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So, traditional sockets are great in that they allow full duplex comms such as when the server wants to notify the client that something has happened but they’re not so great in that they require an open connection which tends to limit your server side scalability. They’re also not so great when it comes to crossing boundaries that only allow HTTP on port 80 or 443.

For quite some time now, .NET developers have been left out in the cold without official support from Facebook. No more, my friends! Today, Andrey Goder announced the first release of Facebook’s official C# SDK in his blog post.

Microsoft has announced a slew of new and exciting releases that will help you take your code to the next level in 2010. As one of the longest running independent developer conferences in India, GIDS.NET at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 is uniquely positioned to provide a blend of practical, pragmatic and immediately applicable knowledge and a glimpse of the future of technology. 

The Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta is a set of controls, APIs, templates, sample applications and documentation currently available for Surface developers.

With the .NET Framework 4.0, Windows Presentation Framework 4.0 (WPF), and this toolkit, Windows Touch developers can quickly and consistently create advanced multitouch applications for Windows Touch PCs.

When you use a XAML element like <Button> in your Silverlight application you get an instance of the System.Windows.Controls.Button class.  Namespace mapping is what links the XAML namespace “xmlns=http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation” in your XAML file with the real .NET namespaces that contain the .NET types.    This mapping is accomplished via the XmlnsDefinitionAttribute class.  At some point in the Silverlight development cycle a programmer at Microsoft decorated the System.Windows assembly with the XmlnsDefinitionAttribute.  Because of that mapping you have access to over a dozen .NET namepaces in your XAML file.

Take a look at these two posts of Anoop Madhusudanan in which he introduces the Slex project - Silverlight Experimental Hacks:

• Introducing Slex - Silverlight Experimental Hacks – Now you’ve a PropertyTrigger, EventTrigger, InvokeCommandAction etc.

• Slex For Silverlight Preview 2 – Conditionally invoking Triggers & Actions, Decoupled Triggers, etc.

If ever you're needing to debug the interaction between a Web Service and its clients, Microsoft’s Fiddler is the tool to use - this includes WCF Services so long as they're using a HTTP transport. The only thing Fiddler won't do is decode messages that are sent using WCF's proprietary Binary encoding - until today, that is: at lunch time, I took advantage of Fiddler's neat extensibility mechanism and created a rough-and-ready Inspector that will translate binary messages from gobbledegook to plain xml for your debugging pleasure.

There’s not much of a narrative to it but it hits most of the ‘futures’ highlights (with a brief detour into current MVC). Feel free to use any / all of it if you find it useful.

Pete Brown blogged about changes he applied to the Silverlight C64 Emulator that allowed him to use the accelerometer as a joystick.

My primary development machine at home is still (gasp!) running the 32 bit version of Windows 7. I just haven’t gotten around to paving it to upgrade to 64 bit. My other machines, including my presentation laptop, are all running 64 bit.

Prior to PDC, I had made some significant changes to the Silverlight C64 emulator. I added sound, started to add a touch-enabled user interface, fixed up some minor perf issues etc. One of the changes was to enable access to the Windows 7 device API in order to use the accelerometer as a joystick.