Developer News

The Difference Between Silverlight and ApolloDare Obasanjo puts it best

The Difference Between Silverlight and Apollo

Dare Obasanjo puts it best when he writes:

Although Pete does a good job of explaining the goals of Adobe Apollo with a great example, I think there is a simpler and more cynical way of spelling out the difference between Silverlight and Apollo. I’d describe the projects as:

Apollo is Adobe’s Flash based knock off competitor to the .NET Framework while Silverlight is Microsoft’s .NET Framework based knock off competitor to the Flash platform.

A lot shorter and more to the point.

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Touch cube points to future toys
A British artist and engineer is developing a multi-touch cube, which he hopes can get commercial backing….
Colin Harman MACITP

Review: WordPress Complete
WordPress is one of the popular blogging tools. Read what Anand has to say about one of the books published by Packt Publishing.
Anand Narayanaswamy

Microsoft vs TestDriven.NET - 31 May 2007

I have just received another courier delivered letter from Microsoft’s lawyers. That makes a total of 3 letters in 4 working days! I can see how these things can get expensive very quickly.

I’d like to highlight a couple of things in the letter.

They say that I have been in correspondence with Microsoft about these issues for many months. What they don’t take into account is that in over a year of correspondence - Microsoft consistently refused to tell me which license I was allegedly in violation of.

For example on Feb 26, 2007 Jason Weber said:

Jamie, for the reasons we discussed at great length, we believe your various extensions to the Visual Studio Express products necessarily violated the relevant license terms. We don't think it's productive to rehash those discussions.

We may have discussed this at great length, but I was never told what that the “relevant license terms” actually were! I only re-enabled Express support when Microsoft yet again failed to tell me where I was in violation. A straight answer with something I could tell my users would have resolved this.

I’m not sure where on my website this was suggested. It’s possible that they’re referring  to one of the comments on the last post. They do however bring up an interesting point. The license attached to their first letter was the one for “Visual Studio 2005 Standard and Academic Editions”. It didn’t matter that the license wasn’t the Express SKU license because the wording is the same. What if it turns out that the reason I can’t add buttons to Express SKU also applies to Visual Studio 2005? I would then be forced to take down TestDriven.NET entirely. What if it also means I can’t use PopFly Explorer for Visual Studio Express?

Update: In the comments I’ve been asked to post my reply to Microsoft’s lawyers.
Update: I have just authorized all comments after being offline for the weekend (a wedding in Scotland). Comment moderation is on to prevent spam. I do not censor comments as has been suggested.

Activate your iPhone using .NET 2.0

It appears that Jon Johansen (DVD Jon) is now a .NET developer. He has created a little .NET 2.0 application to activate your iPhone without giving any personal information to AT&T. The application runs as an activation server on your local machine. You then redirect albert.apple.com to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file. Zac Bowling is attempting to get it working on the Mac via Mono.