Visual Studio Express 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 now ready for download

I have been anxiously waiting for it's release since the announcement this month. I'm glad the wait is over, and Visual Studio Express 2008 was made available way ahead of schedule.

Download now:
1. Visual Studio Express 2008
2. .NET Framework 3.5 (Final)

All I need now is for my web-hosting provider Easy CGI to provide the necessary framework support. Yay!

Usefulness of Blogs

Blogs draw parallel to the personal diaries some of us keep. And recently, I realized the benefits of keeping my blog updated with technical workarounds that I have discovered and shared with you.

After reinstalling Microsoft Vista on my notebook just a few days earlier, I found to my dismay, that I had not backed up my hosts file. I had previously modified the file to point to a website I frequented but have had many DNS timeouts. If you use Vista, you can empathize the pain of modifying system files on this OS. Thankfully, I had blogged about this earlier and was able to rectify my problem.

Good reason to blog?

Sweet!

Maung Maung has posted his demo codes for his Windows Workflow Foundation session during LOVE 2007. Cool! His talk was very concise and provided a very good introduction to WF. I can't wait to get started on the demos. And oh, he provided additional learning links, so do check them out.

While on the topic of workflows, I'd like to highlight that this year's Grid Asia event will feature a tutorial on Taverna. There's also a tutorial on OWL that you can attend together with Taverna.

LIVE from Boston!

After 26 hours of travelling, I arrived here in Boston late last night. It has been rather exciting since this is my first visit to the United States of America. It looks pretty much like Vancouver but that is hardly surprising. The conference has officially started and today, I attended two workshop session on Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN) and Clinical Research Information Exchange (CRIX). I was rather disappointed that the topic on Semantic Webs was changed to ELN, let's hope the schedule remains unchanged for the rest of the conference.

Anyway, I missed writing up on my attendance at the Community LOVE launch organised by the folks at SGDOTNET.

I came back late on Friday night after a shoot at Suntec City. So not surprisingly, I woke up late on Saturday morning and rushed down to NTUC building to attend the LOVE launch. I missed the opening keynote, and went straight to attend the session on developing Microsoft Gadgets.

Ever since landing myself with a copy of VISTA, I've been so hooked on using gadgets on my desktop. So much so, I had to install Google Sidebar just to get the same feature on my older XP boxes. The latter is sluggish and resource intensive... but no choice la, no gadget support for XP yet. I did hope that the session would include more samples on how to create more complex gadgets, e.g. those that interface with web services, rather than a simple "Helloworld" or "GoodbyeWorld" application. Perhaps next time?

The next session on CAML was greek to me. I've not been properly introduced to Microsoft's Sharepoint product offerings. But it has caught my eye. I will have to find some time to find out more and see what it offers.

Lunch was simple, but deeply appreciated. I was fortunate to find a seat near the window to savour my bee hoon and the magnificent view.

After lunch, it was workflows, yeah! It was a very informative session by Maung Maung, with much take home information to keep. Through his demos, he demonstrated the ease in creating both sequential workflows and state machines. Can't wait for him to post his sample codes online. At the end of the session, I had two burning questions: (1) Was there any support for WS-BPEL; and (2) Does Microsoft again only provides out-of-the-box support for transaction and persistence services using SQL server. The answer was yes to both questions. Microsoft will be posting a BPEL translator soon. For (2), you'll need to write your own implementation to work with other database software. Disappointing, but hey, I got a free t-shirt for my questions!

The last session I attended was on Office Business Applications (OBA). The speaker demonstrated the ability to extend, customise and integrate Office applications with external software components such as web services. But I liked what he said about the shrinking time-to-market phenomenon. With OBA, you can quickly create usable software that is familiar to users, and faster to build. He also stressed the shortage and need for OBA developers. Hmm...

The finale was exciting. And I have to raise my glass to the team and Microsoft for providing lucky draw gifts for everyone. I was however, disappointed at my luck with LUCKY draws. haha. I only got one gift, a book on ADO.NET. But I think this book may prove invaluable to me. After all, not too long ago, I was searching on topics regarding ADO.NET for implementation in my projects.

The team did a great job. Thanks!