Getting Started with Silverlight
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Despite the options available with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, accommodating their differences can be maddening. Enter Silverlight, a plug-in for multiple Web browsers on multiple platforms that makes it easier to create rich content. By Adam Nathan. 1202
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Pierre-Alain Joye has made an update to his information about building Cairo on Windows with more fixes and the creation of a dedicated page for the project.   I fixed a possible issue with PDF and PS support, it should work way better now. The cairo_build_windows archive has been updated and a decent freetype2 is now included (from gnuwin32). The build system has been tested with VC++ Express and VC.net 2003. Also a configure.bat is now included, it is a simple "alias" for "cscript /nologo configure.js ". You can call it just like any real configure.   As mentioned, a project homepage has been set up for cairo-win32, and can be found here along with some results of it: PNG file, PDF file.
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The ASP.NET Community Starter Kit from Microsoft is an application that allows you to create a fully featured community-driven website, complete with article and news management, downloads, forums and user handling. By Packt Publishing. 0927
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Microsoft's ReMix07 event touted the benefits of its Silverlight rich media technology.
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A few days after Microsoft released its Silverlight 1.0 plug-in, Adobe Systems has begun to disclose new features in its upcoming Flash Media Server 3. Many observers see Silverlight as being positioned as a major competitor to Flash and Adobe&#39;s other media technologies.
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Hartmut Holzgraefe shares an interesting extension with the community in this new blog post - one for outputting to a Braille device.   And yet another library wrapper extension, this time for libbraille, a library providing a unified API for Braille output devices.   You can get the full details on the extension from its homepage and it can be installed via the pear system.
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Mike Potter has posted an update on the status that Adobe is making for developers, including some new offerings for PHPers.    Over the last several months, Adobe has made enormous progress with software developers. In the few short months since the Macromedia acquisition, we have released new products, opened access to SDKs and continued to create communities of open source software.   We released two RIA SDKs: one for PHP developers and one for Ruby on Rails developers.  Both of those are free, as in speech.  Head to Google Code for the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe or the Ruby on Rails RIA SDK by Adobe.  Join the mailing list for either of them (PHP, Ruby), they're fairly active.    It's great to see a larger company taking such an interest in the dynamic web languages out there and providing good, solid tools for thier developers to use to create bigger and better applications.
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There is an interesting post on OnLamp.com that mentions the search for a good wiki system. Read the post to find out why the author thinks that the wiki world "needs the kind of vision that will make the product more accessible, more polished, less prone to abandonment or neglect...", and the several comments that follow.
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The long awaited âService Pack 2â for Windows XP has finally been released, not without problems though. If youâve got a good bit of computer experience, then installing
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Elizabeth Smith has a new post to her blog today covering some of the fun she's been having with compiling things like Gtk+ and PHP-Gtk2.   So I've been using microsoft visual studio (actually it's Visual C++ Express, but uses the same stuff behind the scenes) to work on getting things compiled on windows. PHP-Gtk2 allows for some nifty extensions, well at least on linux. So I've been working to get versions of libglade, scintilla, gtksourceview and mozembed working on windows. It's a long, slow process. Here's the deal so far.   She talks about her current situation (what's compiling and what's not) and the software that she's trying to get up and running. She also mentions a problem she's been having with an error message talking about "unresolved external symbols" she'll need to track down (or get some help on - anyone out there seen it?)
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(InfoWorld) - While the landscape for rich Web development technologies is getting crowded, industry dignitaries at The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, Calif. Thursday nonetheless saw a place for the various entrants in this space. The field of technologies has grown to include AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript), Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun's JavaFX, said Neal Ford, application architect for Thoughtworks, who moderated a panel addressing rich Web development. Audience members also gave a nod to the Ruby, Python, and Groovy languages. Panelist Scott Davis, an author and consultant, said he originally thought that AJAX would rule the world. "It runs in any browser," Davis said. But his horizons have expanded. "Quite honestly, I've gotten really interested in Flex recently," Davis said. The recent open-sourcing of Flex has made it more attractive, he stressed. AJAX drew affirmations with reservations from panelist Jon Ferraiolo, an IBM Web architect who manages the OpenAjax Alliance. "My perspective is that AJAX works today. It's fantastic, it does nearly everything you want to do except for multimedia types of things," Ferraiolo said. "I think there's room for Flash, Flex; there's room for Silverlight. These things are going to be the cutting-edge applications that require the latest features," said Ferraiolo. With the proliferation of mobile devices however, HTML browsing will not be available on all these systems, and the iPhone does not have Flash and probably will not have Silverlight either, said Ferraiolo. AJAX, however, is always there and is open and can be counted on, he said. "There is a continuum of experience that needs to be looked at," said Josh Holmes, an evangelist at Microsoft who is speaking on Silverlight at the conference. There is the standards-based Web with HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and there is AJAX, he said. Moving on, there are platforms optimized for a particular OS or hardware that can render 3D graphics, said Holmes. "My personal opinion is that Silverlight and Flex are definitely on that heavy, rich but not quite platform-optimized edge," Holmes said. There are benefits to both, he said. Another panelist sided with Flex for enterprise usage. "In the enterprise space, I tend to recommend things like Flex because the development is much faster to get up and going," said Bill Scott, AJAX evangelist at Yahoo. "Creating a desktop style [application] in AJAX is still really hard," Scott said. AJAX does fit into a lot of areas, but none of the rich Web technologies will rule the world, he said. Panelists also addressed the question of application-testing. "Yes, testing is absolutely crucial, and as an industry, it's something we have not taken seriously for the last couple of years," Davis said. "I think this is a space that the market realizes isn't served really well right now," said Ryan Breen, vice president of technology at Web performance tester Gomez. The Crosscheck open-source testing platform was cited by panelist Stuart Holloway, co-founder of software developer Relevance. The issue of tools for JavaScript was raised. IntellliJ, said Davis, "has got killer JavaScript support, and it's got wonderful CSS support," he said. But lately, he has been developing with the simpler TextMate tool. "I've found that the overhead of a big heavy tool is less valuable to me than having something that's easy for me to bring up, bring down, refresh," Davis said. This lighter format seems to fit the Web development model, he said. Panelists and an audience member also mourned the lack of staying power of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). "SVG just breaks my heart," Davis said. "SVG had the opportunity to be kind of a unified solution. I wish it would come back strong, but I'm not holding out hope." Silverlight, Holmes said, uses XAML instead of SVG. "My opinion is SVG has kind of stalled and there were some things that were needed beyond it," so Silverlight uses other technologies instead, Holmes said. Ferraiolo said he was one of the initiators of SVG while at Adobe. "SVG was there in 2001, 2002, but Adobe decided to pull the plug on it despite the fact that it was on 200 million desktops," he said.
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To-do manager, RSS reader, notepad, widgets, image viewer... (requires Java(tm) SE 6 (JRE): http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads)   Download: http://makagiga.sourceforge.net/download.html  Release Notes: http://makagiga.sourceforge.net/releases/2.2.html  Feedback: http://makagiga.sourceforge.net/contact.html
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is releasing its Silverlight 1.0 plug-in for video on the Web Wednesday and also will participate in Novell's porting of Silverlight to Linux via the Moonlight project. Silverlight represents Microsoft's efforts to present multimedia experiences on the Web, offering enhanced audio and video streaming and playback using Windows Media Technologies. The technology aims squarely at rival Adobe Systems and its ubiquitous Flash Player for multimedia on the Web. "We're finally shipping the plug-in," said Parimal Desphande, group product manager for the User Experience Platform and Tools team at Microsoft The 1.0 version of Silverlight, which is being released to the Web, is geared to providing video. Accessible at the Silverlight Web page, it has been available in a beta release. A more potent successor, Silverlight 1.1, will provide for more interactive content, including support for .Net development and transactional capabilities. It remains only available in an early alpha release format. While Silverlight currently works with Windows and Macintosh, Microsoft is endorsing Novell's plan to make Silverlight run on Linux clients via the Moonlight project. Moonlight 1.0 is expected to be done within six months, said Miguel de Icaza, vice president for the developer platform at Novell, who has been overseeing Moonlight. "We will be distributing Moonlight for all the major distributions and provide both packages in RPM and DEB [distribution] forms as well as having a Mozilla-based installer for those not familiar with the packaging system in Linux," de Icaza said. Microsoft cites several differentiators between Silverlight and Flash. Silverlight, Deshpande said, offers high-definition video at a lower cost and functions with Microsoft's developer tools. The company also is offering a SaaS-based component, Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live. "[For] customers who want to use our service for streaming video content, we have that as well," Deshpande said. He touted a list of supporters of Silverlight, including Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment; Entertainment Tonight; Break.com, which shows videos; and the Home Shopping Network.Â  The ability to use Microsoft tools with Silverlight provides an advantage, said Ross Angert, creative director for interactive media at World Wrestling Entertainment. "It's the advantages from a development side that Silverlight offers us," in terms of streaming video costs and displaying multiple video streams, he said. "Flash certainly is a great tool, and we have some Flash product on our site, but I think overall as a company to partner with, Microsoft is going to be a great partner going forward," Angert said. WWE plans to use Silverlight for wrestling videos and broadband content. Current systems will be kept in place without much change, Angert said. "[Silverlight] will give users access to our entire library of videos," said Angert. Developers can use Microsoft's Visual Studio and Expression tools to develop applications for Silverlight. The company is releasing Expression Encoder 1.0, formerly Expression Media Encoder, a tool for encoding and publishing rich media content to Silverlight, on Wednesday. Microsoft also is announcing its Silverlight Partner Initiative on Wednesday, in which more than 35 companies have agreed to support Silverlight. Among the participants are Akamai Technologies, IdentityMine, Electric Rain, and TwoFour Digital.SEE ALSO:Users take sides in Flash-Silverlight clash
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InfoWorld - Microsoft is releasing its Silverlight 1.0 plug-in for video on the Web Wednesday and also will participate in Novell&#39;s porting of Silverlight to Linux via the Moonlight project.
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Redmond makes a foray into the design-suite space with this bundle of four applications. How do they stack up, individually and together -- and should Adobe be worried?
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Adobe Integrated Runtime paves the way for Web applications that perform like desktop-bound programs.Images: Building apps on AIR