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A while back I pondered doing a “live” debug session with people who were/are working with Silverlight 2 and data access via services, etc. I really like a live concept because it allows people to ask real questions and feels more conversational than a one-way presentation. After some consideration, I’m not sure I could quite guarantee the environment I was looking for to accomplish this type of style. So as a second best, I’ve set up a webcast: Troubleshooting Silverlight Data Access. I hope to keep the question channel open during the webcast though and answer as many questions...
Today Visual Studio 2008 has released SP1 which not only brings some fixes, but also is an added value service pack, bringing some new functionality to WPF as well as enabling a “client” deployment pack of the .NET framework so that those deploying .NET framework with your client applications can have a much smaller footprint (by about 80+%).
With the release of SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 today, the Silverlight team has also updated their tools for Silverlight 2 Beta 2. Read again: a tools update for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is needed and available for you. If you install Visual...
Well, I wish I was going to this event: ReMIX UK! For one, it would be starting the day of my birthday and would be a great birthday treat! Secondly, I would be able to meet up with my fellow escamoles chaps and maybe take in some local cuisine instead. If you are in the UK, or for some reason really wanted to see the current value of the US dollar, make sure you head to ReMIX UK! The lineup is pretty incredible when you look at it…here’s some Microsoft favorites: ...
I’ve just completed my upgrade to my site of the official 2.0 release of Subtext, the Open Source blogging engine that I use to manage content on this site. You can read the full announcement from grand poohba Haack himself here. I’m loving this release because of the improvements made but also a little selfishly because the modifications I’ve made to my own fork I’ve been using have made it into this release! These modifications really make this the best platform for me when using Live Writer. This may not make a difference to a lot of you,...
I’ve had a couple things sitting in my inbox for a week or so and rather than call them out individually and take up your precious aggregation space, I’ll summarize them here.
3rd Party Silverlight Controls
Got a note from Valentin about the roadmap for the Telerik Silverlight controls. As they’ve previously noted, they are planning a set of controls: Window, Menu, TreeView, TabControl, PanelBar, Cube, ComboBox, Upload, Calendar, DatePicker, NumericUpDown, MediaPlayer, Range Slider, ProgressBar, WrapPanel, DockPanel, UniformGridPanel. Right now it looks like they are incorporating the feedback provided and doing some polish work like adding Blend tool support for skinning, etc. ...
With the Olympic ceremony only days away and being able to enjoy the Olympic experience online via Silverlight, why not get a little excited and play some casual games, Olympic style. All of these were build using Silverlight and the Popfly game creator:
Torch Lighting
Soccer
Track and Field
Archery
Long Jump
...
If you already pay attention to the IronRuby dev group and are on the distribution list, apologies for the dupe. I’ve just got back from a camping trip and rifling through all my emails now. I checked in on the IronRuby group and noticed a new project emerging from someone. It’s from Ivan Porto Carrero and he calls it IronNails. It was previously called something else (quite frankly I liked the other name better myself) but there was already a project named after his chosen name. So alas, IronNails it is! Ivan describes this as: ...
I’ve seen the rumbling a few times now about property setting in Silverlight. The rumblings are along the lines of “why do I have to use SetValue for setting simple properties like the x/y positioning?” To those points, I agree from a fundamental standpoint. From a technical standpoint SetValue is there and serves a great purpose for providing a common way of setting properties on XAML elements regardless of the element. As a developer, I like it actually. I do, however, see the point about wanting to set simple properties and it just looks a little verbose. Take for instance...
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...
I’ve got a thought lately and curious if I’m thinking crazy. You see, probably the most asked questions I get are around working with services within Silverlight. Although I’ve got some helpful (at least I think they’re helpful) posts on the subject: Silverlight, 404 and some tool help Updates for Beta 2 Working with Syndicated Data Calling WCF/ASMX Services Calling REST Services Cross-domain policy files ...
I’m hoping this post will help explain a few things with regard to Silverlight detection scripts that some sites may be using. This is related to the silverlight.js Javascript file that was deployed with a lot of Silverlight 1.0 applications/sites and is also available as a part of the Silverlight 2 SDK tools.
What the heck is this Silverlight.js you speak of?
Simply put, Silverlight.js is a helper file which enables Web sites to create advanced Silverlight installation and instantiation experiences. It was a resource file that was initially shipped along side several templates and helper projects to aid in the detection...
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...
For those of you who use my RSS FeedReader Web Part for SharePoint, it has been updated into an ‘official’ release for the project. Version 3.0.0.2 is now the latest release. It incorporates all the changes from our team’s contributor, Ryan – thanks Ryan!!! You can read the checkin on the Codeplex site or review this previous post for Ryan’s checkin notes. As always, the source code is included on the site, licensed under the Ms-Pl. There has been some emails/work items/debate over the installer. The installation is two parts: ...
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...
As I patiently awaited, here’s what was presented to my browser:
I’ve made my first official “commit” to an open source project that I didn’t start. I feel good. I feel like cracking open a Mt. Dew and going crazy. Honestly though it does feel good (and fun).
My blog engine I use is Subtext. It’s the blog engine I’ve used almost exclusively (I actually started with .Text before scottw sold out went to Telligent to make Community Server. I kid of course, Scott is a great guy, and very smart. But when .Text was seemingly going to get stale, others...
The Silverlight Streaming service has been upgraded to support Silverlight 2 beta 2 applications. As a note to customers who were previously hosting Beta 1 applications for test purposes, as beta 1 is no longer a supported test platform for SLS. Authors should update/upload their applications using the latest Silverlight 2 bits. These are available (with the tools) from the Silverlight community site. Silverlight 1 applications hosted on SLS are not affected by this upgrade and still supported of course. Remember that you can also now directly upload a XAP file to SLS using the Manage...
Over the past few months Joel and I have been back-and-forthing modifications to his original great idea and goal “build a re-sizable video player using no custom user controls, but instead leveraging controls styles and templates.” Joel started in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and implemented using the style method (aka ‘the MIX model’) available at that time.
I took it and added some functionality of scaling and startup parameters. After the VisualStateManager model for styling was released, this project made perfect sense to demonstrate those abilities and thus I transformed the great styling work that Joel did into the VSM...
I’ve been watching Ariel’s blog for a while and really like the insight. What is it? Microspotting, where she describes “Like the paparazzi, but for geeks.” I would say similar to the core tenet of Channel 9, Microspotting has the intent of turning the looking glass inward to get some profiles of key individuals you might recognize within Microsoft. What is great is that the story is augmented by another of Ariel’s talents: photography. She’s pretty good and I’ve enjoyed the photos that accompany the profiles and stories. From her site: My name is Ariel and Microspotting...
The team att AppDev is providing a free learning CD-ROM for Silverlight 2. They are providing it as a CD-ROM or download and said it represents a $115 value for their training…but are providing it now for free!
If you are familiar with MSDN Magazine, ASPNETPro, and other online/offline publications, the name Dino Esposito might sound familiar. Dino is the one providing the training walkthroughs for you in this offering. It includes roughly 3 hours of training on Silverlight 2 content. Get it now! Thanks AppDev!
UPDATE (30 JUN 2008):
The team at AppDev has heard some feedback and has altered their offer. ...
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...
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...
This has been one of the features that I’ve been excited about for a while since I heard we were changing it. With the release of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and the updated preview of Expression Blend 2.5 (June 2008), skinning and styling controls within Silverlight gets a bunch easier. When Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was released there was the possibility of styling/skinning controls. It wasn’t impossible, but perhaps a bit obfuscated to the eye for people with short attention spans like myself. You can read more about those methods here and here. WPF designers were...
So you want to read an RSS/Atom feed on the interwebs and saw the SyndicationFeed class you could use in Silverlight to give a nice RIA display of the syndicated data. Great, no problem right, just wire up an WebClient, point it to the RSS feed on something like http://silverlight.net or something and boom, done. Wait, what’s this 404 Not Found error? In most cases this is going to be a result of a cross-domain issue. If you haven’t started working with services yet, Silverlight requires a cross-domain policy file to be in place to access remote data not on...
Hot off the press, a new drop of Windows Live Writer was just released. Get it here. This is one of my favorite tools from Microsoft and the update brings a few new changes. First, I’m happy to report that Flickr4Writer and S3Browser still work fine and require no adjustments. The other thing announced today from the Writer team is an updated SDK. This new SDK includes a new type of plugin which enable plug-in activity for pre- and post-publish events. Some of you following me on Twitter may have noticed something every so often that said...
This week I’ll be traveling to Mexico City to meet developers and designers at the local MIX Essentials (English translation here – funny that RIA gets translated to LAUGHS) event. I’ll be presenting two sessions there this week. I was fortunate enough to be asked to kick-off the conference talking about building RIAs with Silverlight 2. I’m particularly excited about this as I have some things to show that haven’t really been shown broadly yet. I will also be speaking on working with data in Silverlight 2 later in the day. This session will cover working with services, servers,...
I searched and didn’t immediately find anything, so I’m partly doing this for my own mental archive but also for others who might want this feature. First, I use two tools for snapshot capturing. When I want a quick snapshot with no annotation, I use WinSnap, which rocks the hizzouse. For when I need annotation (arrows, highlighting, etc.) I use SnagIt from the makers of Camtasia (Betsy Weber rocks). Both of these tools are incredible and I’ve purchases full licenses for both and haven’t regretted it at all. In WinSnap, there is a feature that allows you to...
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...
Take a few minutes and look at this video of Jose Fajardo re-demonstrating one of his ReMIX features shown using Silverlight and DeepZoom. Are you kidding me?! Seriously, Jose has a great imagination and an incredible sense for effectively demonstrating things. In this video he answers questions posed to himself like “what if all web images were DeepZoom-able?” and “what if all the documents on the web were DeepZoom-able?” Then he gets crazy and suggests that people could collaborate with a DeepZoom image and demonstrates this using a Silverlight chat experience built using network sockets. I love his context...
Taking another cue from some great stuff Joel is doing, I liked his implementation of the ‘Leopard Screen Saver’ but wanted to make it more ‘real’ for me. So I wired it up to my Flickr account. Result here (using Silverlight Streaming):
I only had to change a few things.
First, in the Page_Loaded event, I removed the timer start function. This was because with interacting with Flickr it was going to be async. I didn’t want the timer to start until I knew the image collection was built.
My BuildCollection function now looks like this:
private void BuildCollection()
{
// get...
I’m very excited to have the opportunity to attend the RIApalooza event in Chicago in a few weeks (31 MAY). What is RIApalooza? RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and "PowerPoint-Free" zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built. source: riapalooza.com I love the PPT-free zone aspect of it. I loving having the maximum time to show some real working code, answer questions and see what...
In February, the SharePoint team released a Visual Studio extensions kit for SharePoint development. Just recently they released a user guide complete with samples and walkthroughs. The sections include:
Starting out in SharePoint Development
Walkthrough of the VS extensions
Team Site project
Blank Site project
List Definition project
Web...
Want a Silverlight-branded XBOX console? Yeah, me too, that would be cool. Well, there isn’t one of those, but there is a chance for you to show your Silverlight prowess and win some cool stuff. The RIA development portal at DevX is currently running a contest (which ends next week, yikes, hurry!) for creating games in Silverlight 2. The contest seems relatively simple: Step 1: Create wicked cool game in Silverlight 2 Step 2: Host it on Silverlight Streaming How simple is that…oh yeah, except for the ‘creating game’ part. There are a few...
Hello readers! If you are a Foxit user, please update your reader software to the latest version ASAP. A recent exploit was found by a security research firm and Foxit turned around an update to their reader within 24 hours. Bravo to the Foxit team for being very agile and getting this rectified. After some further research and discussion with the development team it was found that the ActiveX component used in the PDF Preview Handlers might also be vulnerable. To reconcile this, Foxit has issued a patched (and updated) version of the ActiveX control for the preview handlers. ...
While Silverlight 2 brings us great capabilities as .NET developers and opens many opportunities for creating rich clients in the browser, it still supports strong media features that have been available since the initial release of Silverlight. The ability to deliver efficient, high quality media in the browser is an increasing need in a lot of sites producing content for their members. Traditional ‘podcasts’ which were historically audio-only, are moving increasingly faster to richer media. This is nothing new of course, but being able to quickly distribute the media on your sites efficiently and provide methods for your users to...
While you may not personally work with a lot of media solutions in your Silverlight application, it is nice to know the quality is there when you need it. Silverlight supports the VC-1 codec for media which provides a standards implementation for high quality media. I would imagine that most developers probably don’t know/care what all that means. But if you are deploying a high-touch media solution (i.e., online TV, etc.) you want that high quality.
Our resident media expert, Ben Waggoner, just put up a great (and detailed) post about some ‘high-touch encoding’ techniques he uses and does some comparisons...
For Silverlight 2, we finally have some native controls to leverage. Most of them are to aid in input scenarios. The text input, however, is currently scoped to be plain text input. Some have desired a richer input control. You knew it wouldn’t be long before someone in the community stepped up to the challenge. Christopher Husse has done just that.
Enter: Silverlight rich text editor.
He posts a detailed description of all the capabilities on Michael Syncs blog. The effort is also posted on Codeplex for you to peruse.
Here is what he calls the ‘incomplete feature list’:
...
This blog runs on SubText. I heart SubText. I know there are others out there but for me SubText has met most of my needs. And when it hasn’t I modify it. Which brings me to this post. There was a thread on an email list I belong to about Windows Live Writer (I heart Live Writer too :-)) and categories (adding new categories on the fly). This got me to crack open the source and hunt. Alas, there was no support for this. I’ve been ranting about WordPress API support for SubText on the developer list and I think...
Tonight my wife is holding the Quarterly Stickholder’s Meeting of the Cortina Babysitting Co-op.
Yeah, WTF? (as Steve Harman would say, ‘wow, that’s fantastic!’)
Last year I wrote about building community within your community and discussed the various ways that my wife has rallied others in our local community to get to know each other, stay involved and serve each other. It really has been amazing and it has created a community that makes it hard for anyone to leave. I recently went through some thoughts of moving and we couldn’t find anything weighing heavier than the friends we’ve gained in our...
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
I’ve started a dialog with a few of you about getting Silverlight and service integration working, specifically with ASP.NET web services (and even WCF ones). A few have downloaded some of my samples, but others have started from scratch. A few have reported getting some interesting errors, ASYNC_blahblah and NotFound errors specifically. While this was boggling my mind (as I wasn’t getting them), a reader’s comments pointed me along the lines of something…he mentioned “maybe it is because my web service is ASP.NET 2.0 and not 3.5” – of which that shouldn’t be the case, so I went to test...
In my previous post about cross-domain policy files I received some comments about whether or not cross-domain access is allowed on Silverlight Streaming. I think really this is two questions that I'll try to clarify here.
What is Silverlight Streaming?
For those who don't know, Microsoft provides anyone with an account to "stream" Silverlight applications for free. We'll give you 10GB of space to put your Silverlight applications. There are some limitations, which you can read about in the service. The "streaming" name has confused some. It isn't only a "where can I put media files" location, but is a service to...
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...
I've been with Microsoft now for over 3 years and have loved every minute of my time here. For the time leading up to being hired at Microsoft, it was a professional goal of mine to work for the company. Fanboy? Sure, call me whatever you want. I prefer to just call it passion. I joined as a developer evangelist for my community (an area we call desert mountain which spans Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana). This was an easy thing to say yes to because everything I learned I learned from being a part of...
Ever since I released my version of the Foxit PDF Preview Handler, I've been flooded with comments about building a version that works for Windows XP. You see XP doesn't have the preview host that Vista has built into the operating system.
Well, I finally had some time to hunt down some code and get it working, thanks to the help of Ryan Gregg from the Outlook team. I released the sample code I used as a base for this as a part of our Code Trip project. You can view my short screencast explaining one of the core pieces here...
One of The Code Trip sponsors, InnerWorkings, has teamed up to have a coding challenge for developers. This is open to everyone to participate. The winner gets an annual subscription to InnerWorkings as well as an XBOX 360 game console.
If you aren't familiar with InnerWorkings, consider this a shameless plug. I really do believe in their product as it is a unique learning experience from what we traditionally have (i.e., lab manuals with step-by-step instructions). They have a wide catalog of topics including ASP.NET, WCF, WPF, Silverlight, CSS, etc. for organizations to choose from. You really need to check them...
The MountainWest RubyConf 2008 is upon us just 2 weeks away in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to be there given my travel with The Code Trip. IronRuby, however, was able to be a sponsor of this year's conference as a Gold Sponsor. This sponsorship is one part that enables video production of the conference for afterwards as well as a few other things. The organizers have done a great job getting great sponsors to make this happen, and IronRuby is grateful to be a part of that.
One thing that was recently released was...
Our current route on The Code Trip takes us to Boulder, Colorado on March 18 to the Boulder .NET User Group! I'm really excited about this stop in Boulder, CO as we've managed to get some help from great partners to demonstrate some very cool developer stuff they are working on.
Specifically, Quark and me.dium will be there to talk to the group. Quark will be showing us some stuff they've been working on for WPF and Silverlight. me.dium is a company that I met at MIX08 last week that were showing off some great stuff they've done with Internet Explorer...
I just saw two links that I simply have to promote as they are very helpful to people doing Silverlight development and one specifically with ASP.NET.
The first is a site on silverlight.net (you should bookmark this site as a resource and subscribe to all the feeds), there is now a Silverlight 2 Beta 1 control sample page, which hosts all the new Silverlight controls on the site. It shows some different usage of all the controls:
Very cool to see all the controls implemented in one section, play around with them and see different styles in some as well.
The second link...
For about a year now I've been using Amazon S3 services. Mostly I'm using it for image storage for my blog and web site. I decided to stop using Flickr for screenshot stuff and keep it to 'photographs' when I can. I signed up for an S3 account and have been using it for screenshot type stuff since then. If you don't know, S3 is a service that basically enables 'object' storage in the cloud. An object can be anything really, but I'm treating it like a remote host for images.
The one thing Amazon doesn't provide themselves is a tool...
When working with Silverlight 2, most will be working with managed code (c#, vb, etc.). But likely people are working with Silverlight as an additive value to their web application, providing some enhanced user experience to an application. there may be times where you will still need to call back into the hosting html context. For then, you'll want to be familiar with two objects HtmlDocument and HtmlPage.
Both of these objects provide access to the page context hosting your silverlight control. If you need to seek things in the HTML DOM, you could use the HtmlDocument class. For example,...
We're off! Just minutes ago The Code Trip left the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas en route to our first stop in Salt Lake City. It's going to be a late night of coding and editing of some video. Now that we've officially left, I'll share the actual pictures of our bus so you can be on the lookout for us: Tomorrow (late tonight) we roll in to Salt Lake for the combined .NET community user group meeting at the Franklin Covey building. We're going to spend 2 hours talking about what we saw at MIX08. We've got a...
Wow, it's been a few months now since I thought about doing a road trip talking about the next wave of technologies. I originally thought it would be the "Silvertour" but we've now actually made it happen. I can tell you that the behind the scenes of this has been a long process. It seems so simple and I can hear the people now saying 'why was it so hard, c'mon you are Microsoft and have zillions of dollars.' Sure, maybe that is true about a big company, but that's also the point. We are a company of companies and...
I've gotten a few requests from internal local sales teams, Sharepoint professionals and developers about how to implement Silverlight in Sharepoint. I usually try to explain that since Sharepoint is essentially an ASP.NET application it is relatively simple to implement. Of course, that usually doesn't help :-). What helps is some documentation and samples that show how you would use Silverlight to enhance a Sharepoint experience.
As a part of the Software+Services Blueprints series, a new bundle has been made available to download to provide guidance and source code to help provide some information. In the blueprint you'll get:
...
Along with some of my compadres, Josh Holmes and Peter Laudati, we're helping our MIX team member Drew Robbins organize the Open Space @ MIX area. What is it? Well, sort of whatever you want it to be. If you've never been to an Open Space event format before there are some things you should know...
Four principles of Open Space:
Whoever comes are the right people to be there
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened
...
From the 'does the guy ever sleep' category, ScottGu enlightens us all again with a very great tutorial on using Expression Blend 2.5 (March preview coming soon) to work with Silverlight 2 content.
Scott walks through a tutorial on using the design-time features of Expression Blend 2.5 and some tips along the way to produce a chat-like application using Silverlight:
Definitely worth a look to study before MIX. Someone might want to pull Scott aside about the font choice though...
tags: silverlight, mix, mix08, scottgu, expression, expression blend, silverlight 2, comic sans
Are you a Netflix customer and have a Media Center PC? Check out what one of our Media Center MVPs re-birthed. Anthony Park, a Media Center MVP, has regenerated a project from back in 2004 (originally developed by Ryan Hurst) and released MyNetflix v2.1.
I'm not a Media Center nor Netflix user but the user interface is impressive and done very well to look like a part of the overall Media Center experience. Here's a view of your Netflix queue:
You can see other screenshots of browsing 'top' categories, movie details and he's also now incorporated 'watch now' information as well.
Great work...
When developing Virtual Earth applications I find myself always having the SDK documents open in the background for reference. While this isn't a bad practice, I've historically only used them for parameter reference, etc. I longed for the time that I could get cheater help intellisense for the Virtual Earth API.
When Visual Studio 2008 came out with Javascript intellisense, I figured the day has come. But unfortunately, the Javascript intellisense isn't enabled for external (external==not-the-same-app-domain) files. The thing about the implementation of the Javascript intellisense in VS2008 is that you can just make a reference to a file for...
if you are a language nut, you'll like this. the Lang.NET symposium just posted all the talks from the recent gathering. they are available online and you can view them here (presented in silverlight). it's quite a line up of people...here's a sampling:
anders hejlsberg
paul vick
wez furlong
tomas petricek
peli de halleux
...
bill gates announces on channel8 a program called 'DreamSpark' which is enabling students of higher education to obtain microsoft developer and designer tools for no charge!
over at the channel8 downloads page you'll see what is available: visual studio professional, expression studio, windows server 2003 standard, and xna game studio. wow. for now this is available in United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium. the program looks to bring more countries on in the future so check back.
there is a student verification process that you have to go through and some of the...
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...
looks like the silverlight tour is giving a free ride for a half-day session on silverlight in dallas. i've sat in on one of the early silverlight tour stops before silverlight even was officially released. i can only imagine that it has gotten more exciting as time goes by.
the dallas event is limited to 32 attendees, so register asap if you can make it. this free session looks to discuss:
Why should I care about Silverlight
What is Silverlight?
...
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've spoken a few times about axosoft. they are a local ISV that does some great work. their ceo, hamid, does a great thing every year for his employees (maybe more often) in encouraging and icubating new projects. they have a core product, but also have incubated some great ideas. some haven't lasted, but some live strong! either way it is great to see what kind of ideas their group comes up with.
PureChat is one of those new ideas. this is an idea that was just released. it is for asp.net sites and is built using c# and asp.net ajax...
while preparing for the code trip, we have several 'on-board' needs. one of which is a quick method to get our content encoded for consumption by devices and frameworks (i.e., silverlight). we want a smooth method so that we aren't boggled down with multiple tools opening and changing settings, cutting and pasting, etc.
so, inspired by my colleagues post about using workflow to automate, i set about the task. we're going to be making several assumptions along our production, one of which is we know we'll have multiple video/audio sources and that there *will* be some post-edit being done. but once...
recently i've been getting a few notes/questions about working with web services and asp.net ajax. my colleague, rob bagby completed a series of great web casts last year covering the topic of the ajax libraries in detail, one of which deals with web services. there are also two webcasts that deal with calling WCF services using the ajax libraries. i highly recommend checking them out!
tags: ajax, asp.net, asp.net ajax, atlas, aspnet, wcf, services, web services, bagby, silverlight
intersoft just sent me an email that the beta versions of their WebUIStudio.NET 2008 R1 is available, which includes a few new silverlight controls: WebAqua and WebCoverFlow.
i'm curious how soon the apple attorneys might prepare a cease-and-desist on the naming of both of these controls, but that's for them to figure our. I'm more interested in getting my hands on them and playing around. you can read their press release here on where to get them. it's very exciting to see so many controls popping up. i hope that when silverlight 2.0 releases that these will all be ready for...
got mad design and css skillz? take a stab at redesigning the mix web site for a contest. i saw through twitter that adam kinney noted only one person entered yet. and there are three prizes!!! should make winning pretty simple right now ;-).
of course i'm ineligible (that's my way of getting off, because i have no mad design skillz), but might i suggest a few themes to try out:
halo 3
rockband/guitar hero - have you seen this and this...
the guys at sapphire, whom i'd previously written about their ruby in steel developer tools, just posted a preview of 'visual rails workbench,' which is a visual designer for ruby on rails. here's one of their preview shots:
this design mode with ERb is just one of the elements of the workbench it looks like. get the full details (as well as some comments on IronRuby support in their other tools that they've been working on) by reading the update on the sapphire site.
tags: ruby, rails, ruby on rails, ror, rails ide, saphhire, sapphire in steel, visual rails workbench, rails...
got an email today about something i hadn't seen yet, another silverlight 2.0 game, Pirates! cameron emailed me about a cool prototype he's working on with the farseer engine. here's a shot:
as cameron puts it:
"The goal of the game will be to attain the buried fortune of a long dead pirate named Rough Hand James. He created a map to his treasure and scattered the pieces all across the globe. It will be your adventure to find those map pieces and locate the treasure. You will start out on your ship with the first clue to the treasure and...
the leaders of the arizona .net user group have convinced scott guthrie that phoenix is nice in march (and it is...spring training baby!) and he should visit. they've organized a super user group meeting and you can find information on when/where here. it will be hosted at scottsdale center for the arts, which is a pretty killer facility. i'd recommend carpooling and not messing with the no parking signs (those scottsdale folks like to watch those meters).
having ScottGu come to phoenix immediately after MIX08 is a great thing for the community. if you couldn't make it to MIX, you'll be...
feedreader, my sharepoint web part originally built for sharepoint 2003, has been consumed by quite a few people (which i think is cool -- it is a rare moment when a lowly d00d like me can fill a gap). while sharepoint 2007 has better built-in support for syndicated feeds (actually 2003 did already with the xml web part), i still think feedreader has some advantages that can be leveraged.
a while back i put feedreader on codeplex, an open source sharing ground. i used the microsoft public license so anyone can download, alter, and profit from the code. i did this...
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...
over the past 6 months i've received numerous questions whether or not a user group for sharepoint existed in arizona. it didn't (there was one but it drizzled away), but i'm happy to announce that some volunteers rallied to start another one. they have set a date for their first meeting or the arizona sharepoint professionals group.
here's the information i have:
Date: Thursday, 31 JAN 2008
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Locations: University of Advancing Technology, 2625 W Baseline Rd, Tempe, AZ
they are asking people to register (not sure why) so if you plan on attending, please do register for them. you...
the guys over at sapphiresteel software released ruby in steel text edition, a full-featured ruby on rails IDE built on the visual studio 2008 shell.
as a microsoft developer interested in looking at ruby on rails early on, i loved when the sapphire project was first released. i had played with earlier version and after re-paving my machine need to take a look at the updated versions.
if you don't own a copy of visual studio 2008, when you get the ruby in steel text edition, you get visual studio 2008 (ruby language support only) -- so this isn't an add-on...
there is an important announcement from the silverlight streaming team. looks like they are moving to some newer/better hardware infrastructure. please see the full announcement.
here's the gist as well:
Tonight (Tuesday, Jan. 8th) we’ll move the Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live service from its current hardware in Sandbox to a more permanent home on new hardware in the Production environment. Note that this doesn’t change anything to the fact that it is still provided as an Alpha version with no associated SLA.
At 9:00 pm PST the admin site front door (Silverlight.live.com) will be set to read-only. This means that...
miss the days of devdays? me too. my team is trying to bring a little of that spark back! joe shirey on my team has organized a full-day of developer and architect goodness. we'll be hosting two events, one in the phoenix, arizona metro area and one in the denver, colorado metro area. here's the gist:
keynote: microsoft patterns and practices is being shipped in to talk about what they've produced and the logic behind it!
developer track:
exposing and consuming data using the microsoft stack (rob bagby): take a look...
as some of you know i've been silent for a lot of december due to a series of unfortunate incidents. the worst of which was a phone call that my wife was being air-evac'd from our neighborhood. yeah, not a good call. she was hit by a car while cycling. she is getting better now after a surgery and physical therapy. not back 100%, not even 70% but getting better daily. in the midst of all of this, i've been battling kidney stones. anyone who has had these knows that pain killers are your best friend right now. i've had...
at the end of november i had a chance to visit seattle to attend the silverlight firestarter event. the entire day was captured on video. those videos are now available at the visitmix.com site. you can stream them directly on the site or download them for offline viewing. the sessions include content from jesse liberty, arturo toledo, laurence moroney, adam kinney, ernie booth and adam nathan.
all good stuff. enjoy.
tags: silverlight,firestarter,silverlight firestarter,visitmix,mix08
well, it's been a while since the phoenix installfest and i've been behind on a few things. on 20 dec 2007, the arizona user group communities hosted the phoenix installfest in tempe, arizona. special thanks to a lot of people, but namely scott cate, spike xavier, lorin thwaits (cameraman), steele price and my comrades rob bagby, eric strait and dan willis.
tempe center for the arts was our host venue for the night. i personally thought it was a kick arse venue even if the food was not the greatest (blame me for that, but you shouldn't complain, it was...
in searching for a past post on10.net i noticed they got an overhaul on the user interface. i also noticed some great new content just this week. today i was able to learn about:
new battery rules for travel
problems with xbox live from major nelson over the holidays (maybe that was my problem)
how to use a windows mobile device as a wireless router (although i'm not sure why, it is interesting)...
this time from telerik. telerik has just announced their RAD Controls for Silverlight 1.1(2.0). they have a site up with some demonstrations, etc. (obviously requiring silverlight 1.1 to render). they have controls like:
upload
button
combobox
listbox
menus
progress bar
tab...
i've got a few messages about 'hey, where did the silverlight project template go in visual studio 2008? what the heck, doesn't microsoft want us to create projects?'
trouble is that it is there, but different...you know same, but different.
if you have visual studio 2008 installed, make sure you install the silverlight tools for visual studio 2008. yeah, i know it says 'tools for alpha' -- just install it would ya. after you install it, you'll have the project templates for silverlight 1.1 2.0 as well as for 1.0. but where is it?
File...New Web Site... then you should see this:
that's what...
remember the tafiti site? want to know how they did that tree visualization in silverlight? now you can.
the tafiti search site is now a windows live quick app -- and uploaded to codeplex. you can download, view source, mess around and learn. from the lie team:
Today we are releasing the Tafiti Search Visualization source code to CodePlex, which means any developer can download, modify, and resell the code (see MS-PL License for all the details).
very, very cool. go to the codeplex site and check it out and check out the overview on LiveSide!
tags: silverlight,tafiti,windows live,life platform services,open source,oss,codeplex
i had previously written about creating custom expression encoder templates and integrating them into the encoder workflow (if you haven't read that, check it out, very simple process). my process was simple and followed the "CASE" methodology*.
Copy
Always
Steal
Everything
basically i would encode a video file to get the output of the encoder template, then blast away all the xaml in player.xaml, and create your own silverlight media player skin. really the only thing you need to know is the 'well known names' for certain controls (the most common of which i outline in my blog post. i've received comments...
just saw in my feed reader...a cheat sheet by keith rull for LINQ. keith purports that this isn't a definitive list by any means but says:
"It consist of a few snippets that you might commonly do when doing LINQ processing."
he uses this for his most common tasks. when i first start learning anything new, i do the same thing keeping snippets around to help me remember certain things. as an example, can't remember how to do the paging? use keith's cheat:
//take three records
var takeThree = listOfPerson.Take(3);
//go to the 10th record and then take 3 records from there
var skipTenTakeThree = listOfPerson.Skip(10).Take(3);
thanks...
one of the great things about being a part of a community is being able to affect other communities. during these installfests that are happening around the country, some have remembered the time of year and thinking of ways to give back to other communities.
my counterpart in chicago, dave bost, set up accepting donations for toys for tots at some of his installfests. when i read that i thought that was such a great idea. we (the royal we as in the technical communities) often only think of our bits/bytes and i think this was a great inspiration to help...
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...
of course if you are already a part of the broader .net user group community, you've seen this already. but if you aren't (shame on you), you should head on over to azgroups.com and look at the event on the 20th of December. be sure to sign up to the AZGroups mailing list as well for updates and future events.
at the phoenix (tempe) installfest, people who are registered and attend will receive a special trial DVD of visual studio that will enable them to get a visual studio 2008 professional licensed copy sent to them as participating in this event...pretty...
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
looks like the flame is making its way to the other side of the coast...the east coast. looks like in a week (15 DEC) the silverlight firestarter will be happening in the philly area (malvern to be specific). you can find the agenda here at dani's blog.
it looks like a great line-up of speakers as well. although i've not met pete brown in person, i've 'conversed' with him via e-mail and he's a sharp dude. peter laudati -- well, if you are in the northeast, a microsoft developer, and don't know peter...what's wrong with you? ;-). and then there is...
"Competition is dropping prices, increasing quality and making everyone’s internet a better place." (ryan stewart)
flash just did an update to the flash player. i believe (according to their site) this takes it to v9.0.115.0 (at least for IE on windows). what's included in this update? primarily H.264 encoding support in the player. this has been in beta for a while, but now 'official' from adobe. the second announcement involves their (adobe) pricing/licensing changes around flash media server products, something that has been somewhat criticized for a while as cost-prohibitive. the new pricing looks like a real aggressive price drop based...
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
...
"Go back to Jersey, Sonny. This is the City of the Angels and you haven't got any wings." (from LA Confidential)
i'm headed to los angeles, ca tomorrow for a week of the phizzpop design challenge. while last week already yielded some training in some of the expression tools and silverlight, i'm