Our sister group in Popfly just released thier game engine to create mashups using the easy to use Popfly toolset. You can build all kinds of interesting mashups quickly and publish them to your favorite social network. What’s intersting about this is I created a game in about 1 min using thier default templates and it’s all in Silverlight.

I embedded it here:

Let me know what you think about Popfly..

C

A few weeks ago I noticed changes in browser's behaviors… 

1) My IE  7.0.6000  no longer prompts for Click To Activate 

2) My firefox 2.0.0.13   no longer required a reboot after installing Silverlight …  If you had not noticed, using silverlight.js on IE allowed you to instantiate silverlight plugin right after installing , but on other browsers it required a re-start… 

I pinged Piotr, our deployment PM, asking if he was seeing the same and he upped it sharing that he had a way to instantiate silverlight on ANY PLATFORM and ANY browser WITH OUT requiring A RE-START…  [call me a geek, but I was happy]..   Today, he posted the blog with the magic call: navigator.plugins.refresh () …   Check it out yourself…  

I hear the  next version of Silverlight.js (when we next release an SDK) will include these changes; in the mean time you can take his advise and use navigator.plugins.refresh () to get around the re-boot issue and instantiate SL right after installing…  

[caveat: this does not work if silverlight is being updated, and the plugin was loaded, but that scenario is not common since silverlight auto-updates itself] …

Thanks Piotr, and welcome to blogging..

Can’t wait to play games on your Zune 2? Here’s what you need to get started. Jump over to ZuneBoards.com and see instructions from a forum member who gives you the step by step guidelines to get started.

They point to two games to get you started, Galactic Wars 3 and Alien Aggressors (if you know of any others, leave them in the comments here.) The first reply in the comments on the ZuneBoards site says “More complicated than I hoped.” Keep in mind you’re in the land of early adopting here.

Gartner just posted a very interesting review of Microsoft’s strategy from Mix08′. While I find the article pretty positive and mostly complete, there are a few things missing here.

1) Tools development - While not the key to the conference and barely noticed in the report is that we have been doing more work around integration of our development tools for developers and designers to close the gap between them. The outcome of this as we rapidly execute on this, will be faster time to market for application development across the board as well as more opportunities for designers to change the user experience of not just web applications but also applications on the desktop.

2) Monetizing applications - They don’t really discuss how we are making sure our partners can monetize their applications. Sure we are going to make it easier to integrate and create compelling ads and we demonstrated a taste of this at Mix, but you we are keen on making sure our partners can make money and that our technology (SL, WPF, VS2008, .Net Framework) is the enabler for this. Not jut top line revenue or ads, but also saving money on bottom line costs like developer costs, code management, etc., traditional ROI costs.

Overall a good read either way..

C

No more ball parking required this time as Futuremark has announced that 3DMark Vantage is now gold and will be officially introduced Monday, April 28 at around 13:00 GMT or 09:00 EST. The seventh benchmark in the 3DMark series comes with new tests for GPUs, CPUs and PPUs, four difference performance presets and more. 3DMark Vantage will be available in four versions, - Trial, Basic, Advanced and Professional, with the first one being free and enabling a single test run. The Basic version which costs $6.95 will let you do “infinite” runs but only using the Performance preset, the Advanced version ($19.95) will unlock all presets, six features tests and setting customization while the most expensive version, Professional ($495) is for business and commercial use.

The minimum requirements for 3DMark Vantage are:

Minimum

x86/x64 single core CPU with SSE2 support. Performance similar to Intel Pentium D 3.2GHz or better
Fully D3D10/SM4.0 compliant graphics card, 256MB
1024MB Memory
2GB of free disk space
Windows Vista (Server editions not supported)

Recommended

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 or equivalent AMD CPU
Fully D3D10/SM4.0 compliant graphics card, 512MB
2048MB Memory
2GB of free disk space
Windows Vista (Server editions not supported)

…while, depending on the preset used, you’ll need:

- Entry - 128MB DX10 Video Card and a monitor capable of displaying 1280×1024 resolution
- Performance - 256MB DX10 Video Card and a monitor capable of displaying 1280×1024 resolution
- High - 512MB DX10 Video Card and a monitor capable of displaying 1680×1050 resolution
- Extreme - 512MB DX10 Video Card and a monitor capable of displaying 1920×1200 resolution

More details are coming Monday so try to enjoy the weekend.