You wait all year for something to happen then three things happen at once!!!!
To kick off the release of Visual Studio 2010, .net framework 4 and Silverlight 4, Microsoft hosted an array of global events inviting developers and technical professionals. Some of the world’s finest speakers showed off the new products, with Microsoft programmers highlighting new features and tools.
Visual Studio 2010 is the latest tool from Microsoft to aid programmers in the creation of Windows Applications, data services, web sites, Silverlight applications and windows phone 7 applications. The productivity tool has caught up with modern technology to offer multi-monitor support. There is now enhanced integration with existing Microsoft Office products, intellisense, for the jQuery library, and other open-source products. It also offers the ability to target .net framework 4 as well as previous versions of the framework. It even colour codes the oldest of ASP scripts for you die-hard VBScript heads!!
.Net framework 4 is the new framework for developing on the Windows platform. The installer itself offers many more templates for creating your programs, including one which targets the yet-to-be-released Windows 7 Phone. One of these phones was on display during the event and the speaker made a simple program for organising contacts, calling into the Outlook program in the office suite, getting the user’s contact list and offering filters to re-organise the emails, phones numbers and other data items in the account. The framework is all about rapid development and .net 4 certainly seemed to deliver in the demos.
Silverlight 4 is the next generation of the fledgling RIA (Rich Internet Application) framework from Microsoft. Building on Microsoft’s proven track record of solid data layer and fantastic base tools, Silverlight itself was intended as a business-class framework to compete with flash in the RIA space. What had let it down in the past was highly restricted security stopping the development of business application. Silverlight 4 overcomes this with a new security layer allowing a user to opt-in to certain security-restricted features such as printer support and webcam and microphone.
The framework is merging more and more with Microsoft’s other rich application framework, WPF, so the lines between internet application and desktop application are becoming blurred. Indeed, a Silverlight 4 application can be downloaded from a website, installed to a desktop application and run as if it was a fully trusted application with access to your local files and network services. Sounds scary? Well there are a fair few hoops to jump through to get this working but it only speaks volumes for Microsoft’s security-conscious values and not wanting to cause headache for even the least savvy of users.
There were plenty of other cool demonstrations of products like Blend 4, Windows Azure and Bing Maps, more to follow next time...
Currently rated 4.5 by 2 people
- Currently 4.5/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5