I’m very excited to have the opportunity to attend the RIApalooza event in Chicago in a few weeks (31 MAY). What is RIApalooza?
RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and "PowerPoint-Free" zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built. source: riapalooza.com
I love the PPT-free zone aspect of it. I loving having the maximum time to show some real working code, answer questions and see what everyone is working on. I’ve decided to team up with a great designer, Corrina, where we will demonstrate some fun things. It should be a great time. I don’t want to give too much away, so if you are in the area, you should absolutely come. You can register on the site, so be sure to do so. I’ll be coming in on Friday and might need to do some fine tune prepping but would love to meet as many folks as possible at the meet-n-greet on Friday night. Follow me on Twitter if you’d like and hopefully I’ll be able to post where the fun is happening.
I look forward to seeing you there!
In February, the SharePoint team released a Visual Studio extensions kit for SharePoint development. Just recently they released a user guide complete with samples and walkthroughs. The sections include:
- Starting out in SharePoint Development
- Walkthrough of the VS extensions
- Team Site project
- Blank Site project
- List Definition project
- Web Part project
- Workflow projects
- Project Item Templates
- Best practices for the VS extensions
They also note that a VS2008 extensions release looks to be targeted for June 2008. Paul Andrew has all the details with some snapshots on his blog post as well.
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You’ve likely reached this page as a result of a search or a referral. This page contains the most current links to download the Foxit PDF Preview Handler for Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Windows XP.
The Foxit PDF Preview Handler is a piece of software written by myself with sponsorship from Foxit Software (providing the license so that we all can enjoy). Special thanks to Ryan Gregg for help with the Windows XP version. These preview handlers are a part of Microsoft Windows Vista in the operating system as well as in Outlook 2007.
For example, in Outlook 2007, if you receive an attachment that is a PDF you can click it and get a preview of that document right within Outlook without having to open the document in another program. It is an extremely helpful feature of Outlook that I love and why I wrote this handler for PDFs. Microsoft did not provide a default one for PDFs as a part of Outlook or Vista. If you install Adobe Acrobat 8.1+ you will get one as well. However, I am not a fan of Acrobat Reader as I think it is a slow application for what I use PDFs for – reading only. For this I prefer Foxit Reader as it is super light-weight and fast.
You can read more about it here.
To download:
This is free software available for you to use. It is not supported by Foxit Software, but supported by me. If you find issues, please let me know.
Want a Silverlight-branded XBOX console? Yeah, me too, that would be cool. Well, there isn’t one of those, but there is a chance for you to show your Silverlight prowess and win some cool stuff.
The RIA development portal at DevX is currently running a contest (which ends next week, yikes, hurry!) for creating games in Silverlight 2. The contest seems relatively simple:
Step 1: Create wicked cool game in Silverlight 2
Step 2: Host it on Silverlight Streaming
How simple is that…oh yeah, except for the ‘creating game’ part. There are a few places to help you get started creating games in Silverlight. Check out the Silverlight Games 101 site which has some great posts and pointers to help in creating casual games.
The prizes are an XBOX 360 (sorry, not Silverlight branded), an 80GB Zune and a game bundle including Halo 3 and Mass Effect.
So head over to the RIA Run site and get all the details to get submitted by 15 MAY!!!
There are some really great application concepts emerging using Silverlight. I cam across two that I feel are really demonstrating great use of the technology, both in the code as well as attention to detail in the user interface. Both of these examples make great use of layouts, controls, etc. within Silverlight 2 to show what is possible with some imagination and the platform.
The first is the “My Travel Management” site which leverages real travel information to represent the scenario of looking at flight arrangements. It definitely is a twist on the Silverlight Airlines, providing a little more detail (and real information) about flights as well as unique visualizations on changing your travel parameters. It uses somewhat of the Office 2007 ribbon style for creating user input options and then displays the results with what I think is a well done visualization of information. Play around and you’ll see what I mean:
The second is a newcomer demonstrating a user interface for a full-featured healthcare application. The “Patient Journey Demonstrator” takes the concept of individual patient care and shows the lifecycle of a patient through the care process, providing views for physicians, secondary care, etc. There is a lot going on in this demonstration and provides different perspectives on controlling layout, custom controls, map integration, media integration, you name it, this one pretty much has it!
Great job to the teams who wrote these applications, keep the great work coming!
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