Rampaging Robot

Adobe Delivers Creative Suite 5 Design Premium (San Jose, CA--April 14, 2010) Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Design Premium, the ultimate toolkit for expressing and publishing ideas in print, on the Web, as interactive content and on mobile devices. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium includes all new versions of Adobe Photoshop® CS5 Extended (see separate release), Adobe Illustrator® CS5, Adobe InDesign® CS5 (see separate release), Adobe Flash® Professional CS5, Adobe Dreamweaver® CS5 and Adobe Fireworks® CS5, as well as Adobe Acrobat® 9 Pro, integration with new Adobe CS Live services (CS Live Services are complimentary for a limited time)* and Adobe Flash® Catalyst™ CS5 (see separate release) for interaction design without writing code. A new version of Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Standard will also be available.

(Las Vegas NAB, NV--April 14, 2010) Blackmagic Design today announced support for Adobe’s newly announced Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 (CS5), for its range of capture cards for the Windows and Mac platforms. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium software accelerates workflows from scriptwriting through post-production. Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 was optimized from the ground up to deliver outstanding performance and exceptional stability. This all new Adobe Mercury Playback Engine is native 64-bit, GPU-accelerated and optimized for multiple-core systems.

Integrated Analytics from Omniture and Powerful Flash Capabilities Deliver Ultimate Toolset for Creating, Testing and Deploying Web Content (San Jose, CA--April 14, 2010) Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Web Premium, a major new release of its award-winning suite of software for Web designers and developers that includes full-version upgrades of Adobe Flash® Professional, Adobe Dreamweaver®, Adobe Photoshop® Extended, Adobe Illustrator®, Adobe Fireworks®, and now Adobe Flash Catalyst™ and Flash Builder™. In addition to a complete Flash family of tools, Web Premium CS5 also features support for the most popular open source content management systems, access to Omniture® SiteCatalyst® and Omniture Test&Target™ from within Flash Professional and Dreamweaver and integration with new Adobe CS Live online services (CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time).*

Milestone Release Celebrates 20 Years of Unrivaled Image Editing and Innovation (San Jose, CA--April 14, 2010) Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced Adobe® Photoshop® CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended software, must-have releases of the professional industry standard for digital imaging. With millions of users celebrating the product's 20th anniversary this year, Photoshop CS5 builds upon a rich history of innovation and leadership with groundbreaking features and performance gains that boost creativity and workflow efficiency. Packing in more technological advancements from Adobe Labs than any other release and incorporating enhancements to everyday tasks requested by the Photoshop community, the software has greater intelligence and awareness of the content within images, allowing for complex and magical manipulation in just a few clicks. Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended delivers everything in Photoshop CS5, as well as advanced tools for 3-D which address the unique needs of the video, Web, medical, manufacturing and engineering industries.

New Version Facilitates the Creation and Distribution of High-Impact Content in Print and Interactive Formats (San Jose, CA--April 14, 2010) Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe® InDesign® CS5, a compelling new release of its versatile page layout software that allows users to efficiently deliver page layouts in print, online and on devices. As a new generation of tablet devices is poised to transform magazine, book and newspaper markets, Adobe InDesign CS5 enables creative professionals to deliver digital documents that include interactivity, animation, video and audio – connecting people to page content in innovative and memorable ways. Adobe InDesign CS5 will be available as a stand-alone application or as a component of Adobe Creative Suite® 5 Design Premium and Standard editions and Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection (see separate releases).

Powerful Set of Flash Platform Tools in Creative Suite 5 Advance Design and Development of Web, Mobile Content (San Jose, CA--April 14, 2010) Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today unveiled Adobe® Flash® Catalyst™ CS5, a new professional interaction design tool that allows designers to rapidly create expressive Web application interfaces and design interaction without writing code. Together with Adobe Flash Professional CS5 and Adobe Flash Builder™ 4, Flash Catalyst CS5 software enables designers and developers to collaborate and work more productively together. These powerful new Flash tools in Creative Suite 5 come in advance of the much-anticipated releases of Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR® 2, which are optimized for high performance on mobile screens and designed to take advantage of native device capabilities for a richer, more immersive user experience.

 

April showers bring May flowers! Congratulations to our Creative Challenge: April Showers winner, member antaver59.

by antaver59

Visual Studio 2010 is here! Get multiple monitor support; new support for SharePoint development, including numerous templates; enhanced multi-targeting support allowing developers to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework; and experience how Visual Studio 2010 simplifies building standards-based Web applications with improved AJAX frameworks, core IntelliSense support for JavaScript, and jQuery.

In this webcast, we explain what sandboxed solutions are, and we demonstrate how to create sandboxed solutions with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and how to deploy and monitor these solutions on SharePoint farms.

Visual Studio 2010 is here! Get multiple monitor support; new support for SharePoint development, including numerous templates; enhanced multi-targeting support allowing developers to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework; and experience how Visual Studio 2010 simplifies building standards-based Web applications with improved AJAX frameworks, core IntelliSense support for JavaScript, and jQuery.

In this webcast, we explain what sandboxed solutions are, and we demonstrate how to create sandboxed solutions with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and how to deploy and monitor these solutions on SharePoint farms.

 

Niagara Falls

by rmeredithiii

 

On Watch

by frederickfung

 

Moment of Reflection

by leervis67

 

Barn in the Wild

by sigfusson

As part of Silverlight 4, developers can now use the NetTcp framing protocol for their web services. This is an addition that we expect a lot of you will find useful. However, many of you will probably hit the dreaded CommunicationException that lurks the unsuspecting developer as soon as he tries to establish that first connection from their Silverlight client to the service.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

You probably have seen this exception message before:

Could not connect to net.tcp://localhost:4502/MyService. The connection attempt lasted for a time span of 00:00:00.4270427. TCP error code 10013: An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions.. This could be due to attempting to access a service in a cross-domain way while the service is not configured for cross-domain access. You may need to contact the owner of the service to expose a sockets cross-domain policy over HTTP and host the service in the allowed sockets port range 4502-4534.

This fairly long exception message comes to “there probably is not an adequate cross-domain policy for the service endpoint you are trying to access”. The Silverlight runtime requires all network communications to be authorized. This is done by retrieving a policy file to associate with a remote server before doing the actual communication. Hard core details about the mechanism can be obtained in the MSDN article entitled Network Security Access Restriction in Silverlight.

So how do you solve this fast and easy?

Short answer:

Create a file named clientaccesspolicy.xml with the file content described below and host it on an HTTP server at http://<<YourNetTcpIPAddress>>:80/clientaccesspolicy.xml.

Long answer:

For NetTcp connection, you must use a HTTP based socket policy.

If you already have HTTP web services in place, you simply will add a few lines to your clientaccesspolicy.xml file and you *should* be done. Otherwise, you need to create a file named clientaccesspolicy.xml that is served via HTTP at the base IP address of your service on the standard HTTP port 80.

Noticed I said base IP address here? Internally, the policy file is retrieved by the first IP address your domain name resolves to. So if your HTTP domain name does not resolve to the same IP address as your NetTcp service, you will need some workaround. One solution could be an adaptation of Carlos Figueira REST-based policy server.

The content of your clientaccesspolicy.xml for debugging can be the one shown here. This policy is very lax though, and as great as it is for debugging purpose, it will let any clients access your service in production. You should therefore tinker with it and adapt it to your specific needs before deployment.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<access-policy>

  <cross-domain-access>

    <policy>

      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">

        <domain uri="*" />

      </allow-from>

      <grant-to>

        <socket-resource port="4502-4534" protocol="tcp" />

      </grant-to>

    </policy>

  </cross-domain-access>

</access-policy>

 

Once you have created your policy file and hosted it, test if it is retrievable by opening your browser and pointing it to http://<<YourNetTcpIPAddress>>:80/clientaccesspolicy.xml. Your browser should show you the content of your policy file. If this is the case, your Silverlight client should be free to talk with your NetTcp service!

-Christopher Scrosati
Developer, Silverlight WCF team

Did you know it is now easier to debug the server side PollingDuplex in Silverlight 4? With the addition of tracing, you can now get a peek at what is happening internally within your service. Traces from PollingDuplex will include information about what failed in communicating with your clients and how it was handled.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Enabling tracing is as simple as adding this configuration section in your Web.config file.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<configuration>

  <system.diagnostics>

    <sources>

      <source name="System.ServiceModel.PollingDuplex" switchValue="Information">

        <listeners>

          <add type="System.Diagnostics.DefaultTraceListener" name="Default"/>

          <add name="xml"/>

        </listeners>

      </source>

    </sources>

    <sharedListeners>

      <add initializeData=".\MyPollingDuplexServiceTraces.svclog" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener" name="xml"/>

    </sharedListeners>

    <trace autoflush="true"/>

  </system.diagnostics>

</configuration>

 

Once configured, restart your service. If you use IIS, updating the Web.config will automatically recycle your service. Voila! Tracing is enabled.

Using this configuration, your traces are stored in XML format in a file called MyPollingDuplexServiceTraces.svclog. You can review the content of this file using Service Trace Viewer (SvcTraceViewer.exe). This tool is part of the .NET Framework SDK and is part of a standard Visual Studio install. Below is a sample screen capture of a trace file I generated from a service that seemed to deny clients to connect.

<?xml:namespace prefix = v ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" />

From this, I see that the server is overwhelmed by the number of incoming new client connections. From there, I can try to find a cause. Maybe the server hardware is too slow? Or is the MaxPendingSessions throttle modified to a value that is too low? I also see there is a MaxSessionsPerAddress throttle that is hit. Maybe there is a client that is attempting to open and maintain a large number of connections? In this case, my service is using a Polling Duplex binding set with very low MaxPendingSessions.

Our team hopes you will find this addition useful. Your feedback is always welcome, so please peruse the commenting section. Happy tracing!

-Christopher Scrosati
Developer, Silverlight WCF team

 

Siena, Italy

by gorbatsov

Take a look at building a simple Web site in Blend using states and behaviors. Learn to manage the content and storyboards to add another level of interaction to the site with a simple color changer.

In this webcast, we explore what's new and possible with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) RIA Services and your Microsoft Silverlight application. We show how you can create an entity model and then expose it to your client application and how to build a compelling interface using the data-binding features built into Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.