Valer BOCAN’s Web Log

Earlier this week I held a short presentation to my team at Alcatel-Lucent Romania about the enhancements brought to C# by version 3.0. My intent is that everybody in the team is aware of the new things and start applying them the earliest possible. Some time in the following weeks I will post a series on LINQ which is the actual reason behind said language enhancements.

I am sharing this to everyone who wants a jump start. You can download the presentation (24 slides) and the code used throughout the presentation. You will need Visual Studio 2008 (any edition) to experiment with this.

Presentation (in PDF format): csharp3-language-enhancements.pdf

Presentation (in PowerPoint 2007 format): csharp3-language-enhancements.zip

Visual Studio 2008 Sample Code: csharp3-language-enhancements-code.zip

I have just installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and noticed the cool coloring that happens in the address bar. Although this is a “nice-to-have” feature, it basically means that regular users may spot a phony website in a blink of an eye. Yes, provided that they have the eyes and the brains to judge that.

On the first day of Mix08, Microsoft unveiled the next version of Internet Explorer. Athough the bits are available now, I haven’t had the chance to toy with it as I am reluctant to install beta software on production machine. Perhaps I will do so on a virtual machine.

The video shows two new features of IE8: activities and webslices. Both features provide a user experience similar to the Search Provider feature we can find nowadays in IE7 and Firefox 2, i.e. there is nothing to install on the client side, just click on a icon and accept the activity or the webslice to be registered with the UI.

Activities allow you interact with pieces of information displayed on the screen. For instance, an address can be right-clicked and mapped directly with service of user’s choice (such as Microsoft Live Maps), in a small context window. This is neat as it allows the user to interact with the information in a non Copy/Paste way.

Webslices are small pieces of information that are continuously updated by IE. If you want to keep an eye on your Ebay auction, you may want to know when the price has updated. Of course, you can always go back to the auction page and can watch for incoming emails from Ebay, however these methods are manual. Webslices are displayed as small icons on the toolbar and they flash if there is an update available, to notify the user.

Although I am just an occasional Firefox user, I am thrilled at the number of add-ins available and how easily they are installed and updated. I wish IE had the same number of add-ins and be as developer friendly as Firefox.

As you probably know, the MIX conference is taking place in Las Vegas at the Venetian Hotel at this very moment. As expected, the conference showcases some of the best products being developed. This year’s Mix is no exception and I am eagerly waiting for the next great thing to appear.

Silverlight 2 has just been released and the folks at AOL came up with a stunning webmail client, written entirely in Silverlight. The speed was blazingly fast and the interface could sort thousands of emails almost instantly, not to mention the possibility of themming the interface according to the user’s taste. Rumours go that people in the audience did not believe that that was an actual live demo. I guess we all have to get used to greater responsiveness and richness of web apps along with the advent of Silverlight.

See the original post and download the interview with Roy and Eric of AOL.