Yahoo! Pipes is a great idea implemented by Yahoo! with an incredibly amazing user interface. When I first played with I just shocked and suspected about flashy stuff. However it is based on only Javascript with the help of Yahoo’s great Yahoo! User Interface Library on the back-end.

The idea is simple to explain if you know the pipes from the operating systems. Basically linking the output of something to the input of something else or vice versa. Something in this case is the RSS feeds or web services provided from different sources.

Pipes are one of the main concepts in parallel computing for pipelining the process. Since web is enormously distributed, what you can do is infinite. There are some operators available like for each, count, sort, filter that you can do various operations to the feeds. So with this tool, you can parallellise web and get the processed result.

The create pipe user interface is very similar to the IDE interface even it has a debugger as we used to do. On the left you have the toolbox and you have the design surface where you drag and drop the components.  Beside creating your own pipes, you can also use people’s pipes as well.

It has been more than a year since Atlas is out. I remember playing with the first hands-on-labs for doing a search query. I also really liked the Ajax Control Toolkit since the first day, still using two controls in a project. Now that baby is out of CTP, BETA and ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is released. A lot has changed since it’s first release. The objects in javascript library, the method names, object names and the product name have changed. As a result, we have 2 separate products. ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0 (Client and Server), ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit . There is one more product which is ASP.NET AJAX Futures January CTP. This is the additional javascript library to provide additional functionality.

Interestingly, it has been shipped with source code.  There is no escape for the client source code release but they also include the server side controls which is good. Although we don’t have the server side controls code, Scott Guthrie announced the server side controls source code will  be released shortly. Client side is released with Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) and server side with Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL).  The client side is more flexible in terms of license to extend the library.  

Thanks to the team…

Scott Guthrie and his team at Microsoft has released a new product code named WPF/E. It looks like a flash replacement for Internet Explorer browser with some additional features. First of all, it only works with Internet Explorer, I think if they don’t give support to other platforms and other browsers, although WPF/E seems really great, it might not be popular as flash.

We want some standards to look our applications look the same on every platform. I have never programmed flash scripts before and I am sure that Microsoft will provide that easy to developers. However if it is only for IE, I don’t think many of the developers will use it.

I don’t understand that new approach as well. The products like Virtual Earth or Photosynth and this only works for Internet Explorer because they use Activex. I don’t know if they will support other platforms but since it’s developed on ActiveX I don’t think they will give any support.

Just a great blog poster from Microsoft Live team, Windows Live Writer. A fully featured blog writer with the support of trackbacks, image editing, image uploads, spell checking.. I am just posting this with Live Writer on wordpress blog and looks very cool. I didn’t like any blog posting tools for while. Lastly I just tried performancing for firefox, I was thinking of using it till I saw this tool.

You don’t have to configure the API’s URL you only type the URL of your blog and writer recognizes your blog api and all the settings you need to post.  The view settings are nice, you can edit the html code and WYSIWG. Also you can view your site’s theme before you post.

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