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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