http://www.asp.net/whidbey/ now has a lot of whitepapers and screen-shots of ASP.NET and Visual Studio Whidbey.

Seems like “Whidbey” has a Frontpage 2003 engine inside, which is nice. Now it can target a particular HTML standard such as XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Nice….

ASP.NET "Whidbey" and Visual Studio "Whidbey" are the next release of Microsoft Web platform and tools. With ?Whidbey? you will be able to build powerful, scalable, and feature rich Web applications faster than ever before. Common and never-before possible scenarios become simple allowing developers to build the best Web experience. "Whidbey" is currently in Alpha, with about 2/3rds of the functionality complete expect a feature complete beta coming in late spring.

Microsoft is having PDC (Microsoft Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles USA this week and blogs around the internet has started to get very interesting posts regarding Longhorn and Whidbey.
I found extremely interesting post in Longhorn blogs where Ryan Dawson is writing about new upcoming technology: XAML, which stands for XML Application Markup Language which is basically Microsoft implementation of XUL.
From PDC site you can find also PDC blog list and lots of other intresting stuff to read and watch.

The Danish government has wrapped up a two-year study of open source’s potential for the public sector, and has some pretty interesting things to say. The Board was particularly critical of closed, proprietary standards such as Microsoft’s Word format, arguing they go against the principles of e-government by requiring citizens to use particular software and reinforcing monopolies. Couldn’t agree more…
The Board recommended that the Danish government take an active role in promoting an open, XML-based alternative for file formats, either by switching to OpenOffice’s XML format or launching an EU-wide project to develop a new format.
I hope this wont be just talking but Danes will take action on this and hopefully whole EU.
Whole article at tekno.dk

mmm… standards standards, I just love these cool guys who can design their sites in CSS.
http://www.alistapart.com/

It seems that Mozilla development finally is going to develop usable WYSIWYG editor for CMS systems. This is quite interesting because Microsoft has chosen different way for content editing by using Office as a web-editor and leaving IE as a thin client.
This back to thin client thinking is something where I have to disagree with MS, but I don?t need to care about selling million copies new office. Anyway, in my humble opinion for browser development is making it module based where user can easily download extensions in it like web-editor. I think everything should be in internet no offices or other apps in computers just browser
Ah, anyway about those Mozilla editors… well, read yourself at
The O’Reilly Network Mozilla DevCenter and Mozile site

XForms has officially became a web standard today in W3c. XForms is successor of the HTML Forms.

“XForms is an XML application that represents the next generation of forms for the Web. By splitting traditional XHTML forms into three parts – XForms model, instance data, and user interface – it separates presentation from content, allows reuse, gives strong typing – reducing the number of round-trips to the server, as well as offering device independence and a reduced need for scripting.”

Read more from press release and XForms home page.

XSLT is my favourite language when developing web application, thought XSLT does not contain all the power found in languages such as C# or VB.NET. In situations where you need to perform functions that XSLT cannot handle in its own, you can resort to XSLT extension objects.

I have been working last months on group calendaring application and there I have face huge problems with dates. How to format dates on XSLT? Version 1.0 of XSLT doesn?t support sorting dates using the xsl:sort tag. This can present a problem since dates frequently play an important role in my calendar application. Now I just need to figured out how this one work. ?

I just found nice little application called XsltMajic Profiler Tool that helps you Performance Tune an XSLT Style Sheet in Visual Studio .NET Using System.Xml. Microsoft has also nice informatic video at Microsoft Knowledge Base. This tool is really worth of checking out if you are working with XML/XSL on .NET.

In the United States staff and students at Virginia Tech have built one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers for just $5m by plugging together hundreds of the latest computers from Apple.
The project involved placing 1,100 brand new Apple G5 towers side by side, making it the world’s most powerful “homebuilt” system.
It is capable of 17.6 trillion floating point operations per second, with a combined storage capacity of 176 terabytes.
“Each individual G5 is a dual processor, 2GHZ machine with 4GB of memory. So it’s extremely fast,” said Pat Arvin, Project Coordinator at Virginia Tech.
The network is linked using 2,900 cables and runs at about 100 times faster than an average corporate network.

Source bbcnews.com

I was yesterday trying out at the mall Nokia’s new N-Gage and it seems nice.
Maybe I am going to buy it; I’m bored to play on computer and especially on consoles.
Read more at official site and in news.