intersoft just sent me an email that the beta versions of their WebUIStudio.NET 2008 R1 is available, which includes a few new silverlight controls: WebAqua and WebCoverFlow.

i'm curious how soon the apple attorneys might prepare a cease-and-desist on the naming of both of these controls, but that's for them to figure our.  I'm more interested in getting my hands on them and playing around.  you can read their press release here on where to get them.  it's very exciting to see so many controls popping up.  i hope that when silverlight 2.0 releases that these will all be ready for primtetime as well!

got mad design and css skillz?  take a stab at redesigning the mix web site for a contest.  i saw through twitter that adam kinney noted only one person entered yet.  and there are three prizes!!! should make winning pretty simple right now ;-).

of course i'm ineligible (that's my way of getting off, because i have no mad design skillz), but might i suggest a few themes to try out:

• halo 3
• rockband/guitar hero - have you seen this and this yet?
• reno 911 - man i love this show -- 'sheriff's department!' -- hmm...ballmer as lt. dangle?
• dora and diego -- go ScottGu go!
• high school musical
• election 2008

either way, all you have to do is visit the restyle contest page and download the starter kit.  so what are you waiting for?  deface, er...i mean...restyle the site in a creative way!

the guys at sapphire, whom i'd previously written about their ruby in steel developer tools, just posted a preview of 'visual rails workbench,' which is a visual designer for ruby on rails.  here's one of their preview shots:

this design mode with ERb is just one of the elements of the workbench it looks like.  get the full details (as well as some comments on IronRuby support in their other tools that they've been working on) by reading the update on the sapphire site.

got an email today about something i hadn't seen yet, another silverlight 2.0 game, Pirates!  cameron emailed me about a cool prototype he's working on with the farseer engine.  here's a shot:

as cameron puts it:

"The goal of the game will be to attain the buried fortune of a long dead pirate named Rough Hand James. He created a map to his treasure and scattered the pieces all across the globe. It will be your adventure to find those map pieces and locate the treasure. You will start out on your ship with the first clue to the treasure and along the way you may encounter the Royal Navy, sea monsters and other pirates. You will engage in sea and land battles, loot merchant vessels and follow clues through towns, uncharted waters and wilderness all to find the greatest fortune every massed by one pirate."

awesome...'rough hand james' -- nice.  check out cameron's blog to follow some of the interesting things he's finding along the way with both silverlight as well as creating some artificial intelligence for gaming.  i can't wait to see what cameron thinks of silverlight 2.0!

today, the iis team released a preview of the 'web deployment tool' for internet information services (iis).  the tool has features that a lot of server admins would want such as deployment assistance, sync/migration of sites across servers (which includes config, content, certs, etc.).

the core features are:

• synchronization and snapshot of IIS 6/7
• migration from iis 6
• analysis of iis 6 installed features
• troubleshooting and validation features

go check out the post for all the details and a download link.