Just some thoughts

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!

LINQ is probably one of the most compelling features of .NET3.5. I love the way you can query your data models and how that is automatically converted to queries to the underlying datasources. If you are not familiar with it, do have a look at MSDN…

Apparently I’m not the only one who loves LINQ. You may already know about Linq2Sql, Linq2Objects and Linq2Entities. However, did you know that there is now also …

• Linq2RiaServices, allowing simple access to data in the middle tier from SilverLight applications
• Linq2ADODataServices, providing similar functionality as the Linq2RiaService, but utilizing the ADO.NET Data Services framework.
• Linq2SharePoint, allowing you to query SharePoint lists and sites from within a SharePoint WebPart, and
• Linq2Azure, which is used to query Azure storage.

 Seems that every locally or remotely stored set of object  gets a Linq interface…

I have been wondering how to keep the tags in a blog to describe its content accurately. As I’m not the most disciplined person, tagging posts correctly and precisely is not what I’m best at. During my work I encountered someone who had made use of Wordle. He used Wordle to quickly analyse the contents of a website. The result was great. Simply counting the words seemed a simply and effective way to accurately describe the contents of a site.

So I ended up creating two plugins: one for creating tag-clouds that have the “Wordle” look and feel, and one for “tagging” posts, simply by enumerating all used words in a post. The first is described on an other post: ImageCloud plugin. The second has become the “text2tag” plugin.

The text2tag plugin can be downloaded from WordPress: Text2Tag.
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This site is made using WordPress, the excellent blogging tool. One of the great things about WordPress is that it is so easy to extend. For example the layout of this blog is an theme extension. Furthermore the pictures are managed using the Yet Another Photoblog plugin.

In order to have this blog do exactly what I want, I’ve created a few plugins of my own:

• text2tag plugin A plugin that collects all used words in posts and pages into a taxonomy (e.g. the post tags). This creates a taxonomy with a pretty accurate overview of what a blog is about.
• ImageCloud plugin This plugin creates Wordle-like tag-clouds using gif images. An example of such a cloud you can find on my tags page. Actually this cloud is created in combination with the Text2Tag plugin.
• XP Uploader A plugin that allows images to be uploaded to a YAPB enabled blog using the XP Web Publish Wizard. This makes it possible to upload images to your blog directly from Windows XP Explorer.
• YAPB Bulk Uploader This plugin adds mass image upload functionality using a Flash Uploader. The benefit of this plugin over the XP uploader is the operatating system independence and the fact that you do not have to configure anything on your desk- or laptop.

Any suggestions to or questions about these plugins are welcome!

Joost