You gotta check this out. Last Friday the new version of the Microsoft Download Center [Beta] was released and the whole thing is on Silverlight. I think this becomes the crown jewel in the fast expanding Silverlight samples / demos gallery.

While doing presentations on Silverlight lot of guys asked me about 'can it only be used for developing fancy Rich Interactive Websites'. Even thought the answer is NO there were no very good examples to show them. (Well! there were few demo stuff like the Silverlight AirLines etc, but not complete applications). I think this is going to be a perfect example to showcase the full power of Silverlight in a different aspect than Rich Media Contents. Woo! Hoo!

Microsoft Download Center [Beta]
http://preview.microsoft.com/downloads/HomePage.aspx

On 30th November Microsoft renamed Silverlight 1.1 to Silverlight 2.0

On a separate note this gives a hint on 'coming very soon', because normally a product name is changed when it is very close to getting launched.

Read the full article @
http://bink.nu/news/silverlight-1-1-is-now-silverlight-2-0.aspx or
http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/11/29/silverlight-1-1-is-now-silverlight-2-0.aspx

It's good to see that the IT Pro Forum (www.itproforum.lk) is up and running again. There is a quite a lot of work to be done and now there is a commited team behind it. We have fixed the monthly user group meeting date as the last Friday of the month, from 6.00 PM onwards. Current Venue is Microsoft Sri Lanka Training Room, but it seems like pretty soon we are going to need a bigger place for this as the attendance is growing super fast.

Special thanks to Paddy for the efforts made on this.

Yup! Apple has revamped their website ... not to oranges or bananas ... but to a cool new UI. I like it very much. I think the old UI has been there for almost a century ... I mean ever since I remember it's been there.

 

Oh Boy! ... I only Installed MSN Messenger 7.5 two days back. Found the following info about MSN Messenger 8.0 on a website I refer everyday.

While MSN Messenger 7.5 just came out, 8.0 is already being worked on and heading towards beta by the end of the year. A third party source whom is said to be from Microsoft has provided us with this information. Here's a list of possible and rumored features Microsoft is contemplating on going into the IM client:

• Change of Messenger Skins
• Real-time Emotions
• Messenger Built Internal Windows Media Player 10
• Pause/Resumed File Transfers (File Blocked Extension Applied)
• Detailed File Transfer (Download/Upload Speed)
• Animated Display Pictures (.gif .jpg .png--File Support under Consideration)
• Mood Status
• Faster Contact List Loading and scrolling
• Public Profile and MSN Spaces Combined
• More MSN Space features
• New Hotmail and MSN Messenger Integration
• Downloadable MSN Messenger on Mobile
• News Updates according to Location
• Top 10 MSN Music Radio
• New Stylish Notifier Pop-up
• Downloadable Skins for MSN (Contact Window & Conversation Window)
• Complete Integration with Windows XP® & Windows Vista® Codename: Longhorn®
• Offline Voice/Message Machine
• Animated Buddy Icon Helper
• Display Picture Ratings

ImagineCup 2006 was announced at the end of the 2005 world festival. Imagine a world where technology enables us to live healthier lives. is the theme selected for imagineCup 2006. So folks If you are planning to compete on imagineCup 2006 @ Delhi, India start thinking now.

May be this is an old news. Anyway I thought about mentioning something about it.

In the software design category first place was won by Russia, second place by Greece and the third place by China.

CONGRATULATIONS !!!

AND for the folks who didn't win ... may be you can try next time ... or go ahead and implement your solution in real world. That will be a real big inspiration to the next years participants. Also that will prove how cool your application is.

Our team (Chandima, Anupama, Sithira, Gayan) did the first two lighting presentation rounds yesterday. and Today is the big day we were waiting for a long time. We have the first mail presentation in exactly two hours time. Even last night we practiced several times. So... fingers crossed.

Btw: our team is not only talented in programming. Have to extract the related video into my machine .

12 days left to start the Japan trip.

i'm sure our team is running on Jet Fuel with Nitro , Keep up guys ...

Didnt get a change to blog during last couple of days. Got stuck with a very urgent project.

anyway finally managed to code few more features to my blog site. finalize the coding for several more things for my blog site.

• Photo Gallery - same like my blog site I have 100% coded the photo gallery componments. This is having two view modes called 'Quick View' and the 'Detailed View'. Quick View mode shows the thumbnails and you can click to see the full view. (actually it will take you to the Detailed View). In the Detail View it shows a large photo, with four thumbnail images at the bottom. So you can get an idea about the next and previous images. In both these views there are Next and Previous buttons to navigate thgouth the gallery.
• Downloads Section - here my target is to give some quick links to useful downloads. clicking on the links will open the relevent site, or might directly download the relevent file depending on the situation.
• Comments - Comments entering section is updated with an WYSIWYG editor. So now commenters can enter in HTML.

Next Update: Next i'm going to update the blog calender. And i got a complain from few friends saying that the site is bit slow. I have already noticed few points where i can enhance the speed. so i'm going to work on that too.

And thanks to Jinath and Indi for pointing the error(s) in the RSS feed, Lolitha and Prasad for the tips given about calender.

Speed that the IT sector is growing is unbelievable. Few years back I had a 486 Computer with 512 MB Hard Disk and 8 MB of RAM. Now i'm having a 3.06 GHz with 2 Gig RAM, and a 120 Gig Hard Disk.

And now the there are many talks about a Pentium V 64 bit processor which will be running at 5 GHz - 7 GHz, with a 1066 MHz bus speed. Meanwhile Hitachi have created a technology to reach 1 TB storage capacity.

in another 5 years what will it look like ...

mmm ... few years back 2MB mail box was what every mail services offered, very rarely few more MBs. But GMail broke this barrier by giving 1 Gig mail accounts.

and now they have increased it up to 2 Gig and the nice thing is the size of the mail box grows. There is a counter in the 'Sign In' page which is continuously increasing the capacity.

I wonder what there storages looks like ....