In addition to Silverlight 2 Beta 1 that is made available yesterday, another great product's new version was made available for download. That is beta version of Expression Studio 2. The application suite that is going to help graphic designers and developers working together. The suite includes the following tools Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder. From which, the most valuable for WPF and Silverlight developers is Expression Blend. That is more powerful XAML WYSIWYG designer than that we have in visual studio. There are even facilities to create animation (similar to flash designer if you've seen it)

S. Somasegar provides quick overview of new features that are part of this release: 

There are many exciting new features in this release.  For example, Expression Web allows you to design PHP documents in addition to ASP.NET 3.5, opening the door for a new range of designers to create their standards-based designs using Microsoft tools.  Expression Blend has an improved interface that speeds up your workflow and facilitates navigating your documents more quickly with the new breadcrumb toolbar.  Expression Design includes an advanced slicing feature that helps you target individual slices as separate formats, including Silverlight canvas, WPF canvas, WPF resource dictionary, HTML comp, XAML, PSD, and PDF.  Expression Media makes digital asset management easy by allowing you to import more than 100 different media formats using drag-and-drop, including digital camera RAW files, then share the resulting catalogue with fellow team members.   Finally, Expression Encoder has higher quality and faster encoding for Silverlight and the ability to perform simple video edits. 

Links were taken from this page: http://silverlight.net/forums/p/10586/33824.aspx 

I’ve came across a post describing a good application on Scott’s blog. That is a new tool for remote collaboration from Microsoft called Microsoft SharedView. It is in beta yet, but already looks very good. It is really easy to install and use. You need to download just 3.6 Mb. Allows connecting with up to 15 people in different locations. There is integration with Live Messenger and Office applications. And it is free.

  Microsoft SharedView is a fast, easy way to share documents and screen views with small groups of friends or coworkers; anytime, anywhere. Use SharedView to put your heads together and collaborate - create, convey, and communicate…across physical boundaries, through firewalls, and down to the smallest details.

Just in case you don't know this yet, Microsoft recently released to manufacturing their new OS - Windows Server 2008.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/default.aspx 

Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 2008 Power Tools. This is update of power tool pack that was previously released for TFS 2005. Now it is compatible with VS 2008, includes some new tools that were absent in 2005 version and it does not contain some tools that were already moved to VS 2008. Although this package is primarily aimed to Visual Studio 2008 and Team Foundation Server 2008, most of the tools work ok with VS2008 + TFS2005 bundle and some of them even work with VS2005+TFS2005 bundle (you can use command line tools, that are not integrated into VS IDE).

If your team is using Team Foundation Server, then this it a must-have addendum to Team Explorer. Here is download link. Below is my humble review of the features that I think worth mentioning.

Work Item Templates

When you are creating more than one work item, some fields are often the same. Instead of tediously entering field values for each WI you can create WI templates and automate you work.

There are two ways to use this feature:

- When creating work item you can choose template to base it on.

- You can apply template to existing work items. Batch changes also can be made in Excel, but with WI Templates you now even do not need to leave VS.

I find this feature extremely useful. It really boosts your productivity when working with TFS.

Find in Source Control tool (new)

Now it is possible to search for files that are checked out by particular user. There is also wildcard search and enhanced search for changeset. Previously we had to use TFS sidekicks for that…

Build Notifications (TFS 2008 only)

You can subscribe to receive queued, started, or completed events notification across several instances of TFS. Application resides in Windows Tray area. It is started outside of VS IDE, that is confusing...

Unfortunately, this feature runs only with TFS2008. So if you are using VS2008 and TFS2005 bundle you must use old methods. I wonder why MS announcements and release notes miss such important info sometimes…

TFPT.exe

This is command line tool that was in the previous version of Power Tools. It has some new commands however. The best description would be to print its help:

Process Template Editor

Just in case you find graphical user interface to be more convenient than editing XML files, this tool is for you. Very helpful tool for those who are in charge of defining work items for a team!

Conclusion

TFS 2008 Power Tools pack contains not only tools for power users, but also several very useful utilities, like WI Templates and Find in Source Control tools , that are a must to have for every TFS user.

Microsoft are closing the gap of missing functionality, but this happens too slowly. It took 3 years for them to add such important feature as status search that is present in VSS. While they position TFS as a higher-level product than VSS, then it must cover functionality of its smaller brother. This is magnified by the fact that most TFS users are VSS users in past, so it is confusing for them not to find functionality they used to.

And there are still some features that are obviously missing in TFS. To count just a few:

- More easy way to rollback changeset

- More easy way to unlock files checked out by someone else

- More easy way to delete WI

I know that all of these are available from command line, but they are inconvenient to use. If you ever tried to unlock someone’s changes you know what I mean…

Anyway, TFS is becoming more mature with each release of this kind and that is great that they listen what users want. That is great product undoubtedly!

Information technology not only adds innovative solutions to our life, but also replaces traditional ones, that we accustomed to use for centuries. One that was and is the hardest to crack is… book. There were many competitors of books so far. But books still alive and people continue buying and reading them. Radio did not replace books (although there are audio books now, they do not replace traditional ones). Television did not replace books. And even personal computers did not do that, though there are so many great features that computers add and the size of today's computers is about a book size.

Amazon recently made their attempt to provide alternative to traditional newspapers and books. They announced their brand new device, called "Kindle", that was specially designed for reading. So, what is Kindle?

• It has size of a book weight as little as 10.3 Ounces
• Made in ergonomic case with the large buttons to "turn over" pages
• Has QWERTY keyboard
• Equipped with monochrome screen especially designed for reading. Technology behind this screen is called e-paper that has no backlight, does not reflect and consumes less electricity than ordinary LCD displays
• It also has EVDO (fast wireless network standard) on the board. It does not need PC at all.
• And it is coupled with Amazon's data service. So they even say "This isn't a device, it's a service."

Strong features of this device are unbeatable:

• You can search in a book and make bookmarks. I always miss CTRL-F when reading books.
• You can scale fonts. It is so annoying if a book has too small or too large font…
• You have rich and recent info in a form of newspapers, blogs and books. There is also access to Wikipedia and it includes The New Oxford American Dictionary.
• You can have one Kindle instead of entire bookshelf.

What would stop me from buying Kindle?

• Design. For me, it looks like old-fashioned calculator.

  

  And why it is made white? It makes it looking as kitchen appliance.

• Monochrome screen. Hey, its 21th century, why should we read from monochrome screens. It looks like step back.
• Coupling with Amazon data service. I guess I never will be able to buy and use it here, in Russia J

It is also not clear what platform Kindle is based on and if it is possible to extend it with own software or not.

If you want more info, there was a good comparison review of Kindle with Sony's Reader, and there is a long article about it in Newsweek.