October 28, 2008 By 35 Comments

Silverlight Toolkit Launched at PDC 2008

What is the Silverlight Toolkit?

The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. This first release includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input.

How the Silverlight Toolkit is Built

We use an iterative, evolutionary development model to release new controls and updates often and get feedback from the community to our development team quickly. With access to source code, unit tests and the infrastructure magic we use internally, the community can let us know what it likes and what it wants to change. Anyone can download the source code and start exploring. This transparency will allow the community to help us prioritize features based on real-world usage and actual customer scenarios. We also want to make it easy to reuse skills and source code which is why all our components are designed with Windows Presentation Foundation in mind and the Silverlight Toolkit is released under the Microsoft Public License.
Silverlight Controls Example

Get Started

Silverlight Toolkit November 2008 Overview

The Silverlight Toolkit defines four Quality Bands that describe the stability and finish-level of each component. Below is a summary of where the components currently in the Silverlight Toolkit fall within the quality bands.

[Microsoft via Codeplex]

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Filed Under: PDC, Silverlight
October 25, 2008 By 95 Comments

New Microsoft .NET Logo

New Microsoft .NET LogoThe new Microsoft .NET Logo launched today.  Expect to see the new logo all over the place over the next few weeks.  The original logo was designed in early 2000, and officially launched with the release of Microsoft .NET 1.0 in January of 2002.  I really like the new logo as it goes fairly well with the Live Mesh and Silverlight logo’s.  It’s nice to see some new energy at Microsoft over the last little while.  Next week should be a huge week for Microsoft with the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) kicking off in Los Angeles.  For those that don’t think Microsoft innovates anymore, you should really check out the PDC. 

Next week you will hear some major announcements centered around things like the Microsoft Could OS, Silverlight, Microsoft .NET 4.0, Live Mesh, Visual Studio Team System, ASP.NET 4.0, Team Foundation Server, Windows 7, Microsoft Dynamics, Windows Communication Foundation, Microsoft XNA Game Studio, SQL Server 2008, Dublin, Oslo, Exchange Web Services, SharePoint , F#, Expression Studio, and a ton more. 

It’s an exciting time to be a software developer! Even if you don’t use any of the Microsoft technologies, the things Microsoft is working on will only make your lives better!  Microsoft is really starting to push the envelope in so many areas, and competitors have no choice but to try and keep up. 

As a side note, I noticed that on the Google Android you can’t change your search provider to anything other than Google.  Also in Google Chrome you cant change the search provider either.  With the Monopoly they have on search, I’m surprised the government hasn’t stepped in yet.  Microsoft whispers into the wind and they get sued or slammed.  Google clearly makes it impossible to switch search providers, tracks all users browsing history and sends it back to the Googleplex, and nobody says boo.  Boo!

 

New Microsoft .NET Logo

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Filed Under: Google, Microsoft, PDC, Real World News
October 22, 2008 By 72 Comments

Best of Software Development in the Real World

Miguel Carrasco with Erin Carrasco and Dominic Carrasco We’ve had a lot of new readers to the blog lately which is fantastic.  We now receive over 30,000 visitors a month, over 3,500 RSS Subscribers, 1,200 developers signed up for the Software Development in the Real World Newsletter, and nearly 200 members on TwitterDevs.  With new visitors comes a problem, mainly the fact that new readers might have missed some of the articles I have written on here over the last few years. 

I was actually adding up the software development blog posts the other day and used a tool to count the words.  Nearly 89,000 words on this blog.  That’s a fairly detailed book with about 300 pages if you add images.

I’ve enjoyed every minute of running this blog, and meeting some of the most interesting people from all over the world.  I want to say a special thanks to all the loyal readers, because without you I would simply be talking to myself, and that’s not a lot of fun.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy some of the best articles that have been posted on software development, team management, and performance tweaking.  While there hundreds of thousands of software development blogs out there, I’ve tried to focus this blog on making developers the best they can be by bringing up topics that you might not think about during your day to day development careers.

The Best of Software Development in the Real World

Technical Transformational Leadership

What kind of leadership do you follow with your team? How do you present yourself within your organization? Technical Transformation Leadership is kind of the word I’ve coined for myself which explains the type of leadership I try and follow on a daily basis.  It’s merger of two styles of leadership that I have found work extremely well within a software development and technical organization. It creates a really collaborative fun environment where everyone clearly understands the goals and objectives of the long term vision, and work extremely hard to achieve it.

How to Rate a Software Developer

How do you rate a software developer?  That’s a fantastic question!  There are so many theories out there, and there are so many forms that HR teams try and come up with to help you conduct performance review.  However, what really makes a great developer?  And if you are a Software Developer, how can you improve your career today!  Below is my bible for rating the developers on my team.  By following these tips and rules, you will improve your status from “good developer”, to “great developer”!

The One Minute Software Development Manager

Being a Software Development Manager is a great job, if you are the right person for the job.  You have to have a real passion for technology and leadership to excel in this role.  I have spent the better part of the last 5 years studying leadership and software development, and have really enjoyed the journey.  Below are some of the key things I try and focus on day to day as I interact with my team.  Hopefully some of these points can help you!

How To Finish A Big Software Project And Be The Hero

We’ve all been there! The huge beast software project that just won’t end/die. In fact Microsoft is constantly getting themselves into this trouble.  Vista, SQL Server, XP, all became these huge projects, that in the end, had to have massive features cut, and new leaders appointed to save the day and ship products!  At the end of the day, if you are constantly building and building, and never shipping, you’re sunk!  How do you get a big software project out of the water and become the software development hero?  I’ll tell you how…

What Makes Version 1.0 Software Hard

I’m always puzzled by how hard software can be to write the first version of any software product.  Software in itself is always hard, for more reasons than I can write in a blog entry. But what makes Version 1.0 so hard?  I’ll give you a hint, most of it has nothing to do with your developers. It has more to do with the process of innovation.

How To Kill Your To Do List, Developer Style!

Are you one of those people that creates to do list’s, action plans, project plans, and seems to have millions of things to do?  There is actually a simple “Hack” you can use today to get your life back on track.  I just finished reading David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: Books: David Allen, and have taken some great ideas from the book!  I highly recommend reading it. Follow along with me on this journey to getting more stuff done than you ever imagined, developer style!

7 Key Attributes of High Performance Software Development Teams

There are so many people out there writing books about the best software development processes, tools, architectures, and so much more.  I woke up this morning wanting to concentrate on writing about the lower level as I see it to a High Performance Software Development team.  I truly see this as the essence to great teams, and great companies.  It’s simply not enough anymore to have the smartest people working for you.  You need to have smart people that embody the essence of your company.

How To Win Friends and Make Developers Happy

How to win friends and make software developers happy!  Sounds simple, however, as most of you will know, managing software developers is tricky business.  Making them happy day to day is even harder. It is true that just because you are a great software developer doesn’t mean you should be promoted to a manager. However, I strongly feel that if you have not been in the trenches, on death march projects, or simply do not understand the developer’s mentality inside out, you will be at a loss when trying to figure out this “special” bunch of people.

Software Development Top 30 Mistakes

I have been developing software and web applications for nearly 11 years now.  Software development has come a long way since the days of Binary, Cobol, etc.  What still fascinates me about software development is the same mistakes made before, are still made today.  Below are the top 30 Mistakes that are made within the software development process.  It’s amazing to see that none of these have anything to do with the language itself.

Who Wants To Beat Google?

How Microsoft can beat Google and win the Search Game.  It sounds like everyone wants to beat Google these days.  Great goal, but how do you do it?  Everyone seems to think they have the magic bullet! Microsoft was about to buy Yahoo! for over 44 billions of dollars!  They are investing billions in R&D.  But do they have the right approach?  Some people think you need more web pages indexed.  Some believe you need a better interface. I tend to think the answer is right under everyone’s noses, they just need to use a little bit more passion, focus, to get the job done.  But what should they be focusing on?  What should the vision be?

The 10 Commandments of Great User Experience Design

Starting a new software development project in the next little while?  Praying and hoping that it goes well?  Are you worrying about all the little software development intricacies like: Making sure you have a proper source control, ensuring you have a continuous integration environment, making sure you have great developers and making sure they are happy?  If you are, you probably haven’t remembered to pay attention to the most important part of the software development process.  The User Interface and the User Experience.

Creating Powerful PowerPoint Presentations

A word of caution for software developers that do not like presenting:  Do not read this article.  This article is meant to help the developers out there that have to deal with software presentations!  To those that get to go through the joys of presenting to large crowds, or small crowds, I really hope this guide helps you on your journey through creating a high impact PowerPoint presentation.

20 Tips to Improve ASP.net Application Performance

There are certain things you should take into account when you are developing your applications.  Over the last 12 years or so of working with asp and asp.net, I have learned to avoid and do certain things that increase your application performance by a massive amount!  Below are my top 20 tips to improving ASP.net application Performance.

The Complete List of Software Development Frameworks, Process’s, Methods, or Philosophies

There are so many software development processes, best practices, philosophies, and frameworks out there that I just wanted to create a complete reference list of valuable things to remember.  Note that some of these I recommend NOT using, however I have listed them so that we can ensure to remember what not to do.  However, you would be surprised how in some cases some of these practices are valid, even though they might see ridiculous.  Anyway, here is the list, and as always feel free to post your comments and I will try and review them and add the ones that are valid!

Ultimate Server-Side Web Development Cheat Sheets

Even before the other Ultimate Web Development Cheat Sheet Guide became popular on Digg and del.icio.us, I was working on another version focused around Server-Side technologies.  I was going to add them into the other list, but removed them.  I wanted to have a list that was more focused, and only had the best Server-Side Cheat Sheets.  Also please note while there are hundreds of cheat sheets for each area, I try and only list at most the top 10 in each area, otherwise it makes the guide useless with repeated data. This makes these guides much more useful than the old guides out there.

The Complete List of Ajax Tools

Ajax has really taken off over the last two years.  Ajax is really just the combination of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.  I actually remember almost over 5 years ago now working with XML and JavaScript to auto-magically update navigation bars from the database.  With the advancement of Ajax, new frameworks, utilities, and software packages have been built to make the production of Ajax web sites much easier.  Below is the complete list of these tools, and the only list you will ever need!  Please feel free to submit more sites in the comments below as they will be added!

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Twitter

Want to improve your Twitter Ninja skills?  Want to impress all your friends with your twitter abilities? Ever wondered how some of the Twitter elite do some of the crazy things they do with twitter? Whether you are new to twitter, or have been using twitter for a while, you are guaranteed to learn something new and cool in the next 5 minutes.

Filed Under: Software Development, Software Team Management
October 13, 2008 By 55 Comments

Microsoft Silverlight 2 Released

Silverlight 2 was finally released to the world today!  Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft made the official announcement today at 9am PDT. This is a significant event as it not only marks a huge milestone for the Microsoft Silverlight Team, but it also marks the date that Flash finally got a true competitor after years of complete domination.  While Silverlight 1.0 was released last year, it was mainly a video only version, with some JavaScript/AJAX support that lacked the true power of .net.  With the release of Silverlight 2, Microsoft has introduced a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework.

I originally spoke about Silverlight in 2007, and since then have spent most of my evening time learning the Expression tools, and focusing on getting Designers and Developers to work together to create beautiful Silverlight applications. Silverlight 2 allows web developers to create applications using any of the programming languages that are available in Visual Studio, including C#, VB.net, JavaScript, IronPython, and IronRuby.

As a Microsoft Expression MVP, people are always asking me to point out cool Silverlight sites. So far it’s been pretty hard to find awesome sites because all the new sites are being built are being built on Silverlight 2 beta which is not yet supported fully by Microsoft. The release of Silverlight 2 will allow many of these applications to launch out of beta, and into production.

How is Silverlight doing?

You have to remember that Silverlight only launched about a year ago.  How is it fairing with market penetration?  In the United States, Silverlight is now running on 30% of the computers. Worldwide, 25% of consumers now have access to Silverlight.  Remember this market penetration was with the mainly Video only version of Silverlight.  Now that Silverlight 2 is here with complete .NET Framework support, expect thousands of applications to pop up, and the install base to grow rapidly.

Microsoft Silverlight Coming to Eclipse

Silverlight on Eclipse Microsoft also announced its plans to support Silverlight development in tools other than Expression Studio and Visual Studio.  In fact, Microsoft will provide funding to an Eclipse Foundation Member, Soyatec, to lead the project to integrate Silverlight development into the Eclipse IDE.  The project will be released under the Eclipse Public License on SourceForge.

The download of Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight “Community Technology Preview” is already available for download from eclipse4sl.org.

Furthermore, Microsoft will release the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) and publish on MSDN the technical specification for the Silverlight Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) vocabulary.  The pack will include controls such as: DockPanel, ViewBox, TreeView, Accordion and AutoComplete.  With the release of the Silverlight XAML vocabulary, third-party ISV’s will be able to create applications that can read and write XAML for Silverlight very easily.

Some Highlights of Silverlight 2

  • .NET Framework support with a rich base class library. This is a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework.
  • Powerful built-in controls. These include DataGrid, ListBox, Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar controls and more.
  • Advanced skinning and templating support. This makes it easy to customize the look and feel of an application.
  • Deep zoom. This enables unparalleled interactivity and navigation of ultrahigh resolution imagery.
  • Comprehensive networking support. Out-of-the-box support allows calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and standard HTTP services, enabling users to create applications that easily integrate with existing back-end systems.
  • Expanded .NET Framework language support. Unlike other runtimes, Silverlight 2 supports a variety of programming languages, including Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby, making it easier for developers already familiar with one of these languages to repurpose their existing skill sets.
  • Advanced content protection. This now includes Silverlight DRM, powered by PlayReady, offering robust content protection for connected Silverlight experiences.
  • Improved server scalability and expanded advertiser support. This includes new streaming and progressive download capabilities, superior search engine optimization techniques, and next-generation in-stream advertising support.
  • Vibrant partner ecosystem. Visual Studio Industry Partners such as ComponentOne LLC, Infragistics Inc. and Telerik Inc. are providing products that further enhance developer capabilities when creating Silverlight applications using Visual Studio.
  • Cross-platform and cross-browser support. This includes support for Mac, Windows and Linux in Firefox, Safari and Windows Internet Explorer.

Silverlight 2 will be available for download on Tuesday, Oct. 14, at http://www.silverlight.net. Customers already using a previous version of Silverlight will be automatically upgraded to Silverlight 2.

Read all the details on the release of Silverlight 2 at Microsoft PressPass

Filed Under: Microsoft Expression, Silverlight Tagged With: ,
October 12, 2008 By 29 Comments

The Greatest Web 2.0 Videos of Our Time

Digg Unicorn  Web 2.0 has given us some great moments, which thankfully have been captured in pictures and videos around the world.  There are however a few standout videos that really bring out the essence of what was Web 2.0.  Below is a short compilation of some of the most popular videos, that really explain what went on during Web 2.0. Watching these videos, pretty much sums up and explains the Web 2.0 era.

1. Here Comes another Bubble

The Richter Scales video “Here Comes Another Bubble” will go down in the history books as THE Web 2.0 Video.  The video mocked pretty much everyone involved with the Web 2.0 revolution as being involved in the second “Bubble”.  The video is set to the Billy Joel tune from “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and was an instant hit across the Internet.  You can download the MP3 for Here Comes Another Bubble if you like.



2. Team Cyprus – Don’t Stop Believing

In sharp contrast to the last video, Team Cyprus’s lip sync of “Don’t Stop Believing” will forever be associated with the end of Web 2.0.  Not exactly sure what the tech elite in this video were thinking when they chose to publish this video to the world last week.  A lip sync of “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, the video includes people from Google, Facebook, The Wall Street Journal, and others.  While the tech crew was partying it up in Cyprus, chaos was ensuing back home and Silicon Valley was starting to burn.



3. Digg Dubb – Groove Is In the Heart

A great video put together by Digg.  A fantastic idea by the Digg guys to make sure everyone at the first Digg meet up at Mighty could recognize the Digg Crew.  The video includes appearances from Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, which are pretty much the best parts of the video.  The party at Mighty was also fantastic, where the video first played.

4. Rock Band – Robert Scoble Jay Adelson

What could be more 2008 than Rock Band, Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, David Spark, and Jay Adelson.  Set to the tune of “Roxanne” by The Police, “Rock Band” has some pretty hilarious lyrics if you are a Rock Band addict.

Filed Under: Videos, Web 2.0
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