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 they provide, I was sent a demonstration link to a Ribbon interface, similar to that of Office 2007 that is becoming popular among Windows application these days. When I saw this demonstration I felt like I was looking at some weird hack or something…it was so strikingly similar to the Office interface and in Silverlight. I think organizations looking to have a line-of-business application with a familiar interface to what their users probably are already seeing is a good thing…it keeps a sense of familiarity in front of their face.
I’ve come to learn that divelements was one of the first companies to license the Ribbon UI interface. I think they may have actually helped shape enabling this use for other component vendors as well. Take a look at their Silverlight Ribbon:
That’s Silverlight in a familiar and functional user interface. Pretty cool. Their sample really made me think I was operating a full client application! The SandRibbon for Silverlight is currently undergoing beta use right now and they have a link on their site to request to try it out.
It is so great to see this ecosystem of Silverlight controls emerge so quickly for us developers to take advantage of and create compelling user interfaces and line-of-business applications in a consistent and productive manner.
Over the past year Sara Ford had created a Visual Studio tip-of-the-day feature of her blog that eventually was aggregated pretty much everywhere and also in the Visual Studio community page displayed within the product itself! The tips were plenty and great…a ton of gems that you may not have known before and a subtle reminder that there is so much more to learn.
This year Scott Cate has decided to take this one step further. He’s begun taking this tips concept and providing actual walk-through and visual demonstrations of these tricks. One thing that I really like about this approach is that while I may skim through the text of a tip and thing “that’s interesting” I may never actually put it in practice because it’s only in text and not visual. Seeing them in video helps me see the immediate value of taking the time to learn the tip and put it in practice and/or validates that the tip isn’t going to be helpful to how I use the tool. If you’re a Visual Studio user, fire up a subscription to Scott’s VSTricks feed to get the videos and see what you’ve been missing (oh and a shameless plug that he’s chosen to use Silverlight to display the videos)!
I have to admit, when the first MIX was happening it confused me. Yet another conference? In my usual pessimistic self I tried to convince people that it was wrong, blah, blah. But I was wrong. MIX has become of of my favorite conferences to attend. Not only for the announcements that likely happen, but for the networking with industry folks in an area I’m most passionate about.
Enough gushing though. I’m going to MIX09. Will you be there? If you register before 13 Feb 2009, you’ll be able to get $400 off the registration fees! Register on the MIX09 site with RSVP code MIX09offer and you’ll get the discount. I realize that most organizations (and individuals) are feeling the crunch of the pressures of life and our world economy. Forking out $1200 (or I suppose $800 with the discount code above) isn’t an easy sell during these types of times. I’ll say this though: If you are doing web or rich internet application development, THIS is the conference you want to go to. Here’s a few reasons why in my opinion:
- Silverlight 3 sessions. What?! Yep, that’s right, several Silverlight 3 sessions have been announced.
- Rick Barraza, Jose Fajardo. These guys are design/innovation inspiration to me. Aside from the fact that hanging out with Rick is just plain fun (haven’t had a chance to hang out with Jose yet, but I’m sure it is equally as great), the ideas that they come up with are really inspiration both from a design and innovation standpoint. If you go, meet them.
- Celso Gomes. Again, meet him. Celso is a designer at Microsoft and one of the best I’ve seen. He’s one of the more wicked designers I’ve seen navigate around Blend…you’ll be amazed and inspired.
- Mix 10K challenge – while not a part of the week conference, this contest is pretty cool. What can you come up with only 10 kilobytes of space? Check out the gallery. It is this type of stuff that happens in the lounge areas. One of my favorites is the Moustachr (hope to see Robby there as well).
- Unsessions – Open Spaces @ MIX. I helped out with this last year and it was cool to see people present some other topics in this free-form area within the conference.
- MIX party – ok, I’ll be honest. Cram a bunch of international geeks at one of the hottest clubs in Vegas (Tao) and what do you get? A bunch of bouncers wondering where all the club people are :-). If you’re the partying type, this is a great place. If you aren’t, no sweat…there will be plenty of other geekier things for you to do (bloggers lounge anyone?).
- Vegas. Never been? Here’s your excuse. Want to feel like that poker pro you see on TV? Well you can get beat on the river card just like the pros. Other than that there are some great people-watching and photography in this town that never sleeps. Mirage buffet is my favorite, Bellagio’s is overrated.
That’s just a few simple reasons. Obviously I’m partial to the Silverlight content. I’ve personally submitted 5 sessions (yet to hear if they’ll be accepted), but am looking forward to being there regardless. I hope you’re able to make it and convince anyone you need that this would be training funds well spent!
The Encoder team has updated their Silverlight Streaming (SLS) plugin for Expression Encoder 2. On the surface pretty much nothing has changed, but it essentially updates the ability to use the plugin to publish Silverlight 2 templates to SLS automatically without getting the random error that you’ve probably seen if you tried.
Since the new Silverlight 2 player templates are completely parameter-driven, which is awesome, it did present a small challenge for the plugin. When you use the new plugin with a Silverlight 2 player template, you’ll notice that the resulting application uses a bootstrapping method to launch with initialization parameters. This models (in fact I modeled my information) the bootstrap method I outlined in a previous post.
With the new plugin, for media applications at least, you don’t have to mess with creating your Javascript files or manifest files…the plugin does all that for you now in the pre-processing before uploading to the SLS service. Because all of this is in there now, my process of making the SL2VideoPlayer a one-click template in Expression Encoder is now complete! I’ve chosen to stick with my “minimum” fork of the template (no markers or caption support) because that’s the scenario I use mostly, just a player. You can get the template files here. Just unzip into the Encoder templates directory and it will show up as an option. When used, the SLS plugin correctly translates all the settings into initParams for you.
Here’s the download links:
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 a different utility to work in. Another one of these tools has been Expression Encoder 2 which I’ve been using a bit more lately. Expression Encoder is a tool that enables the encoding of audio/video assets into VC-1 formats and H.264/AAC formats. It’s a really simple tool to use and also comes with several Silverlight player templates that you can choose as a part of your output. In one click you can have your HD home movie encoded and a rich playback experience developed for you as well. I’ve wrote several times about Encoder, templates, etc. before and you can see some of them here:
With no shortage of information on how to do it, I got home last night and began cranking one out. I’ve been using Amazon’s S3 web services for a while and have really grown to like it a lot. One of the Live Writer extensions I spoke of earlier is a plugin for S3 for Live Writer that Aaron Lerch helped out with as well! I though I should extend Encoder so that I’d have a one click publishing point to my S3 account instead of having to use S3Fox all the time (which is an awesome tool btw).
So after getting home from a user group I started cranking one out, figuring out the nuances and just coding something together. A few hours later I came up with what I’m calling 1.0 beta of my plugin.
It’s not a fancy UI, but it doesn’t need to be, it serves a purpose: enable publishing of Encoder output directly to an Amazon S3 bucket in one click. That’s it. Encoding just media? No problem. Adding a template? Not a problem either. You simply need to enter your Amazon S3 account information and enter a bucket. If the bucket isn’t there, it will attempt to create it. You can also list your current buckets if you forgot them.
There are likely indeed a few problems and some fit-n-finish needed. I am positive the error handling needs to be refined as well as it could probably benefit from some more efficient threading handling. The cool think about the Encoder publishing plugins is that they are WPF user controls, so it gave me a chance to work with more XAML.
At any rate, even in the current form (which isn’t perfect but seems to be working for the specific need I built it for -- “works on my machine” warranty applies here) I wanted to share it out for any others to use and hopefully give feedback and contribute. It’s available as a Ms-PL licensed project with source code and you can get it on CodePlex: Amazon S3 Encoder Publishing Plugin. I hope you like it and can give feedback. Please if you find issues log them in the Issue Tracker for the project so they are trackable.
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. 
So after getting home from a user group I started cranking one out, figuring out the nuances and just coding something together. A few hours later I came up with what I’m calling 1.0 beta of my plugin.