What kind of semi web developer blog would we be without posting a review of Google’s new browser, Chrome? I don’t know, but we’re not writing one. Instead, we’ve spent the last two days immersing ourselves in Google Chrome to bring you the top 10 things that might just make Chrome worth a glance. Read More »

When it comes to Microsoft products lately, many don’t count a product released until the 1st service pack. Well, for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, the wait is over. Personally, I’ve been using Visual Studio 2008 since they were in beta and I contest it’s still one of the best IDE’s on the planet. The service pack adds some bug fixes and new features that are sure to make most .NET developers happy. Read More »

Being a web developer is hard these days. From Flex to Silverlight and ASP to PHP, the choices of technology is almost endless, and a good developer needs to stay on top of all of it. Here’s a list of my personal favorite blogs related to web design and implementation that might help keep you on the top of things. Read More »

Considering that this website is based around creating easy to follow and useful tutorials, I decided to share the places I go for Flex tutorials and information. Now of course the number one place I would go to find Flex tutorials would be this site, but you already knew that.

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To make sure that our articles don’t get to stall here at Switch on the Code we like to changes things up a little every now and then. That is why we are having this interview. One web application that I personally like very much is an Image editing application named Picnik, which is what brings us to this interview. I decided to email the CTO and Co-Founder of Picnik, Darrin Massena, to get him to answer a few questions about himself, Picnik, and programming with Flex. Read More »

When it comes to web-based technologies, we here at Switch On The Code always try to stay on top of things. When Microsoft announced IE8, I took no time at all downloading, installing, and playing with it. I haven’t used every new feature yet, but here’s a rundown of my first impressions of the new browser. Read More »

Today at Mix08 Microsoft made some big announcements; the one that we are most interested in is the release of Silverlight 2.0 Public Beta. This is a very exciting time to be web developer, especially if your focus is heading towards RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). We have talked about some of the cool features that are going to be in Silverlight 2.0 in the recent past. Also being talked about was IE8 which will touch almost everyone who works in the web. Read More »

If you’ve haven’t heard about Silverlight 2.0 yet, you’re probably living in a dark corner of the world. Just in case you need a refresher, you can check some posts about it here, and here, and here, and here, and pretty much any other developer news site.

Silverlight is definitely in the same realm as Flex, but up until now I couldn’t see why a developer would ever choose Silverlight. As I worked more and more with WPF, I began to realize that if Microsoft were able to port the power of that framework to the web, it would own the RIA space. It looks as though Silverlight 2.0 has made a major leap in that direction. The pairing of .NET 3.5 and WPF has, in my mind, created the best environment for rich applications that currently or has ever existed. We here at Switch On The Code are eagerly awaiting the release of Beta 1 to see if it’s as good as it looks. Read More »

Some big news today for Adobe and the web in general. Today Adobe officially released Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0. Both products are helping enhance desktop and web user experiences. I would suggest anyone creating or planning to create a web application to check them out. Read More »

On our blog here we spend a lot of time doing tutorials for Silverlight and Flex. Because of this I decided that it would be nice to hear from a couple people very close to these products, so I came up with some questions and sent them off to Brad Abrams at Microsoft and Mike Potter at Adobe. Hopefully this will be the first of many question and answer sessions here at Switch On The Code. Read More »

Due to a combination of performance and compatibility issues, I recently rolled back my Vista laptop to Windows XP. Unfortunately, I had to give up one of my favorite features of Windows Vista - the breadcrumbs in the explorer address bar. Fortunately for me, and all of you, the folks over at Quizo’s software have made a plugin that brings the Vista breadcrumbs to Windows XP. The software is called QT Address Bar and I highly recommend checking it out. Read More »

There are some really cool things going on for bringing web applications to the desktop and Adobe AIR, formally Apollo, is one of them. Today they have released Beta 2 of Adobe AIR which was released at Adobe Max. You can download it from here. Read More »

Due to some performance issues I was having with Firefox and sites with a lot of Flash, I decided to give Flashblock a try. I’m not necessarily a proponent of blocking advertisements - this blog uses ads to pay for the bandwidth - however some of my favorite sites were causing some downright unacceptable sluggishness in Firefox. I eventually narrowed the problem down to the many Flash ads some sites put on the page (at the time of writing this, Engadget has six Flash advertisements on their main page).

To my disappoint, however, Flashblock has the unintentional side effect of blocking Silverlight applications. I don’t think the addon is explicitly blocking them. Instead I believe Silverlight simply uses some syntax that Flashblock blocks when blocking ordinary Flash. Read More »

According Scott Guthrie over at ScottGu’s blog, the final version of Silverlight 1.0 has been released. C# support is still only included in the Alpha 1.1 Refresh, so our tutorials will continue to use that runtime. Read More »