At this moment, the MIX07 conference is being held in Las Vegas. Microsoft introduced there lots of new upcoming technologies. I'm very pleased to hear all this!! Especially the Silverlight platform looks very interesting! Like Jeff Prosise, co-founder of Wintellect said: "Microsoft rebooted the web.".
- Silverlight
Easy said: a high performance, direct Adobe Flash competitor/killer!
Silverlight provides a cross-browser, cross-platform plugin. It works with Windows/Mac, IE/FF and Safari. It allowed the developer to build a richer user experience within the browser. It incorporates media (rich interactive applications - RIA's, with audio and video stream support) and provides a rich vector graphic system. Developers can build a UI within the browser which is nowdays not possible. Its designed to fit inside a web page, so it allows HTML as well.
At MIX07, Microsoft showed a Silverlight version with an embedded .NET Framework! Isn't that cool. Developers can leverage the .NET Framework and it also works on a Mac! Running on the Mac is possible because Microsoft implemented a new PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer) for this Apple OS. Code will (for security reasons) run in a sandbox model, comparable to ClickOnce. Developers can now program against the media, HTML, .NET (C#, VB, Python, Javascript, Ruby), AJAX in a cross platform way.
This full featured Silverlight is a 4MB download (wow, small!) which is designed to download + install within 20 seconds. It includes all the vector graphics features, all the media features and the runtime/language features. The framework includes LINQ, the network stack, threading model, base class library etc.
Note: Silverlight does not require the .NET Framework or Windows Media Player. The package includes all!
The alpha version shipped this week.
- Expression Studio
The Microsoft Expression Studio has been released as a suite consisting of Expression Design, Expression Web, Expression Blend and Expression Media.
- Silverlight Streaming
As part of Microsoft Live, a free service to deliver and scale rich media Silverlight applications. It will work together with the Microsoft Expression products. It comes with 4GB hosting space. Check out here.
- ASP.NET Futures (May 2007)
Still a little bit unclear for me, but the description says the following. ASP.NET Futures contains features providing a wide range of new functionality for both ASP.NET and Silverlight. The release includes ASP.NET Silverlight server controls, new functionality for ASP.NET AJAX extensions, dynamic data controls, enhancements to dynamic languages, and more. Download here.
- Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)
We already had the CLR (common language runtime), Microsoft just added the DLR. And, its released as open source project as part of IronPython at codeplex. The current CLR was already able to handle dynamic languages, but the DLR adds adds a set of services to it. These include a shared dynamic type system, standard hosting model and support to make it easy to generate fast dynamic code. Languages include VB, JavaScript, IronPython and Ruby. More info at Jim Hugunin's blog.
- Project Astoria
Astoria enables applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. A kind of web service for the DAL. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON. Check the project site or checkout a live demo.
- Project Jasper
Jasper brings us features that can be compared to Developer Express' XPO product, which i'm using with great pleasure.
- Dynamic generation of data classes so there is no configuration or design time code-gen to carry around;
- Rich query and O/R capabilities because “Jasper” is built on top of the Entity Framework;
- Auto-binding capabilities for ASP.NET, WinForms, and WPF to make binding data to a UI simple and automatic.
In the future, .NET code can run in the browser (Silverlight), on the client (.NET Framework), on the web server (ASP.NET) in the database (SQL2005), on smart devices (.NET Compact Framework) and small embedded devices like Vista's SideShow (.NET Micro Framework).
Early supporters of the new Silverlight platform include Akamai Technologies Inc., Brightcove Inc., Eyeblaster Inc., Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball and Netflix Inc.
I failed converting the previous Orcas CTP from VPC to VMWare but i'm downloading the Orcas beta 1 right now. I won't even try to convert it this time and installed VPC 2007 on my Vista laptop. I would love to play with all this new bits and bytes.