Microsoft has released a stand-alone ASP.NET and Windows Forms Chart controls for the .NET Framework 3.5 and VS 2008.  This is similar to what previously existed as built-in chart functionality in SQL Reporting Services 2008 (Very Cool).

You can use them in any of your existing applications (Web or Win) to produce a professional set of charts.  Here is a snapshot of available chart types available in this release:

Here are the download links:

• Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Language Pack for Microsoft Chart Controls
• Microsoft Chart Controls Add-on for Visual Studio 2008
• Documentation for Microsoft Chart Controls

You can find samples on MSDN to help get you started (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart).

Here are the Slides / Demo from the presentation.  Click the links below to download.

Slides

Demos

Microsoft has recently released the Silverlight Toolkit. 

What is the Silverlight Toolkit?

The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. This first release includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input.

 You can download this set HERE.

I will be presenting on Virtual Earth tomorrow night in Lafayette, Louisiana.  Hope to see you there.

Topic: Microsoft Virtual Earth, and what can it do for you

Silverlight 2 has now been RTM'd.  Here is a quick overview of whats new in Silverlight 2.

• Text Rendering - a lot of improvements went into overall text rendering.  This is an area that we will continue to improve and focus efforts.  The Portable User Interface font (default font if no FontFamily value is provided) looks a heck of a lot better in my opinion.
• Controls - Read Shawn's post about the new controls
• Networking - The ability to call secure (SSL) services from a non-secure hosted Silverlight XAP.  The only caveat is the new service endpoint must specify a policy via clientaccesspolicy.xml at the root of the endpoint domain.  Once this is in place (at the root of the endpoint domain), your XAP hosted in a non-secure SSL HTTP instance can call an HTTPS-based service.
• ADO.NET Services - Finally made it in!

 Some links to download:

• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008
• Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime (Windows)
• Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime (Mac)
• Silverlight 2 SDK offline documentation (CHM) 
• Blend 2 SP1

Host of other good information about the release - Recommend reading the official release here.

Microsoft has released Source Analysis / StyleCop recently.  Where FxCop allows you to perform analysis on compiled binaries, StyleCop analyzes your source code directly.  There seems to be a focus on the partial design, layout and documentation.  A good bit of the information is taken away after the compile and cannot be analyzed by FxCop. 

 This will help to produce more readable, consistent code and will help some development groups standardize / enforce coding guidelines.  It appears some of the rules are not configurable and might take some time to get used to. 

You can download the code from the following path:

http;//code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis

I made a mistake by thinking I know better than the hurricane center.  I input the forecast data and draped on top of my data a couple of days ago.  Yesterday it forecast moving from west to east so I assumed that the hurricane would continue to the east and miss our house.  Here we are now with T-8 hours and the track of the eye is now directly over my house.  We should have left yesterday but now it is too late.  Anyway, we have plan B in effect and have to ride out this storm.  Tough lesson to learn but I am putting away my forecast capabilities and leaving it to the experts.  Click below to view the track of Hurricane Gustav.  The yellow line is the track, the blue dots are the times when the hurrican will be in that location and the red vertical line at the end is my house with the vertical exagerated to view it from  space. 

Gustav Hurrican Track

Not cool !!!

The ASP.NET team recently released the ASP.NET Roadmap document on the codeplex site.  I love their goal of making ASP.NET Ajax the first-class choice for all Web 2.o developers ( Show us the love!!!).  They are planning on enhancing the DOM API's and planning to enable great mobile Ajax applications. 

Some of the other goals are to make client-centric Ajax development and UI experiences easy by providing or enhancing the following:

• Client Data and UI Templates
• Client Data Sources
• Client Data and Server Data
• Accessibility
• Animation
• Drag and Drop
• Client-side Controls and Behavior
• Interoperability

They also plan on providing great tools experiences for AJax development:

• Reduced update lag for Javascript Intellisense
• Javascript Intellisense support for a broader range of coding styles
• Recognizing XML Metadata Comments in the Active Document
• Recognizing OpenAjax-compliant Metadata Files
• JavaScript Navigation Tools
• JavaScript Build Tools
• etc...

Looking forward to these new enhancements.  You can download the document here.

I attended the Mix conference this year and was astounded by some of the new technology Microsoft is coming out with.  It was a good networking opportunity to meet PMs from different groups and get some insight to where Microsoft sees the future of the web.  Silverlight stole the show this year and I heard about a new product "Live Mesh" that was coming out soon.  I took a look at Mesh a couple of weeks ago and at first glance it seems to be a synced storage drive.  After diving into the technology a little more, it became apparent to me how impressive this technology really is.  This is a real platform that contains open web standards like REST, RSS, ATOM, JSON and more.  It is a platform to build Software and Services.  It has the capability to wrap existing web applications and take them offline (i.e. It contains a "Mesh Operation Environment - Tiny HTTP Server" that allows offline functionality).  There is always this pressing concern in the IT world as to which technology to use.  This is an exciting time to be a developer!

Thanks to everyone who attended the Acadiana .NET User Group Presentation.

Slides from the presentation

Source for Financial Demo

Source for Controls Demo

I will have a couple of follow up posts to answer some of the questions that came up during the meeting.  Also, I will post the full source for the Deep Zoom demo in a couple of days.