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...

Yesterday I had the chance to talk at a DotNetZone event about Building Rich Internet Applications using Silverlight 2.0. It went very well, people seemed to have an active interest on this new Technology and anxiously looking forward to build real word applications (like this healthcare one announced yesterday by Tim Sneath) with it. My session was quite long (2.5 hours - thankfully no one slept during it ;-)) so I had the chance to talk about almost all of Silverlight's features and give a lot of demos, after all events like that, where you speak to developers, is...

Microsoft announced a bunch of cool new features in Silverlight 2, in this year's Mix  conference. One of the most exciting new features is the Deep Zoom one. Deep Zoom allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.  The simple zooming interface allows users to explore entire collections down to specific details in extreme close-up, all with fantastic performance and smooth transitions. What you probably won't know...

I like trying new software, so I usually install and try all betas I find interesting. Thus I've downloaded and installed IE8, without no second thoughts, as soon as it was announced at this year's Mix conference. What I haven't thought was that since I had previously installed Safari beta 3 and Firefox 3 beta 3 I would end up not having an RTM browser installed on my machine. And although all of them seem to work in general, they all do have a few bugs and quirks that make me switch from one to another just to access...

Having some free time durring the Christmas holidays gave me the oportunity of doing a couple of things to myFacebook gadget. So except from the necessary bug fixing ;-) version 1.2.1 of myFacebook contains three major updates: First I've removed the verb "is" from the user status as Facebook finally listened to all the users that complained about it and removed it from its platform as well. Remember that you're now expected to fill in the verb yourself. I've also noticed that my friends' status feed contained entries that were a lot older than the ones I expected to...

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak in front of a large audience about Microsoft's Live Services, available to developers, in a Microsoft hosted event called "The Next Web Now". Although I had to write this presentation twice, as I lost my first one with my stolen laptop, and had to prepare the second one in just a few hours, I was glad to do it as I always enjoy speaking and communicating with other developers. In general I believe it went well, even with all the computer related problems Panos' laptop had ;-). The event's sessions were video recorded so they're...