Mrinal Wadhwa is a Software Architect form Bangalore, India. He is interested in User Interfaces, Databases, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Networking, Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, Software Design, Architecture, Scalability etc. and is working with a small team trying to bootstrap a software as a service product startup.
Microsoft just released Silverlight 2 .. here’s the official press release
Scott Guthrie and Tim Heuer have detailed posts about what’ new.
Get Silverlight 2
Ryan Stewart’s post on the subject is an interesting read, check it out.
Microsoft just released Silverlight 2 RC0, which is a development release to help developers prepare their apps for Silverlight 2. They’ve not released an end-user runtime for this version since the release candidate is targeted at helping developers prepare their Silverlight 2 Beta 2 apps for the Silverlight 2 release. You can get the developer runtime and updates for Visual Studio Silverlight tools and Expression Blend here.
Looks like they moved around lot of stuff, so there are several breaking changes. You can download a detailed document about the changes here. Mike Snow also has a detailed post describing the changes.
Get Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0
I love 3D in Flash, but till now I’d never been very happy with the quality of text rendering in my Papervision3D projects. Papervision is a bitmap based 3D engine and because of that not very good at rendering text.
Yesterday, I found VectorVision, which is an extension of Paperviosn3D that enables rendering vectors inside of Papervision3D. The authors Mark Barcinski & Adrien Jeanjean, have ported some of the work Mathieu Badimon did for his vector based 3D engine, Five3D, to enable vector fonts inside of Papervision. And to top that they added support for rendering any SVG in Papervision .. super cool !!
Here’s a quick example I cooked up, notice the crisp font ..
Maybe I’m missing something here, but why does FlexBuilder generate css styles as “styleName” but suggests auto completions as “style-name” ?
Raghu has announced on his blog that Adobe will give out free Flex Builder licenses to everyone who attends their upcoming Flex Developer event in Bangalore. The dates of the event are still being decided, so if you want to stay informed signup on Raghu’s little flex app … he promises not to spam but trust him at your own risk 
I’ve been very vocal in the past about the problems Adobe needs to address to help the Flex community grow in India and one of my biggest concerns has been the problems relating to buying Flex Builder in India. Although, those problems still stand, I appreciate Adobe’s efforts to tackle them in whatever way they can. I hope they’ll enable an online store in India soon, but until then I appreciate Adobe for trying to provide new developers all the means that they need to get started with Flex development.
A special thanks to the Adobe Evangelism team in India, who I know have worked really hard towards making all this possible.
See you all at the event.
