Just some thoughts

Developers have been a major audience for Microsoft’s SharePoint team. Developing for SharePoint 2010 got a lot easier. An incomplete list of features added to aid developers: Read more

Currently I’m at the Microsoft TechEd 2009 in Berlin. There is a lot of talk and demo’s on the new SilverLight release. There are a fiew features that make it much more interesting than the previous versions. My top 3:

1. Writable Bitmaps: These allow you to create bitmaps from inside the SilverLight applications. This functionality forms the basis for many new SilverLight effects. A cool feature of the writeable bitmap classes is that you render a portion of your XAML into the bitmap and act upon that rendering. Here at TechEd I’ve seen some cool demos like magnifying glasses, or video frame capturing that use this.
2. Communication framework: SilverLight applications can now communicate with each other. This allows you to modularize your pages. For example, I can think of a set of SilverLight based SharePoint WebParts that communicate about the range of data that they are showing.
3. Offline capabilities. SilverLight becomes true RIA… You can now take SilverLight applications offline. This allows you to start a SilverLight application from your start-menu or desktop. You do not even have to be online to work with the SilverLight apps.

This is just a top 3. There are much more features and improvements like improved development support in Visual Studio 10 and Microsoft Blend, improved integration into SharePoint, improved data binding, RIA services for data access, etc… SilverLight is developing fast!

During my work I got confronted with Wordle. A colleague used Wordle to show what a specific website was about. I got interested in how these beautiful word clouds were made and if I could add them to my own website.

Regrettably, the Wordle algorithms cannot be shared by the author because of intellectual property reasons (IBM owns his work). Given the popularity of Wordle, I found it strange that no WordPress plugin existed that would generate similar word clouds. Searching the web for similar algorithms didn’t provide me with much answers either. But hey, how hard can it be? I decided to have a go at it myself.

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