Now there's two terms that historically went together like oil and water!  Boy times are a-changin', and it seems quickly too.  In just the past few weeks, we've seen the following:

  • lovely day 1On Sept. 28th, Microsoft announced that it would ship the wildly popular jQuery open source Javascript library with Visual Studio going forward.
  • On Oct. 13th, in conjunction with the RTW release of Silverlight 2, Microsoft announced it was partnering with Soyatec to sponsor tools for building Silverlight applications from the Eclipse framework, the most popular Java application environment in use today.
  • Coincident with the Silverlight 2 announcement, Microsoft indicated it would release the Silverlight XAML vocabulary specification on MSDN under the Open Software Promise (OSP) to aid third-party ISVs in developing tools to support Silverlight development.

And today... Microsoft is launching the beta release of the Microsoft Web Platform, which consists of two main components:

  • "Web Platform Installer" (Web PI) consolidates the setup of the components that make up the Microsoft Web Platform - namely IIS 7, SQL Server Express, the .NET Framework, and Visual Web Developer - into a single install!  One-stop shopping folks!
  • "Web Application Installer" (Web AI) facilitates the installation and configuration of several - dare we say it - Open Source applications to run on top of the Windows stack.  We're talking applications like Drupal, osCommerce, phpBB, DotNetNuke, and WordPress.

Cool stuff folks!