Mike-Ward.Net

Friday Links #26

Half a year of links! Didn’t think I would maintain the pace but some how I’ve managed.

Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 - ScottGu’s Blog – Scott talks about some of the stuff we might see in Silverlight 3, like hardware accelerated graphics. This is something my current project at work could really benefit from.

Lee-Soft.com - Windows Simulation Software – Several programs to give you Vista features on your XP system.

Featured Windows Download: Install the Windows Vista Sidebar in XP – Lets you run Vista gadgets on XP.

Google SketchUp 7 for Windows & Mac Now Available – I’m still amazed that Google gives this program away. It use to retail for $500 before being acquired.

C# 3.0 in a Nutshell – PredicateBuilder – This is a really clever piece of code that allows you to build Linq Where predicates dynamically. Helped me solve a vexing little problem at work this week.

Adobe Flex reaches out to .NET developers – developerFusion - Adobe Partner Ensemble, have announced a new plug-in that will enable .NET developers to create Flex front-ends for their applications from within Visual Studio 2008.

Seadragon : Microsoft Live Labs - The aim of Seadragon is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays all the way down to cell phones, so that graphics and photos are smoothly browsed, regardless of the amount of data or the bandwidth of the network.

Featured Windows Download: Ultimate Windows Tweaker is Like Tweak UI for Vista – does the same thing as other programs of this type. It’s just nicely presented and easy to grasp.

Windows Presentation Foundation SDK : Silverlight Toolkit and F1 Help - If you’ve installed the Silverlight Toolkit after Visual Studio 2008, you may have noticed that pressing F1 in the VS Code Editor or in XAML View can take you someplace unexpected. You’ll see this with types and members that are “shared” between Silverlight and the .NET Framework, which means that shared types have the same name and namespace. F1 Help is unable to disambiguate between the two types, and it chooses the last one installed, which is almost always the Silverlight Toolkit’s offline Help. This workaround fixes the issue.

Scientists say Copernicus remains, grave found – Discoverer of the Sun-centered universe remains found in, where else, an old Church. The reconstruction of his face is freaky cool.

Online Storage: SkyDrive Will Upgrade to 25GB of Online Storage – The Windows Live SkyDrive Team announces that the online storage service will jump “soon” to 25GB, with lots of photo-friendly tools like slideshows, people and place tagging, and Live Photo Gallery integration (so, why not just make Photo Gallery 25GB?). Pretty impressive space boost, and it might help link all the Windows Live services into a semi-coherent whole.

jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 - ScottGu’s Blog - Over the last few weeks we’ve been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery intellisense support within Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). This is now available to download and use. See the blog entry for steps on how to install.

Extension Overflow - The purpose with this collection is to provide useful C#extension methods to boost productivity for the .net developers. It’s open source so feel free to contribute. I’m thinking of add my throw helpers.