May 2008 - Posts

ASP.Net MVC Firestarter NYC

ASP.NET MVC Firestarter in New York City June 7th

Join the community for a Saturday in New York City to learn more about the ASP.NET MVC framework and see what everyone is all excited about. Sign-up today for the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter.
posted Thursday, May 15, 2008 10:41 PM by paul with 2 Comments

The Ultimate SSD

The past month I had an opportunity to test a Samsung SSD and can affirm this is the future of storage. As microprocessors have followed Gordon Moore's curve higher and faster our hard drives have only increased in capacity remaining a constant 5400 rpm. Magnetic rotating platters appear so Edisonian in design. Solid state drives are like transistors replacing the vacuum tube with speeds of 10000 rpm or more.

SSD's are manufactured much the same way as microprocessors from wafers in purpose built fabs requiring massive investment. Up till now SSD's have been very expensive, but as the wafers get thinner and larger and with more fabs coming on-line the prices will steadily decrease.

Already we are seeing small laptops with Flash memory on the motherboard and soon it will be the norm for laptops to come this way. The HD in your laptop was installed by a human, SSD's on the motherboard will be done by machines.

I found the Samsung SSD ideal for software developers because of the decreased latency in opening a large IDE like Visual Studio.

Two things I discovered in my trial was that you need Windows Vista Ultimate to get the best performance and you'll never need to defrag again.
posted Wednesday, May 14, 2008 12:35 PM by paul with 0 Comments

eBay Unlawful and Unfair

Unlawful and Unfair

Jim Buckmaster the CEO of Craigslist has just posted on the Craigslist blog that they are sick and tired of eBay and their not going to take it any more!

Did you say eBay? Yea, I have had issues with eBay, on two occasions I put items up for auction and they were won by guys in Nigeria who said they were woman living in the USA. Ebay gave them my PayPal address and my name and that was all they needed to go on a fishing expedition. With my name and PayPal address and a very good facsimile of a PayPay You have received money email they struck once, then again and again. When I contacted eBay they acted as if I was the n00b who needed instructions on how to buy and sell on the web. The second time this happened ebay froze my account while I had two other items up for auction.

This must be happening to many people and I'll bet a few fell for the scam, but eBay is saying nothing.
posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008 5:41 PM by paul with 0 Comments

SkyServer

WorldWide Telescope Launched

I was in San Francisco back in February 2002 for the Launch of Visual Studio and when it can time for lunch I found a seat and sat down next to Jim Gray. He was discussing with a friend problems with some of the servers at his Microsoft Research Lab and I interrupted with a short dissertation on the value of quality motherboards. Jim looked me in the eye and said you're a hardware guy and I said shhhh, don't tell anybody. We talked about many things over the next hour, but mostly astronomy, my childhood memories of the Haydon Planetarium and Jim's SkyServer project.

I've downloaded Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope and with my AMD Quad Core Phenom system with a 32" LCD it's an amazing experience. I'm traveling around our universes spiral galaxies, picturesque nebula and pulsating quasars thanks to the gamma ray burst of spirit that was Jim Gray.
posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008 9:48 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Lap Around Silverlight 2

N3UG Meeting Tonight

David Yack will be presenting a lap around Silverlight 2. Silverlight 2 allows developers to use .NET managed code to build Rich Internet Applications. In this talk we will look at the new controls, networking capabilities and other new features in Silverlight2. Additionally, we will discuss how to easily integrate Silverlight with existing ASP.NET applications.

David Yack is the CTO of Colorado Technology Consultants, a Microsoft Regional Director and is also a Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET.
posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008 9:13 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta

These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since Scott's Team released the products last November. They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better.

Important: SP1 Beta Installation Notes
posted Monday, May 12, 2008 1:33 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Windows Mobile Dev Tour

Windows Mobile Development Tour Coming to NYC & Philadelphia

Topics to be covered:

  • Intro to Win Mobile
  • Tools: Intro/SDK/Emulators/VS2008/Debug/Deploy
  • Managed Code: NET CF Managed APIs
  • Data Guidance
  • Whole new level see the video - Augmented Reality

New York City  May 19,  Register

Malvern, PA  May 22,  Register     More dates

posted Friday, May 09, 2008 10:20 PM by paul with 0 Comments

XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP

Announcing: XNA Game Studio 3.0 Community Technical Preview (CTP)

A preview release of XNA Game Studio 3.0 is now available through the XNA Creators Club site , with a final release scheduled for the holiday 2008 season. For those of you that prefer the shortest path to happiness, here is the direct link to the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP

If you find a bug or want to suggest a new feature, post it on XNA Game Studio Connect.
posted Thursday, May 08, 2008 6:38 AM by paul with 0 Comments

The Open Internet

Investing in Future of Open Internet

Google, Comcast, Intel Capital, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Trilogy Equity Partners have entered into an agreement to invest $3.2 billion in a new wireless broadband company. The new company will combine Clearwire's existing consumer WiMAX business with Sprint's broadband infrastructure and 2.5 GHz spectrum to create a new nationwide wireless broadband network.

We need more networks, more bandwidth, more coverage, more competition, so hopefully this will get us some of that.
I can remember back when WiMAX was an Intel initiative, then Sprint signed-on and now we have coalition with the desire and cash to complete the task.
posted Wednesday, May 07, 2008 10:45 AM by paul with 0 Comments

PopFly Audio

Creating Music for Popfly Game Creator

PopFly Game Creator allows you to upload your own music and sounds as .WMA or .MP3 files to use in your games. You can find out more on the process of uploading and playing back audio on the Popfly wiki.
posted Wednesday, May 07, 2008 8:24 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Asp.Net 3.5 Book on Sale

Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Book (only $16 on Amazon for a short time)

Instead of the usual $54 price, you can buy it for a short time for a ridiculous $16.49,$27.49 but act fast as they say on TV.
Professional ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader. Its Amazon sales rank of #95, which meant it was outselling Harry Potter!
posted Tuesday, May 06, 2008 2:25 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Silverlight 2 Controls

Download Source and Tests for Silverlight 2 Controls

The source for Silverlight 2 controls has been released with thousands of unit tests along with the test framework. That said, to develop Silverlight-based applications that use the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 controls, you do not need this source code. Instead, you must install the Silverlight 2 Software Development Kit SDK Beta 1. The source code for the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 controls enables you to learn the inner workings of the controls. To get the source code and tests, see Source Code and Unit Tests for Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Controls on Microsoft download site.
posted Tuesday, May 06, 2008 2:06 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008

A new name and a new Community Technical Preview CTP of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008.
The preview contains a large number of new features and improvements including increased runtime performance, improved security management, support for distributed language integrated queries LINQ, support for creating applications that run on multiple DSS nodes, and many new features in the Visual Simulation Environment.

Tandy Trower: Robotics Update - Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008
posted Monday, May 05, 2008 7:03 PM by paul with 1 Comments

A Yahoo run, or a run on YHOO?

Start watching for planted Media stories about a YHOO free-fall.

The only way to stop a run on YHOO is for someone to buy-up the YHOO shares as fast as they're dumped.

Jerry and David may need to invest a billion or two of their own money to save the day. A Second Act from the guys who began with one server and a little attitude and set to the task of indexing the World Wide Web.

Two seconds after the NASDX bell rings on Monday morning YHOO shares will drop $2, then all the talking begins...
posted Sunday, May 04, 2008 10:09 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Yahoo Prevails

Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo!

Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.
I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

This was a big failure for Microsoft PR as they fed often false information to blogs like Techcrunch, BoomTown and Silicon Alley Watcher.
Yahoo is still the number destination on the Web despite all the disparaging remarks by those blogs that sold their souls for an increase in Microsoft ad dollars.

On the other side of the world it's already Monday morning and Brokers who accumulated YHOO shares at the behest of Microsoft are dumping them. They may begin to buy them back if YHOO returnes to under $20 a share, but Steve Ballmer really should be focused on MSFT shareholder value.
posted Sunday, May 04, 2008 7:07 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Héctor Ruiz

Héctor Ruiz in this video from TED talks about his commitment to giving the whole world access to the Internet. Dr. Ruiz is the CEO of AMD, and through AMD's 50x15 initiative they hope to connect 50 percent of the world to the Internet by 2015. Sharing his own extraordinary life story, Ruiz makes the case that access to education is life-changing.

posted Saturday, May 03, 2008 8:58 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Popfly Game Creator

Popfly Game Creator

On a Friday afternoon while everryone is watching MSFT go down and YHOO rise, the alpha of the Popfly Game Creator was announced.
posted Friday, May 02, 2008 4:50 PM by paul with 0 Comments

Software Licensing and Protection Services

Protect your .NET code with SLPS

Microsoft loses billions every year from piracy.
Casual Pirates share software and transfer licenses freely. Soft Pirates knowingly download software cracks and keys. Blatant Pirates go to any lengths to hack software and use it illegally.

We should never forget that Microsoft was founded by a couple of hackers.

Software Licensing and Protection Services can help you protect, package, license, sell and control your software.
posted Friday, May 02, 2008 10:27 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Cognitive Surplus

Video thumbnail. Click to play

Clay Shirky from the NYU Media Lab gave the most memorable talk at the Web 2.0 Expo last week in San Francisco. Check-out the video, just click the photo.
posted Friday, May 02, 2008 6:57 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Expression 2 Ships

On May Day the Microsoft Expression Team shipped the second version of their Designer IDE in six flavors to help collaborate with Developers to create amazing websites.
Expression Studio 2
posted Thursday, May 01, 2008 3:53 PM by paul with 0 Comments