So the show is on the road again. Falafel has a booth (come visit us), as do all the usual suspects, we met our friends at Telerik, Developer Express etc. The FU T-shirts and Sumo wrestlers are going like hot cake, thanks Matt for making us look good!

The Keynote this morning was a big aha moment from me. Its all about the cloud, which for Microsoft is Windows Azure. Very exciting, they have been busy and come along way since last year. The new SQL Azure service behave just like SQL Server, and you can even use SQL Server Management Studio to work with it using your familiar Transact SQL commands. Also, the development tools, management and monitoring tools, deployment etc are shaping up nicely.

The PDC drop of RIA Services for VS 2010 and .NET Fwk 4/ Entity Fwk 4 is looking very capable, will find out more about that on Thursday.

Now attending a talk on ADO.Net Data Services and .NET Entity Framework. They have done tons of work here since version 2.0. There is model first development (generate the DB from the model), support for POCO classes and change tracking, much better SQL generation and support for executing customized SQL and stored procedures.

Day 2: Wow! Microsoft just released Silverlight 4.0, and it has ALL the features that were missing! I don’t even know where to start! Here is a quick list: supports rich printing, access to external devices, access to webcam and microphone, can run in trusted mode and access file system and cross domain network access, does HTML in OOB mode, full OOB window management support (custom windows chrome), drag and drop files into the SL app, play flash inside the SL app, expanded WCF support (net tcp), right click, improved theming, improved data binding, runs full .net fwk assemblies, twice as fast…. what do you think? Seems like a go? It is beta now and RTM first half of 2010.

Oh – and today Microsoft scored big points by giving all the paying attendees a laptop! That drew some standing ovations at the keynote.

Day 3: Attended “Building Amazing Business Applications with Silverlight 4 and RIA Services” with Brad Abrams, Program Unit Manager. Very slick tooling and designer support! Nice implementation of server and client side filtering, and composing client side operations (filtering, sorting, paging) with server side execution.

I will update this blog as I find out more.

Based on popular demand, we decided to make the Falafel University shirts available online in the Falafel store

So go ahead! Show them how you really feel :)

Capitola, CA – October 21st 2009 – Falafel Software, today,  launched its worldwide web presence at www.falafel.com and design.falafel.com using the state of the art content management system developed by its platinum partner Telerik Corporation called “SiteFinity”.

“The speed and flexibility offered to us by managing our sites using Sitefinity is unparalleled” said Lino Tadros, Chairman & CEO at Falafel Software, “The capabilities, power, ease of use, fast deployment and shared responsibility with team members to maintain our sites reduced the amount of time and effort to a minimum”.

Falafel has built dozens of worldwide sites for its customers using Sitefinity with great success and flexibility and it was time to build our own major sites using this great technology.

Falafel offers consulting and training on Sitefinity worldwide and builds custom modules for the platform to integrate seamlessly into the Sitefinity framework.

If you are following along in the excellent Walk Through, there is one gotcha.

In the section where you add a custom method to the service, in the current code base you need to add the [Custom] attribute for it to compile:

[Custom] 
public void ApproveSabbatical(Employee current)

Cheers

John

Be sure to tune in to Falafel TV to watch a series of videos on Parallel Computing with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. First out, the 101 video shows you how Parallel.For will drastically improve your performance with virtually no new code…

I was so excited to see MonoTouch released two days ago.  congratulation to Miguel and the team at Novell! I picked up my MacBook Pro where I have been building IPhone apps using XCode (Objective C :( Ah! Karamba!), and installed Mono, MonoDevelop and MonoTouch as soon as I received it from Miguel (Thanks Miguel!).

Well, MonoDevelop started jumping up and down on my dock for few minutes but never started.  Looked at the log files and it seemed like a permission issue with the ~/.WAPI directory.  I am not really a MAC person, so went to Google for rescue, no mention of this.  Sent an email to Miguel De Icaza (Mr. Mono himself) and he put me in touch with Michael Hutchinson and BAM!, Mike is Da Man!

If you see this problem on your machine, what probably happened is that you never ran any MONO programs on your MAC before installing and running MonoTouch, MonoDevelop.  If that is the case, launch a Terminal window and type the following two command: