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Archive for April, 2007
Gartner predicts big growth for virtual worlds.
Experts predict that 80 percent of active web users and Fortune 500 enterprises will have a virtual “second life” by the end of 2011, but not necessarily in Second Life.
Enterprises cannot afford to ignore virtual worlds, according to Gartner, but most should limit financial investments until the environments stabilise and mature.
“The collaborative and community-related aspects of these environments will dominate in the future, and significant transaction-based commercial opportunities will be limited to niche areas which have yet to be clearly identified,” said Steve Prentice, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
“However, the majority of active internet users and major enterprises will find value in participating in this area in the coming years.”
Prentice added that the meaningful corporate use of public virtual worlds is likely to lag “considerably” behind individual consumer use as enterprises struggle to develop appropriate and relevant business models.
Gartner asserts that virtual worlds are not games, but neither are they yet “parallel universes”.
“Growth in virtual worlds is significant but lower than it appears. The overall population of non-game virtual worlds is still small compared to massively multi-user online games and the totality of community-oriented and niche-targeted environments,” Prentice said.
BizTalk Labs offers an early glimpse of the technologies we are working on to build composite applications:
- BizTalk Identity Services - technologies to help developers manage application identity and access control requirements
- BizTalk Connectivity Services - technologies to help developers securely expose a service from behind a firewall or NAT
- BizTalk ServiceBus Services - technologies to help create loosely coupled applications with eventing… - Coming soon!
- BizTalk Workflow Services - Coming soon!
BizTalk Identity Services
Enabling developers to outsource their application identity and access control requirements
You can use it to:
- Provide identity management based on the latest technologies including Windows® CardSpace
- Securely authenticate with websites and services that support identities from this site
- Create claims-based access control - Coming soon!
BizTalk Connectivity Services
Enabling developers to outsource their application connectivity requirements
You can use it to:
- Help securely expose a service to the Internet from behind a firewall or NAT
- Provide a globally addressable name for your service
BizTalk ServiceBus Service
Early ideas to help developers build the next generation of composite applications
http://servicebus.biztalk.net(coming soon)
BizTalk Workflow Services Â
coming soon
Get the SDK
29
Apr
PerformancePoint CTP3 - Possible release date and some future features in Monitoring and Analytics.
The date may be around July 20th.
For more info please check out this post at blogs.conchango.com
Without an announcement on its official blog, Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, seems to have introduced a new capability for its in-world building tools that will allow them to better support established formats, something that SL builders have long found sorely lacking. The new feature should change the landscape for the SL building community by inviting in modelers whose skills have not been applicable before.
The new addition is known as a “sculpted prim†(short for primitive, the word used to denote the basic building block of SL objects), and should make it possible for 3D artists who are used to working in more standard formats to work more easily in Second Life. The scultped prim takes its shape from information encoded into the color channels of a texture. For reasons beyond my technical expertise, this makes it possible to create a more complex, more natural shape than is possible with the current set of SL build tools.
Weblin makes you and your friends visible in the Internet as little avatar characters. You are not alone when you surf the web. Weblin brings you a new exiting and lively world on every website. Get to know People, who share the same interests with you.
Do you want to see the new World? Then register here and get yourself weblin for Windows Live Messenger!
What is weblin?
Weblin is our alter ego, our virtual presence on the internet. Weblin is what makes people visible on the internet. With weblin people who are on the same webpage can see and communicate with each other.
The idea
In the real world we see people whereever we go: at the bus stop, at school, in the office, in the shopping mall, at the gym. If we want, can contact them. When we are surfing the Web, there are many others on the same website at the same time. Unfortunately they have been invisible until now. Weblin give us the opportunity to make ourselves and others visible even beyond single web sites.
The background
With Web 2.0 applications like blogs, social software and many others, the Internet has become more alive for its users. Weblin helps people to improve their virtual lives. Weblin enables people to secure their presence on the web. On any site, at any time.
Getting to know you…
It doesn’t matter what you are doing on the internet, with weblin you’ll meet others who are browsing the same page at the same time. People who have the same interests as you and who can give you new impulses, whether they are from your neighbourhood or from the other side of the globe. With weblin you can meet new friends easily by chance. You can find kindred spirits. You can chat and surf the web together, arrange meetings - whatever is fun. Not just on one website, but across the Internet! The Internet is gigantic. Weblin brings it to life. No more lonesome wandering across the world, now you will meet people wherever you go.
Created by the MSDN development team, PackageThis! allows you to choose documentation sets from the MSDN Library to save as HXS or CHM format files. Simply select nodes in the MSDN Library Tree View to package as your own local mini-library, or to build into your own library. Multiple languages are supported.
What It Does
Package This is a GUI tool written in C# for creating help files (.chm and .hxs) from the content obtained from the MSDN Library via the MSDN Content Service. You select the content you want from the table of contents, build a help file, and use the content offline. You are making personalized ebooks of MSDN content. Both help file formats also give full text search and keyword search.
The code illustrates how to use the MSDN Content Service to retrieve documentation from MSDN. It also shows how to build .hxs files and .chm files programmatically.
Prerequisites
Package This requires .NET 2.0, the .hxs SDK (MSHelp 2.0), part of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK, and the .chm SDK (HTML Help). If you just want to create .chm files, you don’t need to download the .hxs components (and vice versa).
Limitations
There is a bug in HTML Help that will cause the index tab to show incorrect character encodings depending on your default locale. For example, you’ll see this problem if you build a Japanese .chm file on a machine with the default locale set to English. If you change the default locale to Japanese (which requires a reboot) and rebuild the .chm file, it won’t show this problem (even on an English machine).
To view .hxs files, you’ll need an .hxs viewer.
Content Service Logging
Package This sends a string (”PackageThisGui”) to the server to identify its requests in the web server logs. The idea is to determine whether anyone is actually using the tool.
Family.Show: a new WPF reference sampleThe first end-to-end reference sample. Family.Show is a genealogy explorer that allows you to create or import a family tree and explore, annotate or save it to XPS.
Source: Tim Sneath
Content Query Web Part with marquee
Content Query limitations, and Object module access rights requirements
Adding a Sites Listing (& Setting Owner) from WSS Object Model
Announcing a new series of articles - SharePoint Designer DataViews
Accessed Denied Error Crawling BDC
Additional information about WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Language Packs
How to configure Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) successfully
What’s the benefit of going 64 bit?
What’s new in the April update of the WSS 3.0 Online SDK
Alternative to the SharePoint Page Viewer Web Part to solve the height problem
Enterprise Security: Enabling Kerberos and Kerberos Delegation
Randomly Displaying a Single SharePoint Item on Refresh (i.e. Item Rotator)
29
Apr
Some designs I like
- http://www.tutorom.com/
- http://www.joost.com/
- http://www.soonr.com/
- http://www.box.net
- http://www.bloglines.com/
- http://product.thinkfree.com/
- http://www.pageflakes.com/
- http://cssbeauty.com/
- http://www.carbonneutralnewcastle.com/home/
- http://www.weblinc.com/
- http://www.triplecrowncs.com/
- http://reachgroupconsulting.com/
- http://www.3000k.com/
- http://www.thecity.org/
- http://veerle.duoh.com/
