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Interesting new features in Internet Explorer 8: Data URLs. According to the documentation, "Data URIs offer Web developers the opportunity to embed small external resources (such as CSS files or images) directly into a URL on a Web page."
For example, if small (or even larger ones?) images would be embedded into the HTML file and then stored in memory, advanced AJAX web applications could operate very nicely without an Internet connection. Sounds like a simple method to package web applications, sort of. CAB and JAR/WAR files come into my mind. See for yourself.
By the way, while I'm at it, here's a document listing what's new in Internet Explorer 8.
Information about Windows 7 will now start to flow more officially: the Windows Vista blog has an entry about Windows Seven.
Now that the door is open, I'd expect that more and more information would start to flow through these technical blogs.
For a while, I've been thinking of upgrading my main development PC, but now that Windows Server 2008 is out, I've started to think whether Windows Server 2008 would be better suited to my needs than the normal Windows Vista operating system. As I don't play games much, I don't mind minimal support for such software/gear. Now, on the other hand, Windows Server 2008 would run faster (or need less hardware, whichever is your point of view) and also have full-blown IIS 7.0 web server.
I today noticed a nice web site called Win2008Workstation, which contains information about how to "convert" your Windows Server 2008 server to a decent, or even pretty slick workstation. I confess I like the idea!
News from the Office front: the next service pack 2 for Office 2007 will bring ODF support to the productivity suite.
Sounds surely good to many organizations wishing to use openly-specified file formats. Of course, now that OpenXML is one (with the recent ISO standardization), the ODF thing is in my opinion rather moot. Nonetheless, I think it's great that Microsoft Office would directly support ODF formats. Whit this, there's no need for myself to use OpenOffice anymore (there haven't been reasons so far, either).
I noticed from eWeek and the company's own press release, that Microsoft has announced a new roadmap for its embedded operating systems, mostly known as Windows Embedded. Previously, there have been several different editions, and the new roadmap keeps those but also announces new ones.
For developers, the new embedded Windows versions for mobile and embedded PC devices offer better programmability. With the advancements in the .NET Micro Framework (think Silverlight) we should see in the future even more uses for Visual Studio and general .NET development. Sounds like the possibilities will be very diverse indeed in the coming years.
While many developers might not know Mark Hamburg from Adobe, saying that he's one of the designers of Photoshop (among with Thomas Knoll) will immediately ring a bell.
Starting recently, he is now working for Microsoft and helping design the Expression line of products. Also, for you photographers out there, Mark was one of the main designers for the Lightroom product, which I've learned to love.
Personally, I believe this is a blow to Adobe, even though they say otherwise in their corporate blog. At the same time, this is a big win to Microsoft, since they have a new product line that is going to be important for the company and many developers and graphics designers. Having a guy like Mark on the team will make sure that those "wow" effects should keep on coming.
The newest issue of the Finnish Tietokone magazine has my latest article about Adobe Lightroom tips and tricks. The article is titled "Kuvat ojennukseen Lightroomilla".
Enjoy!
Microsoft has just announced the availability of Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta. The beta is available for download from MSDN.
Scott Guthrie has a detailed post about the features in the forthcoming update.
Great additions and enhancements in the making, I must say!
When you are debugging, being able to monitor or watch variable values is often instrumental in finding your bugs. In this job, the Watch and Local windows are really helpful, but sometimes they require too many mouse clicks to reveal those object property values that you need. This is especially true if you have lots of custom classes whose key properties you want to see quickly.
By default, the Value column of the, say, Locals window displays the type (class) name of a class instance variable. So, to view the property values of that class, you need to expand the class with the small plus sign on the left of the variable name. This is trivial of course, but an additional step that you need to make each time. Wouldn't it be great if you could specify how Visual Studio should visualize your class values?
Luckily, this is why the DebuggerDisplay attribute in the System.Diagnostics namespace was created in the first place. To use it, you would pass in a string with property names in brackets, and at runtime (debug time) Visual Studio would display the values there.
For example:
[DebuggerDisplay("ID = {CustomerID}, Name = {Name}")]
public class CustomerInformation
{
public int CustomerID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Address { get; set; }
public string City { get; set; }
public string Country { get; set; }
}
After this, the Locals window would display the class instance as a string like "ID = 123, Name = John" like this:
Of course, you can still expand the class to see all the properties, but by using DebuggerDisplay attribute you won't need to do that anymore for most cases. Simple and neat.
The Windows developer news for today is that CodeGear (Delphi, InterBase, JBuilder et.al) has been sold to Embarcadero Technologies. More details on the web.
I notice today while browsing for more information about Microsoft's new Expression 2 products that they currently also offer a "Expression Professional Subscription". This seems to be an "MSDN for designers" and it includes among other things Expression Studio, Visual Studio Standard, Office Standard and even operating systems. Interesting, and could be very well that designers need.
Microsoft yesterday announced that Expression Studio 2 is now in RTM (Release to manufacture). This means that the new bits should be soon downloadable from MSDN.
The new features in the Expression Studio 2 (and Blend 2 plus Web 2) include improved collaboration between developers (read: Visual Studio users) and graphics designers and of course better support for Silverlight applications.
Sounds good! The press release is here.
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