down at the time that I read the tweet. I found that Twitter has a search site - search.twitter.com where you can search through tweets. I thought that it would be useful to create a Search Provider for Internet Explorer so that I could perform these searches directly from the Internet Explorer Search Bar.

Here are the steps to add a Twitter Search Provider to Internet Explorer:

1. From within Internet Explorer 7, click on the dropdown arrow in the Search section of the toolbar and choose "Find More Providers..."
    
2. After the Add Search Providers page loads, you are going to fill in the Create Your Own Search Provider section. In the URL textbox, enter "http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TEST" (without quotes). You then need to specify a name for your search provider. I chose to enter "Twitter".
   
3. Click on the Install button to add the Twitter Search Provider to your list in Internet Explorer. You are then able to select "Twitter" in your Search section before performing a search.
   
4. Now, just enter the term that you want to search on in Twitter such as searching for a person (joswalt) or a subject (Microsoft), and you will get sent to the Twitter search site with all of your search results provided for you.
   

You have now successfully added a Twitter Search Provider to Internet Explorer. Hopefully, you have found this post useful and start using Twitter to keep up to date with what your friends and family are doing.

Continuing my link posting Silverlight Tips, I have been keep a list of Silverlight Tips for reference from the Silverlight team that will help developers get started using Silverlight. Well, the team has released some new tips:

• Tip of the Day #40 -1.05 != 1.05 - Peril with Floating Point Comparisons.
• Tip of the Day #41 - Using Bookmarks in your Silverlight Application.
• Tip of the Day #42 - How to Create a Web Service for your Silverlight App.
• Tip of the Day #43 - Making it Snow in Silverlight.
• Tip of the Day #44 - Silverlight-enabled WCF Services versus ASMX Web Services.
• Tip of the Day #45 - Text Formatting with the TextBlock control
• Tip of the Day #46 - Font Support in Silverlight
• Tip of the Day #47 - How to Implement a Password Box
• Tip of the Day #48 - How to Implement a Combobox
• Tip of the Day #49 - How to Implement a Progress Bar
• Tip of the Day #50 - Main Game Loop Revisited!
• Tip of the Day #51 - How to Enable and Disable Controls
• Tip of the Day #52 - How to Popup a Browser Window
• Tip of the Day #53 - MessageBox is now Available in Silverlight 2
• Tip of the Day #54 - How to Develop with Silverlight Tools for Free
• Tip of the Day #55 - How to Apply Styles in Silverlight – Part I
• Tip of the Day #56 - Accessing the HTML DOM from Silverlight.
• Tip of the Day #57 - How to Dynamically Load a Silverlight Control within another Silverlight Control

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Silverlight 2, one of the industry’s most comprehensive and powerful solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser. Silverlight 2 delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences.

Microsoft also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundation’s integrated development environment (IDE) and by providing new controls to developers with the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) under the Microsoft Permissive License.

“We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft. “Silverlight represents a radical improvement in the way developers and designers build applications on the Web. This release will further accelerate our efforts to make Silverlight, Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Studio the preeminent solutions for the creation and delivery of media and rich Internet application experiences.”

Microsoft also will release the Silverlight Control Pack and publish on MSDN the technical specification for the Silverlight Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) vocabulary. The SCP, which will augment the powerful built-in control set in Silverlight, will be released under the Microsoft Permissive License, an Open Source Initiative-approved license, and includes controls such as DockPanel, ViewBox, TreeView, Accordion and AutoComplete. The Silverlight XAML vocabulary specification, released under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), will better enable third-party ISVs to create products that can read and write XAML for Silverlight.

Delivering Features for Next-Generation Web Experiences

Highlights of new Silverlight 2 features include the following:

• .NET Framework support with a rich base class library. This is a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework.
• Powerful built-in controls. These include DataGrid, ListBox, Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar controls and more.
• Advanced skinning and templating support. This makes it easy to customize the look and feel of an application.
• Deep zoom. This enables unparalleled interactivity and navigation of ultrahigh resolution imagery.
• Comprehensive networking support. Out-of-the-box support allows calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and standard HTTP services, enabling users to create applications that easily integrate with existing back-end systems.
• Expanded .NET Framework language support. Unlike other runtimes, Silverlight 2 supports a variety of programming languages, including Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby, making it easier for developers already familiar with one of these languages to repurpose their existing skill sets.
• Advanced content protection. This now includes Silverlight DRM, powered by PlayReady, offering robust content protection for connected Silverlight experiences.
• Improved server scalability and expanded advertiser support. This includes new streaming and progressive download capabilities, superior search engine optimization techniques, and next-generation in-stream advertising support.
• Vibrant partner ecosystem. Visual Studio Industry Partners such as ComponentOne LLC, Infragistics Inc. and Telerik Inc. are providing products that further enhance developer capabilities when creating Silverlight applications using Visual Studio.
• Cross-platform and cross-browser support. This includes support for Mac, Windows and Linux in Firefox, Safari and Windows Internet Explorer.
   

More information and details about Silverlight 2 are available by reading the Silverlight 2 fact sheet at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/silverlight/default.mspx.

Get Silverlight 2

Silverlight 2 will be available for download on Tuesday, Oct. 14, at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight. Customers already using a previous version of Silverlight will be automatically upgraded to Silverlight 2.