Apple Ipad Launched

Apple has officially introduced the iPad tablet computer. The iPad is designed to be a revolutionary device for browsing the web, reading and sending e-mail, viewing photos, watching movies, listening to music and reading e-books. The $500 base iPad includes a high-resolution Multi-Touch display and is just .5” thick and will be available in late March. The iPad is powered by a custom 1GHz Apple “A4” chip and includes built-in WiFi and optional 3G wireless. The 1.5-pound device boasts a 9.7” screen (1024 x 768) and a battery life of 10 hours. The iPad is managed by iTunes and just like an iPhone, it can run all of the various applications found at Apple’s App Store too.

iPad runs almost all of the over 140,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®. The iTunes® Store gives you access to the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 11 million songs, over 50,000 TV episodes and over 8,000 films including over 2,000 in stunning high definition video. Apple also announced the new iBooks app for iPad, which includes Apple’s new iBookstore, the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile device. The iBookstore will feature books from major and independent publishers.

Microsoft Launches Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Microsoft has announced the availability of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers.

Microsoft will shed more light on Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4 and all of its other developer technologies at its upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) to be held in Los Angeles November 17-19

What’s New with Beta 2
With this release the Web Tools team has introduced a number of great improvements. A number of these improvements are listed below.
New Template

Using the default ASP.NET web site template, projects now come with a pre-configured site. This template configures your site to use master and content pages. In addition, it has styles pre-defined and controls for login, register and changing your password.

Silverlight 3 Tooling Support
While Dev10 tooling for Beta 1 has Silverlight 2 features that worked with Silverlight 3, Beta 2 now re-introduces all the Silverlight 3 features directly into Visual Studio.

Changes include:

1. Support for configuring Out of browser (see screenshot below).
2. Support for Transparent Platform Extensions.
3. Page.xaml renamed to MainPage.xaml.
4. Removal of support for Silverlight 

Parameterization of Web Packages 

VS will automatically parameterize the connection strings defined in the web.config and the destination virtual application name.  The users can specify customized parameters in parameters.xml file in the project directory as well, to parameterize configurations, such as WCF service’s end point etc. 

Import from web.config file for DB deployment Web application’s Deploy SQL property page provided a button “Import from web.config”, which will import the web.config connection string names to the connection list, with the connection strings as their package source.