Monday, September 29, 2008

Who'd have ever thought it...

ScottGu’s been at it again – this time, however, he’s announcing something quite unusual for Microsoft – shipping an open source toolset as part of Visual Studio in preference to creating a proprietary equivalent. To quote his posting:

I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward.  We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch.  The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license.”

This is a big win – jQuery is a great framework for client-side AJAX, with a huge community behind it – and it’s also an extremely pragmatic approach – why re-invent the wheel again?

Kudos then to Scott and his team – and time to buy “jQuery in Action”, I think!

Get the low-down here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-and-microsoft.aspx

Friday, September 26, 2008

Scott Guthrie - Does the man never sleep?!

Only a week ago, Scott was in the UK for ReMix UK ’08, but somehow he’s managed to slip something significant into his busy schedule:

Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0

Yep – that’s right, RC0 is here! From his posting, there are a load of bug fixes, some breaking changes, 3 new controls and a whole new look-n-feel. Password boxes and Progress bars I can take or leave, but the ComboBox is the important one as far as getting Silverlight into enterprise applications.

There’s a slight gotcha (as well as the well documented breaking changes) in that you have to uninstall Blend 2.5 before you can install RC0 (and boy did THAT take a while) but the upgrade of Blend 2.0 to SP1 (preview) was seamless. Personally I think making Silverlight support available in Blend 2.0 was the right move – not everyone is willing to use Beta software in order to get the tooling.

Good stuff and well done to Scott & his team.

Silverlight goodness: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/25/silverlight-2-release-candidate-now-available.aspx