Flash Player Vulnerability Exploited

A pretty severe vulnerability of the Adobe Flash Player has been spotted by Symantec and could be exploited by hackers to perform remote code execution through .swf files, that could potentially be used to take control of your whole machine.

Based on the information on this exploit by Security Focus, the vulnerable versions of the Flash Player plug-in are:

• Adobe Flash Player 9.0.124 .0
• Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115.0

 

I checked out the Adobe Flash Player Web site and the current version available for download is 9.0.124.0, which is also vulnerable to this malicious exploit.

This could be a huge problem, due to the wide distribution of the Flash Player plug-in. Hope the guys at Adobe fix this ASAP, but in the mean time, beware.

Sources:

• Internet News
• ZDNet’s Zero Day

Virtual Earth Map Control for VS 208

Imagine, just drag-n-drop from your toolbox onto a Web form, set a few properties, without requiring a single line of JavaScript, and you have yourself Virtual Earth on your ASP.NET Web application, with full support of stuff like zooming, panning, AJAX and everything to fulfill…your “mapping” needs.

 

Introducing the Virtual Earth Map Control for Visual Studio 2008, which was unveiled at Remix Australia by Angus Logan in his Windows Live session.

For more information, check out LiveSide.net’s report on it, and the Virtual Earth site. Definitely looking forward to the release!

Present like a pro

Ever wanted to further improve your skills in making presentations and public speaking?

Check out Scott Hanselman’s great post on various pointers that help you to better prepare yourself to make better presentations. On top of that, Bnet’s article on “How to Present like Steve Jobs”, that is also worth a read.

But still, the key is to be prepared, which means lots and lots of practice and rehearsals beforehand.

Event: Remix Essential 2008

Just got news from my MSP manager that Remix Essentials 08 will be held at:

Date	:	27th May 2008
Time	:	9.00am – 1.00pm
Venue	:	Lim Kok Wing University, Cyberjaya

I’ve been hearing “rumours” that Remix 08 will be held at  soon, and I was really looking forward to it.

There will be sessions on stuff like Expression Studio, Windows Live, Silverlight, WPF, and UX. The speakers of these sessions are awesome guys like Leon Brown, Arturo Toledo, Angus Logan, and our resident Silverlight guy, Rohan Thomas.

Unlike the Remix or Mix events of other countries, Remix Essentials 08 is totally free!

On top of that, attendees stand a chance to win a full copy of Expression Studio 2! The seats are limited to a first come first served basis, you’ll definitely not want to miss out, so register right now!

Silverlight for Linux released

As reported by Mary Jo Foley, Silverlight for Linux, developed by Novell in collaboration with Microsoft under the Moonlight project, has just been released.

It currently only has support for Silverlight 1.0, and support for Silverlight 2.0 is still under development.

If you’re running on Linux, head over here to download installer.

For more information, check out the blog post by the Novell Vice President for Developer Technologies, Miguel de Icaza here.

Its been quite some time since Microsoft promised the delivery of Silverlight via their partnership with Novell, and its great that it is finally delivered as promised.

Xceed Upload for Silverlight

Today, I received the online newsletter from the Xceed team, who are pretty well known for their awesome Xceed DataGrid for WPF, where they announced the release of the Xceed Upload for Silverlight.

It is a full featured Upload control (like the ASP.NET FileUpload Control), built on Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1, which has cool features like a loading indicator, imagine previewing, multiple file uploading support, and many more.

As far as I know, I don’t think other control vendors have any file upload control, which is very useful in developing enterprise solutions. This is definitely richer and much more interactive alternate to the ASP.NET FileUpload control, as long as your company can afford it

New version of WPF Released

Today, Microsoft has released a beta preview for of SP1 for various editions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework 3.5. And Tim Sneath has also blogged about the availability of the new major version of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), that will ship with the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1, which full version will be available later this summer.

The downloads for these Service Pack beta releases are available here. For more information also check out Scott Guthrie’s blog post here.

There are a few major improvements, and the most notable one is the introduction of the Client Profile, which is a scaled down version of the .NET Framework 3.5, that is around 25 MB, where assemblies that aren’t used are removed. Its pretty amazing that the solution to the deployment issue for enterprise WPF applications is pretty similar to the approach adopted by the Silverlight runtime. Ease of deployment will definitely help in increasing the adoption rate of WPF in the industry.

There is also improvement to the WPF graphics engine, with enhanced support for shaders and deeper DirectX support, enabling a Direct3D surface to be brushed on top of any surface of WPF elements. Another notable improvement is the “fixes” on the BitmapEffects we most commonly use, Drop Shadow and Blur, which are now hardware-accelerated, and was previously a definite “no-no” in developing WPF applications as it takes up too much processing power.

Other than that, there are many other improvements like the loading screen of XBAPs now running in HTML instead which is definitely a great improvement, the introduction of Splash screen support in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

There will also be new controls to add on to the arsenal of controls available in WPF, which are the DataGrid, Office Ribbon, and most notably, the WebBrowser control, which could potentially enable seamless integration of WPF and Silverlight applications.

Its great to see that many improvements on WPF, and if Silverlight is to continue evolving to provide the capabilities of what WPF has today, I must say, the future looks very promising indeed.

faceOut

Today, I dropped by Silverlight.net and saw faceOut being featured on the right column of the front page.

faceOut is a demonstration application by Infragistics, that is created using the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 controls included in their NetAdvantage for Silverlight control set, to build a rich interactive, enterprise quality mashup utilizing Windows Live Services.

For more information on faceOut, check it out here. Infragistics have also shared the source code to the mashup, packaged along with the NetAdvantage by Silverlight.

You could also experience faceOut here.

Popfly Game Creator

A few days back, Techcrunch reported on a new feature on the social-mashup-gadget-builder Web site, Popfly, which allows users to create their own mini games.

It’s a pretty neat addition on to Popfly, as in the first place, games were never really this easy to create, and this would really be a great addition onto the list of stuff (mashups, gadgets (or widgets), and Web pages) that non-technical people can build, just with a few clicks.

I tried some of the templates out, and I must say its really simple to create these games, and you could straight away play any of the templates to get a feel of how the games are, and then customize the background, characters etc to your liking, and of course, share it with your friends.

It is built using Silverlight 1.0, but even so, I believe it only exhibits a fraction of what Silverlight 2.0 could be capable of, as there is a big difference between the capabilities of managed code and scripting languages.

The game creator function is currently still in Alpha, and I’m speculating that it would only be officially RTM’ed only when it is built on Silverlight 2.0, not the Beta 1 version, but the RTW version of Silverlight 2.0.

As for the targeted audience for this feature…I dunno, maybe young children or girls that like mini-games?

Imagine Cup 2008 Finals

The Malaysian Level Imagine Cup 2008 Finals will be held at:

Date	:	15th May
Day	:	Thursday
Duration	:	9.00 am – 12.30 pm
Venue	:	Microsoft Auditorium (Level 29, Tower 2, Petronas Twin Towers, KLCC

There were plenty of teams that joined this time around, but only 6 of them got into the finals, and I’m happy to say that I have some friends that got into the finals, which are : Enzo Ong (TAR College), De Yan (MMU), Seok Chern (KDU), Tien Hock (USM).

Good luck to all of you!