I wanted to play around with webslices in IE8. A webslice is a portion of a page that a user can subscribe too. The "page" is added to favorites bar and it checks for updates at regular intervals - so things like sports games, stock prices, weather are potential good scenarios. In business KPIs might be useful. Creating a webslice turns out to be reasonably easy.
This is the code before
<div>
<p My IE8 Soccer demo </p> Chiefs 1 , Pirates 1
</div>
This is the after code with the key bits highlighted
<div id="demo" class="hslice"> <div class="entry-content"> <p class="entry-title"> My IE8 Soccer demo </p> Chiefs 1 , Pirates 1
</div> </div>
jQuery is a very popular Javascript library that assists with HTML traversing, event handling etc. Microsoft has decided to ship this library with our developer platform.
Scott Guthrie provides the details
If you developing apps for Silverlight 2, and expect to have it done soon after we release it, you probably want to check out the RC0 release. This is a developer only release. This means it is not intended for broad consumer release and no auto-update will occur. You should use it for testing your apps in preparation for release.
The PDC is just about a month away, and we have made some exciting announcements in the last few days:
- Windows 7 will feature big time. Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President will do one of the keynotes that is focused on Windows 7. A total of 22 sessions are now published on the PDC Site. Check out the list at https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx
- Attendees will get a 160GB USB drive with all the bits!
- Scott Guthrie (I was wondering where his name was) and David Threadwell will be part of the keynotes.
- Announced awhile ago, Don Box and Chris Anderson will deliver an all code keynote. Yeah
Rosario is the codename for the next version of Team Foundation Server. Brian Harry has just blogged about charting a course for TFS Rosario. This is an important entry that I would recommend anyone using or investigating TFS to read. Important snippets for me:
- Rosario will only support SQL2008 - to take advantage of some of the new Reporting Services capabilities
- Better and more flexible support for Sharepoint - we have better support for MOSS but at the same time will make portal support optional.
- Full support for 64 bit
With PDC 2008 around the corner, it got me thinking about other PDC's I attended. The first one was in 2000 when .NET first get announced (can anyone remember what it was first called?). This was in Florida and still sticks out as the best event I attended. Besides the cool content, there was a great bunch of people and nice parties (at Seaworld if I remember correctly).
The second one was in 2001, and is often known as the Hailstorm PDC. Hailstorm, aka .NET My Services, is the basis of this blog entry. The idea behind this was that we would store many of our common entities, like contacts, address information etc up on the web. The market at this time really was not ready. I can remember many people asking if these services would be available on premise rather than being hosted by Microsoft. Around that time, there was quite a bit of press around Microsoft and the court cases. Privacy was also a big deal. The interesting bit, when I reflect on this PDC, is that this would have marked some kind of entry into the SAAS (or S+S) space. At that stage, there really was no other players around, and Microsoft would have been a leader. Hailstorm more or less died. The chief architect, Mark Lucovsky, moved on. To where? Yep you guessed it - to Google.
I can remember a presentation from Bill Gates a few years ago. He talked about products and technologies and mentioned the concept of
1) The first person/company with an idea.
2) The first to implement or take the idea to market
3) The first to make money out of it.
With Hailstorm, it seemed like we were great on point (1) but probably overtaken on point (2) and (3) simply because at the time, the market was not ready for it.
At PDC 2008, we expect to hear lots of information on cloud computing. These services, I expect, will be way beyond just Hailstorm where the focus was mainly around CRUD functionality. It should be exciting.
Finally, the third PDC I attended was in 2003 where the details of Whidbey (VS05), Yukon (SQL05) and Longhorn (Vista) were provided.
I picked up the blog entry by Jon Galloway - and it really is worth sharing. For us souls living in bandwidth constrained South Africa, this is really cool. As indicated on Jon's entry if you want to visit the low bandwidth version of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.aspx just add loband like so - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx. This view is also great for mobile devices.