Microsoft Longhorn RSS and Attention

Nick Bradbury at Bradsoft has a great post on his weblog regarding the Microsoft announcement that it is baking RSS support into Longhorn.  If you don’t know how the announcement might effect you then Nick’s post is worth the read.

I think RSS support in Longhorn and IE7 is going to be great for all of us.  As long as Microsoft doesn’t try to make the current RSS standard their own and shares with the rest of the world the improvements it intends to make, then it will be good for all of us.

The reason for Microsoft seemingly sudden support and interest in RSS makes those familiar with the company a bit skeptical of their intentions.  My take on this is: 

• Longhorn is late, add features people will want.
• Avalon is irrelevant, add features people will want.
• RSS holds key information to the data people WANT to see, key to personal search and the battle with Google and Yahoo.

The last item is the real key to why I think Microsoft is interested in RSS and the key to the data we are personally interested in holds.  I don’t mind Microsoft or anyone else for that matter using my personal data to improve my computing experience as long as I get to be the keeper of that data….since it is MY data. 

We will see what the future holds and the "real" interest Microsoft has in RSS.

Microsoft announces Atlas Project

Microsoft announced today information about an initiative for supporting Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX) in ASP.NET 2.0.   AJAX is not a new technology but has been used recently by such companies as Google in Google Maps and GMail.  AJAX allows client-side script to make calls to the web server without issuing a postback and therefore making the user experience much smoother and more enjoyable.

Scott Guthrie is the person inside of Microsoft who is responsible for incorporating such technologies.  You can read more on his weblog for more information.

ComputerZen.com 2005 Tool List

In the event no one knows who Scott Hanselman is, he writes one of the-best technology related blogs on the planet. 

He just published his list of the best tools for developers and power users and it’s a great resource.  Check it out here, Scott Hanselman’s 2005 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List.

TechEd 2005 Podcasts

In case you are like me, you are not attending Tech, but there is a group at the conference that is helping us out and producing a bunch of videos that you can view one at a time or with your podcast client. 

Check them out here.

Microsoft PDC 2005

Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) is being held September 13-16 2005 in Los Angeles, CA.  It looks like a great time and one you don’t to miss with sure discussions on VS 2005, Avalon, Indigo and Longhorn.

Channel 9 is talking a lot about this event and even has a contest for a free trip to PDC for the best blog post begging to go.  Check it out.

Visual Studio 2005 Release Date

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft announced at Tech’Ed 2005 that Visual Studio will be released Nov. 7th 2005.  This will be a milestone in .NET development.  Microsoft is known for doing things right in release 3 of any product and this is our 3rd release of Visual Studio .NET.

Microsoft is issuing "go-live" licenses for VS2005 from it’s beta 2 product that became available a short time ago.  If you sign the End-User License Agreement (EULA) you can take advantage of this.

In my company we are creating applications today using VS2005 Beta 2 and plan to use those in a live environment before the actual release of the product.

Ajax.NET and HtmlControls, Request Cache, Namespace Mappings,…

In case you are not  aware of what Asynchronous JavaScript is and how it can be used you  should check out the AJAX.NET library.  This technology is what Google uses  for Google Maps and GMail, among others.

This technology has been around for a long time but only until recently has become a hot topic.  You can read about Asynchronous JavaScript from Adaptive Path.

You can thank Michael Schwarz for making the  .NET developer’s life so much easier with his AJAX  library.  From the AJAX.NET blog:

I have released the next version of the free Ajax.NET    Library. You can download the latest version    5.6.2.1 at http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/. 

The new features are:    

• System.Web.UI.HtmlControls support as arguments and return      value to support client control updates without postbacks     
• System.Guid converter     
• Cache Ajax.NET request and response using      [Ajax.AjaxMethod(seconds)]     
• Configure the virtual filename for the Ajax.NET JavaScript      files. In old version you could see the Namespace, Classname and      Assemblyname.

The StackOverflowException I got from several developers was    the missing support of System.Guid. This should now work, sorry!

There are new examples available at http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/ for    HtmlControls, Caching and the Namespace Mapping. You have to scroll to the    bottom of the page!   

Updated:
some  other small bugfixes for a new version number: version 5.6.2.2
– fixed this.url    in class.ashx if server is in root folder
– fixed byte[],    StackOverflowException
– changed interface IAjaxObjectConverter, added    property ClientScriptIdentifier to remove multiple client    scripts

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