I was wondering what "data services in the cloud" ... Pablo Castro's Mix Session, was going to be about.

Project Astoria exposes data that is exposed through the Entity Framework. So you build your EDM and then the service sits on top of htat.

It is two way... you can use HTTP PUT, POST and DELETE.

Here is a post on the ADO.NET team blog about the project Astoria, that is the web data services.

I'm in Pablo's talk right now, but you can check out the project here  and the blog post here.

The second one is called Jasper which is for purely data driven apps. I'm looking forward to Sam Druker's talk on this on Wednesday. Read the blog post here.

Next announcement from Scott Guthrie in the MIX keynote is that Microsoft has created a Ruby implementation for .NET called IronRuby.

I'm looking at another SilverLight demo wiht xaml file that has a IronRuby code file as it's app source.

Scott Guthrie just mentioned (in the MIX keynote) that LINQ will be in Silverlight which means that browser based apps can grab data from the server and do LINQ queries on the client side.

Silverlight is definitely the darling of MIX so far!

ScottGu describes SilverLight as three parts.

We've seen the media capabilities of silverlight. That's the first chunk of it.

The second is the .NET capabilites of the run time ... from ScottGu's lips "a cross platform runtime of the .NEt Framework".

(IT IS ON THE WEB RIGHT NOW as Silverlight 1.1 Alpha!!!! Note that the Silverlight 1.0 Beta is also released today. 1.0 does not have the .NET run time but it does have a goLive license.)

The third is a new service called silverlight Streaming. You can push your silverlight assets (media etc. up to 4GB) onto a Microsoft server and it will push it out to your websites for you so you don't have to worry about server capabilities or getting slash-dotted.  (This of course will scare people... about putting their code on Microsoft's servers... but that's another story..)

Rray Ozzie just announced that Expression Studio is shipping today. All MIX attendees will be getting "a special commorative edition".

Right now Silverlight (wpf/e) is not for the feint of heart - lots of javascript coding involved.

But Ray Ozzie just announced (as I'm sitting here in the keynote) at MIX that Silverlight will support .NET as a first class .NET development environment. So you can develop silverlight apps in .NEt. This means that the silverlight  runtime will include .NEt. And since sliverlight is targetted at macs also this means that .NET will run on Macs. I'm assuming that this will be a subset of .NET, but ..... pretty cool.

Mike Pizzo writes a post about Microsoft's data access strategy that covers a few important things:

1) Announces that EF will not make it into the Orcas release but will ship "A few months after the shipment of Orcas, and within the first half of 2008". This plan will allow them to give us more than what they would be able to give us in the initial Orcas release.
2) Addresses the LINQ to SQL vs. Entity Framework question, which has been asked quite a lot.

READ MORE HERE

[A New DevLife Post]
 

I just checked the Las Vegas forecast for the next week as I head out for MIX tomorrow.. But I know mostly I have to dress for indoors and a/c.

Wally is wondering which of the two possible covers might work for an upcoming book.

I thought I'd help him out by make the decision a little harder.

Mike Taulty has been doing short screen casts about LINQ to SQL. I love his approach as I know from experience how difficult it is to try to give a decent presentation of LINQ to SQL in a single 90 minute session when you have to start from scratch.

There are 9 so far and more coming. Here is a link to the latest (that includes links to the first 8 as well). Stay tuned for more.

From the ADO.NET Team blog:

Late last week, after bits had been finalized, we found a bug in the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Wizard that shipped with Visual Studio “Orcas” beta 1. The problem has now been corrected.

Please download and install the patch available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f69e9eb8-0ebd-4fba-a4cc-2050297ba75b&displaylang=en to fix the problem.

Panel on Open Source in the Microsoft Community at DevTeach

www.devteach.com

I have been futzing with WPF/E today trying to get the concepts down and when I looked up, I saw a post from Mike Taulty that said telerik has Silverlight radControls!

The "blimey" comes from MIke, because the relative American exlamation is R-rated!

www.telerik.com/silverlight

Very cool demos.

It took me a while to figure out how to get the WPF/E project template into Visual Studio 2005. Read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

In their Q1 release, telerik is including the first release of telerik Reporting. With my well-documented, love/hate relationship with Crystal Reports, I was definitely eager to see telerik's implementation. Telerik is all about simplicity (of use) and design. So this first pass at Reporting has some really great mechanisms for formatting reports in a CSS-like manner, which I really like. Another big win for me over Crystal is that while Crystal has evolved into a .NET tool, telerik's was designed in .NET. So you can interact with all of the controls in the report in the same manner as any other control in .NET.

Another benefit is the ease of using the reports in a winform or a webform. The only thing I know that is different is that the webforms don't support multi-column reports.

While there are definitely some more complex things I can achieve in Crystal (and I have the scars to prove it) that I can't yet do in this first version of telerik Reporting, I expect great things to come of this tool as we see it growing over future releases.

On top of all of this, I'm happy that I can actually copy and paste more than one control at a time.

There's a lot more to see in there. Check out the download. You can also download the extensive help files.

I watched a short interview with Scott Guthrie and learned some interesting things about ASP.NET (such as it is the technology behind MySpace's 4 BILLION page views a day)... read more...

[A New DevLife Post]

While there are still a few patches of snow on the ground, we have had a spate of warm summer like weather for the past few days. Last time I looked this morning the thermometer said it was 77 degrees! Where I live we aren't supposed to do our planting before Memorial Day (sees and hardy plants are okay, but not things like tomatoes, many types of herbs and other annuals) - that's how long we can expect frost for. Yet here it is April 23rd and it was 65 at 7am and now nearly 80 degrees. Crazy weather. Beautiful weather. I'm looking at my garden (which was covered with snow only 4 days ago) and feeling as though I am way behind the 8 ball already in getting it ready!

I have had my new Lenovo ThinkPad X60 for over a month now and the Touch Screen is my favorite. Read more (and also a bonus tale (confession?) about me absentmindedly leaving my laptop behind (open and running) at the Sofia, Bulgaria airport - oops)

[A New DevLife Post]

Ascension Technology

Very high tech medical firm. They make things like the little microscopic cameras that surgeons use to look inside or bods. Cool cool.

"Ascension makes 3D tracking devices for medical guidance, minimally invasive surgery, real-time visualization, and target acquisition. Our position and orientation tracking devices navigate, localize, and guide medical instruments for image-guided procedures. They also digitize real-world objects, track pilot’s helmets, and capture human motions for interaction with 3D graphical worlds. The world’s most advanced magnetic and optical trackers, 3D Guidance and phasorBIRD, are at home here."

Two jobs listed HERE on their website.

Microcosm Books (publishes Marine aquarium books ... cool) in Charlotte.

Permanent Part Time job: Book production and web publishing.

Not on their website, but it is here in 7Days (print edition) Classifieds.

Or just email the owner - contact info on website.