General news around the Internet

A handy SDK for Facebook apps: www.microsoft.com/facebooksdk

In my Master’s thesis I used Adobe Flash (AS3) and creating games is quite easy in Flash. It’s an ECMA language as is Java, so it’s easy to work with. On the other hand the backend integration is quite tricky. Adobe Flash Media Server is not free, and the universities don’t have licenses for it either. That caused me a lot of problems which were learning experiences for me, but figuring out which open source projects would work was not related to the learning goals I had been trying to achieve with my interactive educational platform. It would be much easier to use .NET development through the entire project than try to provide Bridges between different programming languages through socket programming.

Since there is already guides about ASP.NET development and Facebook, in my opinion it will be easiest to integrate Silverlight with that. Microsoft provides a number of free downloads and free licenses for university students including Visual Studio, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, etc. through the official Microsoft student website www.dreamspark.com, so it’s easy for student projects to get access to their products. Also, the really interesting thing about using Silverlight for your Facebook project would be that it would also work with the new Windows Phone 7 platform that will be released later in 2010.

Andrew Parsons from Microsoft gives some pointers about how to make your on-campus marketing campaign successful. Maybe google or apple should watch this and learn!

EU accuses Microsoft of harming browser competition (Reuters) by Reuters: Yahoo! Tech .
Microsoft is getting hit with more and more accusations. Since they bundle IE with Windows, they have achieved a huge saturation of the market. But the main complaint about IE is that it’s been non-compliant with Internet standards for years. Web designers have had to design for IE, not the Internet, which means that it’s not really Internet Explorer, it’s Microsoft’s Version of the Internet Explorer. Firefox and other browsers have innovated things like plugins. Now some open-sourcers have created a plug-in for IE that renders compliant internet code, IE is moving toward that too, but it’s too bad that it takes this kind of action to move Windows towards providing support.

Microsoft ‘Stay-At-Home’ Servers – PC World.

Some people at Microsoft are really strange. They are given license to make crazy videos to explain how parents can answer bizarre questions like “Mommy, why’s there a server in the house?” Seriously, watch the video. You’ll really freak out at the outlandishness. You never know, perhaps next Microsoft will offer Feng Shui for a server.

Tough Economic Times Can Be Opportunity for IT Pros: Microsoft technologies help secure the role of IT through business innovation and cost savings..
Tech-Ed sounds like a place for technology in education, but it’s not. Instead, it’s Microsoft’s conference that is a kind of ad for Microsoft. A lot of it is online at the above address.