Silverlight News & Articles

So it's day 2 of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2009 and what we have all been waiting for has happened. Microsoft has announced the beta release of SharePoint 2010 to the world.

Everyone, it seems, is questioning the future of the Web Content Management market. But question they may, Web CMS vendors across the global are still working hard to advance their solutions, and Bulgaria based Telerik (news, site) is no exception.

They have recently announced their Q3 Release lineup and it's packed with new features that include support for SQL Azure, User Interface testing and ASP.NET MVC and much more.

First Microsoft's Interoperability Team announced a PHP Toolkit, then we saw Microsoft throw their support behind the CodePlex.org Foundation, and we hear rumors of a new open source content management system. So now what?

Well the Microsoft Interoperability Team has announced support for the open source IDE Eclipse. At the Eclipse Summit Europe, they offered up a few new solutions in partnership with open source companies Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec:

• An Enhanced Developer Experience for Eclipse on Windows 7
• Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse
• Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java
• Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

Microsoft provides funding and architectural guidance on the projects.

According to Microsoft, the goal here is to "help developers using the Eclipse platform take advantage of the new features in Windows 7 and Window Server 2008 R2, and reinforce Java and PHP interoperability with Windows Azure and Microsoft Silverlight."

You can get all the details on these four projects on Microsoft's Interoperability blog.

And while these projects sound interesting, there's another one underway that caught our attention: Microsoft has joined up with IBM, Zend Technologies, and others to work on a new open source, cloud interoperability project.

Called Simple API for Cloud Application Services, this project is designed to help create basic cloud applications that will run in all of the major cloud platforms. This would include the Amazon Web Services, even though Amazon is not part of the project. 

It appears that NewsGator (news, site) is on some kind of roll. The provider of social solutions for the enterprise has gotten a thumbs-up from several hands this year, including Inc. magazine, which named them one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the country.

Social Sites, the cream of NewsGator's crop, was designed to provide enterprise 2.0 capabilities to Microsoft SharePoint. In addition to collaboration tools, colleague tracking and content mash-up capabilities, Social Sites also offers ad hoc communities, profiles and a graphical display of a person's social network (strongest colleague connections, recommended connections, suggestions for best ways to connect).

Most recently, the company also tacked on Socialpedia, an internal website that leverages SharePoint's wiki capabilities, and Knowledge Explorer, a graphical expertise map based on Silverlight which shows all the people knowledgeable on a certain topic.

As for their recognition from Inc., the team says: "While not a complete surprise, it’s certainly an honor, and an affirmation of our rapid growth and success in enterprise social computing."

The recognition is in a pot with several other NewsGator sweet spots from 2009, including the Microsoft 2009 Best Social Computing Solution, KMWorld 2009 Companies That Matter, 2009 Colorado Companies to Watch, and the Upshot50 2009 Marketing Technology Leader. Inc.'s complete list, which features some other familiar faces, can be found here.

Continued the team at NewsGator: "We’re grateful. Honors are cool. But bottom-line results for our customers are what inspire us to keep getting better." Watch them do just that here.
 

Microsoft (news, site) hits the difficult third album with its would-be web framework king and development systems -- Silverlight 3 and Expression 3. What's new under the hood for those wanting to make a splash online?

KnowledgeLake (news, site) specializes in document management for SharePoint offering a number document imaging and capture solutions. It has recently updated its Connect desktop solution to allow integration with desktop programs such as Web, Windows, Silverlight and WPF applications, making it even quicker to add your documents to SharePoint.

For more than a decade, sales strategists have been advising businesses to take their marketing online. Forward-looking companies have heeded this message.

However, many businesses still prefer traditional media such as TV, radio and newsprint. So while typical consumers might spend 25% of their media time surfing the Web, these companies might only be investing 5% or so of their marketing budgets on websites and other online promotions.

Internet Information Server, or IIS, is Microsoft's free web server. The latest version of IIS - IIS7 - comes with some new features and functionality. Of particular note is the new integrated media services capabilities.

IIS Media Services 3.0 is an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform. With it, you can now deliver richer websites and web experiences that include both web content and rich media. It has a number of extensions, including:

• Smooth streaming: IIS automatically detects and adjusts the video quality of a media file accessed in a Silverlight player, based on bandwidth and CPU conditions. This includes HD quality streaming for high bandwidth users.
• Live smooth streaming: Adaptive streaming for live events accessed via a Silverlight player.
• Advanced Logging: Extensions to report media usage from both the real-time client and server logs. Third party analytic providers can both extend the metrics measures and access the data for reporting purposes. There is an upcoming Silverlight analytics control that will track and report data to IIS.
• Bit Rate Throttling: Controls the rate the media is delivered across HTTP.
• Web Playlists: Provides both developers and hosts control over how media is delivered. For example, you can control the order and playback of media content, allowing you to insert advertising that cannot be skipped. You can also control whether your content gets cached or not.

You can view an example of live streaming and learn more about these new extensions to II7. IIS Media Services 3.0 is available via the Web Platform Installer.

No doubt you’ve heard of, and even anticipated, the release of Microsoft Silverlight 3. The third version of the runtime comes a mere eighteen months after the initial launch in 2007.

Such a quick turnover has understandably made a few folks skeptical, as has the rumor that this will be the only beta before the official Silverlight 3 ships later this year. But so far positive reviews are coming in by the truckload, securing Silverlight in the ring with Adobe Flash for what will likely be a pretty good fight.

Microsoft generally likes to keep a tight lock on their products and services. Their update site not working on any browser other than Internet Explorer and Silverlight not working with Linux are perfect examples. But thanks to Novell’s newest release -- Moonlight -- Linux users can now utilize Silverlight apps.

Microsoft released Silverlight 2, a new version of its solution for creation and delivery of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) through a Web browser.

Silverlight 2 — presented under the motto of creating “next-generation Web experiences” — comes packed with a variety of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible and more secure user experiences.

In an effort to entice consumers to visit its customers’ sites and make Flash software more attractive to Web site developers, Adobe has taken steps to make pages with Flash-created images more recognizable to search engines like Google.

Ektron Inc., the New Hampshire-based Web Content Management powerhouse, and VML, a major digital marketing agency, have announced that they have integrated Ektron’s CMS400.NET CMS and Microsoft’s Silverlight media web browser plug-in.

A good blog post is in essence a question; purposefully opinionated, or better yet, outright wrong. It demands interaction.

The blogger’s job is to provide the question, provoke debate, and invite the community at large to pool its immense knowledge and take the conversation further (a characteristic which distinguishes the blogger from the journalist). The conversation is the reason why we prefer blogs. If it weren’t for the dialog between writer and reader, we may as well just pick up a newspaper or listen to the damn radio.

This is how it was always supposed to be. But typically, either this conversation does not really happen at all, or else it is so slow and disjointed as to suck the life out of the whole process. Blogging platforms and the blogosphere as a whole have failed miserably at enabling effective conversation.

But it would appear that the landscape changing, and that the evolution of conversation is changing the nature of blogging itself. To demonstrate this, we look at a particular, regular post by Robert Scoble, and look at how the conversation now shifts from one forum to another (and more importantly, why). This will demonstrate how the blogosphere is becoming less about the blog, and more about the conversation.

This trend has wide-ranging implications, and points the way for future web communication, both in the blogosphere and beyond.

Content delivery network Internap has integrated BuyDRM’s KeyOS Pay Media Platform into its proprietary offering.

The benefits of this integration will be most evident to users of MediaConsole, a component of the Internap Content Delivery Network. The MediaConsole is a workflow management toolset that supports streaming formats like Flash and Windows Media.