Hot on the heels of the release of the Parallel Extensions (aka PFX) yesterday, Channel9 has posted a video where Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy answer some of the whys and hows. Definitely worth checking out.

Also, check out this screencast (also on Channel9) where Daniel Moth shows PLINQ in action and discusses some features of PFX that we will see in future releases.

Whenever you choose to full screen a video in Silverlight it always plays the full screen video on your primary monitor. I would prefer it behave more like the majority of apps where it plays full screen on whatever monitor the host window is currently on.

Unfortunately there's no program on Microsoft Connect for Silverlight to go report this to, but hopefully Microsoft can get this fixed in the next update to Silverlight.

Microsoft's really steppin' things up! Three major announcements today: first Silverlight 2.0, then ASP.NET Extensions and now the first public release of the Parallel Extensions library. Unlike the former two,which are due out some time next week, you can download the Parallel Extensions right here , right now!

While you're waiting for the download, check out this article that was released in the October 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine titled "Running Queries on Multi-Core Processors". There's another article in that same issue titled "Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines" which is also a must read and includes a real world code sample. For a more general intro to parallel processing, check out this whitepaper titled "The Manycore Shift".

I'm sure we've all heard about the ASP.NET MVC framework that's coming down the pipe. I'm psyched about it, though I think it might be a little overhyped. In all fairness to the ASP.NET page model, it does a lot of things great and I think if you compare the amount of work you'd have to do manually in the MVC model to what you get from the page model, you'd be looking at doing a lot of manual work. That said, like any technology, you just gotta pick the right tool for the right job.

Today though, Scott Guthrie also mentioned some other features that are coming with the extensions. The one I'm most interested in is that there will be "ASP.NET AJAX Improvements". What exactly these improvements are isn't really detailed in his post. It mentions back/forward button support, content linking via permalinks, but those are really things you can have today if you're using the ASP.NET AJAX Futures. I guess it's nice to see that they're being pushed into the "official" realm though. What I'm more interested in hearing about is whether or not any of the things I ranted about when they released the May CTP. The July CTP did nothing to address them and that was the last time the futures were released (it's almost Dec, talk about dead project?).

Client features aside, I'm also psyched to see Astoria and the ADO.NET Entity Framework coming out with this release. I'm really looking forward to finally being able to trash our in house ORM that I wrote four years ago and use something that has LINQ and great design time support (LINQ to SQL doesn't cut it for us).

Well, in case you hadn't already read today, Scott Guthrie has announced a few things about some upcoming beta releases. One of the betas talked about is the next version of Silverlight which used to be labeled as version 1.1. Microsoft has rethought this strategy and is instead going to call it 2.0. If you ask me this is a great idea because the next version is such a major leap forward with the inclusion of the CLR and now a ton of the richer WPF features that it warranted way more than a minor version increase.

I'm super psyched to here that they're really taking a much richer subset of WPF and putting it in Silverlight. If it's going to be touted for building next-gen rich apps, it really needed to be more than a glorified canvas. Scott mentioned that the next beta includes:

• Extensible control framework model - I wonder if it will be the exact same model as WPF (e.g. FrameworkElement -> UIElement -> Control)
• Layout manager support - hopefully this means the Arrange/Measure pattern from WPF is included now so we can implement panels
• Two-way data-binding support - the data-binding architecture of WPF is one of it's most powerful selling points if you ask me
• Templating - make all your <Button>s appear as rotating 3D cubes! :)
• "Skinning" - hopefully this means the equivalent of WPF's resource dictionaries

Scott also mentioned there will be support for WCF like features (e.g. REST, POX, WS-*). Also important to note is that there will be support for cross-domain network access! Finally, he mentions that we can expect to see a Go-Live Beta of Silverlight 2.0 in 2008.