I was honored to be asked by ComponentArt to participate in a judging panel for their just now released 2009 Summer Silverlight Coding Competition.  The grand prize is USD $10,000.  Yes, that’s right: USD $10,000! ComponentArt is even kicking in 2 runner-up prizes of licensing to their products, which is also a sweet deal!  The contest is simple, and you are not required to use ComponentArt controls…in their words: Applicants are not required to use ComponentArt's products to enter the competition (or as the legal jargon requires us to say: NO PURCHASE NECESSARY). We'll obviously let you use our products...

Today, we posted on the .NET RIA Services forum an updated roadmap for the timing and thoughts around the product offering.  What is .NET RIA Services? Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the...

One of the goals of new versions of Silverlight is to be be backward compatible with previous versions.  We make this a priority goal so that people can keep their previous applications deployed while not worrying that people with newer Silverlight will have a broken experience. Silverlight 3 has been out in beta form since March 2009 and hopefully if you are a Silverlight developer you’ve had a chance to work with the new features and tools.  If you have existing Silverlight 2 applications that are deployed, I wanted to draw your attention to some action items if you...

At the Google I/O conference this past week, they announced Google Wave.  Almost immediately, I started seeing Twitter replies, blog posts and various articles talking about how Google Wave is going to kill Flash/Silverlight/JavaFX.  None of these made sense to me…and at that point I’d yet to see anything about Wave anyway.  I posed a few questions on Twitter as to why people felt Wave was an RIA platform killer (that’s what I was reading into a lot of the buzz against things like Silverlight).  I got more confused with all the replies :-).  So I had a moment this...

If you looked at the updated RIA Services Business Application template which had the authentication built-in, you may have seen the login screen with a little icon next to the password field: When you hover over this some helpful information displays in tool tip form: So how did that get there?  The power of the data annotations.  If you look at your model definition, you can add a DisplayAttribute and provide some additional information.  Let’s take a look at a simple example.  Here’s the simple model: ...

In a previous post I wanted to call attention to the multi-targeting and design surface improvements for Silverlight developers with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1.  There has been some comments on that post and a few emails and Twitter replies as well with some great follow-up questions.  I thought I’d post a sort of what works with what information to help you navigate Betaville as a Silverlight developer. NOTE: We’re talking about Beta technologies here.  That means things may not work, that you shouldn’t count on them for production releases at this time, etc.  In the ‘release...

Well today was the public release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1.  It is the first time developers will have the chance to take it for a spin and kick the tires.  I wanted to share some information specific for Silverlight developers with regard to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. Visual Studio 2010 is the first IDE that will support two key features for Silverlight developers: multi-targeted Silverlight development and editable design surface for Silverlight.  The second point also comes with things you might expect (like data binding wizards and dialogs as well – I’m lumping all of that...

I’ve not hidden my love affair for Netflix both as a consumer and as a Silverlight developer and how they’ve implemented the technology.  Long before the instant watch came to the desktop and the XBOX, there were a lot of folks wanting the Netflix experience on their Windows Media Center boxes and extenders.  One such person was Anthony Park (who is now with Netflix as of this writing), who picked up a the MyNetflix media center plugin a while back. Well, today Netflix officially has a Media Center solution for their customers.  I just got done firing my media...

For things that aren’t a part of the Visual Studio tools (yet) and things that help me move faster in my development, I like to take advantage of the power of Visual Studio’s templates and snippets capabilities.  I’ve created a few and modified a few of others that I use regularly.  I’ve shown them in a few presentations and thought I’d package them up in a single bundle for your convenience if you choose to use them.  I was going to package Robby’s snippets up as well, but didn’t think he’d appreciate that…you should get his Silverlight snippets as well...

We’ve update the .NET RIA Services build for May 2009.  The updated May preview can be downloaded here: .NET RIA Services May 2009.  You may have to uninstall your previous version before installing this one.  What is .NET RIA Services? Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support...

I’ll be joining Dan Wahlin and Rob Bagby on 18 May in Phoenix for a Best of MIX event.  I’ll be presenting Silverlight 3 and building data-driven line-of-business applications.  All demo, all tech, all Visual Studio as my presentation tool :-). Come out and join us for the event! Best of MIX Agenda Monday, May 18, 2009 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Wells Fargo Conference Center 100 West Washington Street, MAC S4101-017 Phoenix Arizona 85003 What’s New in Silverlight 3? ...

We’ve just released an update to our Silverlight Enterprise Deployment guidance/whitepaper.  While a lot of the information from the first version of the guidance (targeted at Silverlight 1.0), we made some minor adjustments outlining the specifics for the updated Silverlight installer and documented some of the command-switches and their behaviors.  The guidance covers: Using Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) Group policy Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Manual install options Maintaining and detecting version It’s a great guidance document to...

I’ve seen a few comments/requests incoming lately that people like the ChildWindow control in the Silverlight 3 SDK.  This is a great control that creates a modal dialog for you.  When you use it, it disables your root layout application and shows the dialog you provide: This is great for those true modal needs.  It responds to normal windows DialogResult type responses if you have buttons, etc. – great for error dialogs, logins, etc.  The request I’ve been seeing is for the same functionality, but in a ‘normal’ ChildWindow. But I’ve been seeing requests that it should act more like the normal...

What do you get when you invite 14 companies for 3 1/2 days and throw a bunch of new stuff in their face and ask them to use it?  Well, in Wellington, it was called Expression for Art’s Sake.  This was a bit of an ‘artist in residency’ program where Microsoft invited some companies to bring their developer and designer staff to this event to learn a little bit about Expression Blend and Silverlight.  Coming after WEB09 and ending our Auckland trip with a proper visit to a rugby game (here’s a scrum meeting for you agile developers),...

I’ve just returned this past week from a trip to New Zealand with Arturo Toledo.  We were invited to come by Nigel Parker, who if you live in New Zealand and don’t know him…take a moment and subscribe to his site for information about what’s happening in that area. Our first stop in New Zealand was the WEB09 conference, which was organized by John Ballinger.  Prior to the actual conference, John managed to get all the speakers together for a reception and then a dinner afterwards.  Within those 4 or so hours of time, I’ve met more...

It’s that time of year my friends in Arizona.  No, I’m not talking about when the air conditioners start get turned on, nor how the golf green fee rates are reduced or the snowbirds fly away…although those are good things as well. I’m talking geek fest time.  Mark your calendars: 26 May 2009 – 8:00 AM The community leaders in the area have organized another big event for your benefit.  So who is coming?  Here’s the rundown: Glenn Block – come see why you should get addicted to MEF.  Don’t know what it is?  That’s...

There seems to be a lot of buzz around Silverlight lately and I admit, I like it :-).  But I also think that there is a huge misconception about Silverlight “replacing” WPF.  I get emails a lot about people asking me questions about Silverlight and after a bit of prodding, I see that their target platform for their application is Windows.  I then begin my rant on why it should be WPF if that is the target platform.  I’m usually met with some weird looks being that I do a lot of Silverlight, but I state my case accordingly. The...

I’ve been promising this for a while and I’ve ranted about creating good installation experiences for Silverlight applications before as well here and here.  Well, our team rallied and created some new guidance and sample code to provide for you to implement the best possible experience.  The guidance whitepaper can be found on the Silverlight Community Site in the whitepapers section and includes: Documentation for defining a good user experience Sample code for media applications Sample code for non-media applications Sample code for implementing various states: not...

I got this question on how do you add grouping to the DataGrid in Silverlight without using the RIA Services ObjectDataSource.  Frankly I didn’t know off the top of my head either and I’ve since learned it isn’t obvious.  Allow me to explain the steps. In my simple app I have a static class that supplies some hard-coded data: 1: public List<Person> GetPeople() 2: { 3: List<Person> peeps = new List<Person>(); ...

I’ve been playing around with the Silverlight 3 navigation framework some more (thanks for the comments/thoughts on the last post about sharing data).  I got a few emails about understanding how the navigation works and people coming up with interesting uses.  Let’s take a moment to explore two of these concepts: out-of-browser navigation and controlling your navigation in your app. Navigation Basics If you are using Visual Studio 2008 and the Silverlight 3 tools, you’ll notice that when you choose to create a new project (or perhaps you didn’t notice and this will be new to you) that...

I got an email the other day about if there was a way to pass an object between the navigation pages in Silverlight 3.  The scenario was that the developer wanted to use the same data, but represent it visually in different ways. Silverlight 3 introduces a new navigation framework in the runtime making it easier to navigate to different areas of an application and assist in ‘deep linking’ concepts for applications.  More resources: Silverlight 3 Navigation Overview Silverlight 3 Navigation URI...

I’ve made no hiding the fact that my blog is build on Subtext and that I’m very happy with it right now.  Lately though my wife has been blogging more (that’s another story) and she also started her own business.  Being curious about all the WordPress love, I decided to start checking it out. Thankfully, the Web Platform Installer helped me get started on WordPress without any troubles at all and I was up and running on my Windows server (I didn’t want to start another hosting account anywhere).  I have to say, I really like what WordPress has done, especially...

If you are like any other developer, including me, you probably disregard most warnings and are usually the same type that keeps clicking next when installing things without paying attention to detail.  That’s okay I do it too. In the release of Silverlight 3 Beta, we noted that this is a developer release and that no “Go Live” licensing was going to be available for this release.  What this means is that we don’t recommend putting things in production as we’ve not exposed or wired up the end-user runtime for Silverlight 3.  The only way people can view Silverlight 3 content...

One of the new features in Silverlight 3 is providing an application navigation framework via the Frame and Page controls in the APIs.  If you saw my guide to Silverlight 3, you may have seen the section on navigation which describes the functionality and as well has a link to a video tutorial about it. I wanted to augment that tutorial with some additional information about URI routing, which I think is one of the great features of the framework.  You see typically your UriMapper might have a 1:1 mapping and look something like this (note in my sample here I’m...

One of the great things about the Silverlight team is that usually in the home stretch most of the feature samples of numerous ‘hello world’ type examples start shaping into creative ideas to demonstrate various features.  One such example is a full Silverlight 3 application that Mike Harsh created to actually demonstrate various features and it is what he used to present his session talk as well.  He currently calls it Slidentity and it demonstrates: Various skinned control usage Perspective 3D (when you view the slide show) Open/Save...

Wednesday at MIX09 was a great day.  I was exhausted, but after the keynote I was so high on excitement it was great.  Throughout the day Twitter was buzzing (or is it fizzing?) about all the news around Silverlight 3.  In one conversation around the out-of-browser experiences with Silverlight, I caught a conversation on Twitter about it with questions about the update model.  I jumped in which resulted in this twittersation (sorry, couldn’t resist): So, instead of trying to cram it in 140 characters, I’ll explain here how it works, and take the liberty of using just slightly more than 140...

Well, by now the interwebs are getting busy with the news about Silverlight 3 details announced at MIX09.  The team has been hard at work (and still aren’t resting) pushing out this beta release.  Over the next week you’ll see lots of blog posts by team members and Silverlight MVPs who have been enthusiastically waiting to share what we’ve been working on and show you some sample applications they’ve been working on.  Quite frankly, so will I :-). But in the meantime, allow me to share my thoughts and perhaps some deeper details with you if you can’t discern them in...

I’m sure you’ve heard of the IIS7 Smooth Streaming information and perhaps even experienced it if you watched some of the NBC Olympics streams last year or the Presidential Inauguration this past January.  It’s a great experience for online media being able to seamlessly deliver quality media online without constant buffering when latency occurs in networks you don’t control, such as your customers’ ISP accounts. You may have wanted to try out this experience yourself to see exactly what it does and how it works…as well as to simulate bad/good bandwidth.  Well, you can.  Here’s what you do: ...

Okay, about a month ago I was shown this demonstration by my new favorite friend Ward Bell of IdeaBlade.  Why is he my new favorite friend?  Well besides being a great guy, wait till you see what he has to show you.  I briefly alluded to my excitement via Twitter as a teaser.  I previously mentioned that we saw some sneak peeks of Silverlight 3 added features for line-of-business application development with Brad Abrams.  Today, check out what Ward has to show you: I am...

Want some sneak peeks at Silverlight enhancements for line-of-business applications?  Check out the video with Robert Hess and Brad Abrams where Brad shows some some sneak preview of some feature enhancements. If you want to download the episode above, visit the Channel 9 page here.  Be sure to stay tuned for MIX09 for more announcements and updates! tags: silverlight, lob, xaml, wpf, navigation, deep link, deep linkingThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

Did you know that there are some whitepapers on Silverlight development?  Just recently released is one on security in Silverlight development and deployment.  You can view some others (some older, but there are still some gems): Security Guidance for Silverlight Applications Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Silverlight Applications Silverlight and Web Analytics Content Protection Silverlight Migration Guide – Upgrading Online Media These can all be found on the Silverlight community site in the whitepapers section.  We’ll be...

The other day I was given a peek at a company who implemented a full-frame Silverlight application that when I saw it it was one of those “wow” moments.  A lot of the public-facing Silverlight examples are very different from one another and sometimes you see some that are full Silverlight applications that really give you a glimpse of how people are thinking about using the platform and how creative you can get.  Colaab is one such example that I saw at PDC last year (check it out if you haven’t). Another example is a recent one called SnapFlow. ...

If you are a developer who likes various aspect of testing in your application (beyond the “does it work” testing), you may be interested in a few frameworks for Silverlight. Microsoft Silverlight Unit Test Framework This testing framework was developed by Jeff Wilcox of the Silverlight Toolkit fame among other things.  This test framework is used by the Silverlight Toolkit team themselves (as is what is shipped with the source code for the project).  This framework runs unit test inside the browser and includes the ability to test rich controls as well as the entire Silverlight platform. ...

Our team is working on a new design for the Silverlight Community Site and one of those aspects includes a new media experience for the online media/video portions of the Silverlight, Windows Client, and ASP.NET sites.  Today we rolled out the new experience first on the Windows Client community site.  It’s a subtle update but hopefully a welcome one. The older experience was a basic playback experience and was a Silverlight 1.0 application.  This update brings a few new things, but primarily is a Silverlight 2 player with some fun features to engage the viewer.  We’ve added some new...

Yesterday a minor update to the Silverlight 2 runtime was released.  You may see terms of “GDR 1” floating around.  That’s pretty much an internal term at Microsoft referred to as “general distribution release” – yeah, I know we have a lot of random terms.  Think of it just as an incremental update.  If you are curious for Silverlight’s entire release history, you can view that here. So what’s in it?  Well, nothing earth shattering if you were expecting feature updates.  There were some needed fixes based on customer feedback that we included in this update (which is version...

The big news in the Silverlight developer world today is the release of Prism v2 (also called the Composite Application Guidance).  So what is this? Prism guidance is a set of tools, samples, references and written guidance to help you more easily build modular applications.  Generally the “modular” application will feature several screens, flexible user interaction and role-based behavior.  Composite applications using these patterns are meant to be loosely coupled and contain independently evolving pieces that can work together.  So in the Prism 2 release you are provided: Composite Application Library Reference...

Did I mention I’m going to MIX?  Will I see you there?  I could imagine that some have tight travel budgets, training budgets shrunk, yada, yada.  I’m telling you…if you are a Microsoft developer in the web and WPF space, you need to be at MIX09.  In an effort to help there are a bunch of ways to reduce some costs…here’s some: Register before 27 Feb 2009 with RSVP code: MIXLastChance and get $300 off the registration fee Share a creative picture about Internet Explorer (details and post yours here) and get...

First a congratulations to the Moonlight team for reaching their official release of 1.0!  Miguel and team have done a great job providing parity with Silverlight 1.0 and should be proud of their accomplishments.  Miguel, when is Moonlight 2 coming out :-) -- no rest!! But seriously, this is a good accomplishment for the ecosystem.  Last month I wrote and recorded my experience of the Moonlight installer/rendering on an OpenSUSE environment.  What this demonstrated was that we’d integrated the Moonlight redirection/installer into the server-side installer detection from Microsoft.  Users on Linux visiting a Silverlight 1.0 application and not having...

My friend Joel Neubeck is doing a survey on his site about what patterns people prefer for Silverlight development.  I’m very interested in these results as well, so if you have 2 seconds, please post your vote: Link: Poll: What separation pattern do you prefer in Silverlight development? tags: silverlight, mvvm, mvc, mvp, xaml, wpf, patterns, m-v-vm, viewmodelThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

[previously named "Silverlight as the V in ASP.NET MVC" but changed per comments] One thing that I’m excited about is learning new technologies.  Moving to the Silverlight team, I’ve moved away from a breadth of technology knowledge to something a bit more narrow.  Now I feel like all other developers trying to keep up with the technologies we are releasing.  As such, I’m a beginner for most.  One such technology is ASP.NET MVC, which was just released to release candidate stability. I thought I’d play around with it in the context of Silverlight and use Silverlight as the “view” in the model-view-controller...

I’ve written a few times about some of the controls that have been provided by organizations like Telerik and ComponentOne.  I figured it would be a good idea to do a larger dump of those that I’m aware of (and hope you add comments to point me to others so I can amend this list) and help make you aware of them as well.  There are a ton of great resources out there for Silverlight developers and I’m always impressed how our developer partners are extending our platforms to make tools for developers (and most of the time better than...

A company called divelements has had Windows Forms products for a while that produced, among other things, the “docking” effect that you see with some applications, including Visual Studio.  This is the ability to drag a window to another area and have it automatically dock to that particular position of the parent window: This product is also available for WPF and for Silverlight.  So if you need to add this type of dynamic window moving to your applications, you can check out the SandDock for Silverlight controls. What is great is that in looking at what else...

One of the great things I like about some of our platform products is that they are building in extensibility more and more.  Take Windows Live Writer as an example.  It’s no secret on this blog that I’ve got a geek affair with that tool.  I use it daily and have customized it (via plugins) and my blogging platform (Subtext) to make it even more of a best experience for me for web authoring. Writing plugins for Writer has been a lot of fun and a great way to get the functionality I want/need into a workflow without having...

In an email dialog today I saw someone asking how he could use an existing Encoder 2 template for existing media or streaming URIs when you don’t have something to encode.  After a few explanations, he replied that someone should blog this – and I agree :-). So what did he mean?  Well, when you use Expression Encoder, you are typically going to be encoding media to a format to consume.  Encoder also gives you an additional option in the output settings to generate a media player for that encoded content.  These are all based on templates that I’ve...

The source code for the Silverlight 2 controls was just published!  This is the source for the controls as shipped in the runtime and the SDK.  When you download the project you’ll see the structure: The source, released under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), includes the source for the following controls in the runtime: ButtonBase Button HyperlinkButton CheckBox RadioButton ToggleButton ...

If you haven’t been aware, there has been a team at Novell working hard to make a version of Silverlight for Linux.  This version, called Moonlight, has been in development since WPF/e it was first shown at the MIX conference (which by the way is happening in March with some really exciting stuff, so be sure to register for MIX09!).  Moonlight hit beta this past December 2008 and the team has already been working on Moonlight 2 which is the Silverlight 2 compatible version. Right now, Moonlight 1.0 serves as a functional equivalent to the Silverlight 1.0 runtime, which...

Over the holiday this past week I got a ping from Scott Cate about some Silverlight media questions, namely a player and Silverlight Streaming.  The gist of the conversation was that the Encoder 2 SP1 templates and the SLS Plugin don’t play nice together (yet).  I know that the team has been testing some updates to the plugin for uploading Silverlight 2 templates to SLS, but for now if you tried to do that you’ll get a random error message that won’t make sense to you (something along the lines of template not found). After talking with Scott and...

A few days ago Google announced “event tracking” for their Google Analytics platform.  My account was invited to participate in this initial wave so I decided to take a look.  The main reason of course is because of a keyword in their email they sent to me (emphasis mine): “Event Tracking allows you to track interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as Flash, AJAX, Silverlight, social networking apps, etc.” I have the script already running on my site for general analytics so I figured I’d whip up a quick sample to see how...

One of the things that we have heard in feedback is the need to surface more end-to-end samples.  While the atomic learning videos/samples are great as are more in-depth tutorials, there is still a desire to see how to package all these things up into a single application.  Seeing from start to finish helps absorb the learning process and see how these atomic things fit together and interoperate. Today we added the “application corner” to the Silverlight community site.  Yes, I know the name is less than exciting, but hey I’m not a super cool marketing person with unlimited...

First a word on the “continuum” I keep hearing about for applications.  I’d like to apply it to my digital lifestyle.  You know that vision where you only have one place to keep your music, but can access it anywhere, etc., etc.  I still haven’t hit nirvana like that yet, but for movie watching it’s getting close. I used to be a customer of Netflix when they first launched.  To be honest, at that time their pricing was singular and I just wasn’t watching enough movies at home to warrant the cost, so I ended my relationship.  Now I...

If you want some great Silverlight information, be sure to subscribe to at least two feeds: Microsoft Silverlight Bloggers and Silverlight community feeds.  I’ve recently just added a bunch of great feeds to both of these including all the members of the Silverlight Toolkit team and some Silverlight MVPs such as John Papa. There are also a bunch of resources being added to the Silverlight community site over the next month.  We also added 27 new showcase entries to the Silverlight Showcase on the site.  One in particular that I think is interesting is a project Gantt representation done...

At PDC the WPF Tookit was made available which provides several new controls to WPF to help bring even more compatibility to the WPF and Silverlight story.  The new controls were the DatePicker, Calendar, DataGrid and the VisualStateManager concept to WPF.  Ribbon controls were also provided to the WPF Toolkit, but are not covered here. With the introduction of this toolkit, developers now have a way to get some even more common XAML code-base between projects. Let’s take a look at a very simple example of both UI and code sharing with WPF and Silverlight.  Here’s the simple...

Sometimes I think reading materials get overlooked in SDKs and we miss some hidden gems.  One such gem I’d like to bring to your attention is the ability to add some subtle styling to an AutoCompleteBox from the Silverlight Toolkit to provide you with a cheap version of an editable ComboBox. Sure Silverlight 2 has a ComboBox as part of the core controls now, but as I’ve previously noted, the ComboBox in current form exhibits only DropDownList behaviors.  I’m sure this will likely change with future versions, but if you have a need for an editable ComboBox feel, here’s...

I received a comment regarding the new Expression Encoder SP1 Silverlight player templates and how they can be used within your own application.  Right now the templates appear to stand on their own.  That’s only because the output of an Encoder action will be an encoded file, the template you chose (XAP) and an HTML page to host the Silverlight player application. But what if you already have an application and are trying to integrate media playback within it?  How can you take advantage of the Encoder templates, but just drop them in your existing application?  Let’s take a...

Apparently “soon” means “the next day” to the Encoder team :-).  On 28 OCT James Clarke told us all about the goodness that is coming to Encoder SP1 and noted it would be available “real soon.” Little did we know he had already clicked the publish process to the download servers.  What are you waiting for, go start the download for Encoder SP1 and I’ll share my thoughts on some things here. What’s in it?  I’ll pick my favorites: New Silverlight output templates, H.264/AAC support and IIS7 smooth streaming support. H.264/AAC Device Encoding Support SP1...

UPDATED: See last paragraph about offline installation. Sorry for the short post, this is more of a public service announcement.  When the Silverlight 2 runtime shipped, we shipped the Visual Studio tools along with it.  The tools download was labeled “RC1” and caused some confusion.  There were some reasons for this, but regardless it still targeted the Silverlight 2 release runtime. Today we released the RTW (Releast To Web for those who are wondering what that means) of the tools.  There is no need to re-download the runtime or anything.  All you need to do is download the...

Today at Microsoft PDC, Scott Guthrie demonstrated some of the new controls that have been provided as a part of the Silverlight Toolkit.  The Silverlight Toolkit was what was previously named the Silverlight Control Pack in the press release when the runtime was released.  This toolkit provides a set of controls and themes for Silverlight 2.  In this initial release, they are: AutoCompleteBox Chart DockPanel ...

In the early days of Silverlight 2, one of the included controls was the WatermarkedTextBox.  In Beta 2 the control was removed from the runtime for among other things, WPF compatibility.  The control source code was made available for people to look at as it was referenced in a few projects, namely ScottGu’s Digg sample application.  There was hinting about future plans but nothing concrete.  Now that Silverlight 2 is released, the control is not there :-).  I’ve gotten enough requests about it that I wanted to provide some action for you.  First, let me say that there...

Last week I had the pleasure of talking with the crew from the Herding Code podcast.  Among the questions was one about the open source community and Silverlight.  There was mention about MVCContrib and how that community sprouted almost instantly with the ASP.NET MVC initial releases.  I let the Herding Code crew know that I believe there already is a vibrant open source community around Silverlight and pointed to things like DevExpress’ AgDataGrid control which is free and provides source.  I also mentioned a project that did start right away around Silverlight 2 initial releases: SilverlightContrib.  The project, started by...

With the release of Silverlight 2 many people faced the task of ensuring their applications/code written targeting Beta 2 was upgraded to release.  The team at the Silverlight community site was no different.  We’ve updated almost all the content so far, but I wanted to draw your attention to a few things. Get Started – http://silverlight.net/GetStarted As noted on this page for those getting started, there are links to Scott Guthrie’s 8 part example of building a Digg client in Silverlight (and then using that code for a WPF desktop application).  Scott has updated his code, so that...

One thing that I’m just as guilty as probably most of some of my peers is creating US-centric applications.  Forgetting to think globally for your users is something that I think happens too often.  We operate in our US-centric worlds and forget that sometimes even the simplest things can make a difference. Take for instance, honoring your user’s culture settings (region/locale/whatever you want to call it).  Even if you have a US-based application for a US-company, how do you know that a user might not be of French origin and still perhaps like to view their operating system information...

One of the nice little additions to the data client services in Silverlight 2 is the removal of the need to drop out of Visual Studio to do some proxy code generation.  Prior to Silverlight 2 release, if you wanted to consume an ADO.NET Data Service (the artist formerly known as Astoria), you had to drop into a command line and execute something like: 1: datasvcutil.exe /out:"MyDataService.cs" /uri:"http://foo.com/MyDataServiceEndpoint.svc" While that isn’t difficult, it just wasn’t convenient as a developer productivity workflow.  I mean who wants to have...

Now that Silverlight 2 has been released, one of the features (or should I say fixes) that is included is the ability for non-secure applications to call secure services.  Previously this was not allowed and we referred to it as “cross-scheme violation.”  That means that a particular protocol scheme (file, http, https) could not access another.  Prior to release this meant that a XAP hosted in an HTTP context could not call a secure service.  Now we no longer have that restriction with the release.  There are some things you have to do, so let me take a brief moment...

Whew, we made it!  Silverlight 2 is now released (and available for download)!  (Official press release here.)  I know we’ve always said “by the end of the year” but the team has worked really hard to get Silverlight 2 released well before then so you can start building and deploying your applications.  A lot of people don’t realize that “Silverlight” is actually a team of many that make up the runtime, media, tools, controls, etc. teams.  Hats off to all those involved who pushed hard to get Silverlight 2 out the door (and are already working on the next version)!...

If you’ve been playing around with Silverlight 2 for a bit now, you may have heard about/used the tool chiron.exe.  It was a tool in the SDK that shipped in Beta 2 that was responsible (for among other things) at that time for packaging the XAP.  Fast forward to release builds for Silverlight 2.  No Chiron.  Hey, what’s up? Chiron is still available for you if you want it.  It is a part of the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK which is available on Codeplex.  So if you need/want it, there you go.  Some people were using Chiron...

Are you using SharePoint and want to know how to leverage Silverlight?  Have you seen the Blueprints project on Codeplex?  But what if those particular implementations don’t meet your needs and you want to create your own contained web part with your Silverlight 2 application? Kirk Evans writes about a method of doing this in a recent post: Hosting Silverlight in SharePoint.  Take a look at Kirk’s post with a step-by-step guide of getting started with his method.  In looking at the method he describes, it is conceivable that you actually could make a more generic web part that...

Did you know that the Silverlight community site has over 150 Silverlight 2 Beta 2 samples submitted by the community?!  These range from short samples of specific functionality to full-fledged applications that people can use.  I recently spoke of 2 of the multi-file uploader controls that were features in the gallery.  There is a lot of good information being shared by our community. WE NEED YOUR HELP – UPDATE YOUR SAMPLES! Today I sent around a note to those who I could identify who had submissions in the gallery with some information pointing them to Silverlight RC0 information...

One of the things I hear a lot about it wanting well-designed control templates/styles for developers to use in Silverlight (and WPF).  As someone with that missing creativity gene, I agree.  While we wait for some of these galleries to emerge (and designers to contribute), there is some hope for the rest of us today. For WPF developers, there has been a commercial resource available (not free) in the templates provided by XAMLTemplates.net.  They provide various styles available for purchase for WPF templates and styles. There also have been some emerging in the Silverlight.net community gallery (look for...

One of the things that I’ve wanted to do since Silverlight released was two things with text, enable a Stroke and layout text on a Path.  Both of which in Silverlight 2 aren’t readily available.  Luckily we have a great ecosystem of developers and MVPs who love to extend our frameworks and create new capabilities for developers. Bill Reiss has done just that.  You may recognize Bill from some XNA and Silverlight gaming fame.  His game of Dr. Popper still remains my daughter’s favorite computer game!  Bill has created a new Silverlight user control he calls PathTextBlock control.  Bill...

If you live in the WPF world, you may know the name of Karl Shifflett.  If you’ve heard the name, but just not have met the man…next time you’re at a developer conference, look for the guy in the Hawaiin shirt, shorts, some ink on the arms and is probably passionately talking to some other geeks about the innards of data binding in XAML. Recently, Karl has joined Microsoft to work on the “Cider” team.  The Cider project is a key part of the developer story for WPF and Silveright.  It is the XAML designer/editor/etc for Visual Studio.  Some...

When working with data and Silverlight there has often been the questions of wondering why when a service call fails that Silverlight returns the HTTP 404 status code.  In fact I’ve written about troubleshooting those types of issues in the past and tools you can use to help investigate some problems. Still people mostly ask "if there is an exception, why is Silverlight telling me ‘not found’ instead of sending me the exception?'”  Eugene Osovetsky from the connected systems team aims to answer those questions in a recent post with a little more detail than has been provided in...

You may be reading the title and wondering what is MediaStreamSource?  MediaStreamSource is a piece of the Silverlight runtime that removes a the influence of a media file's container, giving developers direct access to APIs for manipulating encoded elementary audio and video streams. Huh? Basically it can enable you as the developer to implement file parsers/etc. in managed code instead of Silverlight, enabling support beyond the native built-in formats for media.  There hasn’t been much information about these types of topics, and I’d agree that for the mainstream, they may be a bit more advanced media scenarios for when...

I’ve gotten a few questions (including a great comment) about needing to install Silverlight under offline or administrative-restricted environments.  There are two ways you can install this. First, you’ll still need the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio installer.  Next, make sure you download the Silverlight 2 Developer Runtime (Windows).  There is a Mac runtime for developers as well, but if you are wanting to install the developer tools for Visual Studio offline, I’m guessing you are on Windows :-). Okay, here’s the two options.  These really should only be done if you need an offline install experience.  If you don’t, let the...

One area where Silverlight can plat an interesting role for your web applications is wherever file uploading to your server needs to be done.  This may sound odd to think of it that way, but if you’ve ever done file upload in web apps (for larger sizes, chunking, etc.) sometimes it is no fun and involves a lot of Javascript.  There is a video demonstrating on how you can do file upload with Silverlight 2 and also helps demonstrate the OpenFileDialog API within the runtime. I remember seeing a multi-file uploader that Jose Farado had started back in Silverlight 1.1 days. ...

Today we released Silverlight 2 RC0.  This release is for a very specific purpose and although the information will likely be repeated, I wanted to try to help answer a few questions. What is this release? RC0 is a developer release only!  The intent of providing these bits is to provide developers with ample time to have access to the release candidate runtime/controls for Silverlight with the primary goal of making sure that developers with Silverlight 2 Beta 2 applications that are live today prepare for the release of Silverlight 2. What should a developer do? ...

Someone posed this question (“Can you use IsolatedStorage in Silverlight as a more reliable browser caching technique?”) to me and I answered with my usual optimistic “in theory, yes” answer.  Of course I had never tried it which is horrible to answer that to someone without trying it.  In working on creating some Silverlight business application samples, I figured I should probably look at this scenario to see if a) it would work and b) it makes sense.  I’ll at least try to answer “a” here. The Setup Let’s look at the setup.  The goal here is to...

The Expression Encoder team has announced the plans for SP1 of their product (announced, not released).  You can read all the details on their team blog for more information, but two things caught my attention that are probably of most interest: H.264 encoding and a Silverlight 2 template in the box. The H.264/AAC encoding support is a result of customer feedback (as well as preparing for future Silverlight support).  While the profiles in this service pack will be limited and may not meet the needs of everyone immediately, it is a great step and will probably meet the needs...

As you may know, most wheel support is detected at the browser level.  In Silverlight, this makes adding mouse wheel support an interop action with the HTML host.  While people have implemented it, it has mostly been for the use of DeepZoom applications.  In fact, the latest DeepZoom Composer tool actually adds this support now if you choose to have a Silverlight project as a part of the output of the collection. But what about other controls, namely ScrollViewer?  Having content in ScrollViewer enables ScrollBar functionality but doesn’t automatically respond to mouse wheel actions.  Adam Cooper has solved this...

Silverlight MVP and friend, Joel Neubeck, has started a series in the Expression Newsletter.  The first article is available now and is part of a 6-part series in building a casual game in Silverlight: Getting Started – Architecture / framework Movement and collision detection Design – Sprites, boards and dialogs Animations and sound Initialization and Deployment Advanced concepts (Physics, Multiplayer, Optimization)...

While you can do a lot within Silverlight with effects, as demonstrated by techniques used like seen in Shine Draw, you may also want some helping hands to implement these.  It’s not always fun to write some code for when you just want to be able to drop in an effect on your application.  You want to concentrate on your application logic and get assistance in creating some of the visual effects. If you didn’t know, there are some libraries out there that can help.  I’ll highlight two of them here (if you know of more, please post in...

Saw some posts today over at Don’s site about Surface.  The Surface SDK is starting to get more visible whereas before it seemed a little black-boxish to me.  Turns out (as we all knew) it really is just WPF with some unique Surface-like behaviors in the SDK.  Take this quick demonstration from a program manager on the SDK.  With using the same concepts that we use in WPF and Silverlight for data binding, etc. you can come up with a quick application using the inherent gesture support from a Surface device: Pretty cool huh?  Same XAML concepts...

Man, I feel like I’m constantly on this soapbox about creating a good non-installed experience.  I’m recently sparked again by reading a recent post from Pascal Leloup entitled “Silverlight – It’s too damn complicated to setup.”  These are the times that I wish I could sit next to every developer at the moment they experience this frustration. Part of the time it can be dealing with beta software (as is the case in one of Pascal’s scenarios here), and others I think just take some time to understand the why behind certain things.  Let me take a stab at...

In NYC this weekend and want to hang out and learn some Silverlight?  Some community leaders and Microsoft folk are putting on a Silverlight 2 Firestarter event this weekend on 13-SEP.  Shawn Wildermuth of the Silverlight Tour will be there for the keynote and giving some sessions as well.  It looks like some folks from Infragistics will be there as well…I’d imagine they might have some cool things to talk about! The event is free for anyone to attend and should be a good time hanging out with fellow geeks in NYC and learning what others are doing with...

If you use the Slider object in Silverlight (or WPF for that matter) you may have experienced some similar frustration that I have recently.  Let’s take a look at what the Slider is first. The Slider is a simple control on the surface providing a track and a “thumb” (if you aren’t familiar with that term) that enables value changing.  Some of the key properties are: Minimum – the number that represents the lowest (left or bottom) value Maximum – the number...

We just put up 4 new hands-on labs for Silverlight 2.  These labs are based around some of the training that partners and early adopters had received over the past few months.  A guided lab document and source code (before/after) is provided. The 4 labs include building a web application based around a travel site. Building the UI: using different layout with Grids, StackPanels, etc. Styling the UI: use styles, templates and VisualStateManager…work with default templates in Expression Blend Binding...

This week I had the privilege of attending and helping with some Silverlight in casual games presentations at the XNA Gamefest conference happening in Seattle.  I say helping because the real game experts were there. Two Silverlight presentations were given.  One by Bill Reiss/Joel Neubeck and the other by Mike Snow.  Between the two sessions we covered concepts in Silverlight game development as well as a walk-through of starting out to create a simple game.  I consider these guys to be the foremost experts on the topic given their experience in creating games like Dr. Popper, Stack Attack, Zero...

Now that the Silverlight 2 Video Player is available from Codeplex, I wanted to make it a template for Expression Encoder.  I’ll attempt to articulate the steps below.  It’s actually pretty trivial.  In fact in the current incarnation, you have to throw some extra stuff in there you may not need :-). Step 1 – Creating the template folder While I’ve covered this in previous posts and this is also well documented in the Encoder SDK documentation. First you’ll navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 2\Templates\en and you’ll see the existing template folders.  The folders do not represent...

After posting my sample implementation of accessing Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) via Silverlight, I reflected quickly and also chatted with some AWS engineers. Cross-domain Policy One thing that you should never do is just deploy a global clientaccesspolicy.xml file blindly.  Often times in samples, we (I) do this.  I need to be better about this guidance to be honest, so I’ll start here.  As an example, for the S3 cross domain policy file, we really should add some additional attributes to it to make it more secure.  Since we know it is a SOAP service, we can...

One of probably the coolest casual ‘games’ I’ve ever seen is Line Rider.  It’s a fun game, but really gets exciting when you have an artist behind it.  Basically it’s a blank canvas for you to draw a route for the main character to hop on his sled and ride.  Sound lame?  Not when you see what some have come up with.  For example, here’s a very popular ‘ride’ on YouTube. Well, the Line Rider team has recently modified their beta version and implemented in Silverlight 2!  They’ve also added some social networking integration using Live Messenger and the ability to...

I suspect we’ll be seeing more of these efforts for Silverlight and I love it.  In fact, INETA will be sponsoring the 2008 INETA Silverlight Challenge soon, so you should sign up for more information about that as well.  But until then… But until then, check out what some of the community MVPs and leaders are doing on their own!  They’ve started the Silverlight Control Builder Contest ‘08.  Two main organizers (Page Brooks and Dave Campbell) have put some time and thought into how they can get the community excited about developing solutions for the community and alas...

Some new videos just got posted to the Silverlight community site.  Topics included: IsolatedStorage usage HTML DOM Integration Dynamic Assembly/XAP loading Working with Syndicated Data As always, feedback and ideas are welcome.  Ben’s been leaving some great comments here on suggested topics and I’d love to see more.  I’ll be starting a new ‘series’ soon…more to come on that in a week’s time. As a reminder, these videos are meant...

I’ve been a Wells Fargo customer for a long time.  As a financial institution it has served me well.  I’ve never really put much thought into the services I use and the interactions I have with their systems.  Actually I take that back – I make heavy use of the online banking system and have noticed some likes/dislikes, but overall pleased. Over the past year, the automated teller machines (ATM) have undergone some design changes that, while subtle, have been impressive and welcome additions to the ATM experience for me.  It really made me actually notice a change in...

I’ve just finished updating my modification of Joel’s original concept.  Joel had a really great base for me to build off of and used styling and templates to create simple controls for a standard Silverlight media player that could be embedded.  I took his sample and made some minor adjustments to accommodate automatic sizing as well as make it a bit more parameter-driven.  The end result was (what I think at least) a fairly nice player that could be flexible if needed: Joel made great use of styling primitive controls to be able to leverage core...

One of the things I love about the Microsoft developer ecosystem is the partner channels that are enabled to create great add-ons to our platforms and frameworks.  Our partners in this space usually get to the better implementations before we do, taking on the task of filling some gaps in unique implementations while our teams can focus on providing the best framework for enabling that construction. In December of last year, Telerik showed their intentions of making a control suite for Silverlight (then v1.1).  Well now that beta 2 is released for Silverlight 2, they’ve updated their RadControls for...

Now that beta 2 is out and some of the features or more solid, and a majority of the breaking changes have been announced, there is no excuse to hold back anymore.  Oh yeah, and there is a commercial go-live license available now, so no more excuses :-). So where to get started?  Well you should first head over to the Silverlight community site and visit the Get Started section.  There you will find a rather simple formula to get started: Download/install the tools ...

Well, I have about 3 hours until I leave this little city called Mexico City.  Sarcasm of course, did you know there are roughly 25 million people in Mexico City.  I didn’t.  It is amazing.  Traffic, however, is something to be desired.  I’m told that a 3 mile trip at times could take 1hr, 30 minutes.  Maybe I should stop complaining about my commute when I do it?  No, it still sucks. Anyway, on to business.  Yesterday I attended and spoke at the MIX Essentials Mexico conference.  These events are happening worldwide and if there is one coming up...

Um.  Whoa. Okay, DevExpress rocks.  I think this will be very well received by the community and you’ll have to watch their page for when it is available and to get your license. From their site: As the release of Silverlight draws near, DevExpress has invested the engineering resources needed to deliver a feature-rich grid control for Silverlight. Not just a "preview" of what is possible with Silverlight, the AgDataGrid Suite was developed to fully exploit the power and flexibility of the platform… It looks like it will support pretty much everything you’d expect in a DataGrid and more…wicked cool.  Congratulations and thank you...

Silverlight 2 brings a suite of controls for designers and developers to leverage within their applications.  With the Expression tools helping us to be able to skin these controls, also comes some new controls you may not have used yet as well as a new one introduced with the latest release of Silverlight 2. Introducing TabControl. UPDATE: Video walk-through is now live. The TabControl is implemented in the System.Windows.Controls.Extended class library and not in the Silverlight core.  To use it make a reference to the Extended assembly and it will be available to you.  In Expression Blend you’ll see TabControl in the Custom...

If you’ve heard the news about Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and Expression Blend 2.5 (June 2008 preview), you will notice something else in addition to being able to skin your controls easier.  Remember how you may have had to create different states for your element using “MouseOver State" and then create storyboards to transition to states?  There’s now a better way. Enter VisualStateManager. Let’s take a look and see if we can simplify this down a bit a basic understanding.  Let’s use something that most everyone should be able to relate to with states: Button.  A button has...

I just finished up a day attending the Chicago RIApalooza event in, well, Chicago.  First, I must say that I love cities with great mass transit systems.  I’ve said this before and I keep threatening myself to move to one. For this event I paired up with a super designer Corrina Barber.  Corrina works as a user experience designer at Microsoft, is wicked smart and was a perfect compliment to this event.  Most of the attendees at RIApalooza I believed to be interactive developers, so most having a knack for design.  I figured rather than a developer...

A while back the team at the New York Times newspaper produced a digital reader for their content, dubbed ‘Times Reader.’  The technology powering that reader experience (“the digital newspaper that reads like the real thing”) is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), part of the .NET Framework.  It is a remarkable experience for viewing digital news in a traditional format.  It provided online and offline reading capabilities mixed with some new and innovative ways of viewing related stories. Portions of the reader were even transformed into a starter kit framework: Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit.  This kit provides the initial...

There are some really great application concepts emerging using Silverlight.  I cam across two that I feel are really demonstrating great use of the technology, both in the code as well as attention to detail in the user interface.  Both of these examples make great use of layouts, controls, etc. within Silverlight 2 to show what is possible with some imagination and the platform. The first is the “My Travel Management” site which leverages real travel information to represent the scenario of looking at flight arrangements.  It definitely is a twist on the Silverlight Airlines, providing a little more...

The first of my Silverlight videos have posted which cover some networking stuff that I’ve been blogging about already.  If you want to see a walk through of things you might have already read, please take a look at them: Cross domain policy files with Silverlight 2 Using WCF and ASP.NET Web Services with Silverlight 2 There are more coming and I’m interested in hearing your comments so please give them.  If you have suggestions for things that...

I know ScottGu already did a good sample showing integration with Digg and Silverlight, but check out what Jose did! Jose does a great job explaining each of the components here and what he is doing to develop this application.  A good experience demonstration with a lot going on there with Silverlight.  I really encourage you to check out this read and subscribe to Jose’s feed – he’s what I’d call ‘wicked good.’ tags: silverlight, jose fajardo, cynergy, digg, wpf, xaml, ria

Je viens en Belgique pour MIX! In one of my previous posts I made reference to the MIX Essentials event happening in Belgium later this month (24 APR).  Well, it turns out that I will be there!  I'll be speaking on Silverlight 2 and creating rich applications and am joining the company of Gil Cleeren and Catherine Heller...oh yeah and Ballmer (I tried to catch a ride with him, but couldn't cash in my frequent flyer miles).  My session will provide an overview of everything new in Silverlight 2 and how you can start building your applications using it...

Firs, thank you for all that came to the presentation in Anaheim.  The room was full, and hopefully you learned something while there (and hopefully it was along the lines that video in text boxes might not be good design, but is doable :-)). I got a bunch of really great questions and concerns and hopefully answered all of them that were asked.  I saw many more hands lifted than we could get to, so if you have more questions, feel free to send them to me, or join the forum discussions as well!  The Silverlight community site is a great...

UPDATE: The supported method for Silverlight 2 release is shown here: http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideo.aspx?video=69800.  You basically have to make it an assembly resource. Since the beginning of Silverlight you've been able to embed fonts within a Silverlight application.  The challenge in version 1.0 was that you essentially had to use a downloader and some SetFontSource methods on a TextBlock (for example) to do it.  I wrote about this a while back when using my own handwriting as a font within Silverlight.  It looked something like this: this.downloader = control.createObject("downloader"); this.downloader.addEventListener("completed", Silverlight.createDelegate(this, this.handleFontDownloaded)); this.downloader.open("GET", "timheuer.ttf"); this.downloader.send();handleFontDownloaded: function(sender,...

Very cool think popped in my RSS reader this morning.  Scott Guthrie (now a corp VP, congrats Scott) put up a first look post at Silverlight 2.  Not just a 'here's what is coming' but an 8-part tutorial as well as he built a sample application trying to leverage and demonstrate various parts of Silverlight 2. These tutorials should be extremely helpful for those wanting to understand some of the newer concepts brought to Silverlight.  If you haven't done a lot (or any) WPF coding before, some of this should jumpstart your knowledge a bit. take a look at 'First Look at...

i was able to make it to the phoenix silverlight user group last night (2 separate trips downtown, yikes) and had a good time chatting with everyone there.  i understand that there will NOT be a separate march meeting because it essentially falls very close to when scott guthrie and others will be coming to town.  the group is recommending that people attend that to learn the latest and greatest about silverlight 2 right out of MIX!  we had a good discussion about various things.  mike palermo showed a couple of things he'd been working on including a simple game...

miniclip.com now has a silverlight 1.0 puzzle game to their catalog.  this is pretty good to see among the massive catalog of casual games they offer.  this game is built using silverlight 1.0 and is a good use of a lot of the capabilities (and in some cases maxing them out) for the 1.0 platform. Zombomatic ...

thanks to all who came out to the denver devdays big event this week.  this was the first time i've traveled in a while since various family ailments and situations.  i had a good few days in denver with some good peeps.  thanks to beth massi for joining our developer crowd in denver.  she was awesome and had a crowd wherever she was. i attempted to do justice to office development in one of the sessions.  one of the challenges on that topic is that 'office' now encompasses a lot of things...here's my known short list: ...

i recently got an email from a rails developer who was using silverlight on a site to display high-quality media.  what?! you though silverlight was a windows-only technology? blasphemy!  you see, silverlight is a client-technology, which means as long as it can be served up to the browser (and the user has the plugin), the server can be your own custom version of l337hax0r web edition or whatever.  now, there are advantages of using internet information services on windows and some integration with asp.net, but that's not what this post is about.  on to the issue at hand will you... so...

i had previously done a screencast where i talked about the tools i use to convert vector graphics in SVG format to XAML assets to be consumed in either WPF or Silverlight applicaitons.  one of the tools mentioned in the screencast is Inkscape.  inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilitis siilar to illustrator, freehand, etc and uses the SVG file format (mostly).  one of the cool things about inkscape is the extensibility already offered in the open source platform.  after having some colorful discussions with my local linux group on their discussion group, i met one of...

remember that feature i was mentioning that is a plugin for expression encoder?  you know the one that enables you to publish the output immediately and directly to the silverlight streaming service? well, how would you like to write your own encoder publishing plugin.  perhaps you have a process with a content delivery network?  or have some custom process you want to implement in your own workflow (save as an encoder job file, etc.) for ongoing media encodings?  james clarke just announced a quickstart guide on developing publisher plug-ins for encoder. the code looks relatively simple to implement: [EncoderPlugin("Zip Plugin from scratch","Enables output...

pdc for 2008 has been announced so you can save the date. the professional developer conference 2008 will be 27-30 OCTOBER at the Los Angeles Convention Center.  if you want the details (minimal now other than what i just said), you can visit the pdc2008 site. tags: pdc , pdc2008 , devdays , developer , professional developer conference , silverlight , visual studio , linq , asp.net , orcas , vb10 , vb , xml , xaml

brad abrams kicked off some webcasts regarding silverlight over on msdn.  you should check out the on-demand as well as the upcoming webcast series... Kickoff Webcast: MSDN Webcast: An Introduction to Silverlight (Level 100) designers: MSDN Webcast: Designer Series (Part 1 of 5): Getting Started with Silverlight for Designers MSDN Webcast: Designer Series (Part 2 of 5): Working with Expression Design to Create Visual Assets ...

this morning, scottgu posted details on the roadmap for the .net web platform.  it is an exciting roadmap to me, so let me hit some of the highlights: ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions - this will include the MVC framework, AJAX improvements, dynamic data support, asp.net and silverlight support, and ado.net data services (entity framework).  this release is expected to be available for download on the web next week in the first preview mode. silverlight: because of the significant effort being made and...

yo, check it.  expression design has released a service pack.  what!?  i know how can that be?  a service pack < 8 months after its release?  i say awesome.  i've been wanting microsoft teams to continue to become more and more agile especially with regards to very helpful features or great improvements of existing features based on user feedback. one such point of feedback that is implemented in expression design is that of xaml generation of the layers and/or complete surface.  you didn't know design can generate xaml?  shame on you.  i did a podcast (you should really subscribe to the...

saw this on the 'sphere...using ulead, swf2xaml jeff and michael created 'silverlightvr 360,' showing an image of a jeep in virtual 3d.  the user is able to move the image on along both axis points to look at the object (jeep) in a virtual 3d view. tools and directions are listed on their write-up here. tags: silverlight , 3d , xaml , swf2xaml

while perusing the silverlight.net forums i found a question of "creating half circle in blend" and posted my answer (actually posted the xaml of my answer). rather than try to articulate it in text, which i started out doing and was failing in my own mind, i decided to do a quick screencast demonstrating what i did.  keep in mind i'm not a vector guy but did it the way i knew how.  i hope that someone can correct me with a super easier way of doing it, but until then i'm fine with my method :-).  essentially i used expression...

the expression team has made another drop of their blend tool.  the september preview of 'blend 2' is available on the site.  i installed it yesterday and it has some nice improvements for both client and silverlight development.  some better control over keyspline animations if you need them, more properties exposed on things you would have liked not to edit xaml on :-), etc. have fun and get it!  you have to uninstall the august preview if you have it.  blend 1 (rtm) and blend 2 preview can run side-by-side (that's how i run them) fyi. tags: blend2 , expression , expression...

i just put up another podcast video of how to "cheat" at creating a media player for silverlight.  have you been looking at some of these media experiences with all their fancy buttons and dvd player-type overlays, etc. but didn't want to take the time to code your own?  well, you don't have to :-) (man that sounds like an infomercial) in this podcast i demonstrate using expression media encoder as a tool that will essentially generate stub code for you.  now keep in mind that expression media encoder itself generates some pretty kick arse templates that may perfectly suit you. ...

i recently started to embark on a little 3 part series involving taking a pdf document of a baseball field and doing some silverlight and asp.net ajax love with it.  it led me along a path of creating some intense xaml design elements actually and i thought i'd share (in simpler form) the process i used. expression design is a graphic tool that enables creating vector art that can then be exported to xaml (either WPF or silverlight).  it is a great tool that i'm starting to be more and more familiar with.  design understands various import and export format but...

you can tell when a new fiscal year has started (or at least the month after a new fiscal year).  people are back from vacations, meetings are more frequent, last-minute trips are planned, you get the picture.  all of this has been counterproductive to me being able to really sit down and do some fun things with silverlight.  not to feat though, some great things have been going on. after i had helped "bcl man" :-) upload some videos of ironruby, i decided it did not do him justice to use one of the vanilla templates and altered it a bit...

richardz found a place for his awesome silverlight 'jelly' samples...and added another one -- overload. check out the jelly overload! tags: silverlight , jelly graph , jelly overload , jelly pie , jelly bar , expression , xaml

as you might suspect, if you are hosting silverlight applications via silverlight streaming, you may have to make some modifications there as well to support the release candidate.  when hosting the python cube for mark, i had to make a few updates and thought i'd give some quick pointers to information that already exists as well as walk through a simple example. if you have a streaming sample, you might be seeing it running and showing the "Get Silverlight" banner: this, of course, assumes that the user has the updated silverlight plugin installed (either 1.0 RC or 1.1 alpha...

i know i posted earlier with a pointer to the preview sdk over in sneathville, but i walked through the docs this morning and just wanted to re-iterate the need to look at the breaking changes document included in the preview sdk.  why? because when i look at the numerous samples i see that some are likely to be affected.  wouldn't you want your sample to run when the release candidate is put in the wild?  i would. breaking changes...ugh...they suck.  but bear in mind this is beta and we knew there could be some.  in looking through the docs,...

as seen on the silverlight.net forums (you should visit sometime)... over at theconverted.ca there is a new SWF to XAML converter in the market...according to the site: This program converts Flash animations to the Xaml format. It accepts files up to Flash version 8. It handles animation, sound and fonts. You drag files in, it generates the results. You can use the command line for automation. check out some of the demonstration conversions -- pretty impressive! tags: silverlight, xaml, swf, flash, swf converter, swf to xaml

UPDATE: for international users, the team is aware of this limited functionality...and the current build works with US English keyboard layout and US English regional settings.  sorry about that, but it's a lab project that will evolve. for the past few weeks i've had the pleasure of really seeing this whole designer-developer continuum really work.  the team over at Terralever have been working on a little lab project using silverlight.  first let me tell you about the Terralever team...they rock.  i figured there would be a ton of questions, etc., but from our first initial meeting, their team was already spouting...

okay, are you coming off of a high of MIX (or the information surrounding it)?  i know i am, heck i've seen a lot of the stuff and i was still amazed at things that i saw.  there are some great designers and developers building fantastic user experiences with windows presentation foundation (wpf) and silverlight...i was impressed. if you are like me and searching for the best way to get a leg up on this technology and the tools, you're probably hunting around for the opportunity to learn some more.  there is currently an expression blend tour that is coming...

wooclan member and game-coder extraordinaire jason just posted about some hacking he did to provide some basic layout capabilities of textblocks, yeah, like basic as in centering. check it out yo. tags: silverlight, jason mauer, mauer, xaml, wpf

one really great feature about silverlight is the packaging aspect of it.  what do i mean by this?  well, you can essentially put a ton of assets into a compressed file and pull them out as needed.  this would provide you the ability to have a single asset package that is compressed, and thus saving on some download time.  of course there would be tradeoffs that you'd have to consider, but for sample sake, let's assume they are good. so how would you do that?  well let's say you have a bunch of images in a file name 'assets.zip' (here...

i have to say, i'm really excited about this...for a while now i've been talking to customers and communities about wpf and expression blend.  i have to admit though, i'm not a designer, not even a good novice designer :-).  but i "get" expression blend -- the framework is much simpler for me to understand as a novice...and when i see experts open the tool i'm amazed at how quick they understand it and begin to create some compelling visuals/applications. anywhoo, there is a roadtrip happening...expression blend near you!  so check out the city list and register.  you'll learn some...

i've been trying to learn more and more about wpf/e and the current functionality in the february ctp, so i decided to jump on the create-a-video-player-skin bandwagon and mock something up. i thought it would be quite the incredible thing (read: couldn't think of a better idea) to show a zune player...so whoala: and when you click 'start player' (yes i know it would be cool to show the player as a playlist and use the normal zune buttons, but c'mon, v.0.0.3 here...work with me people) it rotates to show you the video (if you don't own a zune,...