July, 2008

Wait a minute…I hear you say… Silverlight doesn’t support 3D! Well, no, not directly. But there are ways to get around this, and Robby Ingebretsen highlights a few : A couple of weeks ago, I spent a little time trying to get my finger on the pulse of...

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so): Monday, July 28, 2008 7:00 PM: Northern Virginia SQL Server Users Group July Meeting - Andy Leonard on Incremental Loads in SSIS 2008 using Change Data Capture [ Event Details...

Bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to blog about recently, in no particular order: The SideShow Team Blog announces the availability of a beta release of SideShow gadgets for Windows Media Center . View guide information, schedule recordings, control media...

If you’re into 3D rendering, modeling, and animation, you may want to take advantage of this. Chris Williams points out that apparently Caligari is making trueSpace 7.6 available for free , along with video tutorials. I haven’t used TrueSpace, but from...

My fellow developer evangelist, Chris Bowen , along with co-authors Steve Resnick and Rich Crane , appears on the latest episode of ARCast.TV, discussing their book Essential WCF : ARCast.TV - Essential WCF

Ever wanted to get rich building games… now you can : You’ve played Xbox 360 games with the millions of gamers on Xbox LIVE. You’ve chatted, shared, and dominated in games of all kinds. But what if those millions could be playing your game? Better still...

Excellent news from Nic Fillingham : Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 has been released to manufacuring and is available NOW for your downloading pleasure via the Microsoft Download Center . Power Pack 1 includes a bunch of new features, enhancements...

via Jon Galloway , news that the ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 CodePlex Preview 1 (say that five times fast) has been released. You can read about what’s in it here .

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so): Tuesday, July 22, 2008 6:30 PM: Maryland and Pennsylvania .NET User Group July Meeting - This month MAPAMDUG presents their Heroes Happen Here community launch [ Event Details...

Frank La Vigne is just going to town on developing cool solutions around Community Megaphone . First it was his Windows Live Writer plug-in, and now he’s created a cool Silverlight front-end for Community Megaphone: You can click on any state and get...

You can get one here: http://www.ajaxload.info/ Lots of choices available, and you can customize to suit your site’s look and feel. Here’s an example, using the background and foreground colors from my blog, along with a transparent background. Neat!

Busy week ahead…here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for this week: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 5:30 PM: Central Penn .NET Users Group Meeting - Brian Mains: Controls and Control Extenders Using ASP.NET AJAX and AJAX Control Toolkit [ Event Details...

Frank La Vigne has created a very cool plug-in for Windows Live Writer that allows you to insert links to Community Megaphone events into any blog post. So if you happen to be promoting your events on Community Megaphone (and if not, why not?), you can...

My colleague Glen Gordon has found a new use for the geoencoded RSS feed from Community Megaphone , namely using it as the basis for a custom Collection in Windows Live Search for Mobile : If you haven't been entering your developer events like user group...

Robin , who is the president of Roanoke .NET UG , and one of the driving forces behind both Roanoke Code Camp and Richmond Code Camp, writes about the benefits of forming a relationship with local community colleges : Roanoke Valley .NET User Group (RV...

Josh Ledgard from Telligent has posted a really good series of tips for Graffiti CMS and Community Server on his blog . Among the useful tidbits: Customizing Content Sort Order in Graffiti Zooming in on stats (I didn’t know about this one) Creating a...

Here’s a list of the user groups meeting this week in Mid-Atlantic, from the listings in Community Megaphone : Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:30 PM: RockNUG Monthly Meeting - n00b presentation, pizza and swag as usual. But a little something different for...

Nikhil Kothari has a great post up from this weekend on providing themes for Silverlight 2 applications: Silverlight provides the ability to completely customize the look and feel of controls (including the intrinsic ones - often something one desires...

In my last post, I mentioned taking a family trip to the Baltimore Zoo . For folks in the area who haven’t been there, I’d definitely recommend making the trip, as there are great opportunities to get up close with animals that you will rarely see. Here...

OK, so maybe I’m a couple of days late with that, but for good reason. I’ve had the pleasure of having family visit, and have been busy spending time with them (including a nice trip to the Baltimore Zoo – one of the 3 oldest in the country – yesterday...

Cool contest for folks working on Silverlight controls: Welcome to the Silverlight Control Builder Contest! With this contest, we hope to incite the development of many open and free Silverlight Controls that all developers can use in their applications...

If you own a Tablet PC, or a UMPC, or even if you have a desktop PC with a graphics tablet and the tablet extensions enabled, this app is a must-have: Video: InkSeine from Microsoft Research - The Official Video InkSeine truly reinvents the pen-based...