Kevin.Gao.Blog()

Microsoft Released the full version of SilverLight 2. This is the promotional picture from Microsoft web site:

I know several of my friends are using Adobe Flex to develop RIA. But with Silverlight, developers can use .NET. I am personally familiar with Microsoft technologies and Silverlight looks promising to me.

To see what Silverlight can do, please visit this page: http://silverlight.net/Showcase/

Today I got an email from Microsoft MSDN Flash with the news that Microsoft just released Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0.

For those who do not know about Silverlight, Silverlight is a Microsoft tool to build a RIA (Rich Internet Application).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application

Much to Microsoft’s dismay, even though Microsoft launched massive marketing campaigns to promote Silverlight, it seems development teams like Adobe AIR and FLEX better.

For what’s new in Silverlight 2, please refer to:
http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/overview.aspx

I am very excited to announce that today at 5:25PM Pacific Time, 18th September 2008, our SourceAnywhere 3.0 team reached the Zero Bug Bounce (ZBB) milestone for the SourceAnywhere 3.0 cross-platform client. All together, we created 3362 issues, including bugs, tasks and notifications for the project.

In the coming 2 weeks, our team will continue to work on the cross-platform client to further improve the product quality. 2 weeks later, our testing team will start to do release testing for the client and our coding team will start to work on the Visual Studio IDE integration client.

After 7 months of hard work, I am excited to see that we are about to reach the Zero Bug Bounce milestone for SourceAnywhere 3.0 cross platform client. At this point, we have only 38 not closed bugs. 9 of them are in the Open state, and 29 of them are in the Fixed state (fixed by programmers, but not verified and closed by testers). During the whole process, we created 3317 issues, including tasks, bugs and notifications.

Although it took longer than expected to reach the ZBB milestone, we are glad to see that we will reach the ZBB milestone this week. SourceAnywhere 3.0 is a major release of SourceAnywhere. We added issue/bug tracking, project branch & merge, shelve/unshelve and many other features into this release.

A few months ago, our web team changed our site, www.dynamsoft.com, to make the visitor experience better.

Two weeks after the work was finished and the live web pages were finally updated, our web site team analyzed the web site usage data in Google Analytics. To our surprise, there were very few clicks from the organic Google content. The team tried searching in Google and almost none of our pages could be found. Even searching “Dynamsoft” or “SourceAnywhere” could not lead to our site.

Was it the magic of David Copperfield? Where had the website gone? If Google works properly (which we can assume it does), the causes of this issues are from the website. Our web team asked me for help. I reviewed the code of the web pages and found the cause of this issue. It was in a tag with the “robots” set to “noindex, nofollow”. -_- These tags are used when the pages are in our testing web server, to prevent search engines (such as Google, MSN and Yahoo) from indexing our not-ready web pages. After the pages are tested and before the pages are moved to our production server, the tags should be removed. But we did not do this.

So, we fixed the code and now finally the pages in www.dynamsoft.com can be searched in Google and other search engines again.

I also noticed several details but did not do further research:

1. When www.dynamsoft.com was not searchable in Google, the site was still searchable in Yahoo and MSN. The reason could be that Yahoo and MSN do not update their search database as often as Google, or they just ignore the noindex and nofollow tag.
2. When noindex and nofollow tags were used, the SSL encrypted pages, such as the download and purchase pages, were all still searchable.

Hi everyone! This is my very first blog post.

Every day is a busy day, however, I will try my best to write something every week. I will also write some How To series to share my knowledge that I have gained from my programming experience.

I wish everyone a productive and happy day.

Thanks a lot.