Beginning with version 2.5 (currently in Preview Edition) building Silverlight 2 applications, and especially assembling the User Interface components such as items from the toolbox, and layout controls, is easier than ever. A Note on This Tutorial. The history of the material for this tutorial is that Scott Guthrie wrote a terrific introduction to this material at the end of February, which he gave me permission to turn into a series of videos, currently (or soon to be) available on Silverlight.NET. This tutorial completes the circle by building on the videos and integrating the material into the Silverlight Tutorial series. The project we’re setting out to build is very similar to the Silverlight chat service built by ScottGu, and is shown in Figure 5-1
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The popular fifth-generation Sentra sedan, introduced in 2001, gets further styling tweaks and added convenience features to keep it competitive in the econocar/ pocket-rocket segment. For 2004, the Sentra receives redesigned front and rear fascias and a newly styled hood. Interior upgrades on the 2.5S, SE-R, and SE-R Spec V include an enhanced Rockford Fosgate sound system and a trip computer as standard equipment, while the SE-R Spec V gets Skyline-style sport bucket seats. Power choices remain a fuel-thrifty 126-hp, 1.8-liter four-cylinder engine in the 1.8 and 1.8S models and, for a good deal more oomph, a 165-hp, 2.5-liter four-banger in the 2.5S and SE-R. But for a wilder ride we recommend the more powerful and responsive 175-hp, 2.5-liter version in the wicked little SE-R Spec V, which also gets a new brake package with quicker-stopping Brembo front discs.
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It’s been called the essence of Web 2.0. It’s the ability to combine pieces of different web sites to create something new, something meaningful. Something for you and the people who have your tastes. Your social network. Not some mass market portal built by corporate programmers who think that they know you and your personal tastes.
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Many developers will have read Herb Sutter’s article “The Free Lunch is Over” which talks about the future speed increases of CPUs. The good news is that they will get significantly faster, but the bad news is that you won’t see all of the possible performance gains unless you write your application to take advantage of them. Over the last few years the increase in clock speeds has slowed down, and chip manufacturers are focussing more and more on concurrent execution of code. Hyperthreading was the first step, which allows a single processor core to execute two threads in parallel, but the future is multi-core chips which will allow many threads to execute truly independently. Intel is already talking about chips with over a hundred cores, so if your code is single-threaded you may only be using one hundredth of the available processing power!
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Of the many innovations the Internet has brought us, one of the most visible is online shopping. The advantages for merchants are clear lower overheads in both staff and shop space, provision of greater convenience for their customers, 24/7 and international availability of the store, and the ability to compete on a far more level playing field with larger companies. The spread of internet shopping sites is a testament to all of these.
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The Microsoft Office 2007 suite utilizes a new file format known as Open XML. This new format introduces an “x” at the end of the file extension (see Figure 1) and will affect compatibility between the versions for the following programs: Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
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Typical content distribution solutions are based on placing dedicated equipment inside or at the edge of the Internet. The best example of such solutions is Akamai [1], which runs several tens of thousands of servers all over the world. In recent years, a new paradigm for Content Distribution has emerged based on a fully distributed architecture where commodity PCs are used to form a cooperative network and share their resources (storage, CPU, bandwidth).
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The vast majority of Chart types offered by Excel should NEVER be used! Our next example shows the graph-types available as pyramid charts. None of these choices shown below represent good graphs! All but the last one display false third dimensions. In addition they all suggest stacked displays that are known to be poor ways to make comparisons.
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