Blumer.com.ar

Microsoft's Singularity operating system is now open to the public for download, under a Microsoft academic, non-commercial license. Inside is a fully compilable and bootable version of what could be the basis for the future of Windows, or maybe simply an experiment to demonstrate .NET's capabilities. Singularity, if you'll recall, has gained wide interest from researchers and users alike, by claiming to be a fully managed code kernel (with managed code drivers and applications as well), something that would finally revolutionize the operating system research arena. The
project is available on CodePlex.

http://www.codeplex.com/singularity

Submited in a comment today. The project looks great. So, we are giving it its own place:
Welcome to the .NET Mass Downloader project. While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue!

http://www.codeplex.com/NetMassDownloader

Scott Gu just announced it: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code

To show off Microsoft's development technologies, a company developer ran a demo of World of WarCraft in the Visual Studio environment.
A top official from Microsoft's developer division showcased an array of new development technologies on Tuesday, including a demo of the game World of Warcraft running within the company's Visual Studio integrated development environment.
Scott Guthrie, general manager of the developer division, gave a wide-ranging keynote at Microsoft's DevConnections conference at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas.
But he seemed to especially capture the audience's attention with the WarCraft demo, which coincided with Microsoft's announcement that it would let partners use Visual Studio and its accompanying software development kit to target platforms besides its own.
WarCraft, a popular online role-playing game, uses a programming language called LUA. The Microsoft presentation showed a developer using the familiar Visual Studio environment to code in LUA and create some extensions for the game.
"Not only does Visual Studio give you line-of-business productivity, but you can also triple-kill your opponents," Guthrie joked after an onscreen character coldly dealt death to a trio of hapless game characters.
The WarCraft add-on will be hosted as an open-source project on CodePlex, Guthrie said.
Mostly, however, Guthrie's keynote centered on Microsoft's multiyear, multiple product road map for application development.
A major focal point of that is Visual Studio 2008, which will be available this month. The company is attempting to jump-start adoption of the product by offering developers the ability to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework, the programming model underlying Microsoft's technologies.
The company is shipping version 3.5 of the framework this month, but many users may still be working on projects based on versions 3.0 or 2.0. Visual Studio 2008 can be used to target all three releases. "We think it's probably one of the most important features we've added," Guthrie said.
Guthrie and other spokesmen gave attendees a run through of additional new features in the 2008 release, including its tools for targeting Office applications. These used to be a separate purchase but are now built into the core IDE (integrated development environment).
He also discussed Silverlight, Microsoft's browser plug-in for rich Internet applications. The company released the 1.0 version of the plug-in in September, but that installment, which utilizes a JavaScript programming model, is meant primarily for working with media content. The 1.1 version, now in alpha, holds far more potential for developers because it delivers a subset of the .NET framework, meaning coders can develop applications for multiple browsers using any .NET language and with familiar tools.
Brian Goldfarb, group product manager, UX platform and tools strategy, acknowledged in an interview that to date, Microsoft's efforts around Silverlight have largely centered on consumer-oriented projects.
But he expects that to change as the technology matures in coming months and said evidence will surface at Microsoft's MIX conference in March. "The MIX show will be focused on the next generation of applications that Silverlight will provide," he said. "What you're looking at MIX next year is really a combination of [consumer-oriented uses] and more line-of-business applications."

Brian Harry's posted the final feature list for TFS 2008 (f.k.a "Orcas"):  http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/08/08/final-tfs-2008-feature-list.aspx

A few of my favorites:

• SharePoint 2007 support
• SQL 2008 support
• Simpler installation
• Native CI support
• NET object model for the build server
• Incremental builds & gets
• Get latest on checkout

Scott Guthrie announces today that Microsoft will offer “the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them” later this year.

According to Daniel Moth

The cool bit is not that you can just read the framework code in your favourite text editor once you download and accept the license; no, the real goodness is that when you debug your applications with Visual Studio 2008 you will have the option to debug right down into the Framework code (with an autodownload feature from an MSDN server)!

Scott Hanselman has a Podcast on the topic and Channel9 will be publishing a video at the end of the week.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

A very extensive and exhaustive comparision beetwen C# and JAVA. A must read.

http://www.25hoursaday.com/CsharpVsJava.html

Blumer is a software company oriented to web based solutions. Based on Argentina, we serve many customers around the world. You can find a brief explanation about our services here (spanish version, english will be ready soon):

Solutions.pdf (51.04 kb)

Getting started with Eclipse can be confusing. New concepts, such as plug-in architecture, workspace-centric project structure, and automatic build can seem counterintuitive at first. Without waxing too philosophical about IDE design, this article presents the main differences between Visual Studio and the Eclipse IDE.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-eclipse-visualstudio/?ca=dgr-lnxw01Eclipse-VS

Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.

It is nice to see the open source projects' progress in Microsoft world, especially it is been extremely fast growth after the Codeplex launched, and also GotDotNet suggests their hosted projects to move on to Codeplex. As you might remember, I have submitted a post about Codeplex a few weeks ago; Microsoft Open Source Projects. This time, it is proud to list most popular and active top 25 projects that has been hosted in Codeplex.

• AJAX Control Toolkit - a collection of samples and components which make it easier than ever to build and consume rich client-side controls and extenders built on the Microsoft AJAX Library and ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. The Toolkit provides both ready to go samples and a powerful SDK to simplify the creation and re-use of your own custom controls and extenders.
• BlogEngine.NET - a full featured blog engine targeted at .NET developers. It is light weight and very simple to modify and extend.
• SharpMap - an easy-to-use map rendering and display engine, including AJAX-powered ASP.Net UserControl and a WinForm 2.0 control. You supply it with GIS data for use in web and desktop applications, and it generates eye-catching, useful maps. Written in C# 2.0.
• VMukti P2P Multipoint Real-time Rich Media Collaboration Platform - Web2.0, distributed, peer-to-peer, grid computing, unified communications SAAS platform for web, phone, and IM rich media collaboration & conference. This Multipoint VoIP, VVoIP Video service delivery platform is based on C#, WPF, WCF, & .NET 3.5.
• GoTraxx - C# program that plays the game of Go.
• DocProject for Sandcastle - drives the Sandcastle help generation tools using the power of Visual Studio 2005/2008 and MSBuild. Choose from various project templates that build compiled help 1.x or 2.x for all project references. DocProject facilitates the administration and development of project documentation with Sandcastle, allowing you to use the integrated tools of Visual Studio to customize Sandcastle's output.
  
• IronPython - a new implementation of the Python programming language on the .NET Framework. It supports an interactive interpreter with fully dynamic compilation. It is well integrated with the rest of the framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers.
• umbraco - a Content Management Platform (CMS) written in c# on the Microsoft .NET platform. It's fast, flexible and with a user interface that makes it a charm to use.
• Coding4Fun Developer Kit - a collection of components, controls and samples in both Visual Basic and Visual C#. The features of the kit include a single installation file that provides users easy access off the Windows Start Menu to the documentation, sample executables and source code; a toolbox entry within Visual Studio for all components and controls for easy drag 'n drop experience.
• Community Kit for SharePoint - a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables practically anyone to create a community website based on SharePoint technology for practically any group of people with a common interest.
• Facebook Developer Toolkit - the original Facebook Developer Toolkit for the Microsoft Visual Studio Express Team. This project contains .NET wrappers to the Facebook API. Also, includes sample projects and controls. We are going to start by trying to maintain both the vb.net and C# code bases.
• TheBeerHouse - CMS & e-commerce StarterKit, an ASP.NET 2.0 website which features a layout with user-selectable themes, a membership system, a content management system for publishing and syndicating articles and photos, polls, mailing lists, forums, an e-commerce store with support for real-time credit card processing, homepage personalization, localization and more.
• Vista Battery Saver - tinny program will save up to 70% of your battery by disabling those nice, but greedy Vista features. Running in task bar with private workset of 5.5M and 0% CPU it will do all work for you, by enabling and disabling customizable features when power source changed or battery power fall under certain percent.

 

• Ajax.NET Professional - one of the first AJAX frameworks for Microsoft ASP.NET and is working with .NET 1.1 and 2.0. The framework will create proxy classes on client-side JavaScript to invoke methods on the web server with full data type support working on all common web browsers including mobile devices.
• Sandcastle Help File Builder - consists of a GUI front end that lets you interactively build help files using Sandcastle. A console mode version is also supplied that allows you to build help files as part of the normal project build. The GUI front end provides access to project settings that let you configure various aspects of the resulting help file including the ability to add additional content, build HTML Help 1, HTML Help 2, or website output.
• dashCommerce - a free, open source e-commerce storefront written specifically for ASP.NET 2.0. It features out-of-the-box product catalog and shopping cart functionality that allows website owners to setup, run, and maintain an online store with little or no costs, license fees, or limitations. dashCommerce offers .NET developers of all skill levels the ability to create an e-commerce site quickly and efficiently. The project is built in C# and takes advantage of features of the Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0. It also supports PayPal Website Payments Standard and Pro as the payment engine.
• PHP Excel 2007 classes - a set of classes for the PHP programming language, which allow you to write to Excel 2007 files and read from Excel 2007 files.
• Power Toys Pack Installer - one-stop download utility for all things power toys. Get latest releases and updates from just a single executable.
• ProMesh.NET Web Application Framework - a MVC-ready lightweight web application framework for .NET 2.0. It includes a full unit testing framework.
• Terminals - a multi tab terminal client to ease the work of anyone who needs to connect simultaneously to more then one terminal server/remote desktop.
  Terminals uses Microsoft Terminal Services ActiveX.
• Vista Virtual Desktop Manager - A virtual desktop manager made for Windows Vista using the new thumbnail APIs to create a live preview of all of your desktops.
• DinnerNow.net - a fictitious marketplace where customers can order food from local restaurants for delivery to their home or office. This sample application is designed to demonstrate how you can develop a connected application using several new Microsoft technologies, including: IIS7, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, Linq, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Powershell, and the .NET Compact Framework.
• SQL Server Hosting Toolkit - A suite of tools designed to enable shared hosters to provide a great experience around hosted SQL Server.
• Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter - a small, cheap, easy to use, URL rewriting ISAPI filter that combines a good price (free!) with good features. It is implemented in about 1700 lines of C code, works with IIS 5.x and 6, does regular-expression matching, rewriting, redirects, and RewriteCond. IIS7 will have a nice model for managed ISAPI, but IIRF is available now.
• PowerShell Community Extensions - provides a widely useful set of additional cmdlets, providers, aliases, filters, functions and scripts for Windows PowerShell that members of the community have expressed interest in but didn't make it into PowerShell v1.0. Examples of these cmdlets are Get-Clipboard, Out-Clipboard, Get-Hash, Get-ShortPath, Set-FileTime, New-SymLink, Format-Hex, Format-Xml, Test-Xml, Test-Assembly, Ping-Host, etc.
• QuickGraph 2.0 - provides generic directed graph datastructures and algorithms for them. It also comes with algorithms such as depth first seach, breath first search, shortest path, network flow etc...
• SharePoint 2007 Features - add new functionality to a SharePoint 2007 farm, site collection, or site. This project will create Features to address deficiencies in SharePoint 2007 or add new capabilities. You should understand a little about Features before trying these out. The packages here use batch files or WSP files to install the Features. After installation, be sure to activate the Features to see them in SharePoint.
• iTunes 2.0 - an online rich internet application. Using ajax.asp.net and silverlight im going to bring the iTunes experience completely online.
• Facebook.NET - a framework for creating Facebook applications in .NET. It is optimized for creating ASP.NET-based Facebook applications.
• ASP.NET RSS Toolkit - gives ASP.Net applications the ability to consume and publish to RSS feeds.
• BDCToolkit - The MOSS BDC & DAL generator is a tool that generates typed webservices and a typed c# data access layer from an BDC application definition. It also ensures that the code that has been generated is used on the correct application definition.
• DbEntry.Net - a lightweight Object Relational Mapping (ORM) database access compnent for .Net 2.0. By using Generics and Anonymous Method, it has clearly and easily programing interface. It based on ADO.NET, and supported C#, Visual Basic, ASP.NET, Access, SqlServer, MySql and SQLite etc...
• System Search to LinQ - create a LinQ extension to interact with the new functionality of desktop search using de advantages of the elegant and efficient programming model introduced by C# 3.0
• D.NET (DDotNet) - a "Development for .NET" framework, created to help all developers to create a better applications. Contains a implementation of ORM (Object Relational Mapping) framework with Business Objects Framework and other components.
• TFSBuildLab - simplify the day to day operations when using automated builds and Team System.
• Blind Shark - a musical game, where you have to find the music being played before your opponents.
• Balder - A 3D game engine for Silverlight and possibly other .net based technologies.
• Elephant Game Framework - a small Game Framework, currently set with a focus on game development through Microsoft XNA.
• PoshConsole - a more modern PowerShell Console.