Microsoft's acquisitions guy, corporate VP of corporate development Bruce Jaffe, also responsible for strategic investments and joint ventures - stuff like Microsoft's $6 billion aQuantitive acquisition and its $240 million Facebook investment - will be leaving the company at the end of February. Valleywag thinks he might start his own company in Silicon Valley.

In this session, Laurence Moroney, Microsoft, will introduce Silverlight 2.0 and how it can be used to easily and productively build next generation Rich Interactive Applications using C#, XAML, JavaScript, AJAX and more. He will demonstrate how to go from Zero-to-Hero as well as how to build more complex nTier applications with Silverlight at the front end, as well as using Silverlight with PHP, Java and other back-end technologies.

Redmond Developer News has published an interview with Dr. James Gosling, creator of the Java language, where among other things, he talks about JavaFX and competing technologies. And he made a comment I can't agree with. Here it is: 'If you look at something like Flash, when you get to the much more advanced stuff - richer interfaces, more complex network protocols, more complex APIs - it really falls short.'

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

Telerik has released RadControls Q3 2007. The latest volume includes updates for all product lines for Web and desktop presentation layer development, as well as a new release of Telerik Reporting and a preview of Telerik's RIA controls for Silverlight 1.1/2.0. Q3 introduces new controls and features across all product lines. Along with functional updates, the Q3 release introduces Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 compatibility.

Shipped as a part of Microsoft Visual Studio, SourceSafe sells more than $40 million (US) per year (Source: IDC) and is a very popular version control program for Windows developers. As the teams go distributed and cross-platform, the limitations of SourceSafe rise to the surface. In fact, there has been a lot of negative press about the drawbacks of SourceSafe.

The evolution of Web sites to dynamic rich interactive applications is a true revolution for users. But for ASP.NET developers tasked with building high-performing scalable applications, it presents major challenges. The features that characterize blogs, wikis, personalized pages, and other data-driven Web 2.0 applications fundamentally change processing, transmission, and rendering workloads, and require new approaches and solutions. In Web 2.0 applications:

Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on 'New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005' that was published in the August 2005 issues of this magazine, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soon to be released as Visual Studio 2008. We spent a lot of time talking to our major customers and reviewing the feedback we got on blogs and questions on forums on newsgroups to identify what enhancements/features would be most useful to our device developers. One thing that surfaced was that device developers needed more help when it came to testing their applications efficiently. Whether that meant testing on multiple devices or under varying conditions or simply being able to write unit tests, they clearly needed help getting applications to market faster by reducing the testing time.

JavaFX is a scripting language that provides more powerful client applications in term of features for the user interface experience as well as being incorporated with server platform technology such as RMI, Web Services, and EJB. Its ability to reuse all Java libraries opens an opportunity for JavaFX to create flexibility and ease the integration and reuse of existing Java applications.

Limelight Networks announced that Blockbuster has exclusively selected Limelight Networks' rich media CDN and Microsoft Silverlight to provide the technical streaming capabilities for the first studio-backed feature streamed in its entirety -- JACKASS 2.5 -- to be distributed directly online by Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment, MTV New Media group from MTV Networks and BLOCKBUSTER.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

Since Ed Zander led Sun into the valley of the shadow of death back, what? over five years ago now, it has never recovered. And there's a good chance the same thing may happen to Motorola. With a year left to run on his contract, Zander quit yesterday and clearly not a moment too soon given the events of the last year or so. There are people who would have gladly ridden him out of town on a rail months ago and it's assumed he's resigning now to avoid getting fired. Zander, whose telecom experience consisted of answering the phone, was brought in four years ago to narrow the lead in phones between a first-place Nokia and a second-place Motorola. Motorola is now in third place, losing ground to both Nokia and Samsung, its market share sheered from 20.7% a year ago to 13.1% now.

VS 2008 can also be used to build AJAX-based web apps. It can be used to target multiple versions of software like existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 programs and continue to deploy them on .NET 2.0 machines. .NET Framework 3.5 supports Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It can handle SOA, Web 2.0 and SaaS applications.

Lots of people have been asking about how to get started with Silverlight, and what they need to do to get up and running with Silverlight quickly. Inspired by blog posts such as Jesse Liberty's, I'm going to take this from first principles, with no prior knowledge assumed. So let's get started with the first and most simple application - a 'Hello World' in Silverlight. You need no special tools for this. Just notepad will do...

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.

There's a couple of things that I like about his sample, and a couple of things that worry me. First, I like the idea that there's an Ajax controller. I hope in the final bits it's simply called Controller and they don't make you distinguish between an Ajax controller and a regular controller - you should be able to pick and choose the functionality you want, and, well, quite frankly, I'm just sick and tired of seeing the word Ajax embedded in code. The Ajax controller should give you, as he demonstrates, the ability to render small bits of HTML. What I dislike about the Ajax nomenclature is that this functionality is useful even outside the realm of Ajax rendering and I think it should be included in the default controller.

Cynergy Systems, Inc announced the opening of its second European office in Central London. The company?s other European office is located in Copenhagen. Dave Wolf, Cynergy's vice president, shared, ?The European market is clamoring for the business benefits delivered by rich Internet applications. As the global leader in RIA design and development, expanding our European footprint is a natural progression in our company's continued growth.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Microsoft's immediate answer to rival web-based applications, its free Windows Live online programs, the stuff it calls 'software plus services,' emerged from their beta gauntlet Tuesday. The suite includes e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, blogging, parental controls for surfing and event planning. Users can read and answer e-mail even if they're offline. It aggregates with AOL and Google Gmail.

In what amounts to a monumental reversal of policy, Microsoft said Monday in a press release - so it's in writing - and publicly at TechEd in Barcelona that it's changing its licensing terms and will no longer restrict developers 'to building solutions on top of Visual Studio for Windows and other Microsoft platforms only.' In the same press release it said it's committed to putting out its next-generation Visual Studio 2008 development environment and its .NET Framework 3.5 upgrade by the end of the month ahead of its 'official' launch on February 27 along with the delayed Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

So I went to go re-watch Scott Guthrie's video illustrating the new upcoming MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for ASP.NET when I noticed that the content is in Silverlight. That's fine, MS is trying so hard to push Silverlight as the answer to the world's problems that it's probably a requirement that all new content from MS come out as Silverlight content. Whatever, I can cope.... normally. However... today I couldn't see the content. Why? Because I got a message that looks like this:

Dave Wolf, vice president, Cynergy stated, 'With the opening of our new Taipei office, we are building on the continued demand for Cynergy designed and developed rich Internet applications, as well as expanding our global presence. Business applications users have come to expect the same user experience they get as consumers of Web applications so the market for RIAs throughout APAC is exploding. Our new Taipei offices give our growing customer base throughout this region ready access to native speaking RIA experts who can quickly and skillfully address their business needs.'

To take advantage of the OpenSocial implementation in Orkut sandbox, you have to create a Google Gadget with the OpenSocial feature, post the gadget on the Internet, and then add the URL of the gadget as an application. As I looked into the Google gadget API to build this, I found something interesting, the Google Gadget framework exposes the function _IG_FetchContent() that can be used to asynchronously fetch the text at any URL.

So what kind of real social networking applications would Silverlight enable? Would it be network visualization or media playback or mash-ups? Google with its Orkut online community (a closed-source ASP.Net application) created an API for social applications so that developers can build applications that can then run inside other social networking applications. They then opened up the specification for that API to other social networking applications so that all other social networking sites can (if they want to) make their sites containers for third-party applications. So I started playing with it.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

Over the last few months I've written a series of blog posts that covered some of the new language features that are coming with the Visual Studio and .NET Framework Orcas release. Developers can use LINQ with any data source. They can express efficient query behavior in their programming language of choice, optionally transform/shape data query results into whatever format they want, and then easily manipulate the results.

I feel as if there is a calm on the .NET waters at the moment and it's a rare and somewhat uneasy sensation. Most of the developers I know are playing with Blend and Silverlight and all the cool WPF stuff, even if their specialty is back-end database work. We all know there is another wave coming and it will probably be a big one, so you better get the exploring out of your system now while you can. The summer is also a time when most businesses and development shops rest and recoup, though our network and storage admin friends use this time to do major projects that are unthinkable near year end.

Silverlight Developer's Journal is an online journal with quarterly print editions. Jesse Liberty, senior program manager in the Silverlight Developer Division, was named contributing editor. Jesse is the author of numerous books and articles and brings two decades of professional software development experience to the magazine. iPhone Developer's Journal, an online journal, has named Kevin Hoffman as editor-in-chief. Kevin, a popular 'iPhone' and 'Silverlight' blogger, has been programming since he was 10 and has written everything from DOS shareware to n-tier, enterprise Web applications in VB, C++, Delphi, and C. He is coauthor of Professional .NET Framework (Wrox Press) and co-author with Robert Foster of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed. Kevin authors 'The .NET Addict's Blog' at '.NET Developer's Journal' (dotnetaddict. dotnetdeve lopersjournal.com).

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

Just a week ago I offered to speak about Silverlight at any public event. Now, it's true that I have an ego the size of Nebraska, but I have to face the fact that the response I received had little to do with me, and everything to do with the excitement around Silverlight...

AJAXWorld 2007 West will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California, and will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA tools, including a Diamond track on OpenLaszlo and sessions on Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's AIR and Sun's JavaFX.

A seasoned Java professional has to know more than just the syntax of the Java language. Java EE offers a set of standardized technologies for enterprise development. A number of open-source frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate are widely used in a variety of Java applications. Familiarity with new 'beyond-Java' languages and technologies will widen your horizons and make you a more valuable Java professional. Real-World Java Seminar is sponsored by CodeGear, Red Hat, Nexaweb, Farata Systems, and PushToTest.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering

'Apps on a Plane delivers what others are promising and then some,' Etelos President and CEO Danny Kolke said. 'This isn't just one Application that is built to synchronize. The true power of Apps on a Plane is that it enables any Web-based Application to perform without a live Internet connection.' The ability of a user to synchronize data is controllable by an easy-to-use interface. The administrator can create maps that determine the data that employees are able to synchronize. This keeps multiple users from updating the same data and also keeps sensitive information secure.

Ensim, the leading supplier of serviceenablement and automation software for hosted IP and application services,today announced that it will offer Ensim Pro X for Windows, the industry'spremier server management and automation control panel, free of charge aspart of a promotion with Microsoft. The Ensim Pro X for Windows Promotionbegins immediately.

Hosted Solutions, a Raleigh, N.C.-based provider of managed hosting and data center services, has acquired Boston Datacenters, Inc., Charlestown, Massachusetts, the region?s premier data center provider.

SYS-CON Events (www.events.sys-con.com) announced today that the first international 'AJAXWorld(TM) Conference & Expo' (www.ajaxworldexpo.com), taking place on October 3-4, 2006, at theSanta Clara Convention Center, California, will offer AJAXWorld University - Developer Bootcamp program. The AJAX Developer Bootcamp will take placeon Monday, October 2, 2006, one day before the conference opens.

Managed hosting provider MosaicGlobe announced on Thursday it has launched its hosted Web 2.0 content management system.The Web-based application enables users to implement HTML and CSS to customize their visual designs.