Keeping up with Microsoft and its state of rapid change

If you are anything like me, you feel overwhelmed by rapid advances that are being made just by Microsoft lately. If you were not lucky enough to get to TechEd or the more recent PDC then you will need to get your hands on the content being presented at these events. Beyond the old favourites of DNRTV and Channel9 these sites maybe of interest too:
/web. Microsoft's new homepage for all things web
PDC. The home page for the PDC event that just happened. I have yet to find a web resource of the TechEd content. I was however able to get the content from a friend who did attend (~60GB!). Well worth it if you can get hold of them.

Silverlight progress

There has been some awesome work happening in the silverlight arena lately. The old favourite Health care demo that was a popular demo when WPF premiered is now beeing shown off in silver light here. Far more impressive is the work being done by innoveware to produce a Quake port running on Silverlight. Very cool guys. Looking forward to seeing this in action. At time of posting only a couple of youtube vids were available.

Framework Design Guidelines v2

Brad and Krys are just about to release v2 of their great book Framework Design Guidelines. Here is a link to their recent "pre-release" talk at PDC. I am a big fan of this subject area and find it relevant to all levels of developers. So if you havn't read the original book try to get this new version, or at least watch the video ;-)

Azure - Microsofts Cloud infrastructure

To compete with Amazon's, Google's etc... cloud systems M$ have announced Azure. See Manuvir Das present Azure on C9 for a technical run down.

Sneaky little WCF error

I was going to drop a post about a WCF issue that had the team scratching their head yesterday afternoon and this morning. However one of the guys on the team spotted this article.

Basically we didn’t validate properly before we threw some enums over the wire, but it would have been nice for WCF to give us an error besides “Connection was closed unexpectedly” which doesn't really lead you to think that a serialization issue is to blame.

Progress with Prism

It is good to see the Prism team moving forward not only with the framework/guidance but also with some documentation and clarification of what it is.

I still need to read all the doc and start playing with it. I must admit that the Stock Trader application is very under-whelming. Will have a play before I bag it too much.

This post from Blaine is very handy.

Things for Lee to do:

• read documentation
• play with samples

Things for P&P team to do:

• Pick a name for this product! Is it Prism? CAB? CAB 2.0? CAL? SCSF?