The Microsoft Technology Center in Germany developed a managed wrapper for COM Interfaces of IE Plugins. It works with IE7 and IE8, is targeted at Express Editions (Both C# and VB.NET) but also works with the other versions of VS.

The project is called SpicIE and can be downloaded here http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SpicIE

SpicIE is designed for simplicity. The initial creation of an Internet Explorer plugin with SpicIE takes only minutes until you have a runnable, debuggable code base which you can extend with your own functionality. There are lots of scenarios where browser plugins could be useful. SpicIE lets you develop your own browser functionality comfortable with minimal technical efforts.

With SpicIE you can develop your own:

IE browsing event handlers

IE toolbar buttons

IE menu entries

IE context menu entries

IE explorer bars

IE toolbars.

SpicIE plugins can be executed by .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5.

SpicIE is open source and published under MICROSOFT PUBLIC LICENSE (Ms-PL).

While evaluating the latest RIA services I followed this walkthrough. Not sure what I did wrong but trying out the POCO – aka plain old CLR objects - example with Cities I could not get the data down to the client and figured a simple problem was causing it. For some reason the DataService assembly was not referenced in my Web.Config and therefore could not get access. Unfortunately there was no error message so I assume that someone else might encounter a similar problem. Just make sure you have this in your config referenced as a handler:

<add path="DataService.axd" verb="GET,POST" type="System.Web.Ria.DataServiceFactory, System.Web.Ria, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" validate="false"/>

Today I finished a webcast on the latest features of my Currency Converter. In the video I show the usage of localstorage as well some jquery features.
Let me know what you think.

Mike Taulty built a nice app to show controls available for WPF and Silverlight. And finally it is now also working on my 64bit Windows7 machine.

I recorded a webcast about the Currency Converter Accelerator that I developed. The stream is powered by Microsoft Silverlight Streaming.

Michael developed that cool demo where he uses the power of the client to access devices through bluetooth. What he did is a very nice way of showing the beauty of our technology stack ... I personally had never thought of connecting Nintendo WII controls to Virtual Earth.

Go ahead an check it out ... very cool and source code is provided as well.

I wrote an IE8 accelerator which can be found at http://ie8.brianas.de and is also registered at http://www.ieaddons.com/en/details/other/Currencty_Converter/

As the hosting business is a low margin business support cost is a very critical area that they want to have as low as possible. In many low-end offerings you actually don’t have any support other than calling high priced hotlines. If you do get support with your offering the hoster still wants the amount of calls be a low as possible. But what happens if a hoster  chooses to aggregate applications or modules of applications for their customers? Who is going to take the support cost and who actually will do the support ? There’s no doubt that this will increase price and complexity of servicing the hosters customers well.

If you go to www.microsoft.com/saas you will end up with the definition: “Software deployed as a Service and accessed using Internet technologies”. To me this is very broad probably too broad. Unfortunately I don’t have anything clearer and more precise than this.

From the talks with the parties involved and from the experience that I have with hosters around Europe I want to add some bullet points that appeared to me as very important and critical for SaaS in the scenario where Hoster and ISV become partners.

Many hosters make their money servicing consumers in a low margin business. Many of them have a business brand like Cohaesio vs. Surftown or Schlund&Partner vs. 1&1.

I’m not sure how realistic a scenario would be where a hoster would give up customer relations by only selling delivery platform services. In fact 1&1 has grown from a direct marketing company to the biggest hosting company in the world. The point I’m making here is that maybe this is a different type of service provider which might not be the classic hoster. I wonder what kind of partner is such a SaaS provider?

In a hosted environment an application will not have the full freedom of choosing it’s runtime behavior and the way it is being provisioned. There are many policies defined in a hosted environment that need to be enforced from the service provider. Therefore I see the merge of the two manifests as a design-time step. It can be used to actually generate

·         a set of abstract provisioning tasks

·         the provisioning script(s)

·         the provisioning workflow

This output needs to be inspected and tested in the hosted environment and will then be approved and enabled.
Parallel to generating the provisioning tasks there are a more steps which need to be accomplished:

·         create a product in the product catalog

·         associate pricing and billing information

·         associate service plans

·         define monitoring and tie it together with service plans and billing

Michel Baladi posted a lot of information on the outcome of our efforts regarding the SaaS Delivery platform in his blog. You can find the information at blogs.msdn.com/baladi

The two most significant innovations which came out of the Architecture sessions are those two manifests. The application manifest is something built by the software vendor to actually define the needs of an application in a hosted environment. It contains information for Provisioning as well as information on how to monitor that application and what metering information is being used.
The platform manifest is a definition of hosting resources such as web servers, database servers etc. and their attributes like load-balanced, clustered etc.

These two plus a set of parameters can be merged together to generate a set of installation tasks.

We discussed the shared database approach or multi-tenant data layer and came to the conclusion that running backups is not so much of a problem but restoring data on a tenant by tenant basis would be a complex pattern that is not supported currently, neither by software vendors nor by the Windows-or .NET platform.  I recognize that there are scenarios where sharing the same database can lead into scalability advantages. This would be the case where database size is so small that the overhead of running the system vs. the actual tenant data limits scalability. This is a scenario that is very likely to exist in consumer oriented hosting solutions. Nevertheless as there is no solution to the backup and restore scenario and other parts of the platform seem also not ready -  I would not recommend this scenario to a Hoster or to an ISV.