Good to know that Microsoft also messes up bigtime! Microsoft started testing their Flash Killer code named WPF/e in December 2006. They added an expiry date in that build of mid February 2007. Apparently they thought it was Feb 23, but it timed out yesterday. Teams mostly put such expiry dates in the product to force them to keep releasing new builds. The WPF/e team has been testing the Feb CTP for a few days now and were planning to release it in the next two weeks, but when they saw the Dec CTP timeout, the entire team got into action and released the Feb CTP today 
. WOW! that was some mess up, but they came around pretty good.
Note: Microsoft has been beta testing with limited users their so called YouTube killer code named Soapbox for sometime now. The videos on soapbox is in Flash and word on the street is that they are working on converting it from Flash to WPF/e. That is one way to get WPF/e to the masses.
I took a break from blogging for a couple of days after two weeks of continuous bloggging. I have started work on Part 2 of C# 3.0 features but it's moving at a really slow pace. I am not finding the time to research and get my concepts clear before blogging about it.
Anyways, back to Windows Vista. Vista is finally out and I hear that some stores saw people line up oustide for about an hour to get their hands on Vista. Not something that I expected. As for me I am already looking forward to what's next. The Windows team has already started work on the next version and based on history, the team started talking about Longhorn on Jan 2002. XP was out on October 25 2001. So it will be another 3 to 4 months before we start hearing about Vienna. I am looking forward to that release as I wasn't super thrilled about Vista given the endless delays and lack of super rich features. It definitely is a must have over XP, but I think as I saw the endless delays and feature cuts, I lost my excitement for Vista.
WOW, check out these amazing photos captured by Lord V on flickr. Truely amazing! You can read how he does it here. He uses two of my favorite cameras 
. Although I think it is the magic in his hands that do the trick not the camera.
Update: From one expert to another. I found this guy's link in the comments section of Lord V's explanation of how he takes his photos. I know what I am going to be doing for the next couple of days . These guys have rekindled the itch for photography in me. What amazes me the most is that all their shots are taken with a sub $1000 Digital SLR cameras. I know you may be thinking that's too much but to give you perspective the truely pro cameras come for over $3000. Can you tell by looking at those photos that they were taken with a amatuer level camera
Windows Vista ships in less than a week from now. So are your ready? I am not going to be ready until I see some really good applications launched for Vista that makes it a must have.
By the way, students are getting Windows Vista Business Edition from the University of Houston Clear Lake for $10. You need to be enrolled for the semester and you need to show your ID to get a copy. One copy per student. That is a real sweet deal, $10 for something that retails for $300.
Woohoo! Microsoft has released the final version (1.0) of ASP.NET AJAX library. That means we can finally write production quality AJAX applications. Microsoft fully supports the library and is giving out the source code for the entire library for free. You can modify and re-distribute the source code at will for both commercial and non-commercial applications. You can read more about this on Scott Guthrie's blog. The AJAX library will be embedded into the next version of ASP.NET (3.0) scheduled to be released by this year end.
Update: I have updated this website to use ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 RTM build
Thanks,
Looks like Microsoft has been busy working on the next version of Visual Studio codenamed Orcas (may be named VS 2007) scheduled to ship by the end of this year. A ton of features and performance improvements. You can read all about it here and here. Also note that when VS 2007 ships we will have a new framework versioned 3.5. I personally think Microsoft has messed up versioning. Up until v.2.0 everything was actually v.2.0 (ASP.NET 2.0, C# 2.0, CLR 2.0) but when Microsoft released WinFX the new set of technologies for Vista, they decided to rename it to .NET 3.0. Which means that all these WinFX technologies sit under the .NET umbrella.
So what does that mean? It means v.3.0 consists of CLR 2.0 (ASP.NET 2.0, C# 2.0) + WinFX (1.0). When v.3.5 ships it will be CLR 3.0 (ASP.NET 3.0, C# 3.0) + WinFX (1.0). WOW! I need to take a break, my head is already spinning just by typing all this.
Note: I am not finding enough time to write Part 2 of the C# 3.0 series, so posts like these are simply fillers 
WOW, I was listening to this diggination videocast and according to Alex from this videocast, when the new 360 launches it will be priced at $399 (the price of the current premium 360) and the existing premium 360 will come down to $299. Of course Microsoft has not announced anything so please take this with a grain of salt. Mostly products are released in a Christmas to Christmas cycle. So don't expect any new product until the later half of this year.
If you listened to the two channel 9 videos I posted you might have heard a lot about functional programming, Lambda expressions, LINQ and so on. It was overwhelming to hear so many terms all at once and not know what exactly each meant. On top of that the speakers talked about multi-core and concurrency and my head started spinning, so I decided I would learn each of the terms mentioned and even better record it for others and myself for future reference.
Instead of going into the details of different terms used above let's see first hand what exactly we will be able to do in C# 3.0.
var customers = BusinessLogic.GetCustomers();
The above statement gives a sense of dynamism to C#. You would be thinking that you no longer have to specify the Type hence C# has become like VB where customer can be of any Type. While the first conclusion is correct, the second one is not. With the above statement the compiler tries to infer the Type using the right side of the expression. If it cannot figure it out, it throws an error. Also, after the above statement, if you write the following statement the compiler will throw an error:
customers = 10;
Although this syntactic sugar makes C# appear like a dynamic language, in reality it is actually statically Typed. Also note that you can only use the var keyword with local variables. There are a few other restrictions and you can read some of them here. There have been many times when I have felt a bit retarded to type the Type of a class two times. For Example Customer c = new Customer(); instead var c = new Customer(); makes it much simpler.
The real reason var was added is so that we can declare a strongly typed variable without needing to know the name of the variable's type. This is required in order to enable another new C# 3.0 language feature: anonymous types. You wouldn't be able to declare a variable of an anonymous type if you always had to include the type name as part of the variable declaration. That's the main reason var has been added to the language.
- from this article by Ian Griffiths
More to come ...
Good Channel 9 videos on the future of .NET. I used to have a lot of debate with a friend of mine on .NET vs Java. The outcome of it was, I always learnt what was going in the Java world.
Ask the Expert: Anders Hejlsberg
Software Composability and the Future of Languages
Anders Hejlsberg (the chief architect of C#) talks in the first video about the Java language not getting to innovate a lot because of the Java Community Process where multiple people drag the language in different directions.
.NET languages this year are getting a lot of dynamic language features (Python, Ruby and so on). It makes me curious to see what approach Java is taking. With .NET it's time to start learning new syntax and language features. The new version of these languages are due to be released by the end of this year. My guess is that it will be ready by the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference scheduled for the month of October.
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