The new Silverlight release in particular is big news. Over 1/3 of Internet devices have installed version 2 since its launch less than nine months ago.

Microsoft also announced that MGM and NBC Sports are using Silverlight for different forthcoming video efforts.

"NBC Sports has evaluated many different technologies for delivering high-quality experiences online, and none have delivered the video quality, scalability and business value that Microsoft Silverlight has consistently brought," said erkins Miller, senior vice president of Digital Media at NBC Sports. "As we look forward to the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver as well as other major championships in 2010, we will be using Silverlight as the preferred technology to deliver the best in next-generation online high-definition video experiences."

Microsoft says it has over 300 partners in 30 countries helping customers design and develop with Silverlight and Expression. These include leading content delivery networks, solution providers, and independent software vendors.

"Silverlight and Expression fill a clear need in the marketplace for a complete end-to-end solution that makes it easy for development teams to work together effectively, from concept to deployment, to create the types of rich interactive experiences today’s users expect," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft.

New features with these releases of Silverlight and Expression include: 

- Expression SketchFlow. Available to customers just four months after its initial debut at MIX09, SketchFlow provides development teams unrivaled capabilities to rapidly prototype applications and take their ideas from concept to reality.

- Out of Browser. Silverlight 3 provides the seamless ability to add out-of-browser, connected and disconnected scenarios for cross-platform applications, radically improving the productivity and capabilities over traditional RIAs.

- IIS Smooth Streaming. As part of Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7) Media Services and combined with Silverlight 3, IIS Smooth Streaming enables the industry’s first HDTV-quality (1080p) video experiences with rich interactivity for both on-demand and live video.

Silverlight 3 can be downloaded immediately. If you already use Silverlight, you should be automatcially upgraded. Expression 3 should be available in the next 30 days.

ComCity, creators of the ecommerce solution SalesCart, said today that it has released a new ecommerce shopping cart software add-in for Expression Web called SalesCart Express.

Microsoft Expression Web is Microsoft’s newest Web site design tool that replaced Microsoft FrontPage in December of 2006. The release of SaleCart Express goes along with Microsoft’s announcement earlier in the year that it had discontinued its own ecommerce offering B-Central.

Now B-Central users can upgrade their shopping carts and ecommerce Web sites to Expression Web and to SalesCart Express.

"We believe that SalesCart Express will once again allow everyday merchants to add full featured shopping cart capabilities securely to their web site using Microsoft Expression", said Michael Barber, president and CEO of ComCity.

I learned it back in 1988 and it’s sure gotten a lot more powerful since then. Recently I had a chance to sit down with a few Adobe teams (Photoshop and Premiere are coming soon) to catch up on what Adobe’s been doing lately. Here Phil Guindi product manager on the Illustrator team demonstrates to me and talks me through a bunch of the newest stuff. It’s long, but if you’re a graphic designer you’ll probably see a few new things.

Even if you’re not you’ll learn a lot about how this app is used to create much of the imagery you see all around you (most billboards, for instance, are created in Illustrator and so are many Flash and Silverlight animations — the design folks at Microsoft still used Adobe Illustrator a lot when I worked there because it’s such a powerful tool — of course Microsoft is trying to switch everyone over to its Expression Suite).

Sorry for taking the week off with my show. Rocky’s mom died on Sunday which put us behind. Thanks to Ryanne Hodson for filling in while Rocky’s tending to family affairs.

Comments

Other movie industry-focused blogs try to delve deeper into the soft white underbelly of Hollywood, and race to the Internet with what they find. As to how well they do this, Bart and a couple of noteworthy blogs disagree.

“While the blogosphere has its share of heroes, it’s also populated by pseudo-journalists who have never done a fact check or apologized to a public figure whose career may have been damaged by their bizarre rants,” Bart said of bloggers. “They pose a challenge to the gatekeepers and the high priests of publicity who must figure out how to deal with them.”

Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net called Bart’s article “full of lies about publication dates that they break themselves,” and suggested Bart’s rant stems from Variety running out of steam.

“Don’t scrap the rules entirely, but adapt them to fit into this new world,” said Billington. “Press has changed, and it no longer allows for months of publication time and extensive fact checking. Grant access to everyone, don’t be so restrictive to only

This is fascinating, but even more so is the comments on her post. People from 30Boxes, AIM, etc. are telling how their service does something similar. That’s interesting in that I had no idea there were companies doing this AND in that these companies know that these comments will resonate to a targeted audience that they want to reach.

From a marketing standpoint, this clearly demonstrates the need to follow not only your name online, but conversations that are of import to your company. No search feed would have clued these people into Emily’s post.

These are likely either 1-regular readers of her feed or 2-regular Techmeme readers (being that the post is now on Techmeme). Either way, they are plugged in enough to know how to mention their company without sounding spammy at all. In fact, they have added their commentary to a blog post that is very relevant to their company.

No advertising will give these companies what these guys just gave them:

1. The real attention of a vocal, and well-read, blogger

2. The focused, relevant attention of all her readers

3. The attention of all the Techmeme readers who clicked through to read Emily’s post

Impressive on all accounts. Make it someone’s job to follow relevant feeds and comment when appropriate (and only then). If you don’t have someone on your team to do this, hire someone. This is WOM at its finest.

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Google counts links from blogs in its search engine. So, if Microsoft wants to get something higher on Google, all it would have to do is call upon its bloggers. It’s probably the best SEO network the world has ever seen (Microsoft has more than 3,000 bloggers, with at least 500 active ones).

Internally, how does this work? The bloggers at Microsoft have a mailing list. Someone goes on the mailing list and says something innocuous, like “hey, the Expression team just announced Blend” with a URL underneath and there’ll usually be a few dozen posts in an hour.

Don’t think this matters? Well, if you search Google for Martin Luther King, you’ll notice the result set has changed quite a bit from two weeks ago (when a bunch of bloggers decided to “Google Bomb” an anti-King site to make it lower on the list because we felt it wasn’t really the most relevant result that should come up when you search for Martin Luther King).

Anyway, this kind of “blog farm” can dramatically change results on Google and other search engines in a way that SEO’s just simply can’t match.

Oh, and even better, they set the agenda that everyone has to link back to. Yes, even the bloggers will go higher. A search for “Expression Blend” on Google’s blog search shows dozens of bloggers talking about the new name and release.

As to Blend and its chances in the marketplace? More later.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

By leveraging the .NET Framework you can do absolutely anything in no time, but is that power also the problem with ASP.NET?

In the dark ages before ASP.NET, we were stuck with ASP and PHP but we were just as enthusiastic about them as we are with ASP.NET now.

They were relative easy to learn and to learn well enough to do something really cool with in a short period of time.

That made them accessible to almost anyone with just a will to learn and in my opinion that’s what made the web what it is today.

ASP.NET changed all that.

The power and scale of it was so immense that it could take years to be familiar with just the page life cycle or the basic classes in the CLR and even longer to be able to take full advantage of the entire platform.

After almost 5 years I still find classes and methods I didn’t know existed.

That makes ASP.NET much more difficult to learn and master than ASP and PHP.

The tools used to build ASP.NET web applications, Visual Studio, Visual Web Developer Express and Expression Web Designer, are also much more advanced than the earlier tools.

The traditional webmaster now has to be a full blooded programmer just to be able to open up a user control’s code-behind file to add another item to a DropDownList.

HomeSite, TextPad and Dreamweaver 4 were much easier and simpler at the time for editing ASP and PHP files.

My point is that the very essence that started the dynamic web is missing out on ASP.NET because it is too difficult.

The hobby web developers and the newcomers face a much steeper learning curve, which might lead them to choose another platform.

I believe in the power of ASP.NET, but then again, I’m neither a hobbyist nor a newcomer.

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Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/

One of the cool things I discovered was that MySQL supports regex in SQL queries. How about some examples….

Consider a typical OR style search like the query below:

select id
from products
where name like '%alpha%'
or name like '%beta%'

By using the regex support in MySQL, you can rewrite it as:

select id
from products
where name regexp '(alpha|beta)'

MySQL doesn’t support the full set of regular expressions you use in ColdFusion or Perl, but it does support most of what you would use normally.

That includes beginning and end of line matches, character classes, ranges, and matching certain numbers of items.

A few more quick notes: The MySQL Regex escape character is two back slashes.

So for example, \\. will escape the . character.

Secondly – to do case sensitive regular expressions, you use the binary keyword:

select id
from products
where name regexp binary 'Camden'

Lastly – do know that when you use regex in MySQL, the engine has to check each and every line to see if your regex matches.

This may lead to slower performance.

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Raymond Camden, ray@camdenfamily.com
http://ray.camdenfamily.com

Raymond Camden is Vice President of Technology for roundpeg, Inc. A long
time ColdFusion user, Raymond has worked on numerous ColdFusion books
and is the creator of many of the most popular ColdFusion community web
sites. He is an Adobe Community Expert, user group manager, and the
proud father of three little bundles of joy.

I do. I was a user of that back before Microsoft owned it (back when it was Vermeer FrontPage).

No tool introduced in the 1990s brought about such contentious debates (most serious Web developers avoided it and held their noses with disdain, mostly cause it was famous for changing your HTML that you hand coded).

Me, I didn’t mind that it changed my HTML. I didn’t want to write HTML anyway. I thought the Web should work like Microsoft Word. Why the hell did we need to write all these little codes like <p> and <h3> and <i>?

That’s the way the Web was back in the good old days. You opened up your editor (NotePad) and typed in HTML by hand.

Yes, today such a thing seems incredibly stupid (but you can still try it, in WordPress there’s a little button marked “HTML” – click it and then you too can experience what developing Web sites in 1994 was like).

Anyway, I tried all the Web editing tools and found FrontPage was the most interesting because it joined a decent editor with a server that could add cool things to your Web site and take them further than most of us could just by coding by hand.

Anyway, that all explains the past of Microsoft’s newest Web editor, Expression. Microsoft is running away from its FrontPage brand because it was so damaged by the impression that it wasn’t a “serious” Web development tool.

I just saw over on Aaron Brethorst’s blog that beta 1 of that has shipped.

Expression, on the other hand, is definitely a serious tool, I got a demo of this before I left Microsoft and it’s quite impressive.

One problem, though.

I think that the way to publish to the Web is to use a blogging tool like WordPress or Moveable Type, or use a content management tool like Drupal.

In such a world Expression doesn’t seem to fit in very well.

But maybe I’m wrong. What do you think? Are you even going to try it? Why or why not?

UPDATE: Aaron just wrote me and said that even with tools like WordPress and Drupal you still need an editor to design the templates and that Expression fits in well here.

That’s an awesome point. I’m downloading now.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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Regex is a very powerful technique to describe patterns and many programs use them to describe sequences of characters to be matched. Search programs such as ‘grep’ rely heavily on regex. Basically regex forms the core in the linux world. Many scripting languages such as perl, ruby, php…etc have built-in regex functions as well. So you can see, learning regular expression is important because they are used alot in many places and probably more so in the future.

Regex can be scary at first but if you can get the basics, it is really not too hard to understand. In this article, we are going to look at how regex comes into the picture when writing php applications.

To do a quick summary so far, a regular expression is a sequence of literal characters, wildcards, modifiers and anchors.

Literal Characters

Literal characters are letters, digits and special characters that match only themselves. Examples are abc, 123, ~@ and so on (some characters are reserved though).

- An inclusion range [m-n] matches one of any character included in the range from m to n. Example ‘[a-z]‘ will match any alpha character that falls within the a to z range.

- An exclusion range [^m-n] matches one of any character not included in the range from m to n. Example ‘[^0-9]‘ will match any non-digit character.

- A period “.” matches any character. It is also known as the wildcard. Example ‘a.c’ will match ‘aec’, ‘acc’, ‘a@a’ and so on.

- The escape character ” enables interpretation of special characters. Example ‘a.c’ will match ‘ac’ only. Remember that ‘.’ is a reserved character to represent a wildcard? Therefore to match a period, ie ‘.’, we need to escape it like so ‘.’

- The expression [:alnum:] will match all alpha-numeric characters. It is a shortcut to [A-Za-z0-9]. As you can see, it is not really a shortcut. The expression [:alnum:] might be easier to remember for some people.

- The expression [:alpha:] will match all alpha characters. It is a shortcut to [A-Za-z].

- The expression [:blank:] will match a space or tab.

- The expression [:digit:] will match a numeric digit. It is a shortcut to [0-9].

- The expression [:lower:] will match all lowercase letters. It is a shortcut to [a-z].

- The expression [:upper:] will match all uppercase letters. It is a shortcut to [A-Z].

- The expression [:punct:] will match all printable characters, excluding spaces and alphanumerics.

- The expression [:space:] will match a whitespace character.

Modifiers

A modifier alters the meaning of the immediately preceding pattern character.

- An asterisk (‘*’) matches 0 or more of the preceding term. Example ‘a*’ will match ”, ‘a’, ‘aa’, ‘aaaaa’ and so on (Note the use of ”. It simply means that the expression matches nothing as well).

- A question mark (‘?’) matches 0 or 1 of the preceding term. Example ‘a?’ will match ” and ‘a’ only.

- A plus sign (‘+’) matches 1 or more of the preceding term. Example ‘a+’ will match ‘a’, ‘aaaaaaa’ and so on. It will not match ”.

- {m,n} matches between m and n occurences of the preceding term. Example ‘a{1,3}’ will match ‘a’, ‘aa’ and ‘aaa’ only.

- {n} matches exactly n occurences of the preceding term. Example ‘a{2}’ will match ‘aa’ only.

Anchors

Anchors establish the context for the pattern such as “the beginning of a word” or “end of word”.

- The pike ‘^’ marks the beginning of a line. Example ‘^http’ will match any new line that starts with ‘http’.

- The dollar sign ‘$’ marks the end of a line. Example ‘after$’ will match any line that ends with ‘after’. (Variables in php starts with $. Try not to confuse with it).

Grouping

Grouping ‘( )’ allows modifiers to apply to groups of regex specifiers instead of only the immediately proceding specifier. Example ‘( aa | bb )’ will match either ‘aa’ or ‘bb’

Enough of the boring stuff, it is time to put what the theory of regex is into good use.

PHP Implementation

There are 2 main variants of regex, Perl-compatible regex (PCRE) and POSIX-Extended. PHP offers quite alot of functions to implement these 2 types of regex. In PHP, the most commonly used PCRE function is ‘preg_match’ and in POSIX-extended regex, ‘ereg’. Both syntax are slightly different but equally powerful. The preference to use ‘preg_match’ or ‘ereg’ is entirely up to individual although Zend suggested that preg_match is slightly faster. I prefer to use ‘eregi’ simply because of my background in linux administration.

Example 1: Matching United States 5 or 9 digit zip codes

Zip codes in the USA have the following format ##### or #####-#### where # is a digit. If you want to verify the zip code submitted say from an online form, you will need to use regex somewhere in your script to verify it. The matching POSIX-extended regex pattern will be:

[[:digit:]]{5}(-[[:digit:]]{4})?

Confused? Wait, let me explain why. This regex is split up into 2 parts: [[:digit:]]{5} and (-[[:digit:]]{4})?.

First Part: ‘[[:digit:]]’ means the digit range and {5} means that the digit must occur 5 times.

Second Part: The bracket ‘( )’ groups the ‘-[[:digit:]]{4}’ together and the ‘?’ means the expression ‘(-[[:digit:]]{4})’ can either occur 0 or 1 time.

To implement the regex in PHP, we use the following code:

$zipCodes = 'xxxxx-xxxx'; $pattern = '[[:digit:]]{5}(-[[:digit:]]{4})?'; if (ereg($pattern,$zipCodes)) { echo "matched found "; } else { echo "match not found"; }

Example 2: Matching Dates

Say we want to verify the dates entered by the user. If we only accept dates like “YYYY-MM-DD” or “YYYY-M-D”, the regex pattern will be

[0-9]{4}(-[0-9]{1,2})+

The ‘+’ behind the term (-[0-9]{1,2}) means that the term must occur at least once. Note that I can also rewrite the regex as:

[[:digit:]]{4}(-[[:digit:]]{1,2})+

or

[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{1,2}-[0-9]{1,2}

As you can see, there can be many solutions to a problem…

Conclusion

Regex may be hard to digest at first but the logic is simple if you are able to practice more. Learning regex is as important as learning PHP. More examples can be seen at web-developer.sitecritic.net. Good luck.

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Bernard Peh is a Web Developer based in Melbourne. He works with experienced web designers and developers everyday, designing and developing commercial websites. He specialises mainly in SEO and PHP programming. Visit his blog at Melbourne PHP