CodeClimber

Silverlight 2.0 RTM available from Oct 14th, on a Linux machine next to you

Simone Chiaretta — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:30:59 GMT

Just listening to TheGu announcing the official release of Silverlight 2.0 RTM together with the full stack of development tools, including an Express version of the tool, and Soyatec, a plugin to build Silverlight application inside Eclipse (available next year).

Furthermore, they will be releasing a Silverlight Control Pack on Codeplex, that include a pack of controls that will follow a fast iteration process.

Everything will be available from tomorrow, October 14th.

More info on Microsoft Press Pass: Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2, Already Reaching One in Four Consumers Worldwide

UPDATE: They will porting Silverlight to Symbian teaming up with Nokia

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Eclipse

Running Windows 2008 Server as development machine

Simone Chiaretta — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:03:48 GMT

Due to a new (*) IT security policy of my company, this weekend I had to wipe out my XP installation and install a BitLocker capable operating system and I had to decide whether to install Vista or jump to Windows 2008 Server turned workstation.

I already installed Windows 2008 server on a VM inside running on my Mac and I really liked the experience of running it as workstation, so I replicated the same environment on my laptop.

This time, instead of manually applying all the changes required to turn Win2008 Server it into a workstation, I used the Windows Server 2008 Workstation Converter, which does all the changes automatically, and also installs the Sidebar and the the Aero cursors.

I’ll do most of my work inside VMs since every project is a bit different, and has different requirements (and I don’t want to install VS2005 or even VS2003 on my machine) but I decided to install on my machine the tools for the current state of the art development (ASP.NET 3.5 with VS2008 SP1).

Here is my list of tools that lives on my dev machine:

Generic Development
.NET Development:
- Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite SP1
- Team Explorer
- TFS Power Tools
- ReSharper 4.1
- Power Commands
- Reflector.NET
- MbUnit Gallio
- NCover
- Visual SVN
- NDepend
- LinqPad
Web Development
- Firefox
- Internet Explorer
  - IE Developer Toolbar
- Fiddler
  - JsonViewer
- WireShark

As last note, MSN Messenger and Windows Live Writer will not install on Windows Server 2008: that’s not because of a problem with the OS, but because the Live installer checks for the OS, and will work only on XP or Vista. After struggling a bit I found the stand-alone installers for both, and now I’m blogging with WLW 14 (the latest beta) on my new Windows Server 2008 turned Workstation.

Technorati Tags: Window 2008,dev tools,WLW

(*) New as in released one year ago, and mandatory since yesterday.

Spam is getting better: now they tell me I'm an MVP!

Simone Chiaretta — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:39:55 GMT

This afternoon I received an email with a strange subject: "Congratulations MVP Microsoft 2009!".

At first I thought the usual spam email that just got better, but then I saw the post of the Italian MVP lead that announced the new MVPs for October 1st, and realized it was not spam, but that someone decided to award me with the MVP title in the category ASP/ASP.NET.

When I started taking part in the community I was looking at MVPs as Guru and unreachable people, and now I'm one of them: I still can't believe it.

I'd like to thank Alessandro Teglia, the Italian/Baltic MVP Lead, all the Subtext team (Phil Haack, Steven Harman, Scott Dorman and Barry Dorrans) and most of all David Silverlight. (I already thanked all the Italian guys in the post on my Italian blog)

See you all in Redmond for the MVP Day next March: I'll finally be able to meet all the guys I always talked to via email or chat or lately with Twitter.

PS: You might wonder what the gladiator on the left is: it's the unofficial logo of the Italian MVPs, aka Italian Gladiators.

MVP

Review of bikemap.net

Simone Chiaretta — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:15:28 GMT

A few weeks ago, thanks to a tweet from Thomas Freudenberg, I discovered bikemap.net, a Web2.0 web application that allows users to post their favorite bike routes and track their trips, mapping them using Google Maps.

The things I like the most is that, unlike many other track mapping sites (included the Nike+ site), it gives you the option to follow the road and not just draw straight lines, so you don’t have to add 100 small segments just to follow the path of a mountain pass street with many switchbacks.

The other awesome feature is the altitude profile: it’s automatically created using the altitude metadata of Google Map, and it’s incredibly precise, even with non US areas. The graph blow is my Sunday morning trip that starts directly from my door.

As you might notice, there is a vertical row in the graph: you can move it with the mouse, and, on the map, you will see an icon following the path as in the image below:

But you’d better try it by yourself on the trip’s page directly on bikemap.net: Milano – Besana Brianza.

At the moment there are around 45.000 tracks mapped on the site, most of which, around 42k, in Europe, but also around two thousands in the US and around 250 in Australia and even 32 mapped in New Zealand.

If you are a biker, you’d better check it out. It’s an awesome site, neatly implemented with a great user experience, and a great example of integration with GoogleMap. And if you are interested in looking at my tracks, I’m codeclimber on BikeMap.net

Technorati Tags: bikemap.net,bike,map,googlemap

Big in Bosnia

Simone Chiaretta — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:54:00 GMT

Well, not as the Guano Apes in Big in Japan, but, tonight our (Keyvan’s and mine) book, Beginning ASP.NET MVC, went for the first official public display at a INETA user group meeting in Banjaluka, Bosnia, during a presentation about ASP.NET MVC held by Dragan Panjkov.

Thanks to Dragan for the plug and for the photo.

UPDATE: More info about the talk, together with slides, demos and more pictures of the event can be found on Talk: Introduction to ASP.NET MVC.

Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,Banjaluka,book

ASP.NET MVC Beta1 in a few weeks and v1 by end of year

Simone Chiaretta — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:34:52 GMT

A tweet in the morning, straight from Remix08 UK, where ScottGu is doing a presentation on ASP.NET MVC:

ScottGu says feature complete MVC beta "in a few weeks". final v1 by end of year

Then the month that ends in ember is December, not March-ember as someone said.

[via irascian and Andrew Rimmer]

Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,remix

C# vs Ruby

Simone Chiaretta — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:23:06 GMT

This is not another humor post, but just a comparison between the searches on the terms C# and Ruby using Google Trends.

Apart from the number of searches on the term C# which are double the ones on the term Ruby, it’s funny to notice the trend in the various days of the weeks: Ruby stays constant throughout all the week, while C# drops to half the volume during weekends. There might be a few explanations for this:

Ruby is used by people that don’t have a personal life and spend the weekend developing stuff
C# is used by people that develop only on their 9-5, Mon-Fri job

Any other guess?

Thanks to Andrea for sharing this on his blog.

Technorati Tags: C#,Ruby,trend

SimoneChiaretta.Age++

Simone Chiaretta — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:05:00 GMT

As every year on September 11th I’m getting one year older… and today I’m becoming 34.

My 33rd year has been an exciting one from the professional stand point, and pretty good from the open-air ones as well.

I started an exciting job in Avanade and I met great colleagues, I co-founded the UGIALT.NET community, I got excited by the ASP.NET MVC framework and started evangelizing it, I became a Mac addicted, I wrote a bunch of articles on ASP.NET MVC for DotNetSlackers, I started writing a book, again on ASP.NET MVC (it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon UK and soon will be Amazon US), and I organized the first Italian ALT.NET conference.

On the open-air side unfortunately I didn’t climb as much as I wanted, due to poor weather conditions and some health issues, but I started biking again, after almost 10 years or more of not doing it.

And then yesterday we all survived the LHC experiment and the Earth didn’t get sucked in by a black hole.

What better gift for this exciting year if not a brand new all-carbon road bike?

I just found out that Keyvan birthday is September 11th as well, so Happy Birthday to him!!!

Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,bike,birthday,LHC

A smart community kiwi joins Microsoft: Andrew Peters

Simone Chiaretta — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:36:25 GMT

Andrew Peters, one of the smart guys I met during my 9 month of life in New Zealand, is joining Microsoft, as member of the team that will work on the Entity Framework.

I’m pretty sure that his experience building LightSpeed, a kind of lightweight ORM and domain modeling framework built by Mindscape, will help with development of the Entity Framework.

Andrew is also the man behind NHaml, a custom view engine for ASP.NET MVC, a port of the popular Rail Haml view engine.

My best wishes to him and to his wife Kara for the relocation to Vancouver: in case I’d decide to move away from Italy again, that would be my next spot, and considered that there is a MS development center, that makes this city even more attractive.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,AndrewPeter,Mindscape

Which is faster? Flash or Silverlight?

Simone Chiaretta — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:14:33 GMT

The answer is: it depends. Flash/Flex is faster when it comes to graphic rendering, but Silverlight is faster when it comes to pure computation speed.

There are two speed benchmarks for RIA application, and they both focus on UI rendering:

BubbleMark: it displays many bubble floating around the screen as fastest as possible, and use the resulting frame per second as result of the test
GUIMark: similar to the BubbleMark, but with more effects and animations used: vectorial images, alpha transparencies, text reflow and so on.

Then another benchmark has been developed, CountingPrimes, which focuses only on pure computational speed (and measures the time taken to compute 10000000 prime numbers).

And here are the results of the test run by the authors of the benchmarks (green the fastest, red the slowest):

UPDATE: Removed the table with the results as it will be an infringement of Silverlight license (not allowed to publish benchmarks of beta software)

From a quick look at the figures it seems that:

Flex is way faster than Silverlight when rendering complex UI.
Flex and Silverlight have pretty much the same speed with just animation.
Silverlight is almost 4 time faster than Flex in pure computation speed.

I was not able to run all the tests myself, and the version on Silverlight 2 is implemented with Beta 1 and doesn’t run with the beta2 plugin.

Anyone has the time/will to try and optimize the code used in the GuiMark?

Technorati Tags: silverlight,RIA,benchmark,Flex