As you may have heard from Scott Guthrie or Scott Hanselman, Microsoft announced that it will make jQuery part of the official dev platform. JQuery will come with Visual Studio in the long term, and in the short term it'll ship with ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft will also ship a version of Visual Studio which includes Intellisense.

jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. You can read John Resig's (jQuery Team) post about this big announcement.

A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code.  jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them.  One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another.  jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands.  The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.

Microsoft has released RC0 for Silverlight 2 to allow developers to have time get used to the new changes before releasing to end users. Scott Guthrie posted a good overview of the updates that were included in the RC0 release. You can read a complete list of the breaking change from here.

 Here are some of the new changes in this release:

• PasswordBox control added
• ProgressBar control added
• ComboBox control added
• New control templates (they’re much cleaner than the previous ones IMHO)
• API changes here and there and elimination of some assemblies such as System.Wondows.Controls.Extended

Downloads:

• Visual Studio 2008 Tools RC0:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=129043
• Expression Blend SP1 RC0:  http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/default.aspx?filter=prerelease 
• Windows Silverlight 2 Dev Runtime RC0:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=129011

Well, I get to be one of the lucky people that gets to go to the Microsoft PDC 2008 Conference in Los Angeles, CA on October 27-30. Since 1991, the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has been Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects. Attend the PDC to understand the future of the Microsoft platform and to exchange ideas with fellow professionals. You’ll learn about upcoming products, meet Microsoft’s leaders and top engineers, and write some code.

At this year's conference, Microsoft will be giving a 160GB external USB2 hard drive with all of the bits from the conference to each attendee instead of a collection of DVDs as in the past. It is even rumored that a Beta version of Windows 7 will be included as well.

Channel 9 on MSDN has been producing a series of Countdown to PDC 2008 videos to help everyone get a great overview of what to expect this year at PDC. Here is just a few of the videos that you can watch about the upcoming conference:

• This is the Software + Services PDC: Mike Swanson
• By Developers, for Developers: Don Box and Chris Anderson
• Building Block Services, John Shewchuk
• Extending the Data Platform to the Cloud: Dave Campbell
• Amitabh Srivastava: Corporate Vice President of Cloud, Infrastructure, & Services

Microsoft released SP1 for the Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office for Visual Studio 2008. The Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office system (version 3.0) can help you extend applications in Microsoft Office 2003 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system by using Visual Basic and Visual C#. The tools include Visual Studio projects to help you start to create an Office Business Application (OBA).

For the latest information about Visual Studio Tools for Office and Office development, see the following development centers on MSDN:

• The Visual Studio Tools for Office Developer Portal contains links to product information, code samples, videos, and community resources about using Visual Studio to customize Office applications as part of your solutions.
   
• The Microsoft Office Developer Center contains links to technical articles, code samples, downloads, community information, support, and other documentation about Office customizations and OBAs.

SP1 Overview:
You must install this update on your development computer, and also on client computers, if you use Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to develop Microsoft Office solutions.

This update provides bug fixes and new features, including .NET Framework Client Profile compatibility and the ability to add host controls and smart tags to documents from application-level add-ins.

When you install the Visual Studio Tools for Office runtime on a non-English version of the operating system, you should also install the appropriate language pack service pack to see the text of the messages from the runtime in that language, rather than English.

Download SP1 by clicking here.
 

I blogged previously about some great Silverlight Tips of the Day that the Silverlight team has been releasing to help developers get started using Silverlight. Well, the team has released some new tips:

• Tip of the Day #28: - How to Implement a Custom Mouse Cursor
• Tip of the Day #29: - Creating a Transparent, Draggable Dialog with Rounded Corners
• Tip of the Day #30 - Fast Sprite Animation in Silverlight
• Tip of the Day #31 - How to Detect Alt, Shift, Control, Windows and Apple keys with Left Mouse Down in Silverlight
• Silverlight Terrain Tutorial Part 3 - Creating Smooth Tile Transitions using Opacity Masks
• Tip of the Day #32 - How to Declare a Custom User Control from a XAML Page
• Tip of the Day #33 - How to Scale your entire App and its Elements to your Browsers Size
• Tip of the Day #34 - How to Center your Silverlight Application in your Browser
• Tip of the Day #35 - Full Screen Mode Implementation
• Tip of the Day #36 - How to Create Reflections and Shadows for Images and Text
• Tip of the Day #37 - How to Dynamically Load and Display Silverlight Applications
• Tip of the Day #38 - How to Customize the Silverlight Install Experience
• Tip of the Day #39 - How to Create a Zoom Toolbar

As Jeremy Sharp mentioned, the NWASQL User Group has rescheduled the September meeting from September 10 to September 17.

I thought that I would do my part as well to help get the word out about the meeting be moved to a new date. The group usually meets the second Wednesday of every month.

The September 17th meeting will feature NWASQL member Eric Humphrey who will present SSIS Part II, extending the previous presentation "SSIS Basics".  Eric is an SQL professional, serving WalMart in Bentonville.  As always, the group will meet at 11:30, providing lunch, SWAG, and networking opportunities!