Points of interest #9

Well this week was a nice rest, most of it spent relaxing with my wife. So it was a non-coding week but a range of links did catch my interest:

Silverlight/WPF

• Laurent Duveau lets us know that Expression Studio is now available on MSDN.
• Ashish posts a lot of links related to WPF.
• Brad Abrans posts about search engine optimisation for Silverlight and Ajax.
• Scott posts about a Video Player he is working on created with Silverlight.
• Delay has a proof-of-concept XPS reader for Silverlight. Very cool.
• Karsten talks about 3 new hands on labs for Expression Blend.
• Deitel now have a Silverlight resources section.
• Charlie has a nice post that walks you through your first Silverlight project.
• Mithun Dhar posts another list of Silverlight resources.
• Joe Stegman gives a heads-up about breaking changes between Silverlight 1.0 Beta and RTM.
• John Pelak is doing a series of posts about porting a WPF app to Silverlight. This points to the fourth in the series.
• I came across a new Silverlight related blog : http://blog.silverlightcity.com/

Open Source Related

• Al Nyveldt posts about the relases of BlogEngine.Net
• I came across Watin - A .NET equivalent of Watir (a way of testing your web applications). I had looked at Watir but ended up using the web testing tool created by Thoughtworks. This does look interesting though.
• WatiN Test Recorder (A tool for recording interactions with your web application and saving them in a Watin format).
• Need to create RSS / ATOM feeds? Came across this project on codeplex: Argotic Syndication Framework.
• Andrew lets everyone know that MBUnit 2.4 has reached RTM.

Ajax

• Came across Yahoo User Interface Web Controls for ASP.NET (on codeplex)
• Joe Stagner posts a list of a large number of AJAX Frameworks.

P&P

• Enterprise Library 3.1 is released
• A forum post about how to uninstall GAT/GAX
• Bil talks about the SCSFContrib project on codeplex (looking forward to the WPF support they'll be adding to SCSF).

Other

• .Net Cheat Sheet by help.net
• Coding4Fun posts about the Facebook Developer Toolkit.
• Codswallop has a list of 100 Web App Tools which are useful to Freelancer's (and others)
• Something new has come out of Google Labs: Google Trends (see what people are searching for)
• Boy Genius talks about the HTC Kaiser (I wouldn't mind getting one myself :D)
• Aaron posts about strong name signing for Media Center Application Assemblies.
• Steve Clayton points us to a free 2007 Digital Outlook Report created by Avenue A|Razorfish.
• Mike gives an example (with code) of a HttpRedirection module.

Commercial

Note: If I come across a link which I think may be interesting but also has a commercial benefit (i.e. Products that have promotions to raise awareness etc) then I will add them under a Commercial heading to make it clear.

• StyleSpread - StyleSpread is a CSS tool. Now you have TopStyle, the css editor within VS and in other tools such as Expression Web and Dreamweaver so you may be thinking why would you need another (which is what I thought as well). Now I haven't used this tool so I can't comment on whether or not it is more usable than the others but the video clip looks interesting and may be worth a watch. Now if only they offered the option to integrate it with VS (you could always say open file with and select the tool) or Visual Web Developer Express. Competition is always good so it will be interesting to see how StyleSpread does. For bloggers interested in the promotion they can find out more here.

Have a good bank holiday weekend (For those of you in the UK)!

John