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:
and more...lots of content that may be interesting to you...go check them out!
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 frequently asked questions are available on the DreamSpark FAQ.
what a great way to enable our future technologists to develop great software using great tools!
while leaving seattle this week and stripping down for the usual false sense of security check at the airport, i noticed a clever bit of advertising from a store that i frequent online. you see everyone is asked to put their shoes in a bin now...here's what my bin looked like:
clever. "place shoes here. buy shoes here." kudos to zappos for finding an opportunity here! they are a great store and their 'piece o' cake' return policy is exactly just that.
just found out about a great feature on windows live maps. how many times have you needed to provide directions to someone (or a group of people) that you may not know where they are coming from? you could give them the address and have them map it out themselves, which is usually what most people do.
on your web site you might even enable them to see a map and enter an address for specific location directions, after all, that person might know better shortcuts than the mapping services right? well, windows live maps has a feature which can give you (a website owner or just a party planner) both worlds. it is implemented as '1 click directions' and here's how it works.
first go to windows live maps and enter an address to plot. i'll use the scottsdale center for the arts, the location of where the azgroups.com team has arranged for scott guthrie and others from the silverlight team to come to phoenix for an event. i typed in 'scottsdale center for the arts, scottsdale, az' and it gives me back some options. i click on 1 click directions:
and it now gives me a map of the location with 4 different directional instructions from the north, south, east and west:
perfect little added value to this typical scenario. now i can email someone that link, print it out for a party, or put the link on a website. and it still gives the user control to start from a specific location:
so the end user gets the best of all worlds in their online direction searching! thanks live maps!
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 and a magnifier for photos (similar to the one michael has for video). the concept was that you have a high resolution image on the page and then he had a magnification bubble that would react to the mouse wheel event on a mouse to zoom in/out of a selected area. it looked in concept a lot of what like the Live Labs 'Seadragon' project describes as far as smooth zooming, etc.
one of the things mike did in this image magnifier is use a high-res image and basically clip it to the area being zoomed on for the mouse using transforms, etc. i asked mike if he was using another image element or using an imagebrush. i noted that i felt he should use an image brush rather than to use an existing image so that the image wasn't requested twice. this is the efficient way of doing it when working with MediaElements and VideoBrushes so that the video in the brush is in sync as well as efficiently processed. we worked up some pseudo code on the board real quick to describe what i was talking about.
well, i was slightly wrong. the imagebrush element doesn't use 'sourcename' like a videobrush. in videobrush you use the x:Name value of your mediaelement. in the imagebrush you specify the actual image location (ImageSource). i guess this somewhat surprised me so i started sniffing (thinking i made a mistake in my 'efficiency' statement. when looking at the result of something like this:
<Image Width="240" Height="121" Source="silverlightUGwithText_6.jpg" Stretch="Fill" x:Name="PhxUgLogo" Canvas.Top="102" Canvas.Left="132"/> <Ellipse Width="107" Height="107" Stroke="#FFEC1818" Canvas.Left="224" Canvas.Top="250" StrokeThickness="5"> <Ellipse.Fill> <ImageBrush ImageSource="silverlightUGwithText_6.jpg" Stretch="None"> <ImageBrush.RelativeTransform> <TransformGroup> <ScaleTransform ScaleX="1.4" ScaleY="1.4"/> </TransformGroup> </ImageBrush.RelativeTransform> </ImageBrush> </Ellipse.Fill> </Ellipse>
there are actually 2 HTTP requests to the image source. you can see them being requested. what i've learned is that silverlight maintains an internal image cache anyway so the second request (although there and happening), would see the cached image instead. so it looks like the method of using two Image elements would have the same effect...so given that i'm not sure either is 'better' than the other for doing this type of sample...what do you think? regardless it was a cool demo. thanks mike.
we talked a lot about why people are waiting for silverlight 2 and if that made sense. we also had a good discussion of 'what if i just have casual media on my home page, why silverlight instead of flash' which is a question i hear a lot. this discussion never revolves around technical issues (noted i said 'casual media' instead of high fidelity streaming, etc.) but rather around penetration of the plugin. a lot of sites don't want to bear the load of plugin download/installation. it's an interesting challenge when any new technology comes out and no different a discussion than when the .net framework first came out -- which 'app' was going to bear the installation tax in their app? good discussion.