I’m sure I’m not unlike most people who have more “experienced in years” relatives.  Sadly it seems that generation has been slow(er) to adopt current technology advancements.  I think this issue is exasperated, for me at least, when those relatives are not in close proximity so that you can force help them move into that age of technology.  Just recently my father asked me how easy it was to set up a webcam so that he could talk/see my nephew and sister who live in Denver, Colorado.  This is a good step in the right direction for family who is dispersed all over.

My relatives in New York, however, have less geeky grandsons/nephews to count on nearby :-).  But luckily my aunt and uncle are trying to solve some of this.  In the past my grandmother has had WebTV to use.  I remember seeing it last time I was there last May.  It looked a bit dusty.  I asked her if she used it and she said it seemed to take a while, and she didn’t really understand it a bunch.  Hence, it didn’t work as a reliable way to communicate online with my grandmother.  One of my other relatives has a Mailstation device, which can only send/receive text-based mail.  It totally works for her though and she’s good about checking it and using it.  But you still have to check it. 

My uncle sent me a note the other day saying he equipped my grandmother’s home with a new gadget.  A Presto device.  He provided the new email address and said we could send notes and pictures to grandma.  Intrigued, as I’ve never heard of this, I researched.  Turns out this is a one-way device.  I initially thought this would suck, but I think for the usage scenario of my grandmother, this would be great…albeit a bit analog. 

It’s basically a pseudo fax machine/printer.  The device is wired to a phone line and can receive “Presto Mail” which is mail sent through it’s network.  When an email is received, it will print it out, in full color, with picture attachments printed out as well.  My grandmother doesn’t do anything.  The account apparently can be configured to dial out and retrieve the batch of messages for the device.  This removes the task of requiring her to be proactive about “email” and rather wait for messages to come to her.

Still skeptical, I tried the Presto preview option they had on their site.  You could send an email to their test account and they will show you exactly how it will be printed out for a user.  I tried with several lengths of messages, and several types of pictures and sizes.  It seemed to work as advertised.  You could also “template” your message by adding a special subject moniker to your message, like [Presto Squiggle] which would apply a pre-defined template called Squiggle to the message.  The templates are different types of borders/fonts/colors that will be applied to your email.  They have generic templates as well as occasion templates like birthdays, anniversary, holidays, etc.

That night I decided to gather my kids and send a message to “GG” from her great grandkids.  I told my daughter Zoe to draw a picture for GG that we could send it to her.  I then took pictures of her holding the picture, my son Zane and me, and also scanned the picture itself (so GG could actually see the detail).  I sent a quick note in email and attached 4 pictures.  The next morning I received a message from Presto that my message was delivered and it also included a link for me, the sender, to view the resulting format.  Cool.  A week later I got a letter from my grandma, in the old-school postal service kind of way, thanking her for the pictures and note and that she added Zoe’s picture to her photo album.  It worked!  Grandma loved the pictures/note, didn’t have to check anything as it just prints out to her home, and I get to use my chosen medium (digital) to communicate.  Sure, the "reply stream isn’t there, but for grandma, this is okay.

I know there are other mechanisms, like photo frames, but I think those require a bit more work for that generation.  We had thought about a photo frame before, but unless connected to broadband it wouldn’t get updated that frequently and we’d have to send updated memory cards and felt that just might confuse people (i.e., why can’t i see the old pictures plus the new ones you sent?).  I’m sure there are better frames out there that allow for ease of storage, etc. but I still think it is a more-than-no-touch support gift.

For my grandmother, I think the Presto system will work well keeping in touch more frequently with me at least (I’m a horrible sibling/son/grandkid with regard to keeping in touch with family).  If you have relatives further away, you may want to consider this as well.  I was really impressed so far with the use.  Thanks Uncle Frank for setting it up!

this is a test

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 we do :-)). 

Here’s my round-up of controls (alphabetically – links here will jump to their section):

Cellbi ComponentArt ComponentOne DevExpress Divelements FarPoint GOA Toolkit (Netikatech) Infragistics Intersoft (WebAqua and more)

SilverlightContrib Silverlight Toolkit SLExtensions Telerik Vectorlight Visifire Xceed Open Source and Other Silverlight Projects

Cellbi

Cellbi has a library called SvLite Effects which contains animations and controls such as:

• Carousel
• Wipe
• SlideShow
• Primitives
• Tweens
• Window
• ComboBox
• Accordion

A demonstration of these controls is provided on the SvLite Effects site.

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ComponentArt

ComponentArt recently announced their roadmap for Web.UI for Silverlight.  While there is nothing downloadable as of this writing, they do have plans for a suite of controls for Silverlight that include:

• ContextMenu
• DataGrid
• Slider
• TreeView
• ItemFlow
• Menu
• Toolbar
• Upload

Some of their current preview demos are available on their technology preview site for the Web.UI for Silverlight controls.

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ComponentOne

ComponentOne extends their “Studio” line of products to include a Studio for Silverlight which currently includes a suite of controls:

Accordion Book Chart Color Picker ComboBox Cube Data DataGrid DragDropManager Expander FilePicker Gauges HeaderContent HtmlHost Hyper Panel Image

Image Magnifier Image Rotator Layout Panels Maps Masked TextBox Menu MessageBox NumericBox Range Slider RichTextBox SpellChecker TreeView Uploader Window Zip

You can explore these controls using their Silverlight Control Explorer sample application.

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DevExpress

No stranger to the control market, DevExpress hit the ground running early with releasing a DataGrid along with full source code.  They have since added more to their Silverlight-specific controls:

• DataGrid
• Rich Text Editor
• Menu/Toolbar Controls
• Layout Manager

These can all be viewed using their online demos area of their site.

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FarPoint

Another familiar name, probably most widely known to Visual Basic developers for FarPoint Spread, the team has seemingly been working on a set of controls for Silverlight.  They are currently in “lab” form but include controls for:

• DateTime
• Numerics
• Mask edit
• Text input
• Calculator
• Error reminder
• Spin

As I noted, these are in lab form, but FarPoint has a preview build available and demonstrations on their lab site.

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Divelements

Divelements has had products for Windows Forms for a while and recently expanded to the WPF and Silverlight space specifically introducing new controls for Silverlight:

• SandRibbon
• SandDock

Take a look at their demonstration of a sample application leveraging both of these products in an Office-like UI.

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GOA Toolkit for Silverlight

Netikatech first showed up on my Silverlight radar with their Windows Forms implementation that was quite impressive.  I had a chance to also meet with the company in Belgium and demonstrate this framework at MIX Essentials.  They’ve since also released the GOA Toolkit for Silverlight which includes (in a few packages):

• Panels: Stack, Dock, Canvas
• ListControl
• Sizers, ContentPresenters, LocatedBorders
• KeyNavigator, Staters, DropDown
• GOAOpen library with full source code

A demonstration of implementing this toolkit is available at the GOA Toolkit Demo site.

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Infragistics

Expanding their NetAdvantage product line, NetAdvantage Silverlight provides a set of controls for developers which Infragistics markets as Line of Business and Data Visualization controls:

• xamWebGrid
• xamWebTree
• xamWebOutlookBar
• xamWebEditors
• xamWebSpellChecker

You can view samples of these in the Infragistics line-of-business feature browser application.  Additionally, they are providing visualization controls:

• xamWebChart
• xamWebGauge
• xamWebMap
• xamWebTimeline
• xamWebToolbar

These are some really great visualizers and they have interesting samples of all of them in their visualization sample application.

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Intersoft (WebAqua.NET and more)

WebAqua.NET from Intersoft provides two controls that simulate a popular user experience most commonly found on the Mac OSX platform.  In addition, Intersoft (as of Feb 2009) has also expanded to include data access controls and an additional presenter control.  They provide:

• WebFishEye
• WebCoverFlow
• Presenter
• AstoriaDataSource
• WcfDataSource
• XmlDataSource

You can see a demonstration of both of these controls on the WebAqua.NET site and the demonstrator for the Presenter and data source controls.

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SilverlightContrib

This is an Open Source project being driven by the community and Silverlight MVPs, namely Page Brooks.  This group of community folks have rallied to create some controls and framework libraries.  Their current controls include:

• Color Picker
• Gauge Control
• Star Selector
• Enhanced Metafile
• Cool Menu
• Zip, Byte, String Utilities
• Animation Tweening
• Wheel mouse listener

This is great to see this community-driven type resources.  Their demo application is also available for perusing here and you can download the bits/code on their CodePlex project site.

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Silverlight Toolkit

Who could forget the beloved Silverlight Toolkit!  Coming from a team inside Microsoft, this is an Open Source project led by a team within Microsoft to provide a set of controls with full source code to developers to leverage, extend, etc.  The controls are:

• AutoCompleteBox
• DockPanel
• HeaderedContentControl
• HeaderedItemsControl
• Label
• NumericUpDown
• TreeView
• WrapPanel
• Charting
• Expander
• ImplicitStyleManager
• Viewbox
• Set of XAML themes

The goal of this project is to provide some extended controls beyond the core that Silverlight provides with the assumption that some of the controls from this project may make it into future releases of Silverlight’s core framework.  You can view the project and sample applications on the Silverlight Toolkit CodePlex project site.

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SLExtensions

Another significant Open Source project that provides a suite of controls/libraries in it’s distribution.  As of now there are:

• Treeview
• Captcha
• Virtualized Stack Panel
• Dockpanel
• Flow layout
• Viewbox
• GoogleMap
• Virtual Earth
• Change tracker
• Binding comparer
• Bootstrap
• HTML Editor

The project also contains a set of utility libraries for handling mouse wheel, analytics, browser history, etc.  Check out the SLExtensions Showcase for some demonstrations.

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Telerik

Another familiar face here in the .NET component world is the great team at Telerik.  They came out early with some preview set of controls for Silverlight 1.0 and now expanded to a solid set of Silverlight 2 controls for RadControls for Silverlight which include:

Calendar ComboBox ContextMenu CoverFlow Cube DatePicker Docking Drag and Drop Expander Gauge GridView Layout Panels

MediaPlayer Menu Navigation NumericUpDown PanelBar ProgressBar Slider TabControl TimePicker TreeView Upload Window

Check out their Silverlight demo application demonstrating all these controls, various skins and how they can be used.  On the demo page they have also created 4 sample applications that implement their controls in various scenarios: Resume (CV) viewer, Media, Job board, and an automotive configurator.

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Vectorlight

Vectorlight has a suite of controls available for Silverlight 2 developers for free.  You can also have the option to purchase the source code.  Their controls include:

Color Selector Dropdown Fieldset File Upload ItemViewer Main Menu Menu Popup controls Progress Bar

Rich TextBox/TextBlock Roller Blind Scroller Spell Checker Table TextBlock Plus Text Roller Blind TreeView

All of their controls and associated demonstrations can be found on the Vectorlight site.

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Visifire

One of the early comers to the control front for visualizations was Visifire, providing an Open Source implementation of some charting controls for Silverlight.  They’ve continued to iterate on their offerings (and also provide commercial licensing) regularly.  They provide charting visualizations for:

• 2-D Column
• 3-D Column
• Line
• Pie
• Bar
• Area
• Doughnut
• Stacked
• Bubble/Point/Scatter

Be sure to view the Visifire online gallery for samples of all these charts!

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Xceed - http://xceed.com/Grid_WPF_Intro.html

Many should recognize Xceed for their previous components in the Windows Forms world.  Well, you may not have known this but they’ve been providing great controls for WPF and Silverlight?  For Silverlight, they have:

• Upload
• Zip

You should really also check out their WPF DataGrid as well that just had an update released (and also has a FREE express version).  It is very feature rich and should provide you with some great value in your applications.  Information about the updated Xceed WPF grid can be found here.  You can also view a demo of their Silverlight platform products on their site as well.

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Open Source and Other Silverlight Projects

There are, of course, other Silverlight controls being developed by individuals.  Here’s some that I’ve found as well (Open Source unless otherwise noted):

Media

• SL2 Video Player (shameless plug): basic and full-featured media player.
• Mino Player: free media player (no source)
• Blacklight controls: media player

Reporting

• Report Sharp-Shooter for Silverlight: reporting component/viewer for Silverlight

Utility/Input

• Silverlight File Upload
• Silverlight Ribbon (CodePlex): another implementation of the Office UI Ribbon
• Web Ribbon: another implementation of a Ribbon UI
• Silverlight Validator: input validation toolkit
• Rich Text Editor
• Blacklight controls: panels, animations
• Silverlight Multi File Uploader
• LinkLabel: helps to implement inline hyperlinks in text blocks
• Silverlight.FX: an effects library for Silverlight provided by the awesome Nikhil Kothari

Gaming/Graphics

• Farseer Physics Engine: physics engine
• Kit3D: 3D modeling framework
• Slide.Show 2: photo slide show framework and application
• DeepEarth: Virtual Earth and Silverlight DeepZoom

Data Visualization/Charting

• Silverlight Dashboards: gauges, etc.

Themes/Styles

• reuxables: resource dictionaries for adding pre-configured themes to your Silverlight application

If you know of more, leave a comment!

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Summary

So there you have it!  A cast of characters for where you can get components and save time in your Silverlight application development.  If I missed anyone, please comment and I’ll keep this list updated.  I know there are a bunch of individual Open Source projects out there (heck, I’ve got my own as well), so if more people comment and surface those gems, I’ll add them here as well.

This is a great list of those extending our platform and making Silverlight great as well as helping you to be productive and concentrate on other aspects of your application versus building something that already exists.  I’m a HUGE fan of buy versus build most of the time – especially in things like components.

I hope this helps!

I love my Garmin Nuvi.  As I’ve mentioned before it’s one of the best pieces of technology I own for use, form factor, fun, and coolness factor.  I’ve got the 260 which suits me fine, but if I had to buy a new one, I’d get the 760 now.

One of the weird things is that I keep it on all the time when I’m driving, even if I know where I’m going.  The points of interest (POI) feature is awesome and has helped me discover new places to eat every once in a while.  There are other customizations you can achieve as well like custom voices (I have the UK and Australian female voices on mine to make me feel distinguished) and icons.  All of these are generally announced on the Garmin blog, which is regularly updated with information about Nuvi and all their other product lines.  You can get custom icons from the Garmin Garage location as well.  One thing that I highly recommend is using the POI Loader.

This software enables you to create your own POI waypoints.  You can create them as regular POI waypoints or you can also create “proximity” points that alert you when you are getting near a specific point.  This is generally why I keep it on all the time now.  I’ve created a few of my own POI waypoints for areas of construction that I might forget about, some speed limit changes that I may forget about, etc. 

Recently though, I also found a guy who has organized all photo radar points into a database (you could create your own of course) and sells them for $10 for a 12-month subscription.  Boom, done.  Saves me the time looking them all up and I just have to click and they are uploaded.  The database (which I found on eBay and he has Arizona database as well as other states for photo radar) contains not only fixed points, but also “known” speed trap regular areas.  Just this morning I was on my way to Costco and was alerted to slow down with a notification of a potential speed trap (they weren’t there this morning, but they are regularly there for sure as my wife’s driving record will attest to).  The image (which is the image captured here) displays an icon (notice the little radar dude) as well as a warning banner.  A sound is also audible as well to help you pay attention to the warning.  Very cool.  For $10 I get database updates monthly from this guy (which has 1197 points for Arizona).  Hopefully recent movements by our Arizona state legislature may make me worry less, but until then this helps remind me to drive safe and also keeps me out of trouble (hopefully).

UPDATE: The service I used to use isn't available anymore, but if you want to get red-light/radar points-of-interest (POI) for your GPS device, you can get them here.

The other “customization” I made this week was to purchase the lifetime map subscription.  I’ve been royally burned by lifetime subscriptions in the past, so I was leery on doing this, especially since the lifetime subscription applies only to the particular device.  I knew, however, that I was going to get at least one more map update, so for the extra $30, I get 4 updates per year for the lifetime of my device.  Seemed worth it to me at the time of purchase.  The update was surprisingly huge (1.5GB) but now I’ve got the latest map, updates for “life” and 1197 statewide radar alerts plus my own custom points.

If you have a Garmin device…have fun customizing!

Well the move was inevitable.  Which move?  Well if you are a FeedBurner user and haven’t been paying attention for the past year, you may not have known that Google bought them and are transitioning the service to their infrastructure.  What does this mean to you?  It depends.

If you use the core FeedBurner service and use the “feeds.feedburner.com” URI for your subscription links, then generally speaking you should be fine.  Google has planned to redirect that URI to their updated one once you move your feeds (or you could also use “feeds2.feedburner.com” afterwards as well.  Users that fall into this bucket I think will not see much issue.

Those of us who use the “MyBrand” feature of FeedBurner, where you can use your own top-level-domain as the feed link (i.e., feeds.timheuer.com) are more affected.  I moved all my feeds to the Google infrastructure yesterday (they will force move everyone by 27 Feb 2009 anyway so I figured “why not”).  Here’s what happened.

1. Initiated the move
2. Move seemed flawless for the 25 feeds I have “burned” with FeedBurner – it transitioned to my Google account fine
3. Went to check my "feeds.timheuer.com/timheuer” link and boom, 404 error.  Suck.

Even though I followed the new instructions on changing the CNAME it was still failing and my FeedBurner URI was getting a 404 Server Error page (as was anyone wanting to subscribe).  I’ve since gained some wisdom and wanted to share it with you.  Here’s my recommendations for those who use the MyBrand service.  I know others have had issues, and I just wanted to share my experience with the interwebs in hopes it might help some others.

NOTE: MyBrand is a feature of FeedBurner (now Google Feeds) that allows you to use <something>.yourdomain.com as the primary URI to your burned feed instead of the default feeds.feedburner.com URI.  This is highly valuable as then ultimately you are in control of your feed endpoint.  If for some reason you want to move away from FeedBurner in the future, you are still in control of your main feed URI and can redirect users accordingly.  If you aren’t using it, I highly recommend it.

First, prior to the move, change your DNS record TTL (time to live) value NOW.  Most DNS services have a long TTL value for CNAME records.  Most of the time the default values are around 24 hours (TTL=86400).  That means any change to that value *could* take at least 24 hours for the Internet to catch on.  Prior to your move, change this value to as low as you can.  My provider lets me change it to 1800 (30 minutes) is the lowest.  Change that value to as low as you can and wait at least 2 days.  What this does is improve your chances that when you do make the CNAME change, that it will replicate faster across the Internet. 

After you’ve set the TTL on your CNAME and waiting 2 days, initiate the transfer.  Have several tabs in your browser open in the event you need to do some testing/changing of your DNS records, site, etc.  Have access to anywhere you have your MyBrand link on your site ready (i.e., open that Remote Desktop if needed).

Once the transfer has been complete, Google will tell you all is well.  It isn’t, if you use MyBrand.  Follow these remaining steps.

Login to your new Google Feeds account.  After logging in click the My Account link:

Now click on the MyBrand link on the left.  This will show you the current MyBrand vanity domains you have set up. 

Your new CNAME record will be displayed on this screen and will be something like <loginname>.feedproxy.ghs.google.com.  As soon as you get to this screen, go to your DNS management and update your CNAME record (as well as add a backup record – i called my “feeds2” at the same time)!!!

After you’ve updated your DNS record, go back to the MyBrand panel and scroll all the way to the bottom and click the “Deactivate” button to deactivate the service:

Trust me, you need to do this.  All the instructions that tell you to simply remove/re-create the vanity URI at the top of this screen are wrong.  You must deactivate first.

Once deactivated, go back to the same screen and add your domains back in (as well as your backup one you created) and click Activate again. 

You should now be fine.  It’s weird but this Deactivate/Activate step seems required if you are already using the MyBrand service prior to moving your feeds.  If these steps don’t work and your original vanity URI is still showing a 404 error, then use your backup – it is likely working.

I hope this helps anyone prepare during the move!  Once you are satisfied things are back to normal, I recommend going back into your DNS settings and modifying your TTL for your CNAME record to a higher amount (86400 or higher) so you can reduce DNS lookups for your users.