MS Office to support ODF and PDF...

The news is out and this time it is correct. Microsoft has decided to add support for ODF and PDF in MS Office 2007 through the Office SP2 to be released in early 2009. What it means is that now we can save office files in ODF and PDF format. Currently also it is possible but you have to use different plug-ins for this. Now this support would be give in Office only.

This is a good feature for end users. Once installed, they need not have to use any plug-ins or converters to translate the word file to PDF etc. This may also open lot of opportunities to programmers to play around with this feature programmatically using Office APIs.

Cheers,
Amol

Fortress........succesor to Java????

If you look at the various programming languages that we use today, most of them were designed for earlier generations of machines. Though, Microsoft has responded beautifully by introducing .NET and languages based on .NET, others are much behind.

Sun Lab is working on a language which could be potentially successor of Java, called as ‘Fortress’ to solve problems for application development for high-performance computing. Parallel computing is supported in this language. Its syntax is based on mathematical notation. It has language constructs such as for-next loops are parallelizable.

Should you want more information on this, you can download the binaries from
Project Fortress Community .


Cheers,
Amol

Thick client application using Silverlight

If at all we want to use cool Silverlight UI in the thick client application, would it be possible. If we concentrate on Windows forms only then there are few workaounds and answer to above-mentioned question is ‘Yes’.

The simplest thing to do is to use WebBrowser control on the Win Form and then let the browser control display the web pages using the Silverlight. Isn’t it simple to start with? And yes, it is also possible to have two way communications between the Windows Form application and the Silverlight application.

I also found on the net that few people have successfully used this approach on Linux as well with the help of go-mono of course.

Well, well, well….I am not finished yet….

Microsoft is also planning to launch a new MSN toolbar beta powered by Silverlight. Now, does that ring a bell in your mind? I am sure yes if not then please go through this blog one more time.


Cheers,
Amol

Moonlight….Silverlight on Linux…

You may be already aware that Moonlight is an open source project that supports the Silverlight 1.0 profile for Linux. According to the go mono web site, they have released not yet feature complete test installers for the Moonlight. These are basically snapshots from their development tree for Moonlight project.

Should you want more information on Moonlight, here is the URL.


Cheers,
Amol