The Line Between Web App and Desktop App Begins To Blur

And….once the line begins to blur we all know it will eventually go away all together.

Mozilla is getting into the act tool.

Mozilla Prism

Also, search google for Silverlight + Desktop Application and you’ll get to the Silverlight overview. Silverlight Overview. An interesting section can be found at the end of the overview.

“Expression Design is a professional illustration and graphic design tool that lets you build compelling elements for both Web and desktop application user interfaces. Creating rich visual elements for Silverlight applications is made simple using Expression Design. XAML is automatically generated for elements that are supported on the Silverlight platform and all other visuals are automatically rasterized and included as bitmap objects.”

You can use Expression Blend and xaml to create desktop executables. The installing Expression Blend also installs several sample applications that run as exes. So soon if not already we should be able to create an app we can run as a web page and recompile to run as a executable.

Silverlight Resources

Here’s the main “Getting Started” page for Silverlight. This will give you the links to download the tools for VS 2008 and the bate SDK.

http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

MSDN Silverlight Developer Site

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/silverlight/default.aspx

Silverlight Architecture

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404713.aspx

Runtime/Plug in Overview

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/overview.aspx

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 - Development with the .NET Framework

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404700.aspx

Road map info from Scott Guthrie’s blog….

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/29/net-web-product-roadmap-asp-net-silverlight-iis7.aspx

First Look

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/22/first-look-at-silverlight-2.aspx

Whitepapers

http://silverlight.net/learn/whitepapers.aspx

 

A free, fully functioning professional quality Silverlight2 data grid from DevExpress with full source code. Pretty slick.

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Components/Silverlight/Grid/

Run ActiveMQ as a Windows Service

Instructions from Apache are here

Generate a Database Installation Script for SQL Server - schema AND data

This could potentially be a really useful technique for certain kinds of deployment or migration tasks. The article describes a procedure to easily produce scripts to create your database schema and then populate the new schema with the data in your source database.

The article is here

Mock Objects

Nice intro to using Mock Objects in .NET - provides some discussion on the two main mock frameworks in addition to an overview and a general idea of why and how to use this useful libraries.

The article is here

Scott has a follow up article on mocks (Mocks - It’s a Question of When) discussing when you would choose to use mocking, which is here

 

Martin Fowler has an article about the art and science of mocking, called “Mocks Aren’t Stubs” that is also well worth reading.

Randomer than new Random(seed)

Random.org provides services that will give you random numbers, or dice rolls, or a variety of other random goodness based off of atmospheric noise. Somewhat more random than the computer can do, in case we ever need such thing.

Random.ORG

OpenID - Using your own domain as your OpenID, without hosting a OpenID Server

If you haven’t heard about OpenID yet, you will. It is an identity federation concept like Passport was meant to be, but it is an open specification, not an implementation. Therefore anyone is free to create and manage an OpenID service and provide OpenID’s. The idea is that if you get an OpenID from some provider, it doesn’t really matter, and the any web application (or windows application for that matter) that supports OpenID can accept your OpenId credentials instead of username / password specific to that application. Eventually it will reduce the number of places you have to maintain credentials. Coupled with Information Cards, it could be a really great thing. We will probably try to support it in our tools soon. This also provides a link to a comparison of various OpenID providers.

The article is here

 

Here is a very nice, user friendly discussion of Open ID, it’s relation to CardSpace, in the usual Scott Hanselman style…

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ScottHanselman/~3/280609393/TheWeeklySourceCode25OpenIDEdition.aspx

Flexible, Ajax style "Loading" indicator JS library - Busy.JS

This is another very nice, simple and flexible Java Script library that serves one purpose only: make it very easy to create busy indicators on your web pages. I haven’t looked at it too closely but it appears to use VML or something to render these things on the fly, rather than use an animated GIF, so you have an amazing amount of control over the shape, size, transparency and color of your resulting busy indicator and in fact can change any of its properties at runtime (not sure why you would, but that isn’t the point )

This one definitely goes in the toolbox.

 

Library Home Page

Try it Out!

An Agile Approach to Software Specification

 

This came from the home page of some startup Jeff Atwood is launching, and I had to share it. I’ve had this feeling before.

A powerful Semantic Web API - Open Calais

Here is a link to a ReadWriteWeb introduction to a free for use API for extracting semantic information from raw, unstructured data. Essentially this API will take as input a chunk of content and extract out a few core entities: People, Companies, Places and Events. For instance, it can examine a chunk of content and list all the names of the people involved, the names of any companies mentioned, any cities or states. I’m not sure what our current usage of an API like this would look like, but I imagine it could be a very powerful tool.

The RWW Article

Open Calais

Try it Out!