Just found a Silverlight game that uses Virtual Earth as a backdrop for a helicopter chasing alien invaders. Check out the game here: http://www.andybeaulieu.com/silverlight/DestroyAll/Default.html

Want to hack yourself? You'll find the source for the game here: http://www.andybeaulieu.com/Home/tabid/67/EntryID/75/Default.aspx

The game is created by Andy Beaulieu.

Today when I had my usual rss read-through I came across a different blog post usually not found at a tech blog. Chris Sacca over at Google writes about a shooting incident he witnessed in San Francisco. Read his dramatic blog post here.

Did you know about this? Have you heard about it before? I didn’t have a clue before I saw Roy Osherove blog post. It turns out that this was the perfect solution for me and my family. I have now integrated my domain (torresdal.net) with Google email and other nice features of Google Apps. Before I always redirected my domain email to my work email. Now I can manage my private emails in a separate location, which is what I really want.

In addition to email there were a couple of other features I found interesting. My fiancée and I found the Google Calendar really useful. Finally we had a common calendar which was easy to use and easily accessible. In addition to those I’ve already mentioned a Start Page, Chat, Web Pages and Docs and Spreadsheets was also included in the service.

So if you have your own custom domain and want to use Gmail/Chat with yourname@yourdomain.com, Google App’s should be a nice solution. Not that I’ve tried or looked for anything else, I just tried this service and found it very useful.

First thing I thought about when I heard about WPF/E was that it's Microsoft's answer to Flash. Nothing wrong with that, but now when I saw the official name I thought the exact same thing! Silverlight, Flash, silverlight, flash.... Hmmmm... Just another name for flash :) I wonder if this was what they meant. At least they didn't end up with Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation for Extreme Internet Graphical User Interface (MWPFEIGUI) or something like that. Guess they saw the blog post over at Secret Geek. Anyway, I'm looking forward to do some real coding on Silverlight and for the record; here are the official Silverlight page.

Update: For more info about Silverlight, check out Mary Jo Foley's blog post.

In case you missed it, MS AJAX 1.0 is now released. Now you can play for real :) Check out Scott Guthrie's blog for details. Or if you want to go strait for the download, you'll find it at ajax.asp.net.

When I moved my blog from Blogger to DasBlog I wanted to keep rss.xml and atom.xml, and redirect them to the new DasBlog url’s. I googled a bit but didn’t find much. And the ones I found I wasn’t able to use (maybe because I’m running Vista RC2). Anyway, last night enough was enough and I decided to put this to an end. I started to look at IIS’s config file applicationHost.config (usually found at C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config) and one section got my attention: <httpRedirect enabled="false" />

The problem was finding schema documentation for this element. After a while I found this (http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=25&i=946&p=24). To solve my problem I used this:

<httpRedirect     enabled="true"

exactDestination="true”

httpResponseStatus="Permanent">

        <add      wildcard="/rss.xml"

destination="/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss" />

        <add      wildcard="/atom.xml"

destination="/SyndicationService.asmx/GetAtom" />

</httpRedirect>

So if you have a similar problem I hope this helps.

Update:
I upgraded to Vista Release and suddenly the redirect didn't work anymore. I tried and tried and tried and gave up. I tried again and came over this:

That nailed it. Don't know why I didn't see this before, but it would be nice though if the error message said something about enabling this feature.

During the day I found two new releases. Asp.net Ajax RC is out (http://ajax.asp.net/) and Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is released (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/vs2005sp1/default.aspx). I vote for Monday releases, so we can get paid testing them. Since I can’t keep my hands off these two, my weekend is ruined! :) Enjoy!

Update: You might want to have a look at Scott Guthrie’s blog before running the installation. He has some tips you should have a look at. Both for pre Vista and Vista operation systems. You'll find his post on vs sp1 here and vista here.

There has been a lot of confusion around web2.0. Who’s better to reduce this confusion than Martin Fowler! Check out his latest blog post about this topic. I especially found this interesting:

"A common misconception I run into is that Web 2.0 is all new stuff. Most of the ideas under Web 2.0 are actually quite old and have been used on the web from early on, for instance Amazon's community or the use of Wikis. The point is that then they were the minority. The Web 2.0 shift is about the principles that were used by a few in the 90's becoming the majority in the future."

And just to clarify even further, Web 2.0 is not a product; you cannot buy it in any store! :)

Scott Guthrie (General Manager at Microsoft Developer Division) writes in his blog that ASP.Net AJAX Beta 1 was released on Friday! If you want to download go here, for more information go to http://ajax.asp.net/ or se Scott’s blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/.

I have not done any real development in any language supporting the AJAX phenomenon yet, so I’m really excited to get started and see what all the fuzz is about.