Snowball - The Blog

While the title of this blogpost sounds like the theme song of a British film of a few years back, it's certainly not the most unimportant post of them all...

Microsoft is really gearing up these last days before PDC 08, which will, as you now MUST know, be taking place in Los Angeles next week. Read Snowball.be from October 25th for my personal coverage from the event!

Now, on to the releases...

• Silverlight: Silverlight 2 was released to web on Tuesday of this week. Here's everything you need to get up and running.
• Silverlight 2 SDK: includes SL runtime, Help and Visual Studio 2008 tools
• Blend 2 SP1: will give Blend 2 support for Silverlight 2
• Deepzoom Composer
• Tools for Visual Studio (stand-alone)
  Here are some interesting links you will want to read:
• Scott Guthrie's post
• Tim Heuer's post
• Scott Hanselman's post
  Also worth checking out if you are an Eclipse guy, is Elclipse4SL.org. Eclipse now also supports developing Silverlight applications. Talk about wide adoption!
  
  Regarding installation, I personally recommend uninstalling Beta 1 and Beta 2 tools and runtime. By doing so, I had no issue on 3 PCs with the installation.
• ASP.NET MVC Beta
  While I haven't spend much time with the MVC framework (one can't do it all, can he...), the framework is moving along fine and moved officially to beta status.
  You can find more information here. Just like always, TheGu has posted all you need to build your first app with the MVC framework.
• Microsoft Web Application Installer
  Developed to get you up and running with the most free web platforms in no time, the Microsoft Web Application Installer allows you to set up these applications with just a few clicks. Not only ASP.NET apps, no sir! It includes Drupal, PHPBB and Wordpress in addition to .NET apps like DotNetNuke.
  
  Using the Web Application Installer, you don't have to configure IIS, SQL Server and all the rest.
  Get the beta here.

This should get you through the weekend!