Visual Studio 2010 Launch

It seems like we’ll have to wait for the launch in Vegas. April 12.

Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.0

Finally we’ll have Silverlight on Windows Phone 7! Here it is:

SILVERLIGHT 4.0 RC and Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.0

· Microsoft delivers the premier mobile application development experience.

- Today, with the combination of Windows Phone 7 Series, Silverlight, the XNA Framework, Visual Studio, Expression Blend and Windows Phone Marketplace, developers have the richest, most productive development tools and platform for creating and deploying high performance, compelling mobile applications. 

- Microsoft offers a familiar and flexible development experience for mobile applications with Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone and Expression Blend for Windows Phone.

- The Windows Phone Marketplace offers developers a low-cost, easy, transparent and predictable way to publish, distribute and monetize their applications.

· One Silverlight, many opportunities to deliver the best experiences with the highest quality.

- Silverlight developers can use their existing skills to create amazing consumer and enterprise experiences that run across many and varied devices.

- Developers can write once, optimize everywhere to deliver engaging, high-quality experiences through all major browsers on Mac, Windows, and Linux client operating systems as well as a growing range of devices including Windows Phone, Symbian and Moblin.

- A growing list of companies have chosen Silverlight to deliver high-quality experiences including Major League Soccer; eBay; CT Corporation, a Wolters Kluwer Company; Netflix; Associated Press; H&R Block and NBCOlympics.com.

Download the Silverlight 4 RC today.

Silverlight 4.0 Tools for Visual Studio:

- Silverlight 4 offers compelling features such as beyond-the-browser extensions, webcam and microphone, native multicast support and a full suite of enterprise development capabilities including enhanced printing, networking, reporting and charting, as well as integration with Microsoft Office, SharePoint and Visual Studio 2010.

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/

o Download Expression Blend 4 beta today.

- Expression Blend 4 beta expands on revolutionary design and development workflow, through adding support for Silverlight 4, .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010, and groundbreaking new features like Path Layout, animated pixel and transition effects, and Model View Model support.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6f014e07-0053-4aca-84a7-cd82f9aa989f&displaylang=en

Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.0:

o Download the free Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP today, including Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone.

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/devices/windows-phone/

- Developers already working with Visual Studio can download the free Windows Phone 7 Add-in for Visual Studio today.

- Developers can fully test their applications without the need for a physical device by downloading the free Windows Phone 7 Emulator, also available for download today.

- Expression Blend for Windows Phone will be available in the weeks ahead.

Cool! Can wait until I get my hands on a WM7 phone! And to see it on Symbian!

<update>

It looks like the Symbian version is on it’s way, though it was removed from MSDN:

Thanks for the tip, Rasteiro :)

Seems like flash is loosing some grip… Will we have a battle limited to Silverlight and HTM5?…

</update>

ASP.NET MVC 2

Here a great little yesterday’s news: ASP.NET MVC 2 is RTM!

Here’s the link for the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, where we can install MVC (among others). Be sure to uninstall the previous versions.

c# open-source

csharpopensource is a reference guide to some of (allegedly the best) C# open source projects available. Basically it works as a directory, other than a repository.

Fences: will I finally cleanup my desktop?

Here’s a cool utility to arrange your desktop into nice little “folders”: Fences. I just love the way it hides your icons: just double click!

Free PDF: “A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control”

It’s a light and short 88 pages booklet PDF (have you noticed a trend on this kind of format?). Here it is: “A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control”. A fast way to get in touch with the Microsoft offering over this scenarios. All about identity management from a decentralized perspective.

Noda Time: the Joda Time .Net version

Traditionally dates have never been properly addressed on the development community. First we compacted years on a couple of digits (remember the 2000 year mess?), then we stored them on strings (not particularly bright, I’m afraid), and nowadays we finally typified them onto a datetime structure. But still we didn’t get it right.

Datetime implementations both on .NET and java are still not there. From the inability some have representing the datetime on a format other than the localdate, to non standard, non extensive, buggy and slow implementations, datetime is not yet a first class citizen.

Joda Time is an API intended to replace Java date and time classes. Here’s the .NET version, Noda Time, and the announcement from Jon Skeet.

PS: by the way, Jon Skeet is considered the “Chuck Norris” of the programming community (his stackoverflow reputation is 142,008). He presently works at Google and wrote C# in Depth. Here is a compilation of Jon Skeet Facts:

• Jon Skeet is immutable. If something’s going to change, it’s going to have to be the rest of the universe.
• Jon Skeet’s addition operator doesn’t commute – it teleports to where he needs it to be.
• Anonymous methods and anonymous types are really all called Jon Skeet. They just don’t like to boast.
• Jon Skeet’s code doesn’t follow a coding convention. It is the coding convention.
• Jon Skeet doesn’t have performance bottlenecks. He just makes the universe wait its turn.
• Users don’t mark Jon Skeet’s answers as accepted. The universe accepts them out of a sense of truth and justice.

One of the 2 is for sure: other Jon Skeet is a facade for a large community of developers or he just doesn’t sleep!