We're living strange times. The most interesting confirmation that supports this came from the recent "AppleGate" in Silicon Valley. A single blog post from Engadget stating that the iPhone is going to be delayed several months caused a 4 billion dollars fall in Apple's stock price. And it all happened in about 6 minutes. Eventually, the story turned out to be not true and the stock recovered in around 20 minutes (you can read here the detailed story).

This thing makes me think about the awesome power a blog can have nowadays. With all the push-style mechanisms in place (like RSS, Atom and the tons of client apps for them), news travel instantly around the globe. The latency of information delivered throug the blogosphere is by far the lowest we ever had. Just think about the radio and then the TV revolution... what a huge impact they had at that time! Not to mention the more recent Internet revolution. Seems to me that with the growing popularity of the blogosphere we're about to enter in a new phase of the digital revolution. And like any revolution, it will create a lot of opportunities for all sorts of groups of people. Including the ones that intend to speculate on the stock prices.

I think that Apple's example is the perfect demonstration for some of the problems we might face via the blogosphere. It all started from a bogus email (created as a result of Apple's internal email system being hacked) that looked as a perfectly valid one. Looking just fine, it was picked up by Engadget and transformed into "breaking news" on the blogosphere, reaching almost instantly a huge number of destinations. And then, the inevitable happened. Being negative "breaking news", it translated quickly into emotional reactions on the stock market. Final result? A 4 billion dollars fall in stock price.

This event is yet another confirmation for me that the most important thing that influences stock prices is the emotional reaction of investors. Combined with the high speed delivery channel provided by the blogosphere, it can lead to very interesting situations. Which makes me think... are we really ready for the blogosphere revolution? Are we prepared to handle all the consequences? And of course, the big one: are we prepared for the digital wars to come?

First we had the Beta, then we had the CTP (Community Technology Preview). Now we have the "Futures", which is basically a new step that Microsoft takes in terms of being transparent towards the developers community.

This interesting initiative is being tested by Microsoft with the release of Microsoft ASP.NET Futures (http://asp.net/downloads/futures) which contains an early preview of next generation functionality in ASP.NET and Silverlight. Among other things, this release of Microsoft ASP.NET Futures contains the following:

• ASP.NET AJAX Futures: support for browser history management, CSS selectors, and even stuff about accessing Astoria web data services (more to come on Astoria and Jasper in a future post)
• Silverlight controls for ASP.NET: media server control, XAML server control
• Dynamic Data Controls
• ASP.NET Application Services
• Support for Dynamic Languages in ASP.NET

I've hit yesterday some problems when installing SQL Server 2005 Express on my Vista machine, so I though I'd share some of my findings that can help you avoid spending time searching for an answer.

First of all, you need SP2 of SQL Server 2005 Express on Vista (the RTM installs, but warns you about compatibility issues). There are three different packages available right now:

• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition SP2 (then you can install separately SQL Server Management Studio Express)
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced  Services SP2 (includes SQL Server Management Studio Express, Reporting Services  and Full-Text Search)
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit (brings Connectivity Components, Business Intelligence Development Studio, and a Software Development Kit)

There is a good link on MSDN (here) where you can learn more about these packages.

Here comes the tricky part. On Vista, you might encounter a strange error during setup stating "SQL Server Setup Failed to compile the Managed Object Format (MOF) file ...". If this happens, don't cancel the setup process! The problem appears as a result of a WMI repository problem and can be fixed easily by opening a command prompt with elevated privileges (Run as administrator) and running two times the "winmgmt /salvagerepository" command (the first time you get a failure message, but the second time it lets you know that the WMI repository was successfully salvaged). Once this is done, you can safely resume the setup.

MIX'07 is here and marks the release of a Silverlight version with .NET support (take a look at http://www.visitmix.com to see some of the stunning Silverlight demos showcased during the keynote).

What's Silverlight anyway? Basically, it's a cross-platform and cross-browser plug-in that enables you to incorporate a rich media experience (video, audio, vector graphics, and so on) into browser apps. The really cool thing about Sliverlight is the fact that it ships with an incorporated version of the .NET Framework, and all of this fits into a package that is less than 4 Mb in size and is designed to install in less than 20 seconds. Of course, we're not talking here about a full version of the desktop .NET Framework, but still, it is a significant part of it. Some speculated that Silverlight used the Tiny CLR which is not true. Instead, Sliverlight uses a version of the  .NET Framework that is based on the full version (it's a completely separate binary, but it is derived from the same source tree). Some of the features of the full version (like COM interop, server-optimized GC, Fusion, GAC, to name just a few) were left out for obvious reasons, with the rest of them being part of the Silverlight .NET Framework (a few examples include LINQ, the network stack, threading, collections, XML, garbage collection, a subset of WPF, and many more).

The System.Net namespace in Silverlight does not support SOAP or WS-* yet, but provides out of the box support for REST/POX/JSON endpoints. However, there is also a JSON to .NET bridge component built into Silverlight that can be used together with Orcas Tools Add-in for Silverlight to create strongly typed proxy objects for Silverlight clients that call WCF or ASMX services.

The System.Windows namespaces (home of the WPF) provides a compatible subset of the full WPF feature set. The most notable absence is the support for full-fledged 3D (turns out it is pretty hard to build full 3D support in a cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in). The good news is that you will be able to build pieces of UI for Silverlight that will run without changes in full WPF.

It's also worth to note that having the same JIT, GC and type system with the desktop .NET apps, the Silverlight version of the .NET Framework is super fast (measurements show it is 300-1000 times faster than native JavaScript). Add to this the fact that it can coexist with the full version of the .NET Framework in the same process and you can have a pretty clear picture of the power you're getting.

Here are some useful links for learning a lot more about Silverlight:

• Scott Guthrie talks about Sliverlight on Channel 9 (see it here)
• The Silverlight install page is here
• The new Silverlight community site (launched on April 30, 2007)
• Silverlight forums

As you might already know, the guys from the Connected System Division @ Microsoft just released the first CTP of Biztalk Services (available at http://labs.biztalk.net). This marks one important step in materializing the Software + Services vision that has been cooking in Redmond for quite some time.

There are several very interesting blog entries that explain the ISB concept and help you get started with consuming Biztalk Services. Among them, I highly recomend the posts of Clemens Vasters (read it here), John Shewchuk (read it here), and Dennis Pilarinos (read it here).

There are currently four main types of services available:

1. Biztalk Identity Services (http://identity.biztalk.net) - provide services for application identity and access control management
2. Biztalk Connectivity Services (http://connect.biztalk.net) - provide services for exposing services from behind a firewall or NAT (in a secure manner of course)
3. Biztalk ServiceBus Services (http://servicebus.biztalk.net) - provide services for creating loosely coupled applications with eventing (this one is coming soon)
4. Biztalk Workflow Services (http://workflow.biztalk.net) - provide workflow services (this one is coming soon too)

In case you'd like to get started with these services just go to http://labs.biztalk.net and get the Biztalk Services SDK which should put you on track very fast :)