Eddie Amos

Silverlight 3 Jumpstart Book

Grab a copy of Silverlight 3 Jumpstart by Microsoft MVP and Regional Director David Yack. You won’t learn Silverlight in depth. But you will get a soup-to-nuts view of what building a business application in Silverlight is really like. All of the essential mechanics are here.

• How Silverlight compares to alternative client technologies (ASP, WinForms, WPF, Flash/Flex/Air)
• Development tools – got Visual Studio? not much more is absolutely required
• “Hello, Silverlight” – of course
• Hosting a Silverlight app – pretty easy stuff
• Basic screen layout with XAML and visual controls
• Data binding controls to data – because that’s our bread and butter
• Debugging – about time someone talked about that
• Making it look decent with styling – think CSS
• SketchFlow intro – executable sketches to win your client’s confidence
• Plumbing (aka, Application Architecture) – so you don’t reinvent every wheel “

http://www.silverlightjumpstart.com/

If you are a twitter fan then you must download this software from Seesmic.  It simply rocks. http://seesmic.com/seesmic_desktop/windows/

Happy coding and have a great weekend.

Amazon announced this morning a pilot program that allows customers with Microsoft Enterprise Agreements (EA) to use their existing Windows Server licenses with EC2.

To participate in this pilot:

• Your company must be based (or have a legal entity) in the United States
• Your company must have an existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) that is valid for a minimum of 12 months after your entry into the pilot
• You must already have purchased Software Assurance from Microsoft for your EA Windows Server Enterprise, Datacenter, and Standard licenses
• You must be an Enterprise customer (Academic and Government institutions are not covered by this pilot)

 To learn more http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/windows-license-mobility-pilot.

This latest version of Silverlight delivers hundreds of features and controls that, when combined with the continued innovation in Microsoft’s world-class tools for designers and developers — Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend – present the leading edge in rapid, powerful application development. With printing support, rich reporting and charting, and integration with back-end systems and server products including Microsoft SharePoint.  Silverlight is ready for business.  Learn more at http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/#tools

1. You can build innovative customizations for SharePoint
2.  Develop applications for Windows 7
3. Understand existing code and architecture
4. Identify test impact from code changes
5. Customize Visual Studio to meet your needs.

 Try it today at http://www.microsoft.com/vs

You can now write programs that distribute work across multiple processors without having to work directly with threads or the thread pool. Visual Studio 2010 includes parallel computing libraries for both the C runtime using the new multithreaded tool support in the Visual Studio.   .NET Framework 4 includes new libraries that support task and data parallelism. These libraries rely on a new task scheduler integrated with the .NET thread pool.

Parallel programming in Visual C++. The C runtime library now includes the Concurrency Runtime, which is a concurrent programming infrastructure for C++. Visual C++ also includes the new parallel patterns library and asynchronous agent libraries, both of which run on the Concurrency Runtime and expose productive programming models for concurrency to C++ developers.

The new Thread Execution Data Views enable you to determine details about an application’s performance, such as the following:

• How each processor on the computer is being used by your code as compared to other code at any time.
• How threads in your program are interacting with one another and with the computer.
• How threads are migrating across cores.

Check out Visual Studio today at http://www.microsoft.com/vs.

Happy coding.

Visual Studio Lab Management is built on top of System Center Virtual Machine Manager and it lets you create virtual environments with multiple images in minutes. It also makes it easy for you to connect to the environment and take snapshots. You can also create network isolated copies of the same environment to clone.  Very cool.
 
You can build, deploy, and test your application on a virtual environment then deploy your application on the targeted environment. You can run automated tests on this environment and review the results of each tests. This makes it really easy to automate application deployment and testing, and hence increases developer and tester productivity.

 Create reproducible bugs. When you are running your manual tests, you can create a bug that includes a snapshot of your virtual environment when the bug occurred. The developer can open the bug and connect to the snapshot for this environment to see the actual state of the environment at that point in time. 

 http://www.microsoft.com/vs

This training kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. The content is designed to help you learn how to utilize a variety of Visual Studio® 2010 and .NET Framework 4 technologies. Please note that some of the content within the kit will not work with Visual Studio Express. You will need Visual Studio Professional or above.

Enjoy

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=752CB725-969B-4732-A383-ED5740F02E93&displaylang=en

Check out March Madness in HD – http://mmod.ncaa.com/video/?player=hq

Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, Microsoft’s developer toolset for Windows Phone 7 Series is available for download. The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP contains what you need to get started with Windows Phone 7 development. Specifically, it includes the following:

•  CTP of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone – This allows you to develop and debug your phone application in a familiar development environment. If you are already using the release candidate of Visual Studio 2010, the Windows Phone 7 Series Add-in for Visual Studio lets you create applications alongside your web, cloud and desktop applications. 
• Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator – This is integrated with Visual Studio so you can see your app in action and debug it as you would with any other VS project. 
•  Silverlight – Microsoft has extended our platform technologies from the web, desktop and console to the phone giving developers a broader application development experience. With your existing development skills you can start developing applications for the phone today. Or if you have a great app already, Silverlight lets you write once and optimize everywhere, including the phone. 
• XNA Game Studio – This enables you to build games spanning the phone, desktop and Xbox 360. Expression Blend for Windows Phone, a professional design tool for building immersive mobile experiences in Silverlight, is not a part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP

So it’s time to stop reading and start coding.  You can get the bits here – http://www.microsoft.com/express/Phone/