Browsing Silverlight website with Ubuntu using Moonlight

This week project Mono released a Firefox plugin called Moonlight which enables Mozilla Firefox to display Silverlight contents.

I spent one whole night getting Ubuntu 8.04 install in a spare partition and setup Mono Moonlight. Below is the screenshot of a Silverlight website inside Firefox.

 

Note: Siverlight.net does not render yet but this website seem to comes with all basic Silverlight control and runs well on Moonlight, even it’s animated menus

Ubuntu 8.04 comes with Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 and as mentioned in Moonlight’s download page, changes to the way Firefox 3.0 handles <object> tag breaks Moonlight. I found a walkaround here using a script for Greasemonkey addin. You got to install Greasemonkey then only click on this LINK. Which then you will get a prompt as below.

 

It’s not perfect yet (note the v0.6 version number) as media like sound and movie cannot play on Moonlight yet but its a good start showing another Microsoft interoperability initiative.

POP3 Server for Windows Server 2008

POP3 services only make it to one version of the Windows Server family which is Windows Server 2003. However because of this server OS been around for about 5 years, there are a lot applications out there designed to leverage the feature. Even SharePoint can make good use of this POP3 service to send email if the customer does not have any email server or they host it else where. However it comes handy for me to do development as I don’t want to touch my production email server.

For those who still  need POP3 Services, a guy named Hannes Preishuber has come out with their own POP3 extender for SMTP services. How it works I am not sure but you can check out their website here.

http://weblogs.asp.net/hpreishuber/archive/2008/04/30/visendo-smtp-pop3-extender-for-windows-2008-server.aspx

Windows Mobile Device Center could not be installed on Windows Server 2008

I am in the process of trying to create an environment to do all my development including ASP.NET, SharePoint, WPF and Win Mobile, in this case the ideal OS to use will be Windows Server 2008. So when I tried to installed Windows Mobile Device Center on top, I got an error message saying it could not install because one component is missing. Wonder who wrote this error message without telling me what is actually missing.

Do some digging on Windows Live Search (or %$#gle it if you want to) and I came across a KB stating it is actually I need to install Desktop Experience on top of Windows Server 2008. At least Windows Live Search working!!

The problem does not occur in Windows XP or Windows Vista.