“Silverlight 3 Released” and other links…
ScottGu’s Blog: “Silverlight 3 includes new media codec support for H.264 video, AAC audio and MPEG-4 content. This enables you to easily play and stream media encoded using these standards. Silverlight 3 also includes raw bitstream audio/video APIs that enable you to create additional codecs (in any .NET language) that support playing any other media format. Silverlight 3 also adds a variety of additional media features that enable better logging (for media analytics and ad monetization scenarios), provide the ability to disable screen-savers when playing long-form video content, and enable content protection.”
“Announcing SharePoint 2010 Technical Preview”
Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog: “Today, we’re announcing that SharePoint 2010 has reached the technical preview engineering milestone. The SharePoint team is running a limited, invitation only Technical Preview program. While we’re not sharing SharePoint 2010 details at this point, we did want to give our customers & partners a sneak peek at SharePoint 2010! We’re very excited about SharePoint 2010 and looking forward to the SharePoint Conference this October where we’ll talk about all the investment areas across workloads and the platform. What we’re sharing today is just a fraction of what will be in SharePoint 2010!”
“SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek”
Paul Andrew: “Today we introduced a sneak peek of SharePoint 2010. We’re only announcing a few of the many new features right now, but there’s some exciting stuff in the list today to talk about.” I’ve looked at the videos (especially the “Developer Sneak Peak”) and am only slightly enthused about the “SharePoint Client Object Model”—however, the formalization of this concept by Microsoft (which exists informally for SharePoint 2007) is considered here an indirect admission that the “option” to easily bypass the SharePoint UI customization hell (and use SharePoint as a data entry/access layer) is very necessary. Yes, I understand that the original physicist that envisioned the Web wanted a read-write experience but this idea that data must be edited in place everywhere it appears should be considered one strategy among many instead of the only way to go…
“Introducing the SharePoint object model”
Nick Grattan: “As an alternative to programming against the SharePoint web services you can use the SharePoint object model. The object model can be used when the application will run on the server where SharePoint is installed (such as a console or WinForm application) or in assemblies that are run within a site (such as a Web Part).” Okay, this does not sound like ‘bypassing’ SharePoint and more like tight coupling from the 1990s… This is not a superior loose-coupling option over SharePoint Web Services.
“Using XamlReader.Load”
MSDN: “…the ability to create managed objects from XAML input is still available in the managed API, by using the static method XamlReader..::.Load. This topic explains how to use the Load method, provides requirements for the input XAML, explains how to connect the output to the object tree, and discusses the XAML namescope issues that can affect using the FindName method against parts of the object tree that originated from a call to Load.” This method should allow me to use the same AJAX-friendly server(s) that I use for XHTML with XAML. All I need to do on the server side is use different XSL templates that render XAML against XML data instead of XHTML.