I’ve been involved for quite some time now with a new Microsoft project codenamed “WebMatrix” but couldn’t say anything about it since all the info was under NDA. Today though, the public availability of the Microsoft WebMatrix Beta was announced, so I guess I’m no longer bound by the NDA agreement and can let you in on a few things. So first let me clarify a few things, and to do that I’m going to use an excellent explanation from David Ebbo’s blog. WebMatrix: a stack and a tool Let’s start with WebMatrix.  The term is actually...

Since I’ve started talking about Sliverlight and analytics yesterday I thought this is probably the best opportunity to mention Silverlytics (Silverlight + Analytics). Built by Location3 Media an interactive marketing company, Silverlytics is a multitenant Windows Azure-based analytics service that uses Microsoft Live Labs Pivot for its data visualization.  All of its data is collected from Service Oriented Analytics behaviors in Silverlight applications.  The Windows Azure platform is perfect for web analytics because of its scalability and global reach while Pivot provides a very cool way to slice, dice, and understand the data.  Location3 Media is...

A common misunderstanding and argument I get, for not building web applications using Silverlight technology, is often, the lack of a way to keep stats of your application traffic. So I thought this worth a blog post in order to put a few things right and let people know that there is actually a solution they could use. This solution is Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework is a codeplex based open source Extensible Web Analytics Framework for Microsoft Silverlight Applications. It addresses the challenges of tracking Silverlight applications by enabling it in a number of scenarios like the...

This weekend I got the chance to speak about IE8 and the future (the next version IE9) in a different event from the ones I’m used to speak, MediaCampAthens. MediaCampAthens intends to bring together new media enthusiasts, explorers and professionals to share the current state and their visions for the future of the web, arts, new media, interactive advertising and marketing throughout one day. MediaCampAthens hopes to unlock the potential of new opportunities within the new media industry in Athens. Topics may include - but are not limited to – Web 2.0, entrepreneurship,...

A few months back I’ve started working with Giorgio Sardo on a Facebook IE8 Web Slice. In fact there were a few people that already were aware of that and have been bugging me for the download link ;-) since my TechEd 2009 interview and my IE8 talk at Microsoft Dev Days where I’ve shown just a glimpse of it. Well your wait is over, yesterday Microsoft officially released a set of very useful IE8 addons that target Facebook at the IE addons site that include the Facebook Web Slice. I can’t...

Wow these are great news, I’m going to participate at TechEd Online TechTalk series this year. I’ m going to be interviewed be Giorgio Sardo on how to build an IE8 Web Slice. The official description of the talk is Are you interested to light up your site on IE8? The MVP Konstantinos Pantos will share his experience building a web slice; we will also talk about some handy tip and trick for building compelling accelerators and visual search providers for Internet Explorer 8. Pretty excited about that, can’t wait…

So it’s time for me to reveal what I’ve been up to for the past 6 months. As some of you may already know, I moved to a new start up company about six months ago, called Metadata (I know the site isn’t quite ready yet, but we focused on the product instead of the site), where I was assigned the task of designing and building a solution for Content Management. The company business strategy required a product that would satisfy the needs of every possible client ranging from small companies that need simple websites to large news portal organizations...

Most of the people I meet have this idea that they have to either buy or find an open source third party component, or (even worse) use flash, when it comes to drawing graphs for a web application or site. So I’m guessing that most people don’t know that the Data Visualization Group within the SQL Server Reporting Services Team has created stand-alone ASP.NET and Windows Forms Chart Controls for the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, similar to what has been already available as built-in chart functionality in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. There are...

My hosting provider is located at Germany which has always made it kind of difficult to communicate. I selected a long time ago cause it was cheap and now I don't want get into the whole process of moving everything somewhere else. So whenever I have to ask them something I always use a translation service to understand what they're saying (yes I don't know German and yes they always reply in German :-)) Today though I've read that the Windows live messenger translation bot was released. For those of you that haven't worked with live bots before, these are...

Just a few days after Microsoft released IE8 Goggle retaliated by releasing their browser, Chrome. After installing it my first impressions are: Extremely clean and streamlined UI Nice source view and developer helpers Nice download manager Extremely fast page loading Great JavaScript performance What's missing (in my opinion): Grouped tab browsing Web Slices Accelerators To conclude, I thing IE8 is a more feature complete browser according to my standards and although it's beta has more rendering problems than chrome has at the moment, I'm sticking to IE as my default browser. UPDATE: It doesn't support Silverlight...