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.
For those of you who are looking for new readymade controls to work with, this is the one. Get it from http://www.codeplex.com/silverlight/
Today you can get your free copy of CodeRush Xpress for Visual Studio 2008. This tool has a good number of features which will help you to simplify and shape complex code.
CodeRush Xpress includes the following features.
In addition, you receive the following refactorings.
Add Block DelimitersCombine ConditionalsCompress to Lambda Expression
Compress to Ternary ExpressionConvert to Auto-implemented PropertyConvert to Initializer
Create Backing StoreDecompose InitializerDecompose Parameter
Expand Lambda ExpressionExpand Ternary ExpressionExtract Method
Flatten ConditionalInline DelegateInline Temp
Introduce LocalMake ExplicitMake Implicit
Move Type to FileName Anonymous MethodName Anonymous Type
Reverse ConditionalSplit ConditionalUse String.Format
Use StringBuilder
Go and grab your free copy here.
Now that Microsoft PDC is in progress, we can expect a lot of new things to be unveiled over the next 4 days.
Today’s news is about Cloud Computing and the name of this is Azure (meaning clouds). Only the attendees have access to the private beta program and it opens a new wave of computing where you host your applications, database and other media on Microsoft’s web servers. You can also sign up for the services and start working with Azure.
Also a lot of things have been said about Windows 7 (the next version of Windows after Windows Vista). But let us not get too excited because all of us knows what happened to Vista after all the hype over the last few years when Vista was in development.
You can catch all the news about PDC here.
Wishing you all a very happy Diwali and prosperous New Year.
May this new year bring you all joy and may all your wishes be fulfilled and wishing you all a safe and happy Diwali.
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For developers who would like to create reports for SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services but don’t have Visual Studio 2008, will be glad to know that there is now a stand alone builder available for those to create and publish reports.
Report Builder 2.0 provides an intuitive report authoring environment for business and power users. It supports the full capabilities of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services. Compared to Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008, Report Builder 2.0 includes a number of additional features:
Get it here.
Last week Microsoft released the final version of Silverlight version 2. There has been a lot of changes in the final version and those of you who have been developing on beta 2 all these days should download the final version.
You will have to install the Silverlight_Tools.exe and this setup is smart enough to remove the beta 2 tools as well as remains left by the beta tool. Just relax and let this tool get the work done.
You will also need to install SP1 of Expression Blend 2 if you are using Expression Blend 2 – June 2008 preview.
Instructions are available on http://www.silverlight.net/.
The Web Application Installer Beta is designed to help get you up and running with the most widely used Web Applications freely available for your Windows Server. Web AI provides support for popular ASP.Net and PHP Web applications including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce and more. With just a few simple clicks, Web AI will check your machine for the necessary pre-requisites, download these applications from their source location in the community, walk you through basic configuration items and then install them on your computer.
For those of you who are clueless or wondering if you were doing the right way in configuring your server for hosting a website, this tool comes in handy and asks what you want to install/configure on the server. Just select the components including SQL Server Express if you want so and then leave it to the experts. The installer does all that for you.
This should be helpful for those who are not quite technical in depth to configure a web server.
Get it from here.
For those of you who are eager to know what has changed in IE 8 B2 for developers and how to make changes to your website to render properly in IE 8 B2, here is a document that explains the new features as well as the changes to be done for your code.
Download it here.
Now that the ASP.NET MVC Framework has been released here is a good article that explains the features, pros and cons of using this MVC Framework versus the regular ASP.NET Forms that we have been using since 1.0.
You can catch the article at the below mentioned link.
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2008/10/06/net-3-5-sp1-best-practices-when-to-use-the-asp-net-mvc-framework.aspx
Just heard about this tool from Pandurang (when going through his slides from Virtual Tech Ed)
Similar to Reflector for .NET Applications there is a tool to dessicate the Silverlight applications. You can download this from http://silverlightspy.com/
Note that this is a Clickonce application and you will have to ensure that your computer has the minimum requisities before installing this tool.
Minimum softwares needed
Internet Explorer 6 or higher Silverlight 2 (Beta 2 or Release Candidate 0) runtime Windows Installer 3.1 .NET Framework 3.5 runtime
Will let you know how this measures up after testing this with few silverlight applications.