Big Announcement Today at Noon

Per a few reports online, Microsoft has a big announcement happening at noon today in regards to Silverlight. Correction-a just-now received Tweet from Anthony Handley says it is in about 14 minutes at http://www.seethelight.com

By the way-follow me on Twitter: @weberjon

I have been fortunate to have seen version 3 in beta of Blend and am actually excited about this version-which, for me, is a bit unusual for a Microsoft product. Although I am still a bit of the feeling that Windows 7 = Mohave plus possible service packs, I am strongly of the feeling that Expression Studio 3 (esp. when paired with Visual Studio 10, which I saw beta’d about a month ago in the Chicago ‘burbs by two huge proponents of WPF) will be a turning point for many designers; Adobe should be a bit nervous (not earthquake-shakingly nervous yet, but definitely nervous).

Here is an appetizer from a few months ago which should wet your whistle from uber-SL designer Corrina Barber on some of what is in store:  http://blogs.msdn.com/corrinab/archive/2009/03/25/9508683.aspx

Like in the mid-to-late 1980’s, this is going to be a damn cool time in which to be a designer…

Cool Updates

A few really cool things of note:

BFlex/BFusion 2008 – This was a GREAT conference. The second year for this conference, held again at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, was a HUGE success from my point-of-view. Matt Boles, THE original trainer for ColdFusion, was the main instructor for courses I attended at the conference, but he was not the only one doing courses. Bob Flynn, and his band of incredible volunteers, was again able to get a bunch of us together for (this time) two-days of FREE training by industry experts. If not for my car breaking down on the way home (just south of Lafayette, IN on I-65), it would have been a perfect weekend of training and networking. If they decide to do this a third time, do not hesitate to sign up-last year had 80 people for one day of training and this year had 200 people each day for two days of training! Lunch was provided for both days, as was a bunch of swag and, of course, VALUABLE TRAINING FOR FREE! HUGE KUDOS TO BOB AND THE GANG AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY FOR THIS EVENT!!! (Was that noticeable enough? If not, reread those words in all caps a few more times).

Adobe gets Kudos from me for CS4 finally getting a formal release-if you have not played with this yet, give it a look. My students will be learning on CS3 still for the specific course I am teaching, but I expect that CS4 will now get merged into the course (as it just “released” this last week). I hope that we will also be able to use Flexbuilder in the course, but the progress of the students will determine whether or not this will be possible to do.

Microsoft has finally released version 2 of SilverLight after it being in beta for what seemed like forever. I hope that they soon add more WPF elements into the “SilverLight Realm,” as I am beginning to enjoy working with WPF. Did I really just type “enjoy working with WPF?????!?!?!?”

I am liking Twhirl as a desktop-based tweeting tool. Twitterberry seems to be decent for the CrackBerry, but it is not as “nice” to use as Twhirl. (If the term “tweet” is one with which you are unfamiliar, google twitter.com. Live it. Love it. Learn it.)

Why are RIM (Research In Motion) and Apple both not allowing Flash and SilverLight onto their devices? Get into the 1990’s, guys (esp. since it is now 2008). Heck, even Sony has it on the PS3 these days…

New Software Releases

Forthcoming, per ad emails I got today:

Abelton Live 7

QuarkXPress 8

Cool Betas-now available:

Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Fireworks

Adobe Acrobat 9

Weird non-releases:

Adobe pulls trial-versions of their software due to bug