Dave Bost

A received a note from Anthony Handley a few weeks back feeling out my thoughts around renaming (and re-chartering) the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group (CD2) to the Chicago Silverlight User Group. I thought it was a great idea as it provided a directed focus on what the topics and general direction of the group would be. It would only help the community at large understand the conversations that were taking place.

The intention of the group from the beginning was to bring the conversations between designers and developers closer together from a platform agnostic approach. As Anthony expounds on below, the group started to gravitate to more discussions focused on a particular area – Silverlight. Changing the name only solidifies the charter of the groups intent to the community and provides a means to bring more people together around a common cause (a “community”).

We are still able to facilitate conversations and idea sharing between designers and developers through events such as RIApalooza. Myself, along with the leaders of the Chicago Silverlight user group and the Chicago Adobe user group are currently in the planning stages of RIApalooza 3. More details to come.

Here is Anthony’s message…

In the past 18 months, the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group has sought to walk the lines between design and development while remaining platform agnostic. We’ve had some great presentations and speakers in the past; however, it has become increasingly difficult to find and schedule topics that appeal to designers and developers in both the Adobe and Microsoft worlds. After careful introspection and evaluation, the CD2 leadership team have chosen to clarify our place in the community and focus on Microsoft Silverlight & WPF.

And so, we’re extremely excited to announce the creation of The Chicago Silverlight User Group. The core purpose of the group (better designer/developer collaboration) hasn’t changed, but includes a renewed focus as we concentrate on all that Silverlight and WPF have to offer as a rich platform. We invite all of CD2’s members to continue to join us in this new and excited SIG in the coming months.

In effect, this is the sunset of CD2 as we know it today. We realize that some of the content we sought to bring to CD2 is already capably provided by the likes of IxDA and the Chicago Area Adobe User Groups. We believe these groups also add value to the designer and developer communities.

The new user group’s inaugural meeting will be at 6PM on Wednesday, March 3rd at The Illinois Technology Association (ITA) 200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor | Chicago, IL 60606

We will be launching a new registration website in the coming weeks. If you have any questions or comments about The Chicago Silverlight User Group, please contact us at the email addresses below.

I am happy to report that I will be speaking at the (re)inaugural meeting of the Chicago Silverlight user group on March 3rd. We will be discussing the new features of Silverlight 4.

Announcements, Expression, Illinois Events, Silverlight, Talks

The release of Visual Studio 2010 is right around the corner. For several months, developers have been plugging away at the Beta bits and we have received valuable feedback. Based upon that feedback, the Visual Studio team has decided to push out a Release Candidate (RC) that is now available for you to download.

Jason Zander provides some additional details regarding the RC…

We got a lot of invaluable feedback on Beta 2 through Connect as well as your survey responses.  In particular many of you pointed out areas of performance where we were not at parity with VS2008 and it was impacting your ability to adopt the product.  Some of those areas of feedback included general UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs), editing (typing, scrolling, and Intelisense), designers (Silverlight and WPF in particular), improved memory usage, debugging (stepping, managed / native interop), build times, and solution/project load.

You can now download the Visual Studio Release Candidate and continue to provide your valuable feedback.

Scott Guthrie is taking it one step further by inviting you to submit your feedback to the Visual Studio Connect website, but also sending him an email directly:

Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix.  If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu@microsoft.com) with details about it.  I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation).

The team is also looking for feedback regarding the install experience as well.

Visual Studio 2010 is a MAJOR release. A number of items (based on customer feedback) has been ripped and replaced with leading-edge technologies. All of this effort to gain customer feedback is to make sure we’re ALL (Microsoft and the community of developers and users) is happy with this release. We all want a tool that is going to help us succeed in what we do – write software!

Go download the bits now!

.NET 4, .NET Development, Announcements, Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2010

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at the Madison Code Camp (MadCamp) where we’re dedicating a whole track to our recent New Efficiency launch events (one of which I participated in Chicago just the other day). In the morning, Kevin Remde will walk the IT Pro set through the new management features in Windows 7, as well as the new enhancements in Windows Server 2008 R2 and what’s coming ahead in Exchange Server 2010.

In the afternoon, I will walk developers through the paces of how to light up their applications on Windows 7 by taking advantage of features such as the Ribbon platform, the Taskbar, Jump Lists, Libraries as well as underlying platform additions such as the new Sensor and Location Platform and Multitouch.

This isn’t all that’s going on at MadCamp but there will be two additional tracks with more great content for IT Pros and Developers alike.

We dug deep into our budget and pulled out some great giveaways including the opportunity to win one of the following:

• Dell Mini 10 Netbook with a copy of Windows 7
• Zune HD
• Games, Books, Peripherals, etc.

I hope you can join us!

follow: http://twitter.com/maddotnet

tweet: #madcamp09

Announcements, Community, Windows, Wisconsin Events, training

I’ve been sitting on a blog post about Microsoft’s participation in Open Source development and release of some interoperability toolkits. What’s happened in the short time I’ve had this idea in my queue, Microsoft up and releases something new or announces some news about additional efforts. With that, I’m going to try and summarize what’s happened in the last month or so regarding Microsoft’s participation and contribution to the Open Source world…

CodePlex Foundation

Arguably the biggest news of the past few weeks was the announcement that Microsoft was establishing the CodePlex Foundation.

The CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit foundation formed with the mission of enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities.

Although initial funding has come from Microsoft, this isn’t a Microsoft-only organization. Already board members include Miguel de Icaza (Mono) and Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke) with the expectation that many more will join. From Microsoft’s end, we have some of the top advocates for Open Source internal to Microsoft including Sara Ford, John Lam, Jim Newkirk, Phil Haack and Scott Hanselman. There are ways for you to participate as well.

Many of the questions you may have regarding the CodePlex Foundation can be answered on the foundation’s FAQ page.

This is certainly something I’m going to keep my eye on and look for ways that I can participate as well.

PHP Toolkits, API’s and Collaborations

I recently interviewed Claudio Caldato from the Microsoft Interoperability team for the Thirsty Developer. Claudio and his team have been some busy little beavers over the past few weeks. Let’s see if I can break it down for you…

• It may come as a surprise to some but Microsoft has been working feverishly over the past couple of years to make Windows the best platform to run PHP applications. On the Thirsty Developer episode, Caludio discussed the recently released PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services. ADO.NET Data Services shipped as part of .NET 3.5 SP1 and provides a RESTful interface into your data services and provides an efficient way to surface your data to the web. From their the data is easily consumable as it is served up in JSON or plain old XML (POX). The PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services is an Open Source project that provides a set of utilities and libraries for PHP developers to easily take advantage of these ADO.NET Data Services. Claudio does a better job of explaining the toolkit than I can from this Channel9 video. This toolkit was recently highlighted at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C.
• Another Open Source project supported by the Interoperability team at Microsoft is the PHP SDK for Windows Azure. This SDK provides a programming model to take advantage of the Windows Azure Platform services. Features include:
  • PHP classes for Windows Azure Blobs, Tables & Queues (for CRUD operations)
  • Helper Classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST & Error Management
  • Manageability, Instrumentation & Logging support
  • Support for storing PHP sessions in Azure Table Storage

  The Windows Azure Platform can also host your PHP applications as it has built-in FastCGI support.

• For PHP developer’s utilizing the Zend Framework, there was a recent announcement regarding a partnership around the Simple Cloud API project. The Simple Cloud API’s effort is to provide one interface to interact with a variety of cloud application services including the Windows Azure Platform. This is an open source project initially funded by Zend, IBM, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Rackspace and GoGrid. The first deliverables for the Simple Cloud API project are features relating to file storage in the cloud, document database and simple queue services. Initial implementations will be available for users of the Zend Framework, however the project for contributors to translate the API’s to other object oriented technologies.
• While we’re on a PHP kick, the SQL Server Driver for PHP 1.1 CTP (August 2009) was recently released. This driver provides a direct connection to your SQL Server database from your PHP applications. Not to confuse you, but the PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services allows PHP applications to connect to data services exposed over the web through ADO.NET Data Services. The SQL Driver for PHP is a PHP extension that provides direct connection to your SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008 database.
• Switching gears… the interoperability team hasn’t focused all of their attention on PHP. The Microsoft Interoperability team collaborated with Noelios Technologies out of France to build the Restlet open source project, a lightweight REST framework for Java that includes the Restlet Extension for ADO.NET Data Services. The extension makes it easier for Java developers to take advantage of ADO.NET Data Services as well.

I think its safe to say that the Microsoft Interoperability has been quite busy in supply solutions and interfaces to Microsoft application and data services for non-Microsoft developer technologies. What else would you like to see?

IIS Team Releases Windows Cache Extension for PHP

The Interoperability team isn’t the only team at Microsoft that has provided some great solutions to the PHP community. The IIS team recently shipped the beta of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP. The Windows Cache Extension for PHP is a PHP accelerator that is used to increase the speed of PHP applications running on the Windows operating systems. Any PHP application can take advantage of the functionality provided by the Windows Cache Extension for PHP without any code modifications. All that is required is that the extension is enabled and loaded by the PHP engine on IIS. Features include:

• PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 support
• Configurable file cache
• Configurable PHP opcode cache
• Relative file path cache
• PHP functions to obtain information about the cache status

You can submit questions, report bugs and provide feature suggestions at the Windows Cache Extension for PHP Forum.

These examples and many others showcase the efforts that Microsoft is providing in integrating their solutions with the rest of the world. As a representative for Microsoft, I am extremely pleased at the progress and look forward to where these efforts take us.

You can find more information on these efforts and many more over on Port25. You can also keep tabs on the announcements around Microsoft interoperability by following the twitter stream, @OpenAtMicrosoft.

ADO.NET, Announcements, Azure, PHP, SQL Server

Another announcement coming down the Firestarter pipeline… this one is all about ASP.NET MVC. A full-day of ASP.NET MVC live from New York and online to take you from 0-300 level in a day.

At the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter, we’ll give you a quick tour of the framework, then peel back the layers and dive deeper into how it works. As part of that, we’ll spend time discussing the design and development practices that lead to the creation of the MVC framework. By the time you leave, you’ll have enough knowledge to get fired up and start building web applications on the .NET platform.

ASP.NET MVC Firestarter (Live from New York)
Saturday, Oct 3, 2009
8:30 AM – 5:15 PM Eastern Time

LIVE EVENT | REGISTER >>
LIVE WEBCAST | REGISTER >>

All times are EST.

Announcements, training