I checked out Google Notebook today. Whatever google comes up with these days, is going to be very useful and different. This application is no different. You can think of this application as an online scrap/note book in which you can take down notes as and when you are surfing on the web. In fact, there is a firefox plugin also available that can be downloaded and installed. This plugin gives us the option to select a text, right click on it and add it to the online notebook. Cool isn’t it?
Google Notebook makes web research of all kinds – from planning a vacation to researching a school paper to buying a car – easier and more efficient by enabling you to clip and gather information even while you’re browsing the web.
And since Google Notebook lives in your browser, you won’t be left with a scattered collection of notes, Word docs, and browser bookmarks to sort through; all your web findings will be gathering into one organized, easy accessible location that you can access from any computer.
Check Out Google Notebook
The RSS functionality in IE7 is “powered” by the Windows RSS Platform. The Windows RSS Platform API encapsulates 3 main components: Common Feed List, Feed Synchronization Engine, and Feed Store.The Windows RSS Platform would be available for Windows Vista.It will also be available as part of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP 64-bit.
The Windows RSS Platform is available to any application. The idea is that applications can utilize the Windows RSS Platform to become RSS enabled without having to re-implement basic RSS building blocks. This can significantly reduce the time and effort application developers have to invest in order to integrate RSS into their programs.
Here’s what the Windows RSS Platform provides for developers:
- Support for every major RSS and Atom format, as well as many popular extensions.
- Background scheduled updates.
- Support for server-friendly technologies like conditional GETs and RFC 3229 for feeds.
- Bandwidth-friendly enclosure downloads using Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS).
- API exposing a simple object model for feeds as well as direct access to the raw XML stream.
All of this functionality is available as shared technology as part of IE7 on Windows Vista and down-level. As a developer, including RSS support in your application can be amazingly easy.
The .NET Framework 3.0 adds new technologies to the .NET Framework 2.0, which makes the .NET Framework 3.0 a superset of the .NET Framework 2.0. You can think of .NET Framework 3.0 as an “additive” release to the .NET Framework 2.0, as contrasted with a generational release where software is revised across the board. (For example, the .NET Framework 2.0 was a generational release over the .NET Framework 1.0.)
Because .NET Framework 3.0 is an additive release and uses the core run-time components from .NET Framework 2.0, it is completely backward compatible with the earlier version. Your existing .NET Framework 2.0 based-applications will continue to run without any modifications and you can safely continue your investments using the technologies that shipped with .NET Framework 2.0.
If you are moving to .NET Framework 3.0 from .NET Framework 1.1 or 1.0, you should perform impact analysis and run compatibility testing prior to deployment. While we have worked to make .NET Framework releases compatible, there are a small number of known incompatibles due to security and significant functionality additions. For more information, see the page Breaking Changes in .NET Framework 2.0 on the Microsoft .NET Developer Center Web site.
The Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.0 (formerly known as WinFX) is the new managed-code programming model for Windows. It combines the power of .NET Framework 2.0 with new technologies for building applications that have a visually compelling user experience, seamless communication across technology boundaries, and support for a wide range of business processes. Microsoft plans to ship .NET Framework 3.0 as part of Windows Vista. At the same time, Microsoft will make .NET Framework available for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1.
The following table lists some of the technologies included with .NET Framework 3.0.
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Technology
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Description
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Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly code-named “Avalon”)
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Provides classes for building next-generation smart-client applications that combine UI, documents, and media.
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Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, formerly code-named “Indigo”)
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Offers a unified programming model and runtime for building service-oriented applications.
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Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF)
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Offers a programming model, engine, and tools to build workflow-enabled applications that model business processes.
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Windows CardSpace (formerly code-named “InfoCard”)
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Provides a technology for simplifying and improving the safety of working online with personal identity information.
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Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
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Enables productively building Windows and Web-based applications.
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All of the classes that represent the new components (WPF, WF, WCF, and CardSpace) are part of the System namespace. The core classes of the .NET platform, such as the common language runtime (CLR) and base class libraries (BCL) remain as they are in .NET Framework 2.0.
The following diagram illustrates the structure of .NET Framework 3.0.
Read Article : Deploying Microsoft .NET Framework Version 3.0
In a surprise move, Microsoft is bending to pressure from governments and will sponsor an open source project to build tools that enable conversion between its Open XML formats in Office 2007 and OpenDocument (ODF). The forthcoming Office suite will also support an add-in for saving directly to ODF.
The Open XML Translator project will be hosted on SourceForge.net, and is available under the BSD open source license. Microsoft says anyone can submit bugs and contribute to the project.
If this is not news, what is?? 
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