Marco Casario | RIAvolutionize the web

Adobe Flex and AIR plugin for Visual Studio announced today (not from Adobe)

SapphireSteel has announced a few hours ago a brand new Flex / AIR plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio. The plugin will come out in two different version: Amethyst Personal (available next week) and Professional (available 2009).

Amethyst Personal is a free Flex/AIR IDE [1] which will provide a project management, editing, building and launching environment for Flex/AIR/ActionScript. This will be completely free and may optionally be installed into the free Visual Studio ‘shell’ edition.

Amethyst Professional will provide a drag+drop visual design environment for Flex and AIR. The visual designer will integrate with Visual Studio’s Toolbox, Property panels and code editor to provide a seamless design-and-code experience which will be familiar to C# and VB developers.

Amethyst Professional will also include full IntelliSense capabilities including code completion, code navigation and auto-expanding snippets. Amethyst Professional will provide IntelliSense both derived from pre-compiled libraries and ‘on-the-fly’ by analysing code as it is written. It will have a powerful integrated debugger to allow you to step through your code, drill-down and examine variables in a similar way to the debugger in other Visual Studio languages.

Developing with Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight Crash Course

I've just found this interesting track at the Web Directions conference that this year has some  Rich Internet Application tracks :

Developing with Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight

Web Directions focusses on practical and inspiring concepts, technologies and techniques for people whose day to day job is building web sites, applications and services. It’s for web designers, front and back end developers, product managers, Information Architects, and anyone else responsible for building great web solutions

Understanding Microsoft WPF, Silverlight and Blend 2

Yesterday and today I'm attending a training on Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight at the Microsoft headquarter in Italy.

I finally understand a lot of things about WPF, Blend 2, Silverlight and it's now more clear to me.

At the end of the training I'll post some of the notes I took.

PS: Thanks to Scott and Roberto of  Microsoft for the opportunity :)

Flex vs Silverlight round 2

I wrote some times ago a post titled Flex vs Microsoft Silverlight took some notes and trying to show advantages/disadvantages to use Flex or
I'm playing around with Silverlight (while I use to work hard hard with Flex as you probably know) and I discovered that none mechanism to create and handle data binding exists at the moment.

As I wrote on the Chapter 1 of my upcoming book (sorry for the marketing activity ;)), Flex Solutions:Essential Techniques for Flex 2 and Flex 3 Developers, one of the features of Flex  that you use more during the development phase of an application is data binding.  For data binding in Flex, we mean the process which binds an object to a component in such a way that the latter becomes automatically added when the value to which it is binded changes. In Flex there are three methods to create a data binding: 

• Using the curly braces syntax
• With the <mx:Binding> tag defined in the MXML code
• Declaring the BindingUtils method with Actionscript

The first beta of Microsoft Silverlight doesn't allow developers to have the support for data binding. Even JavaFX doesn't forget to support this important feature :
Carrying that approach to data binding, JavaFX is supposed to enable developers to create and configure components by automatically synchronizing application data with GUI widgets. Sun also claims that the language is far more scalable for the Java environment compared to other scripting languages, as it is supposed to be able to handle very large programs in Java. (via ComputerBusiness)

Flex wins this second round !

Flex 2 vs Microsoft Silverlight - First Round

Microsoft Silverlight has been announced and you can find many posts and articles around the net about this technology.
I was very interested about Silverlight and I tried to go deep to better understand what it offers and how it could differ from Flex 2.
I would like to create a comparing table to

These are notes I wrote so far :

- Starting from the scratch : the Silverlight plugin has about 0% penetration at the moment. Flash player is everywhere
- Silverlight seams to be very .Net dependent. Flex is totally independent to server side technology used
- It does not offer J2EE integration and enterprise messaging. Flex offers  Flex Data Services (now Livecycle Data Services)
- No support for Linux browsers/systems. Flash Player runs on Win, Mac, Liunux, Sun Solaris
- SOA( WebServices and XML) based services only. Flex has three RPC services : HTTP, SOA and Remote Object (with AMF3)
- Low information about Silverlight Mobile. Flex is not mobile (so far) :))

Instead, what impressed me it's the video capabilities of Silverlight. At the moment this is the only feature that could compete with the Flash Player capabilities.

It leverages the VC-1 codec and it supports HD DVD and Blu-ray and the DRM features.

In the next days I'll feel more confident so I'll give you more detailed informations and comparing notes.

Microsoft released its hosted streaming service (for free) :Silverlight Streaming

Microsoft is out with its proposal for hosted streaming service tat runs both on Windows and Mac :

Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. The service offers web designers and developers a free and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows™ and Mac.

The storage and delivery is free up to 4 GB,                         with outbound streaming up to DVD quality (700 Kbps).

Microsoft brand-new home page !

I saw the new Microsoft Home page only today, but I discovered that it was published on 14th December. This is a clear signal ;)
Frankly speaking I found the new desing more usable and it makes easier to quickly search for different stuff on Microsoft site.
But they removed the Flash content on the center for a simple image ;)
I'd love to see some use of ajax or something like that for the search feature !

XBox360 Live on Mobile

EngadgetMobile reported that Microsoft announced their Xbox Live concept and extends it to the PC, Windows Mobile and even Java-enabled phones.
Whether you're at your PC or rocking a mobile, you'll be able to track your gamer tag, message friends, purchase content for that device or set it to download to another device, and of course compare rankings with your buddies on various gaming titles.

Microsoft XBox 360 announced for November worldwide

Microsoft had already announced plans to launch the Xbox 360 console this year in the United States ahead of the holiday season, which begins in late November.

Next InternetExplorer will support RSS

via CNET:

Company will build support for Really Simple Syndication into the
next version of Internet Explorer, as well as into Longhorn.

Microsoft plans to make Really Simple Syndication a whole lot simpler. Really.

The software maker said on Friday that it will build support for RSS into the next version of Internet Explorer, as well as into Longhorn, the Windows update scheduled to arrive next year.

"We really think that RSS is going to be key to how people use the Internet in the future," said Gary Schare, a director of strategic product management for Microsoft's Windows unit. "Because of that we are betting really big on RSS in Longhorn by integrating RSS throughout the operating system."

Read the entire article.