So much excitement over stuff that I'm interested in.
For Microsoft, today was a big day with the release of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. I've been using it for a couple of weeks, and I've gotta say that I like it for a number of reasons. I haven't really looked up close at the meat of all of the improvements in the framework, but the tooling has made some great strides. First of all, you can pull out windows and drag them anywhere you want, on to any monitor. Not an issue on the 27 inches of iMac love at home, but at work it's nice to pull of the solution explorer into an adjacent window. The Intellisense for Javascript feels less hackish. The historical debugger, while I haven't used it, shows promise if it works as advertised. And finally, with much rejoicing, we've finally got the Silverlight tooling with a functional designer. Oh, and the code is more readable too.
And with all of that goodness, ASP.NET MVC 2 has been out for a few weeks, and Silverlight 4 is part of this release. Good "old fashioned" ASP.NET Webforms finally has non-chaotic icky-ID markup. There are improvements in WCF and some of the other bits too, all of which I haven't yet read up on. It's a huge release.
Jetbrains got the final version of Resharper 5.0 out today as well.
Meanwhile, along with this product launch in Las Vegas, the video world is getting rocked with the NAB show. Panasonic finally did what everyone in indie circles has been waiting for: Introduced a "real" video camera with a big ass sensor that can use SLR lenses. The 4/3" sensor won't have the aliasing problems of the DSLR's. The only disappointing thing is that it uses AVCHD instead of one of their pro codecs (like DVCPROHD or AVCIntra), and at a low bit rate at that. If it's priced wrong, I doubt it'll get traction. Still, one has to wonder how it is that Canon hasn't already done something this, seeing as how they already make SLR's, SLR's with video and actual video cameras already.
Also exciting, if a little out of nowhere, Redrock Micro is showing a follow focus remote control thing for use with iPhones and iPod Touch. I really dig the stuff that company has put out, and ordered a shoulder rig for my 7D. I'm tired of having an SLR that can shoot video and not having the proper stuff to do so.
Meanwhile, I already mentioned the release of Panasonic's HPX370, so it'll be interesting to see what else gets announced this week. Adobe is pushing CS5 of course, and the big video news there is that they've somehow managed to do realtime editing of H.264. That seems like a bad idea, but I suppose if it means sucking in files and going, and rendering or converting at the end, that's probably OK.
It's fun to see lots of technology news about stuff I care about, and that isn't about the Twitter or Facebook.
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