Things have been quite busy with me lately and thus my post count has dropped significantly. Nope, I haven’t dropped off the earth. I have been working pretty hard on a few projects that I’ll hopefully be able to shed some light on soon. I gave an MVC/jQuery/IE8 talk recently at a Philly.NET Code Camp and posted a really basic app on CodePlex to support the talk. You can check it out at http://bizweb.codeplex.com. Otherwise, stay tuned!

Channel 10 has posted a great summary of the announcements from today’s MIX 09 events. One of the items that they didn’t post is that ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released. Be sure to check it out!

I don’t get an opportunity to use Microsoft Expression Web that often, but when I do, I always discover new features. I was looking for a way to compress HTML and JavaScript files that I was generating for one of our affiliations. In Expression Web, simply go to Tools > Optimize HTML to see a list of options. Just remember to resave your files as a different name in case you remove comments unless the comments can be lost. If you need to take a .min file or a compressed file and see a more fluent version of the source, you can right-click in the source window and choose Reformat HTML to reformat the source.

Infragistics, a User Interface Components company, has released a new UX Pattern website that allows users to view various patterns and submit their own to the library. The site can be found at http://quince.infragistics.com/. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I’d recommend it. It’s a great way to browse patterns or even to showcase certain design capabilities to end users.

I was reading a Robert Scoble post about why Google Latitude product is receiving more attention than Yahoo SearchPad. I totally agree with him. After reading his post about his interview and watching the video, I’ve devised a list of items that’s wrong with SearchPad:

It appears that Google is ignoring Feedburner and the customer base that comes along with it. Google is in the process of forcing customers to switch their feed syndication from Feedburner over to Google, however, they seem to have some issues and don’t seem to be answering the questions being posed by Feedburner customers. I have an issue where after migration the MyBrand functionality stopped working. I’ve tried using their funky CNAME value for my feed, but that doesn’t seem to work. According to the response from the community on my question, I need to change it to a generic CNAME value. Who knows how long this will work (or if it will). I wish Google would stop ignoring the Feedburner customers.

The edition line-up for Windows 7 seems to be more streamlined then the list provided for Vista. To summarize, there are now 2 main editions for home users: Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Ultimate. There are also 2 editions for businesses which are Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise (Enterprise will be for customers that have Software Assurance and is similar to Ultimate). For more information, be sure to check out the press release at Microsoft.com.

I received Telerik’s monthly newsletter this morning and noticed that they’ve added support for ASP.NET MVC to their AjaxControls. Now they’ve taken it a step further to produce an MVC forums application using their control suite. If you are a Telerik subscriber, you can download their demo application from their website.

First off, congratulations to the Microsoft ASP.NET team for their hard work on the MVC out-of-band releases over the past few months. It’s nice to see these OOB releases on Codeplex. Earlier, Scott Guthrie announced that the team has released the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RC1. A release candidate is very similar to an RTM release except for the fact that a few minor bugs still may be fixed between the current release and RTM. Scott has a list of the new features in the RC on his blog. Be sure to check it out!

Since SAP purchased Business Objects for $6.7 billion in 2007, Crystal Reports deployment for Microsoft Visual Studio has become more difficult to deploy. Instead of choosing a built-in merge module, you now much visit the SAP site and download the necessary files for your environment.