MSDN Flash - Silverlight, Rugby and Visual Studio 2008
I know - the last one only just came out yesterday. I'll blame the spam legislation :-) Here is this weeks - should be in your mail box Friday or early next week.
Silverlight, Rugby and Visual Studio 2008
Silverlight 1.0 is out! The final release of Silverlight was announced a couple of weeks ago, and means that if you’ve been waiting for the production release of Silverlight, it’s here and you can get into it.
You might have heard about a small Rugby tournament that is going on somewhere else in the world at the moment too. Obviously the New Zealand Rugby union is pretty focused at the moment, keeping AllBlacks.com up to date with interviews, match highlights, table standings and scoreboards. To help you keep up to date, AllBlacks.com launched its new Rugby World Cup Windows Vista sidebar gadget a couple of days ago – built entirely in Silverlight 1.0. The cool thing about this gadget is that if you don’t have Vista installed yet, you can access the web version of the gadget with your web browser and because it’s Silverlight, it will run on Windows Vista, XP and on Macs. Get the gadget here.
One common question we get around Silverlight is what are we doing to get designers interested in this technology? If you are fortunate enough to live in Wellington Nas Khan has set up a user group for designers called ZamDes. We are also kicking off a global design event in Auckland on the 4th of October called “Expression around the clock”. Places are limited, but please tell any designers in your organization to register for the free half day event. If you can’t make it, you can always follow along on the global website at https://expressionevent.com.
I’ve also kicked off my User Group tour of New Zealand with presentations to more than 70 people at the new .Net User group in Ellerslie (read Jacqui’s summary) and the .Net User Group in the Auckland CBD. My presentation covers a bunch of the new features in Visual Studio 2008 across Windows Client, Web, Office, Mobile, Services and some of the new language features.
Feedback about Visual Studio has been very positive so far. Here’s what Chris Jacques, who runs his own consulting firm - B2B 24-7 in Auckland said:
“B2B 24-7 will be using the Web and Mobility features in Visual Studio 2008 in the development of all future customer solutions. We believe Visual Studio 2008 will allow us to deliver a richer customer experience within an affordable timeframe in an exciting market place”.
If you are interested in learning more about how Visual Studio 2008 will reduce the time you spend configuring and increase the time you spend coding and allow you to build richer applications, come along a user group meeting on my tour. We also announced our community leader of the year award recently – so support your local community leaders by getting along to a user group. We’ll have copies of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 for you and I have a few other prizes to give away.
We’ve also updated the mscommunities.net.nz site with a couple of new user groups – so make sure you check it out and stay up to date with community news.
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