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From Miguel de Icaza:

Today we are making the first public release of Moonlight, supporting the Silverlight 1.0 profile for Linux. The release comes in two forms:

  • No-media codecs supported, but easy to install: head to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight and click on the cute installer for Moonlight. This currently hosts builds for Linux x86 and x86-64 for Firefox.
  • Source-code compilation, but you can optionally compile FFMpeg codecs yourself. To do this, download our moon-0.6.tar.bz2. And follow the build instructions.

Definitely a major milestone. I remember when we announced this at ReMIX Boston last year. Very exciting to see the progress being made here.

First Moonlight Release - Miguel de Icaza

From my friend Scott Lock:

Overwhelming interest in all things SharePoint has led the leaders of Northern Virginia's .NET User Group to launch a spin-off of the group to meet users' requests. The SharePoint Special Interest Group (SSIG) is focused on delivering the content the users want. While the SharePoint platform is extensive, we plan to deliver speakers able to address a wide variety of topics, including development, information architecture, user experience, governance and infrastructure. All these components come together to create the best SharePoint experience.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the SharePoint Special Interest Group. This group will be meeting on the second Wednesday of every month at the AT&T location. The same place where Caparea.net meets. This is very exciting not only because SharePoint is cool and is big enough to have it's own group, but two of our own members have stepped up to build this new Caparea.net community. David Berry and Gregory Stringfellow have taken the helm as co-captains and founders of this new group. As a member of the Caparea.net family, the SharePoint Special Interest Group will be supported by Caparea.net.

What a better way to kick off the group than with our area's own SharePoint MVP, Sahil Malik! So come on out and see what the buzz is about!

See you there!

Scott Lock

President

Capital Area .Net Users Group

The inaugural meeting is tonight at 7pm at the AT&T building in Tyson's Corner (same place that the regular Caparea.net meetings are held). More details here.

I was privileged to join JD Lewin, Nic Fillingham, and Brian Johnson for the latest episode of their podcast. Among the topics, Maker Faire, sensitive robots, the EEE PC, Zune 2.5 (including Zune games), and more:


JD, Nic, and Brian Podcast - Episode 7

You can find links to stuff mentioned in the podcast on on10.net.

Well, after endless haranguing by one of my co-workers, I finally broke down and got on Twitter.

I'm still in the evaluation phase, but I see some utility to it. Just need to balance the usefulness against the potential time-sucking productivity-killing aspect to it.

Anyway, you can find my tweets at http://twitter.com/devhammer. And if you have trouble getting there, you can always check http://istwitterdown.com/ (sorry, that domain just cracks me up).

And if you're local to the DC, MD, or VA area and are involved in the local developer, please drop me a line with your Twitter ID so I can keep up with what you're doing.

Important note for folks who are planning to try the beta of Visual Studio 2008 SP1:

Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 is not compatible with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta.   The good news is that Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is coming soon.  Until then you will not be able to install both Silverlight Tools and Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Until Silverlight Tools Beta 2 ships you'll need to uninstall Silverlight Tools Beta 1 to evaluate Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta.  Likewise, if you've already installed Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta then you'll need to uninstall it before installing Silverlight Tools Beta 1.

Hit the link for complete instructions.

Your Websites, Our Passion! : Error installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta and Silverlight Tools Beta 1

Scott has a deep and informative post on what's coming in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 beta 1 that is a must-read.

Tons of feature info, screenshots, and more.

Read the whole thing here:

Today we released a Beta of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1.  

Traditionally our service packs address a range of issues found both through customer and partner feedback as well as our own internal testing.  While this service pack holds true to that theme and delivers updates for these types of issues, it also builds on the tremendous value that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 deliver today and enables an improved developer experience by adding a number of additional components that cover a range of highly requested customer features. For example, the service pack is the first release for Visual Studio 2008 that delivers full support for SQL Server 2008 and the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

Somasegar's WebLog : Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 SP1 Beta available now

My colleague Allan de Costa Pinto shares a cool (and free) tool:

Start creating your own screen casts with Community Clips. Really easy to use, absolutely free, and works as advertised. Nice work!

Community Clips

In the following screen cast (less than 3 minutes) created with Community Clips, I show how I blog:

I've been helping some of my favorite customers build out their centers for .NET Excellence. Community Clips will feature prominently in sharing the knowledge at these centers. More on those efforts shortly.

Hit the link below for the video...

Allan's Best Week Ever : Want Cool Stuff? Get Community Clips from Microsoft Office Labs

Since writing about games for Zune on Wednesday, I found a couple of demo games over on ZuneBoards.com, along with instructions on building and deploying them (you do need to install either Visual C# 2008 Express Edition or Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition or above, then install the XNA Game Studio Express CTP in order to build and deploy games for Zune).

I deployed the games to my red Zune 80, and figured I'd shoot a quick video of Alien Aggressors in action, along with a demo of the Zune clock app, also from Zuneboards.com:

As usual, any downloads are at your own risk, and keep in mind that XNA Game Studio Express 3.0 is a community technical preview (CTP), which means it's pre-beta, which means don't go installing it on your mission-critical machine and then complain that it messed something up.

imageYou know you've wanted it, you know you've been waiting for it. So...BEHOLD...I GIVE YOU...The ZUNE CLOCK!!!

Thanks to the magic that is XNA Game Studio Express 3.0 CTP, we can now put a clock on the Zune. Personally, I've always just relied on my watch, but I understand a lot of folks have wanted this.

Get it at ZuneBoards.com.

Note that you need to have XNA Game Studio Express installed in order to build and deploy this software to your Zune.

(and stealing shamelessly from Hanselman, who got it from Jeff Atwood)

 

works-on-my-machine-starburst

 

Works On My Machine Disclaimer: This link carries exactly zero warranty or support. If it deletes files or kills your family pet, you have been warned. It might work great, and it might not.

Don't have plans for the weekend yet? Head up to Nanticoke, PA for Techbash 2008:

Since its inception in 2005, TECHbash has evolved into the premier technology conference in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Join an estimated 300 Developers, IT Professionals, CIO’s and Industry Experts from Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and host-state, Pennsylvania. This one day event brings together a broad spectrum of Technology Professionals to network, knowledge share and discuss existing technology solutions to business challenges, as well as preview prerelease products on the bleeding edge.
This year, we expanded to three tracks offering more presentations and providing you with more content choices representing a greater breadth of Industry insight. We will open the event with a keynote presentation from the unstoppable juggernaut, Joe Stagner, Program Manager for Microsoft’s Web Tools and Platform Division.
Attendees will have the opportunity to:

  • Enhance technical knowledge with comprehensive and relevant educational content
  • Build experience on current and soon-to-be released technologies and products
  • Engage with sponsors, presenters, and other technology professionals
  • Learn how to get involved with .NET Valley, Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Technology User Group
  • Leave with software and other swag

Among the speakers are my fellow DE, Dani Diaz, Joe Stagner, and Miguel Castro. Sounds like good times.

No, this isn't a political post. I just came across a cool use of Silverlight's new Deep Zoom feature (h/t Adam Kinney via twitter), Death and Taxes: 2009:

"Death and Taxes:2009" is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the imagediscretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal income taxes. The data is from the President's budget request for 2009. It will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress by October 1st to begin the fiscal year.

The poster provides a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities, that fluctuate yearly, according to the wishes of the President, the power of Congress, and the will of the people. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster.

Note that you have to have Silverlight 2, beta 1 installed to get the Deep Zoom experience. Otherwise, it fails over to a Flash version.

Very cool...time for games on Zune!

Today, we are delivering the first Community Technical Preview (CTP) of XNA Game Studio 3.0, giving you the ability to build games for the entire family of Zune media devices.  This feature gives you access to the majority of the XNA framework APIs while retaining a seamless sense of integration with the Zune media experience.  In addition, this release now requires either Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition and higher (C# language support must be installed), or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.

Keeping with Zune media experience, the XNA Game Studio 3.0 integration includes discoverability/access to user’s non-DRM music – allowing you to customize background soundtracks or create real-time visualizations.  In addition, we’ve announced the ability to have multiple nearby Zunes wirelessly engage in an ad-hoc social gaming experience. 

A preview release of XNA Game Studio 3.0 is now available through the XNA Creators Club Online site (http://creators.xna.com), with a final release scheduled for the holiday 2008 season.  For those of you that prefer the shortest path to happiness, the direct link to the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP is here.

XNA Team Blog : Announcing: XNA Game Studio 3.0 Community Technical Preview (CTP)

For several weeks now, I've been working with a new tool from the folks at Telligent (they wrote Community Server, the software that runs blogs.msdn.com) called Graffiti CMS. The CMS in this case stands for "content made simple" and Graffiti, in my experience, really delivers on this idea.

Graffiti sits somewhere in between a blog engine and a content management system. Adding content is as simple as posting to a blog (and you can even use tools like Windows Live Writer to publish content to Graffiti), but you can also easily customize your site by changing themes (or creating your own), adding links, or if you really want to go wild, by creating widgets and/or plug-ins.

Graffiti has a free express edition available that supports a single site and up to three content contributor accounts. imageI'm now running a handful of sites on Graffiti (full disclosure...Telligent provided me with a server license for Graffiti for personal use), including my local church softball team site, for which I created a Theme (called, appropriately enough, Softball) and a plug-in that renders a Virtual Earth map based on a Windows Live Maps collection. Both the theme and the plug-in are now available on the Graffiti Marketplace from within your Graffiti control panel, so if you're using Graffiti try them out and let me know what you think.

You can see them in action in the screenshot to the left.

Another cool plug-in you might want to take a look at is the Graffiti UserGroups plug-in/theme combo from Alexander Groß. I downloaded and played with it a bit and it's pretty cool. The only downside I see is that by default it requires the use of their custom theme, which prevents me from using it. It should be possible, however, to modify another theme to display the information, so I might end up using this.

What's cool about Graffiti is that it's very quick and simple to set up, and doesn't require any special knowledge to get started with. And as a .NET developer, the fact that widgets and plug-ins are easy to write by simply extending some of Graffiti's built-in classes is a big bonus.

I've also written a widget for my colleague Brian Hitney's Worldmaps service. The widget takes a WorldMaps user ID and displays a thumbnail map of the hits for that account in the sidebar (if you don't provide a user ID, it will display a map of all hits for all WorldMaps accounts). You can choose between a 200 pixel or 160 pixel wide thumbnail, and can optionally have the map expand on mouseover to show a more detailed version of the map, all without knowing a lick of javascript. The WorldMaps widget is not available on the Graffiti marketplace, so if you'd like to try that one, just drop me a line, and I'll be happy to send it to you.

This sounds really cool:

About the Conference

Join us for a day of developer-oriented technical sessions featuring Microsoft® ESP™.  Microsoft® ESP™ is a visual simulation platform that brings immersive games-based technology to training and learning, decision support, and research and development modeling for government and commercial organizations. Come and learn how this all-in-one simulation platform of Microsoft ESP consisting of a simulation engine, development tools and rich content can help you quickly build affordable, extensible, high quality simulation solutions that can tie in with external solutions and integrate with industry standard input/output devices and database-driven content. You will also learn about the Microsoft ESP SDK that consists of four primary systems, some of which contain their own additional SDKs for specific topics:

  • Programming System
  • Terrain and Scenery System
  • Mission System
  • Object Modeling System

The sessions will allow you to:

· Experience the development of richer solutions more quickly and focus on content that's specific to your solution by starting from the rich base world content that comes with ESP.

· Design using the platform's model of planet Earth, built-in physics engine, numerous aircraft types, scenery and terrain, and a fully-configurable weather system.

· Achieve "you are there" realism with highly-detailed terrain and seascapes in all seasons, active wildlife, real-world motion, realistic night skies, continuous time of day, accurate vector data and buildings, 5.1 multi-channel surround sound, and much more.

These sessions will target Developers, Architects, technical managers and Web designers, be very much demonstration oriented, and will be delivered by seasoned developers with experience in Government and Public Sector. Seize this opportunity to immerse yourself in this exciting new technology!

Public Sector Developer Weblog : Microsoft ESP Developer Conference - May 22, 2008 - Reston, VA - YOU ARE INVITED!!

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