over the past 6 months i've received numerous questions whether or not a user group for sharepoint existed in arizona.  it didn't (there was one but it drizzled away), but i'm happy to announce that some volunteers rallied to start another one.  they have set a date for their first meeting or the arizona sharepoint professionals group.

here's the information i have:

Date:  Thursday, 31 JAN 2008
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Locations: University of Advancing Technology, 2625 W Baseline Rd, Tempe, AZ

they are asking people to register (not sure why) so if you plan on attending, please do register for them.  you can click the registration link here.  if you experience problems registering, i'd say just show up :-).  sorry, no web site for further information other than the registration site.  if you do go, encourage them to do 2 things for me (i'll be in denver or i'd go): 1) start an email group instead of a forum and 2) post their events on azgroups.com so others can see (i've posted this first one).

the guys over at sapphiresteel software released ruby in steel text edition, a full-featured ruby on rails IDE built on the visual studio 2008 shell.

as a microsoft developer interested in looking at ruby on rails early on, i loved when the sapphire project was first released.  i had played with earlier version and after re-paving my machine need to take a look at the updated versions.

if you don't own a copy of visual studio 2008, when you get the ruby in steel text edition, you get visual studio 2008 (ruby language support only) -- so this isn't an add-on only, it is a full deal.  if you already have vs2008, this will install into your current environment.  it has all the goodness you'd expect of an IDE: color coding, snippets, code folding, integrated debugger, and interactive consoles.

the sapphire guys also have the developer edition which is a little more full featured, and includes a faster debugger and few other features like dynamic update intellisense.  DHH was quoted as saying:

"Ruby In Steel is particularly interesting to developers coming over from the Microsoft world as Visual Studio is a familiar environment to them. That'll likely ease the transition." source: InfoWorld

i think this is great for people interested in learning new environments as well as new languages.  already being familiar with a tool like visual studio may help you understand about ruby without having to learn any new tool.

and no, it doesn't run on a mac.

i had previously done a screencast where i talked about the tools i use to convert vector graphics in SVG format to XAML assets to be consumed in either WPF or Silverlight applicaitons.  one of the tools mentioned in the screencast is Inkscape.  inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilitis siilar to illustrator, freehand, etc and uses the SVG file format (mostly).  one of the cool things about inkscape is the extensibility already offered in the open source platform.  after having some colorful discussions with my local linux group on their discussion group, i met one of the inkscape contributors.  we 'chatted' (read: emailed) privately off the group for a while about vector formats, why not SVG, etc., etc. and ended up in an amicable place understanding the role of XAML.  through this, ted, helped contribute a checkin to the inkscape project that enables files being edited in inkscape to be exported directly to XAML format.

ted tells me the inkscape guys will have a booth at the southern california linux expo in february.  i think that they'll have a stable build of the xaml feature by then (crossing fingers).  if you are brave enough for daily builds it is already in there if you want to try it out.  if you are going to be in in southern california, you should stop by the expo and chat it up with the inkscape crew that will be manning the booth.  it's a great tool that has helped me in the past few months.  while the conference isn't free, well neither is the expo, the expo hall looks like a $10 ticket.

UPDATE: register with code MOF1 and you'll get 50% off the registration to SCALE!  thanks ilan!

UPDATE2: jon galloway demonstrates his tests of inkscape

there is an important announcement from the silverlight streaming team.  looks like they are moving to some newer/better hardware infrastructure.  please see the full announcement.

here's the gist as well:

Tonight (Tuesday, Jan. 8th) we’ll move the Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live service from its current hardware in Sandbox to a more permanent home on new hardware in the Production environment. Note that this doesn’t change anything to the fact that it is still provided as an Alpha version with no associated SLA.

At 9:00 pm PST the admin site front door (Silverlight.live.com) will be set to read-only. This means that your existing apps will still be able to function normally, whether hosted in SLS or hosted locally and fetching video content only from SLS. However you will not be able to provision new accounts and you will not be able to delete/change/upload content to the service, whether via the admin site or the API.

At 10:00 pm PST the DNS change will come into effect and all the traffic will be redirected to the new boxes in Production. There is a one-hour TTL on the old DNS so you may see some funkiness if you try to access some apps between 10:00 pm PST and 11:00 pm PST depending on what piece of the overall path (origin server, cached content in the CDN, etc.) to delivering your app and its content is still from the old config or already swapped to the new one.

At 11:00 pm PST everything should be back to normal. The old DNS will be inactive. The new hardware and new DNS will be the only one in operation in the Production environment. If you see any issues with your apps after that time, please report it to the dev forum on Silverlight.net or reply to this post.

miss the days of devdays?  me too.  my team is trying to bring a little of that spark back!  joe shirey on my team has organized a full-day of developer and architect goodness.  we'll be hosting two events, one in the phoenix, arizona metro area and one in the denver, colorado metro area.  here's the gist:

keynote: microsoft patterns and practices is being shipped in to talk about what they've produced and the logic behind it!

developer track:

• exposing and consuming data using the microsoft stack (rob bagby): take a look at the ado.net entity framework, linq and the ado.net data services (project 'astoria').
• office as a developer platform (tim heuer): didn't know you could easily write office applications using managed code?  let me show you how easy it is and what visual studio 2008 has done to enable this and make it even easier.
• what is new in visual basic 9 (beth massi): that's right.  beth massi -- if you are a vb'er, you've no doubt heard the name from the vb team.  we convinced her that she needed to be a part of this and she agreed!  come learn from beth all the new goodness that is VB9: xml literals, object initializers, anonymous types, extension methods, lambda expressions and some wicked intellisense improvements!

architect track:

• why user experience matters: face it, developers are not good at defining user interfaces and thus it is often an aspect that is left out.  let's discuss the reason this needs to change and how attention to the user experience affects application adoption.
• agile development at microsoft: the team from patterns and practices will discuss how they have fully adopted agile methods in their development team and their learnings over the years.
• the Windows Live platform: think windows live is just virtual earth?  think again!  come hear about the services available to you as service-based building blocks that microsoft has exposed for your use!

this is going to be a great day and a must-see event.  it is completely free to attend.  come hang out with us.  we will also have a couple of surprises throughout the day and some fun stuff to show as well.

register for your event today:

PHOENIX 29 JAN REGISTER HERE

DENVER 31 JAN REGISTER HERE

do not miss out on this opportunity to hear from some locals as well as some people we are dragging out from redmond and the product teams!