Manning Publications’ deal of the day for today, Wednesday, August 11th, is 50% off the electronic and dead-tree versions of their Silverlight books:
Silverlight 4 in Action and Hello! Silverlight are “MEAP” books: that’s “Manning Early Access Program”, which gives you early access to preliminary versions of a book as it’s being written (and yes, the final version as well).
To get the discount, enter the discount code dotd0811 in the “Promotional Code” field when you check out.
Interested in finding out more about Windows Phone 7 development and the opportunities that come with it? Want to see both the Samsung and LG Windows Phone 7 prototypes up close and personal? Want to take a break and have coffee with us?
I’m holding a Coffee and Code with mobile developer Mark Arteaga and mobile expert Anthony Bartolo in downtown Toronto at the Starbucks at King and Yonge this Thursday from noon to 7 p.m. (4 King Street West, right on top of the subway station). We’ll be at or near the big conference table they’ve got in the back. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, “Coffee and Code” is an event where I take advantage of my status as a mobile worker and work out of a work-friendly cafe, where I’m reachable, findable and approachable. If you’ve got any questions about Microsoft, software development, the industry, the tech scene or just about anything else, this is a perfect chance to ask me!
This is a Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code, and I’m bringing a couple of Windows Phone 7 people along with me. If you were at last year’s TechDays conferences, you may have seen them: Mark Arteaga, who’s written many apps for the old-school Windows Mobile and now writing apps for Windows Phone, and Anthony Bartolo, who’s been working in the mobile industry longer than a lot of my peers have been working. Come join us for a coffee (or tea, or lemonade) and some tech talk!
Catch Mark’s blog entry about this upcoming Coffee and Code here.
Anthony has also written a blog entry about Coffee and Code here.
Don’t have Silverlight? You can download it here or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) and Zune formats.
Here’s a Channel 9 video shot at Emerging Languages Camp 2010, the first conference on up-and-coming programming languages held in Portland on July 21 – 22. It’s a casual conversation with:
In this conversation, Rich and Joe talk about their ideas on programming language design and evolution, functional programming, concurrency, how F# fits into Visual Studio and the granddaddy of them all, Lisp.
If you haven’t tried the latest Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, get your hands on it now! This one’s got new goodies like a new SVG engine, the “Chakra” JavaScript engine now integrated into the browser instead of a separate object called via COM, better Acid3 (95/100) and WebKit SunSpider scores.
Channel 9 has posted some videos on this newest version of IE9, and I thought I’d share them here:
This video (2 minutes, 43 seconds in length) shows off some of the new demo apps on the IE Test Drive page that show off the benefits of IE9’s hardware acceleration. Rob Mauceri, Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer, narrates.
Can’t see the video? Download Silverlight or grab the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.
SVG is short for "Scalable Vector Graphics", whose specification is an open standard and supported by all major modern web browsers, including IE9. This video (4 minutes, 36 seconds in length) shows how you can take advantage of SVG and the fact that it’s hardware-accelerated in IE9. Patrick Dengler, Senior Program Manager for Internet Explorer, does the presentation.
Can’t see the video? Download Silverlight or grab the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.
IE Beatz is a drum machine app written JavaScript, SVG and HTML 5 audio to demonstrate the combined power of HTML 5 and IE9. This video (6 minutes, 4 seconds) features IE Beatz’ creator, Josh Rose of the IE9 team, explaining his creation and showing some of the underlying code.
Can’t see the video? Download Silverlight or grab the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
If you’re interested in the knowing what phase the moon will be in on a given day – whether you’re into astronomy, astrology or just trying to figure out if more fights and arrests happen during a full moon – the upcoming Windows Phone 7 app Deluxe Moon by Lifeware Solutions looks like a gorgeous way to find out.
They sure do love their comics in France, where they’re called BD (bandes dessinees, meaning “drawn strips”). I grew up reading translated versions of Asterix and Tintin, and later enjoyed Jean “Moebius” Giraud’s works, which took comics to wild new places (which as you might have guessed, included Metal Hurlant, which came to North America as Heavy Metal).
Hence it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a team in France built the Ave Comics app, shown in action above, which lets you preview, purchase and read digital versions of comics.
I’ve been busy with all sorts of stuff, so I ‘m a little late with an announcement you might have seen elsewhere online: IE9 Platform Preview 4 has been released!
If you want the full story, check out IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch’s blog entry over at IEBlog, where he goes over the latest platform preview of our browser in detail. I’m just going to give you the major points, such as IE9 PP4’s Acid3 test score:
…plus how IE9 PP4 stacks up against its previous incarnations and browsers built by the Esteemed Competition, according to the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test…
…and that there are a new batch of demos showing HTML5 compliance, hardware graphics acceleration, JavaScript speed and the really wacky things you can do with IE9 if you use a little imagination, such as a game that melds “Hamster Dance” with Dance Dance Revolution:
It’s one thing to talk about the goodies in IE9 PP4, but it’s an entirely different thing to experience them. Take the latest version of IE9 for a test drive – go and download it now!
As you take this version for IE9 for a spin, you might want to start thinking about getting your sites, whether they’re already up or in the works, ready for the next big leap: IE9’s transition from “Platform Preview” to “Beta”. That’s coming soon.
Here are some things to think about, as suggested in IEBlog:
