Openning Kahuna for Public :)

Try the new Microsoft Web Mail, actually I watched the channel 9 video with team and Kahuna is amazing stuff guys. It really ROCKS !

http://www1.imagine-msn.com/minisites/mail/default.aspx?locale=en-us

You have to wait since this is a waiting list mechanism; it may take sometime till you get the opportunity to be added as one of the beta users cause a lot of people in the queue. We pick up some users randomly from the hotmail to join this beta experience just when you notice a green button under the Hotmail Logo in you hotmail start page the you have to be happy cause your lucky to experiment our new product between 200 million users online.

Kahuna is Microsoft's answer to Yahoo Mail's redesign, which is also currently in beta test, and also will produce a new, faster version of its Web-based mail service. Like the new Yahoo Mail, Kahuna uses a variety of technologies, including AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), to create its new look and feel.

Kahuna, which works under the marketing slogan of "Faster. Simpler. Safer" has a secondary phrase used by its development team of "Pimp My Mail," said Hotmail program manager Imran Qureshi on his blog. Qureshi has posted a screenshot of Kahuna in action here.

Official screenshots of microsoft Mail beta

Quoted from Imran Qurashi Blog

http://spaces.msn.com/imranq2/blog/cns!516AB90C3B384A7B!244.entry?_c=BlogPart

Top 5 reasons I Love mail beta… reasons 1 and 2

Mail beta is a brand new web mail experience focused on being faster, simpler and safer than existing web mail services (read more). The team focused on the basics of reading and sending mail. Mail beta is a work-in-progress and a large number of beta users are driving what it becomes (we can barely keep up with all their ideas…)

Here’s the first of some of my favorite things about reading mails in mail beta:

1. Fast, faster and faster still
Mail beta is significantly faster, I mean by an order of magnitude:
a) The UI responds instantly to many actions and quickly to others
b) Very few context switches (where the whole page changes and your eyes have to rescan)
c) You need fewer clicks to do the everyday tasks
d) Cleaner look (including more “white space”) so your eyes can relax and find stuff faster

2. Read mail without leaving your inbox using the Reading pane
The Reading pane allows you to read your mail without leaving your inbox. If you like the reading pane in Outlook now you have it in web mail. Other web mail services forces you to open each message and close it before reading the next message. If you have 10 messages to read, they will require 20 clicks, Kahuna: 10. (How’s that for your carpal tunnel?)

Want to see a wide email? Just click and voila!

Posted By: Imran Qureshi

CIDER

I was watching a video conversation with CIDER team, they were previewing CIDER test using Visual Studio 2005. Visual Designer codename "CIDER" give the designers the opportunity to design forms separated from the workshop of the behind codes. So the visual team foundation gives you the ability to develop now synchronize with your designers and all their work will be reflected into your behind code as a developer. No need for the designers to learn Any NET Language anymore to create an amazing form presentation, in my point of view i advise designers to star learning and trying Avalon not only cause it's amazing and pretty cool but also cause it will be the next generation of Windows Presentation Foundation which make look and feel more productive and attractive.

--------------

Interesting that the XAML editor within the Visual Designer (Cider) is keep your editing formatting as it's so seems even if you change the value of some attributes it still keeping your formatting which means that it obviously deals with xml structure based and it just search for the smart tags and elements and then change its attribute value without effecting the formatting of the file i mean it doesn't reorder the lines as Visual Studio (Web Windows) editor does. I heard them call it GUNKS but not sure about the word but certainly it's a genius editing methodology.

--------

The XAML includes new Panels included as components for your Windows Forms, when you will develop the WPF (Avalon) you will notice that you are allowed to add complex panels i meant Grid Panel inside Right-Dock Panel and so on, some panels are:

Grid Panel

The controls are located in (x,y) grid.

Dock Panel

The control is docking into (Top,left,righ,bottom,center) docking.

-Within Cider when you are trying to drop a control into a docking panel you will notice highlight signs show you available positions.

Flow Layout Panel

within the flow layout panel controls are ordered into sequential order, one after another from left to right. When you resize the form you will notice that controls within the FLP will reorder it self to be convenient with the resize event.

Stack Panel

It's looks like as the FLP above but what's different is the ability to change the controls flowing method between rtl,ltr,utd or dtu.

---------

I like the new Color System within WPF which allows you to fill the component with two colors fade into each other from the angel you determine.

---------

Cider is giving the designer the ability to modify the presentation without affecting the code behind. You can create templates forms or skins also cause you can add more than XAML file within your project and switch between them even in the runtime which is really cool. You will figure that you can play with the UI of controls easier now using Visual Designer which produces in the end an XAML file.

Cider Team didn't give a specific date for the release of CIDER BETA 1 or any CIDER CTP yet but they confirmed that CIDER will be shipped as a part of next Visual Studio in 2007 codename "Orcas". WinFx release will be shipped as a part of Windows Vista which expected to be released in the next November if am not wrong.

VISTA LAUNCH CONTEST!!

Go now and get your chance to win a trip for the party of lunching MS Windows Vista ..

My Guess close to 23 November 2006 (next Thanksgiving holiday) based on what I read about what was going at the CES this ya. What about ya? J

https://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/betaexperience/launchcontest/

After you take the decision am sure you will like the joke about some people who are trying to make some doubt in order to change your decision but as long as the contest is running you can change your date as much as you want.

Gloassary

Some Text Quoted form http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Cider.CiderGlossary

AJAX

AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a term describing a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of: * HTML (or XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets for presenting information* Document Object Model, JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented* XML, XSLT and the XMLHttpRequest object to interchange and manipulate data asynchronously with the web server (although AJAX applications can use other technologies ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

Cider

The code name for the Visual Designer in Visual Studio that targets WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)

Love

The code name for attention and understanding. We want everyone to feel the Cider love!

Orcas

The code name for a future release of Visual Studio (as in, the one after VS 2005)

Hawaii

The code name for a future, future release of Visual Studio (as in, the one after the one after VS 2005)

Avalon

Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF

WPF

Windows Presentation Foundation, the next generation of Windows UI

CTP

Community Technology Preview, an early-release drop of a future product. The level of quality is pretty non-deterministic, definitely below beta quality, but we're working on process improvements to raise the quality level without reducing frequency of CTP.

VS

Visual Studio, the professional development tool from Microsoft.

WinFX

The "Windows Framework", a managed code set of Windows-based technologies that builds on top of the .NET Framework 2.0. It includes WPF, WCF, etc. See the WinFX dev center on MSDN.

msft

One of the ways that some people, including NASDAQ, abbreviate Microsoft.

Sparkle

The Expression Interaction Designer, a member of the Expression suite.

XAML

The XML format that describes a set of avalon objects and properties. It stands for the "eXtensible Application Markup Language".

MSN ToolBar Tabs

For who uses the MSN toolbar, if you would you like to know the mechanism of how the bar provides the functionality to open new tabs within the same IE window browser. Just try to switch between the tabs and notice the taskbar downward, you will notice that a new window was activated and the current been hidden. If you concentrate and think more you will realize that the toolbar is passing arguments contains the window Number and the group of windows it interacts with. So this means that the tool bar is doing the same as you are opening a new window otherwise what Mozilla Firefox does which switch between the tabs by creating an instance of a new browser component included within the same Window Browser MDI. Since this Functionality is added to new Internet Explorer 7 which expect to release with the shipment of Windows Vista to be involved into the new OS.

Report Designer at VS2005

Posted by trobbins // Tue, Jan 3, 2006 12:36 AM

Quoted from: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=151149

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 includes a report designer functionality and a new set of ReportViewer controls that can be used to build and display reports within custom applications. Reports may contain tabular, aggregated, and even multidimensional data. The ReportViewer controls are used to process and display these reports within applications. There are two versions of the controls. The ReportViewer Web server control is used to host reports in ASP.NET projects. The ReportViewer Windows Forms control is used to host reports in Windows application processing.

Both controls can be configured to run in either local or remote processing mode. How you configure the processing mode effects everything about the reports from design to deployment.

· Local processing mode refers to report processing that is performed by the ReportViewer control within the client application. All report processing is performed as a local process using data that your application provides. To create the reports used in local processing mode, you use the Report project template in Visual Studio

· Remote processing mode refers to report processing that is performed by a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services report server. In remote processing mode, the ReportViewer control is used as a viewer to display a predefined report that is already published on a Reporting Services report server. All processing from data retrieval to report rendering is performed on the report server.

Refactor!

Refactor! for Visual Basic 2005

Refactor! for Visual Basic 2005 is a free plug-in from Developer Express Inc., in partnership with Microsoft, that enables Visual Basic developers to simplify and re-structure source code inside of Visual Studio 2005, making it easier to read and less costly to maintain. Refactor! supports more than 15 individual refactoring features, including operations like Reorder Parameters, Extract Method, Encapsulate Field and Create Overload.

Download now

Windows Vienna

Quoted from http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=32095

Windows Vienna to follow Vista

Posted by Tom Warren on 18 January 2006 - 23:35

That's right folks. Windows Vienna is the new codename for Windows Blackcomb the successor to Windows Vista.

Not much is known about Blackcomb officially and Microsoft is not ready to talk about it yet. However, Microsoft's blogging guru, Robert Scoble confirmed in a thread reply to a channel 9 video, "since this video was shot the codename for Blackcomb has indeed changed to Vienna. I haven't gotten the story on this yet, though."

While Windows Vista is intended to be a technologies-based release, with some UI changes (in the form of the Aero set of technologies and guidelines), Vienna is targeted directly at revolutionizing the way we interact with our home and office PCs.

For instance, the "Start" philosophy, introduced in Windows 95, may be completely replaced by a "new interface" which was said in 1999 to be scheduled for Blackcomb, before being moved to the Longhorn project, and then back to Blackcomb. The interface involved some ideas based upon truely 3D Windows and an intergration of what is now known as Sidebar.

The Explorer shell is expected to be replaced in its entirety, with features such as the taskbar being replaced by a new concept based on the last 10 years of research from Microsoft's "Vibe" lab. Projects such as GroupBar and LayoutBar are expected to make an appearance, allowing users to more effectively manage and keep track of their applications and documents while in use, and a new way of launching applications is expected - among other ideas, Microsoft is investigating a pie menu-type circular interface, similar in function to Apple's dock feature.

All features are speculation and rumour at this point. However, with Vista arriving so late (5 years after Windows XP) - will Vista sell to the masses just as many enterprise customers have moved to XP and many home users are comfortable with XP. Time will tell.

The New Generics

The VB.net has released a new namespace called generic which includes some of the classes that were supported by System.collection before such as (Array, Stack, Array List, Queue, Dictionary, etc ).

Now Generic types became more powerful and you will notice a large different between the performance of the updated Generic Classes. VB.NET 2005 supported a new methodology allow for the programmer to develop an Array collection doffed for a specific type rather than using the formal Object type as a default declaration.

A- Dim b as new Stack (of Integer)

B- Dim b as new Stack

In (A) we can notice that b has been declared to recognize only numbers that can be assigned to Integer. But in (b) it supports all the conversion from any type to the object type which takes a reference from the defined item and do a method called boxing upon the item. Any assigning in (A) cause an error assigning for the integer will cause the compiler to report an error. Furthermore the Typeof method make the processing for the collection faster regarding that it doesn't need to do the boxing task.