Just a quick one, because I fully intend to go to bed soon. Right.

Installed Expression Web (after getting it gratis, thanks, Microsoft) and had a go at editing the theme for my blog.

Basically, it looks like it barfs horribly at that stage, because it doesn’t support PHP. Which the entirety of Wordpress is written in. Basically, it looks like I’m going to have to either:

1. Give up entirely
2. Write my own Wordpress theme from scratch, implementing some clever hacks so that all along Expression Web doesn’t think it’s actually dealing with PHP at all, and nothing breaks.

I think I’m going to go for 2 because I’m me, and frankly I love the intellectual challenge of fun hacks.

I might have to do some experiments to see what’ll work best, see if I can figure out a way of going with the grain rather than against it. We’ll see.

Check this out! If you’re a student (and your institution is down on the list - Imperial is, but I’m not sure about other places, I didn’t look too hard) you can get the following for FREE:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Windows Server 2003 Standard
• SQL Server 2005 Express
• Microsoft Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional

Buying this stuff individually would cost a fortune, this is an amazing deal, so if you’re at all interested in developer / web designer tools (or you know someone who is) this is well worth taking a gander at to see if you’re eligible.

Microsoft DreamSpark

Check out their new Surface Computing! Alas, only for businesses and such for the moment, but they hope it will come down in price until common folk like you and I can afford one.

They’ve also released betas of Messenger, Writer, and Mail. Prepend all those with “Windows Live” to get their full names. Writer is a pretty decent piece of software for blog posting, and it integrates with all the major blog providers, not just Live Spaces, which is a welcome relief. I’ve been using it for a while and it’s an excellent tool.

The Messenger update seems mostly cosmetic though, so it’s hard to see where they’re going with it.

I’ve also been invited to try out Popfly, which is a way of building Web 2.0 mashups without writing any code. My first impression is that while you can build something that displays the last 10 Twitter posts on a map based on where they came from, it’s hard to do anything too complex.

A Facebook/Microsoft C# wrapper for the Facebook API. My inner geek is happy.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/showcase/

I wish I didn’t have exams on and so had more time to play with this…

So exams are over for the next 5 weeks, and I’m, rather frighteningly, already going after the revision. I went into the exams a little more unprepared than I’d like, so I’m going to have a crack at the books early and with any luck I should really nail the last three exams. Also this stuff is all going to come up again in the comprehensives towards the end of my degree, so if I internalise this deep wisdom now I might not have to cram it all back into my skull in a couple of years time.

Microsoft have announced something new - they call it “Silverlight” and it’s kinda like Microsoft’s answer to Flash. It’s based on some of Microsoft’s .net technology and it’s a sub-set of their new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology for making cool-looking programs. I haven’t done any programming for a while so I feel like I’m kinda behind on this stuff, and Silverlight is making me feel like maybe I should get back into it. It looks like v1.1 is going to enable programming in C# in the browser, and that makes me happy. It’s apparently going to be 300 to 1000 times faster than Javascript, and this is only a good thing.

What’s good about Microsoft lately is you can get cut-down versions of their programming tools (like Visual Studio) in free Express versions if you’re a hobbyist and you can’t afford the real thing, so I’ll have to looksee if they have anything for Silverlight/WPF.

Oh, and yes, I did just write about something incomprehensible and geeky. It’s my blog/blag, deal with it.

Also, today is the 300th birthday of our great nation. Here’s to the next 300 years as one nation.