John Lam just announced that the Dynamic Silverlight bits are now available. What that does is enable you to write code targeting Silverlight in Ruby (IronRuby) or Python (IronPython).
The Dynamic Silverlight bits are implemented as Silverlight extensions which means that they will be downloaded on an as-needed basis. The additional download is currently about 712KB download in size. If you are interested in looking at running Ruby in the client on the desktop in addition to if you are running Ruby on the server, this might be of interest to you. Check it out and some of John's tutorials as well as an update on IronRuby from his MIX08 session.
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 special guest on board, Kelly White from the Portland area user experience group (PDXUX) who will be sharing his thoughts on Silverlight 2. We'll show some of the Deep Zoom technology and some other great stuff! Don't miss this if you are in the area. See you soon!
The group that brought you one of the first Silverlight end-to-end games (Zero Gravity) is now featured for some of the work they've done with Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2 for Miniclip.com, the largest online gaming site in the world.
You can view the Terralever case study online here. The Terralever crew is interviewed in four different segments talking about the project from a designer, developer, business and technical perspective.
The team built two casual games for Miniclip.com on both versions of Silverlight. The first, a Silverlight 1.0 game called 'Zombomatic 3000' has been on Miniclip's site for a few weeks now. It is a puzzle-based game built entirely using Silverlight 1.0 technology and the tools. The team took the vision further and had been working on Tunnel Trouble, a game with more interactivity, more logic and a more dynamic game play.
I've enjoyed watching the process happen and have been amazed by the talent that has been producing these games. I've also been impressed with how far the team has been able to take Silverlight to its limits and the challenges and learnings they have faced along the way. They presented a session at MIX08 on their experiences with developing Tunnel Trouble if you want to check it out as well.
Congrats to the Terralever team for building the first commercial games built on Silveright!
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 thus we still have budgets. For me, that's been the biggest challenge wrangling in budgets, efforts, desires, balancing other goals, etc. It's been a long process.
But it's on baby. The Code Trip is coming...like in a few days literally. We thought small (budgets) and wanted to go the RV route. Well, for various reasons (stop by an event and we can chat), we got a friggin tour bus. And in fact it's the tour bus coming off the Styx tour. How crazy is that? Here's a preview of what we'll be cruising around the western U.S. in:
So we're off...leaving from MIX on Thursday, March 6 (stop by the blogzone to help send us off). Our schedule is up on the site and will be continuously updated. The site will be evolving after MIX announcements :-). We're excited to head out. We know we've forgotten things probably. Heck, it will be a great time and we look forward to seeing you all on the road. Visit the site, subscribe to the main feed, follow us for real-time updates on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook. We'll be having contest announcements TODAY as well so you'll want to make sure you follow all those links as we'll announce some contest in certain areas.
From MIX we'll be hitting these cities first:
Please join us in person if you can, but follow us on line to view our daily log podcasts and code samples we'll be putting up. See you on the road!
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:
- A simple “hello, world” sample showing Silverlight in a Web part.
- A Silverlight slider control as a SharePoint custom field type.
- A navigation control.
- A Colleague Viewer that uses lookups in Active Directory by using Windows Communication Foundation.
- A Silverlight picture viewer from a SharePoint picture library.
- A visual how-to center, created in Silverlight and based on a SharePoint list, for viewing videos.
A pretty great resource for those wanting to discover implementation details as well as some ideas for Silverlight in Sharepoint!
