For those who don’t know, DreamSpark throws free software at students (after verifying their student-hood, of course). I previously wrote about using DreamSpark to get and use a free OS in place of Vista over here.

Now, keeping the awesomeness of DreamSpark in mind, Expression 3 was only very recently released. A number of threads have popped up on the internet, with the most notable first result for me being this thread on Channel 8. Coupled with requests from other students I personally know as well as faculty from schools near the DC area (thanks for reading, guys!), I figured I’d look into it.

There’s good news, and there’s the news which isn’t exactly bad. I’ll spill the news which isn’t exactly bad first.

There’s no official target date on getting Expression Studio 3 up on DreamSpark, nor will it be available in July, nor is the target timeframe a certainty or guarantee. There; that’s the news which isn’t exactly bad.

The good news: the target timeframe is still before the point when classes start for many of you. The word, as given by a Microsoft spokesperson, is that a “target timeframe would be [the] end of August.”

If you can’t wait ‘til then, go grab Expression Studio 2 from DreamSpark right now. Otherwise, show some patience, be awesome, and grab Expression Studio 3 once it drops for you guys for free in a month. Cheers to dreamers at Channel 8 for holding out, and I’ll have an update for people once a specific date has been settled upon.

This post was originally supposed to be about why blu is faster with WPF, hence the tweet in the image, but after some digging, an equally unusual happening supplanted my original purpose for this post. If you decide to download blu, feel free to follow me as well; blu is a fine application if you don’t mind the occasional random crashing.

When Vista was being developed, the ability to magnify WPF vector graphics was included as an accessibility feature: vectors scaled in the magnifier on a WPF app would be easier to see and read, thus making this feature highly beneficial for those with diminishing sight. However, down the road, the WPF guys decided to scratch this feature in SP1.

Now, before I start, it’s best to know what vector graphics are. Outside the usual jokes about vectors thrown around during the Longhorn days when Aero Diamond managed to be a very persistent rumor, not many people actually understand the benefits of vector graphics over raster images (or, for that matter, what a vector graphic even is).

• Raster images are built pixel-by-pixel stacked like brickwork to generate an image. Because of this, raster images aren’t any good once you start zooming in and seeing the individual pixels. Generally, raster images are great for photographs simply because there’s far too much detail to be captured through points and lines, which brings us to vectors.
• Vector graphics, on the other hand, are built using a series of points connected together by way of instructions for various types of lines. Along with fill, effect, and other instructions generally used to make things look pretty, that’s really all a vector graphic is. Because of this, vector graphics are great for web graphics and other computer-generated things which don’t require photographic precision (Corporate logos are a great example).  Thanks to the fact that vector graphics are rendered upon request, they’re infinitely scalable; all you’re doing when scaling a vector graphic is scaling the math behind the scenes.

Here’s the thing: this feature was supposedly nixed from Vista SP1, but before I found out about this, I tried scaling blu in the magnifier. The text scaled just fine, while the rest of the app did not (though this second bit could just be due to how blu was designed). I tested this out in Windows 7 and found that vector scaling in the magnifier was also kept out of Windows 7, as you can see by the fact that the text in blu is not magnified in Windows 7’s magnifier.

Well, if you take a look at the leading image at the top of this post, you’ll clearly see that vector scaling works in Vista SP1 at least with text (the unmagnified app is to the left).

Anyone have any ideas? I should note that I am on Vista SP1, and I do have .net 3.5 installed.

The wide world that is the internet may have successfully convinced you that Microsoft just released this wonderful, mystical new blogging front-end for use on ASP.NET servers (Windows hosting, for those of you who just grab shared plans and run with them rather than learning nitty gritty details). There’s a problem with this interpretation of what Oxite is, and the fault lies with those who nearly emulated a recent Saturday Night Live Short with the Oxite announcement. To be fair, part of the fault lay with the MIX Labs description of Oxite, but that has since been mostly corrected. Update: or not. MIX Online still calls it “an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites.”

What is Oxite? First of all, it’s not a competitor to Wordpress, MovableType, Drupal, or any other completed blogging front end or CMS. It’s not meant to be any of those. It’s meant to be a code sample, a foundation, a building block for those looking to create something like Wordpress for their own sites. According to Jeff Sandquist of Channel 8, 9, 10, and MIX Online fame, “it is a developer sample. period.”

On the other hand, these guys didn’t just toss it up there for no reason at all. Oxite was made public in order to encourage developers to do something with it. The only example that’s online right now is the site for MIX Online, though this could change once developers begin using Oxite as a base to build their own Microsoft-centric blogging/content platforms.

Basically, if you hate Community Server (who doesn’t?) and have some spare time and ASP.NET knowledge on your hands, Oxite might be just what you need. Even if it isn’t something you’ve had in mind, it’s a perfect base for a hobby project.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the news about Oxite, you can pick up the code sample at codeplex and you can see the MIX Online implementation of Oxite live. The single biggest benefit to Oxite is that, unlike Community Server which costs tons to implement and even more to maintain, building a solution atop Oxite costs far less in the long run for business and is far more safely extensible for everyone.

AeroXperience may host a contest for developers willing to work some magic with Oxite down the road, though this depends on the level of interest.

Mike held a small roundtable for a number of pressies. He gave a quick rundown of things you all basically already know, so I took the time to ask a few questions which kept you guys in mind. The questions I asked:

• What’s the difference between “API Complete” (build 6801) is and “Feature Complete” (Beta 1)?
• Why were lots of code samples and features being shown off for the Superbar at PDC when developers can’t develop for it? (Rafael’s extension of my API v. Feature Complete question)
• Why were the sensor demonstrations missing from the Windows 7 keynote today?

The answers to these questions can be found in the true-to-life* transcript after the break.

*Given that this is a transcript, it may be wrought with grammatical errors, but this is exactly how the chat went down.

Bryant: I had a question which I had myself but my colleague Rafael phrased it much better than I did, and it kinda ties into your note about how the build given to developers here at PDC this week is “API Complete” whereas the builds you were… whereas beta 1 is going to be “Feature Complete” or at least that’s the attempt… my own question is: what’s the difference between “API Complete” and “Feature Complete”? More specifically, Rafael’s question is, um, he noted that there are a lot of sessions at PDC talking about the superbar, and developing for the superbar, and one session that he went to had a lot of code samples being shown, but he also took note that developers can’t even develop for it because the superbar isn’t even in the build.

Mike: So the question really is, first of all, “What’s the difference between ‘API Complete’ and ‘Feature Complete’, and what is a developer to do who wants to write software that takes advantage of features that aren’t in the current ‘M3’ build.” So API complete, um, says that all the interfaces that developers are gonna code to… are in the product, and the third milestone of Windows 7 always had the goal of being API complete, which means  we’re not going to add any more APIs subsequently. Feature complete means that all the functions that are gonna be part of Windows 7 are in that build, and our beta, which will ship early next year [in time for CES], will be Feature Complete. The real – One of the hard questions we had… which we faced, is “Well, do we give everyb—do we only demo the API Complete release even though we have been working since September when we cut M3, do we demo more than the M3 build” and the answer is “aaah! We only have these developers together that often. It’d seem like kind-of a shame to not show them everything we had,” which then begged the question “Well why don’t you just give them the build that Steven used on stage?” which was the stuff from last Friday. The answer is “Well, in order to stabilize that, we woulda had to start stabilizing it back in August to be done in September (which is kinda what we did), so we couldn’t give you something from last Friday at this scale, or at the same time, it’d seem like a shame to not show you everything that we had. So what you see here is that optimization. Is it perfect? No. I think the other thing—hey well I could tell anybody anything til it’s all the way done. The problem there is, you don’t give the ecosystem the chance to get going. So, you are here a little bit watching the sausage being made in the sense that you’re watching us have this dialog with our partners to make sure that they are ready so that when we get to beta, there’s some momentum for Windows 7, and then certainly as we get towards general availability for Windows 7, there’s a healthy set of things that take advantage of Windows 7 that are out there.

Bryant: So, I guess tying back into the API Complete v. Feature Complete stuff, could a developer develop for the superbar in 6801?

Mike: Certain aspects of it, yes; certain aspects of it, no.

Bryant: Okay.

Mike: and some of that is sorta enough work to do between now and then that when the beta comes out they can get, you know, have all those features be there.

Bryant: Okay, thanks.

Mike: Great question.

Bryant: A few more questions, I guess, but… in the keynote that I saw today, there was one thing that was notably absent, and that was the sensor demos which were later discussed in the expo hall. Are you guys saving the sensor demonstrations — like the accelerometer demos, the touch demos and such… well not the touch demos so much but mostly just sensor work) — but are you saving that more for… WinHEC?

Mike: If I told you, I’d have to kill you.

Some other pressie: Cool!

Mike: Okay, here’s the challenge. Today was the first time that we talked about Windows 7 in any scale, and I’d say, again, sorta the… how advanced this thing is – this phase, we’re further along than we’ve been at least in a long time. How much do people know? We’ve held a lot more back than ever, so today was like “WOW; lot to talk about and not a lot of time,” and we had to be sorta choiceful about what we talked about.

Bryant: Yeah.

Mike: Next week we have WinHEC – things that are about sorta the core of Windows 7 by default happened here. Things that are more… developer oriented… happened here. Things that are more hardware oriented, without being specific, you could expect to be in a convention center not unlike this one in a town with the same zipcode.

[laughter]

Mike: Yeah, in about a week.

Summary:

• What is API Complete v. Feature Complete? API Complete has the developer bits ready for the developers to work with, even if some of them are dead-ends for now. Feature Complete expands on this by making all of the APIs functional.
• Why were code samples and such being shown off for the Superbar? Developers will be able to code for it anyway, but they’ll have enough to work with between now and Beta 1 that once Beta 1 hits the scene, they’ll have a good amount of code that doesn’t require functional awareness actually prepared.
• Why were the sensor bits missing from the Windows 7 keynote? Because it’s more relevant to WinHEC, but there’s a session on that which I’ll be covering today, so it’s all good.

There you have it. I’ll be covering today’s sensor demonstration at 10:30 today. I look forward to bringing you what I see.