The next NWA .Net User Group meeting will be on December 9 at 5:30 PM. INETA will be sponsoring our main speaker, Kate Gregory, who will be presenting on "The Windows Vista Bridge: How Managed Code Developers Can Easily Access Exciting New Vista Features". I will be presenting a brief 15 minute presentation on Rest in WCF prior to Kate's presentation.
Lightning Presentation
Title: Rest in WCF
Description: This session will describe the new REST features available to developer in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 3.5.
Presenter: John Oswalt (ME!) is a Lead Developer/Analyst for Tyson Foods, Inc. based in Springdale, AR and a Microsoft Certified Professional in ASP.NET. He is currently the Vice-President of the Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group. He has over 10 years experience in developing websites and applications. His passions for language include HTML, CSS, ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET, SQL, JavaScript, and many others. He is the owner of a few different types of blogs on the internet (Technology – letsblogabout.net) and (Sports – www.callthehogs.com).
Main Presentation
Title: The Windows Vista Bridge: How Managed Code Developers Can Easily Access Exciting New Vista Features
Description: Accessing new Windows Vista features is a challenge from managed (.NET) code. The level of interoperability required is out of reach for many developers. The Vista Bridge is a sample library you can use in your own projects today that provides access to new user interface features as well as “behind the scenes” power features. Discover a shortcut to Windows Vista for Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C# programmers and how you can get involved.
Presenter: Kate Gregory is the Microsoft Regional Director for Toronto, a Visual C++ MVP, the author of over a dozen programming books, and a technical speaker. In 1986, she founded Gregory Consulting with her partner, Brian. Based in rural Ontario, Gregory Consulting provides consulting and development services throughout North America, specializing in software development with leading-edge technologies, integration projects, and technology transfer. They also provide training, mentoring, and technical writing services. Her current specialties include C++ programming, migration to managed code, and Vista development.
Swag:
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard
- 6 Office Business Applications for SharePoint - MSPress
- Introducing LINQ - MSPress
- Programming LINQ - MSPress
- Hunting Security Bugs - MSPress
- Silverlight 2 – MSPress
- Infragistics NetAdvantage for .NET 2008
- JetBrains choice of ReSharper, TeamCity or IntelliJ
When:
Date: Dec 9th
5:30 PM - 5:45 PM -- Welcome and News, Sign-in and Food
5:45 PM - 6:00 PM -- Lighting Presentation
6:00 PM - 6:10 PM -- Intermission (Presenter switch over)
6:10 PM - 7:30 PM -- Main Presentation
7:30 PM - 8:00 PM -- Closing and Prize give-a-ways
Where:
The Jones Center
922 East Emma Avenue
Springdale, AR 72764
226 Kansas City Room
NetMeeting URL: http://snipr.com/59eh8
Click here to RSVP on CodeZone!
Social Networks - Join the Nwa .NET User Group groups on the following social networking sites:
Calendar Links:
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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.
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Microsoft Corp. today provided the first look at the next version of its developer tools and platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft described the next release through the following five focus areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).
Today’s announcement included an in-depth look at how Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 (code-named “Rosario”) will help democratize ALM with a unique solution that brings all the members of a development organization into the application development life cycle, and removes many of the existing barriers to integration. Additional details on the other focus areas will be disclosed over the product development cycle.
“With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, we are focused on the core pillars of developer experience, support for the latest platforms spanning client, server, services and devices, targeted experiences for specific application types, and core architecture improvements,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. “These pillars are designed specifically to meet the needs of developers, the teams that drive the application life cycle from idea to delivery, and the customers that demand the highest quality applications across multiple platforms. You can expect to hear a lot more about Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming months.”
You can read an overview of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 by clicking here.
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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.
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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:
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PasswordBox control added
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ProgressBar control added
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ComboBox control added
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New control templates (they’re much cleaner than the previous ones IMHO)
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API changes here and there and elimination of some assemblies such as System.Wondows.Controls.Extended
Downloads:
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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:
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