I’m a little late to the game posting information about it, but there is a plethora of Silverlight stuff to do this week in the Seattle/Redmond area this week.  Sleepless in Seattle…definitely not – Silverlight in Seattle baby!

Allow me to interpret Adam’s vector goods…

• 14 Sep (tonight!): Jesse Liberty is presenting at the .NET DA user group meeting on .NET RIA Services.
• 15 Sep: Nerd Dinner!!!  Just a casual gathering of people who speak in acronyms and like food.  Bellevue Crossroads food court (awesome choices for anyone).
• 16 Sep: I’ll be presenting (thanks to David for the invite!) to the Seattle Interact group on styling/templating interfaces for Silverlight as well as some on behaviors.
• 17 Sep: Seattle Firestarter event.  ScottGu and friends.  I’ll be doing my best to demonstrate some of the key scenarios for Silverlight and hope to inspire your thoughts.

With the exception of tonight, I’ll be at each of these events and am looking forward to spending the week in sunny Seattle with you folks.  Be sure to stop by and introduce yourself!

Just doing some getting caught up from my holiday recently and I was reminded of a “line of business” application that was completed in Silverlight for the United States Army.  It is a bit of a supply chain management application…where the supply is soldiers!

This is a pretty cool application that was taken from a full client (Windows Forms) application and brought to Silverlight by ProModel.  They specialize in supply and demand issues.  Take a look at the interview/demo that Adam Kinney did with Dan Hickman of ProModel.  Sure, it would have been cool to have a drill sergeant do the demo, but I’m guessing they are busy right now.

What is pretty cool is that ProModel chose to use IdeaBlade’s DevForce Silverlight to implement the solution.  Using this helped them get from zero to something quickly and not worry about plumbing and integration code.  Some of the user experience for the assignments as well (as seen in the demo) was pretty cool.  Some other background behind the solution:

• IdeaBlade Case Study
• Ward Bell talks with Dan Hickman

Hearing Dan talk about it and seeing the final product, it seems like they were really able to concentrate on the end-user interaction with the experience without re-learning a lot of data access with Silverlight.  Check out the demonstration above and also be sure to check out the solution they used, DevForce Silverlight!

(and yes, I know that Lee Ermey is a Marine, but c’mon…isn’t he *the* drill instructor?)

I’ve been doing a lot of asking and listening lately…to you, the Silverlight developers!  I’ve received a lot of positive feedback and “thank you for asking” comments and it has been real encouraging.  If you haven’t seen some of them, here’s some of my recent inquiries:

• Do you have a need to convert Flash applications (not just assets, but ActionScript)?
• How do you prefer to learn Silverlight (and how do you decide on choosing Silverlight)?
• Are you using the provided Silverlight Toolkit themes in your applications?

If you have thoughts on these, please share them at the links above.  We’ve also been capturing ways of looking for feature suggestions.  One experiment has been using a ‘wisdom of crowds’ type approach.  Previously Joe Stegman (group director for the Silverlight runtime) had spelunked the forum questions, blogs, etc.  Check out what he has to say (emphasis mine) about a recent effort to collect some suggestion feedback:

Tim Heuer and Scott Barnes have established a more community focused way of tracking Silverlight 4 feature requests.  You can find their feature tracker here: Silverlight Feedback Forum.   Other than a few items that our outside our control (iPhone, bundling), you're likely to see at least a few of the top items in the next version of Silverlight. source: Joe Stegman.

Hmm…some hints to the future?! :-)

Thanks for all your feedback and keep it coming!

For those that may use my Foxit PDF Previewer (for use with Outlook 2007 or Windows Vista and Windows 7), I wanted to provide a few updates.

Blank white screen previews

I’ve been getting quite a few reports lately about white screen previews while the PDF file renders fine in other readers.  After some research and patient testing with some of you that reported it, it’s been determined that the consistent piece is that the PDFs were documents that were scanned.  These documents in the PDF format contained a different format of encoded images.  The current incarnation of the Foxit PDF Previewer does not have the decoder embedded within the product.  Here is the workaround to get it to work:

1. Download the JPEG2000/JPIG decoder file directly from Foxit: JPEG200 Decoder.
2. Take the contents of that ZIP file (fxdecode1.dll) and place it in the directory where you installed the Foxit PDF Previewer (if you accepted all the defaults it will likely be c:\Program Files \Tim Heuer\Foxit PDF Preview Handler)
3. That’s it !

The decoder library isn’t currently licensed for me to distribute with the previewer and thus this workaround.  It may be possible in a future version that this functionality will be built in, but this is a minor workaround.  The decoder is built into the Foxit SDK for version 3 (the previewer uses version 2).

Outlook 2010 Technical Preview

I have also received some comments from beta testers of Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview.  These reports have indicated that the previewer does not work in 64-bit mode for Outlook.  I can confirm this to be true.  I’ve logged a bug with the Outlook developer team to track this issue and will make any modifications necessary to make it work.  Please feel free to subscribe here for Foxit PDF Previewer specific updates (you may also subscribe to my main feed as well).

I would like to remind participants of the Office 2010 technical preview program of any confidentiality agreements they may have agreed to and to respect those in public.  If you are a part of the program, please log an official bug with the Outlook 2010 program channels with regard to Foxit Previewer not working…this will help my cause :-).

That is all.  Thanks for being a user of the software and as always, thanks to Foxit Software for being such a great partner to provide the licensing of the SDK for this software to exist.  They make other great PDF software so be sure to check them out.

I subscribe to a lot of feeds.  I read a lot of them, and a lot I skim.  But I also make sure I subscribe to things that break up my day.  Here’s some of my favorites if you haven’t seen them before:

• FAILblog.org – the classic.  All things wrong.
• AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com – stop right now and subscribe.  When I’m feeling down I go here.  Seriously.  I’ve also had a photo of my sister I’ve been threatening to post there.
• UgliestTattoos.com (warning some NSFW) – I’m am seriously amazed what people put on their bodies.  I’ve got tattoos…but I’m mean…for real?
• Photoshop Disasters – no graphic advertising intern can sneak crap past these guys.
• There I Fixed It – amazing how resourceful people are ;-)

Just a little bit of syndicated humor does wonders.