Long Zheng, author of the popular blog iStartedSomething.com, along with David Golden and Winston Pang has released the Twitter client application called MetroTwit. As the Name suggests it has taken a few cues from the Microsoft’s Metro design style. The interface is beautifully simple, and very clean. It is build on Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation and .NET 4.0. Silent features of MetroTwit are:

• Infinite scrolling – If you ever want to read more tweets, just scroll down and more will appear almost instantly. Be careful though, it’s addictive and you could be scrolling for hours.
• Windows 7 taskbar integration – You don’t have to switch away from what you’re doing to keep tabs on new tweets. A counter in the taskbar will tell you exactly how many unread messages there are.
• Autocomplete for usernames & hashtags – The people and topics you care about, at your fingertips. Simply start typing any part of a username or hashtag and we’ll find them for you.
• Quick-glance notifications – Read excerpts from new tweet updates as they cycle through in the notifications. If you run out of time, hover over the notifications to stop the countdown to read even more.
• Resizable and reorderable columns – Not all columns must be created equal. You have the choice and flexibility to control exactly how your columns should look.
• Flawless high DPI support – The vector-based user interface powered by Windows Presentation Foundation works and looks even better in high DPI.

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Expression Blend 4 enables you to create websites and applications based on Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, and desktop applications based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 3.5 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and WPF 4. Expression Blend provides support for prototyping, interactivity through behaviors, special Silverlight functionality, and on-the-fly sample data generation.

Expression Blend includes new behaviors that are quickly and easily configured. To support the development of line-of-business (LOB) applications, Expression Blend introduces support for Views and ViewModels.

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The first Release Candidate Builds of Microsoft’s next generation development platform and tools are currently available for download for MSDN subscribers. It will be available for public on February 10 (Download Link). Visual Studio Quality Assurance team member, Kirill Osenkov, explained some of the problems with the product:

“During Beta 1 and Beta 2 it became painfully obvious that the new VS had an obesity problem: it was slow, consumed a lot of memory and the worst thing, with enough modules loaded it stopped fitting into the 2GB address space on 32-bit machines…. In a nutshell, with a lot of new functionality a lot more modules were loaded into memory. Besides, we now had to fully load the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) at application startup. Moreover, there were all kinds of memory leaks all over the place.”

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Tell us who you are?
My name is Andrea Boschin and I’m a 41 years old MVP on Silverlight. I live and work in Treviso, a beautiful town near Venice in Italy. My primary job is as employee for a local company where I develop web based applications for monitoring vehicles through a GPS based solution. I’m also a freelance consultant for companies which want to adopt the .NET Framework technologies. I like writing about Silverlight on my English blog  SilverlightPlayground where I post about my experiences with it trying to give a real world vision. I’m involved in speaking in many events and I’m also president of one of the most active user-groups in Italy (last year we was awarded by Microsoft as Community of the Year 2009). This leaves me a few free time I spend with my wife Daniela and my daughter Gaia.

Tell us about your MVP history, when were you first awarded?
I was first awarded as MVP in July 2007 and it taken me about the whole summer to become aware of what was happening to me. My first year as MVP was on ASP.NET platform. I used this technology since many years before being awarded and I currently do my work mostly with it and with Silverlight. During the second year of MVP that I’ve started for ASP.NET, my expertise has been converted to Silverlight due to my strong involvement on this astounding platform. This makes me the very first Silverlight MVP in my country and one of the first of the world and it is reason of big proud for me.


What do you do in order to keep up with latest tools and technologies?
I spend lot of my night time studying technologies. Usually I focus myself on a particular aspect of an interesting thing and I start exploring it trying to understand how it works, if it can help me and finally I try to implement a bunch of examples. This is the usual flow I start every time I get some news from the various blogs I read every day or when a new interesting beta is deployed. Unfortunately sometimes this does not ends with a real world experience just because I do not have a project to apply what I’ve learned, but many other times I’m able to connect my passion with my work and this makes me a lucky man. This happened with Silverlight, I’ve studied since the first 1.0 beta releases and then I applied to a part of the software developed for the company where I work, with great success.

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Tell us who you are?
My name is Ibrahim Ersoy. I’m MSP of Anadolu University attending “Bachelor of Public Management”. Besides MSP I’m a Software Developer, 3D Enthuastic and licensed chess-player from “Republic of Turkey”. I’m Interested in new and upcoming technologies such as Servers, Business Systems, Game Development Technologies. I’m studying on integration these technologies together these days.

Tell us about your University?
Anadolu University is a state University founded in 1958 and it is one of the most prestigious universities in Turkey. Anadolu University is located in Eskisehir. Currently it has over 1.400.000 students attending.

Tell us about your MSP history, when were you awarded?
I’m awarded this year i.e. 2009-2010. I thought about it several times to apply before but in 2009 I’ve applied and awarded as MSP.

What do you do in order to keep up with latest tools and technologies while focusing on your education?
Actually, I’m very comfortable with my education because my exams start on April 1st. So, I have planned a schedule. There are times when I’m totally working with tools and technologies and there are times when my focus is on education and exams. If you plan your life then there’s nothing you need to worry about.

What does being an MSP mean to you? and What makes you a great MSP?
In my opinion, MSP is a student with high technical background. A great MSP must have one or more of these:

• High technical ability
• Valor
• Sociable
• Creative
• Passion for technologies

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Today Seesmic launced Seesmic Look, a Windows based twitter client. Using the power of Windows Presentation Foundation, the user experience of Seesmic Look is awesome. Seesmic Look works on Windows XP, Vista and 7 with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. It also works on Windows based touch screen tablet computers. It can also be controlled by a remote on a computer-connected TV screen. According to Seesmic “Seesmic Look is a unique way to immerse yourself in the real-time web. Optimized for Windows 7, this innovative interface allows you to feel the pulse of millions of users or be inspired by individuals of your specific interest. Beginners learning to understand real-time can stay engaged and connected without even logging into Twitter, while experienced users can take advantage of Look’s powerful features in creative and imaginative ways.”

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DubaiDev.Net and Techies.ae recently hosted a Deep Dive Silverlight 3 Event at Infusion Dubai office by Stephen Kennedey. Stephen is a Infusion Trainer who is well versed in Silverlight and WPF.

According to Rami M. Nassar (User Group Leader – DubaiDev.Net) “We witnessed Stephen talk about design patterns, coming from MVC, passing MVP and for WPF/Silverlight the usage of MVVM. Stephen explained why we should be using this and also the trouble we’d run into when not. He took us through a basic implementation of a XAML page (view) that has two texts on it and a supporting class (model) that has two properties as we should not let the viewmodel have any knowledge of the view he explained why we would have to use some INotifyPropertyChanged interface implementation to tell the observer (view) the data has changed in the viewmodel (and the model respectively). For this he advised us to use a base class to do that work and leverage that code in all of the derived classes. For Collections he instructed to use the generic ObservableCollection types and have a ViewModel for the content of that collection to which a new view should be bound when using the data in a view. He showed us a trick how to work around not having commands in Silverlight leveraging attached property on controls. Finally we went through several best practices and optimizations, rounding it all up with a Q/A session. Stephen provided the deck for Techies.ae to attach to the notes.”

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With the launch of Silverlight 4 at PDC, alot of developers are now working on the new features provided by this platform. Silverlight enables development of the next generation of Microsoft .NET based media experiences and Rich Interactive Applications also known as RIA for the World Wide Web. Here at MicrosoftFeed, we will now try to highlight different cool and interactive Silverlight applications showcasing the power of this platform. Silverlight is delivered as a cross-platform and cross-browser plug-in that exposes a programming framework and features that are a subset of the .NET Framework and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

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Microsoft with it’s ongoing collaboration with Facebook released a very exciting new developer resource: the Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform. This SDK combines the power of Web, client and social technologies to enable millions of developers to transform their imagination into next generation application experiences.

No matter what your application flavor is, the Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform supports the development of applications across Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and Windows Forms, enabling easy consumption of Facebook services delivered through the Facebook Open Stream API. According to the press release by Facebook team

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Every developer has a story. Microsoft want to know yours. How did you use the .NET Framework to create a killer app? What parts of the .NET Framework (ASP.NET, ADO.NET, WPF, WCF, WF, etc.) did you use to develop it? What other Microsoft products (SharePoint, SQL Server, Windows Server, etc.) were used in the solution? What challenge did you solve? How did you integrate your solution with other solutions and systems? Participate in the Tell us your story competition and you can win one of over $16,000 in prizes.

MicrosoftFeed in association with Telerik is launching a “Share your Telerik Story” competition. Telerik is a leading vendor of User Interface (UI) components for Microsoft .NET technologies – ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF, and .NET Reporting and content management solutions. Building on its expertise in interface development and Microsoft technologies, Telerik helps customers build applications with unparalleled richness, responsiveness and interactivity. Created with passion, Telerik products help thousands of developers every day to be more productive and deliver reliable applications under budget and on time. This competition will run till Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 11:59 PM PDT (Pacific Daylight Time). So, what you have to do to win this competition?

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The Microsoft Surface Developer Challenge is a fun entry into building intuitive and forward-thinking applications specifically for Microsoft Surface. Instead of simply retro-fitting existing applications for Microsoft Surface, this challenge starts and ends with touch. It’s about touch first computing on the Microsoft Surface platform.

Microsoft Surface creates opportunities for numerous industries—from hospitality to financial services—to reach new customers with customized, branded, interactive computing experiences that move beyond the traditional user interface. It represents an easier and more natural way of interacting with digital content and empowering customers to have more control over their experience. Read the rest of this entry »