Jeff Sandquist

Last week, we discussed the fact that Microsoft invests heavily in both HTML5 and Silverlight, two technologies that other companies would have you believe are mortally opposed. Our commitment to both was underscored this week by our announcements about IE9 and Silverlight 4. When we launched Gestalt beta less than 4 months ago, our goal was to demonstrate a really simple idea: that a proprietary plugin like Silverlight complements and advances the standards-based web. With today’s launch of Gestalt 1.0 and the first few widgets in the Gestalt Widgets Pack, I’d like to drill deeper into this underlying philosophy of Gestalt. Gestalt: More than the Sum of the Parts The word “gestalt” is a German word that roughly means “the whole is more than the sum of the parts”. The web, being a combination of lowest common denominator web standards (whether “open”, “de facto” or “de jure”) and speculative proprietary extensions whose backers hope will one day attain “web standard” status, has... - Jeff Sandquist

A few months ago, we released Gestalt beta as a MIX Online lab. Gestalt began as an exploration—a way to bring Ruby and Python to the web browser. Today, we’re delighted to announce that Gestalt has been updated to version 1.0. It's now part of IronRuby 1.0 and IronPython. The IronRuby team has made a number of much-needed improvements to Gestalt. In addition these changes, we’re releasing a handful of widgets that we built using Gestalt. Learn more about them, here. What is Gestalt? Gestalt allows you to write web applications in Ruby or Python + XAML in your HTML pages. There's no need for a compiler. You can use your favorite text editor to create DLR Gestalt applications from a Mac or PC. Gestalt applications run cross-browser, so it’s a "write once, run anywhere" client solution for writing Rich Internet Applications (RIA.) Learn more about the philosophy behind Gestalt in Joshua’s post, or find out more about Gestalt here. What’s new in Gestalt 1.0? Gestalt Beta -- plus more!... - Jeff Sandquist

Joe Stegman, Director of Program Management on the Silverlight team, joins us to discuss Silverlight 4's Out of Browser improvements (OOB means you can run Silverlight applications on the desktop, outside of, well, the browser...). Of note, you can now interop with COM objects in SL4's OOB. We also touch on the the future of Silverlight and clearly define the distinctions/differences between Silverlight and WPF. When to use SL? When to use WPF? Enjoy. - Jeff Sandquist

Wednesday, the second day of Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference, was jam-packed with news about upcoming products, beta releases and more. If you didn’t tune into the live stream, here’s what you missed: Internet Explorer 9 Arguably one of the bigger announcements from PDC, Steven Sinofsky gave attendees a first look at what’s coming in IE9 with a demo of an early build. The updated browser will support new web standards including HTML5 and CSS3 and will also have a faster JavaScript rendering engine. Sinofsky admitted that JavaScript performance in IE8 was much slower than other browsers and it’s clear that addressing this problem was a key goal for the IE9 team. A post on the IE blog shows a chart comparing the script performance on IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Although still a test build, IE9 has narrowed the gap considerably when it comes to speed: The new browser will also include “hardware accelerated rendering” which means it will now render graphics and text... - Jeff Sandquist

The popular Twitter application from Seesmic is moving away from the Adobe AIR platform and over to Windows where it will use .NET and WPF technologies. The company also announced a Silverlight version is in the works for some sometime next year which will re-introduce the cross-platform capabilities previously offered via Adobe AIR. Considering that some of the top Twitter applications currently use AIR (TweetDeck immediately comes to mind, for example), you may wonder why the company decided to make the switch. According to Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s CEO, the app’s users have been asking for a native Windows client for some time. He also said that the new client will be faster and will use less memory than the AIR version. Le Meur notes on his blog that the new app will also offer some great Windows-only features, including location-based updates and access to several languages in spell checker. If you’re interested in trying the new version of Seesmic for Windows, you can sign up now... - Jeff Sandquist

The Associated Press has just launched a new application designed for Windows Mobile devices called AP Mobile. Soon to be made available in the Windows Phone Marketplace, the new application offers news from 1100+ local providers across 50 categories including top news, business, politics, world, sports, celebrity, travel, and more. The topics appear across the top of the application and you can swipe through them using your finger. You can configure the app to just display the categories you care about, too, if you don’t want to see them all. News items feature an image and headline which you can tap to read full story. Also included are social networking features that let you share the news on Twitter or Facebook or save the link to your Delicious bookmarking account. You can email stories, too, if you would rather share privately. Some users are already seeing the app listed under the “News and Weather” section of the marketplace while others (like myself) haven’t seen it show up... - Jeff Sandquist

Thanks to a grant from Microsoft Research, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has launched a new website called Be a Martian. On the site, visitors can virtually “explore” Mars, zooming around the planet, looking at images from various Mars landers, explorers, and satellites from the 1960’s to present-day. But Be a Martian isn’t just an educational experience – it’s a crowd-sourced experiment that may end up helping NASA accomplish something important: process the massive volumes of image data they have collected about the red planet. To encourage visitors to pitch in with data analysis, Be a Martian makes work a game. Multiple games, in fact. In one game, players line up images from the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter with a larger image from the Mars Global Surveyor, a process which could help NASA create more accurate 3D models of the planet. Another game has users counting craters. And everyone participating earns points and badges for playing, making the process even more fun. The site uses... - Jeff Sandquist

On Tuesday, Microsoft kicked off the 2009 Professional Developer Conference (PDC) with some big news about Windows Azure, the cloud computing platform announced a year ago at PDC 2008. The biggest news to come out of the keynote was the announcement that Azure will launch into production on January 1st, but customers will get the first month of service free. However, prior to its public launch, a few companies are already using Azure now. During the keynote, some of them came on stage to discuss how. This group included some big names like WordPress, Domino’s Pizza, and the Cheezburger Network (yes, the blog empire built from LOLcats). Matt Mullenwag of Automattic, the company behind the open-source blogging platform WordPress, showed off how Azure powers their service, taking away the stress related to massive traffic spikes. And yes, that was a downright geek-tastic way of demonstrating how Azure works with open source technologies. The recent release of the SDK’s for PHP, Ruby,... - Jeff Sandquist

Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) released this week during PDC09. Rx uses Parallel Extensions for .NET (Px) for all of it's concurrent and parallel computing needs. How is it using Px, specifically? What's going on here and why?  Stephen Toub, PM on the Px team, and Wes Dyer, developer on the Rx team, tell us all about this partnership the experience of collaborating on two very compatible technologies that, taken together, create something beautiful. Some many xs, so little time. Enjoy. - Jeff Sandquist

We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).  We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday. In Chapter 8, Functional Parsers, it's all about parsing and parsers. A parser is a program that analyses a piece of text to determine its syntactic structure. In a functional language such as Haskell, parsers can naturally be viewed as functions.   type Parser = String -> Tree A parser is a function that takes a string and returns some form of tree. You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain): Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 - Jeff Sandquist

In this interview I sit down with Lily Ma, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team building tools for SharePoint development. Lily shows off the new SharePoint feature and package designers in Visual Studio 2010 and how they make packaging up and deploying your SharePoint customizations easy. As she dives deeper into the tools, she also demonstrates the flexibility and control you have in specifying what features go in what packages across projects in your solution as well as how to modify the manifests to meet a variety of developer needs. Also if you missed it, check out Overview of SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010. For more information on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 please see: SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 Walkthroughs SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 Samples SharePoint 2010 Development Resources SharePoint Team Blog Office Development in Visual Studio Team Blog And please give us your feedback in the SharePoint... - Jeff Sandquist

One of the new features we're announcing today at PDC is the Outlook Social Connector SDK. This is a new way to integrate social networking data into Office Outlook 2010. Too busy with the @Ch9Live show to tell you too much more but check out the video. :) - Jeff Sandquist

During PDC 09 I grabbed some time with Stephen Walther to talk about some of the exciting new developments with the ASP.NET Ajax Library. There were a number of new things to talk about including: The ASP.NET Ajax Library is now in Beta Merging the Ajax Control Toolkit and the ASP.NET Ajax Library There is now a pure client-side version of the Ajax Control Toolkit as well as the server-side version Microsoft donating the ASP.NET Ajax Library into the CodePlex Foundation There is now full product support of ASP.NET Ajax Library from Microsoft (including Ajax Control Toolkit We then walked through some demos of the ASP.NET Ajax Library that brings the following exciting capabilities to developers: Power Build data-centric web apps using advanced client-side data access libraries and controls Keep your markup clean and standards-compliant with imperative coding Make it easier to code using JavaScript intellisense in Visual Studio Keep loading and execution of your scripts simple with the... - Jeff Sandquist