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 as possible. I’ve seen many questions on forums, through emails, and all over the interwebs about people hitting certain pitfalls with Silverlight and data access. Most of these are common scenarios and you need just a bit of “a-ha!” help to get you over the confusion stump. That’s my aim. I have set aside an hour (would have liked to do it sooner, but just time doesn’t permit right now) to tackle the most common things I’m seeing with data and Silverlight. I’ll create the scenarios that get you stuck and show you what I do to help get you un-stuck from those moments. Stop scratching your head any longer!
We’ll look at tools you can use, how you can dig deeper into error messages, working with different types of data, etc. I want to help! Please leave your questions here on this blog post as a comment so that I can be sure to address the scenarios. This isn’t a 1:1 debug session, so it will be hard to tackle the “hey, I’ve got this service from my AS/400 server exposed as a fitzer-valve service bus, which is able to be called from my Java front-end but doesn’t work in Silverlight: why not Tim?" questions, but I hope to help get you along the path of what to look for and to avoid the common mistakes.
Sound good? I’m looking forward to it. Again, please leave comments on this post so we can have the best possible session. You can register for the webcast here. I look forward to our time together :-).
We just put up 4 new hands-on labs for Silverlight 2. These labs are based around some of the training that partners and early adopters had received over the past few months. A guided lab document and source code (before/after) is provided.
The 4 labs include building a web application based around a travel site.
Building the UI: using different layout with Grids, StackPanels, etc.
Styling the UI: use styles, templates and VisualStateManager…work with default templates in Expression Blend
Remember Photosynth? Remember when you first saw it and your initial smile came across you in that ‘this is cool’ kind of feeling?
Multiply that.
A team at the University of Washington in conjunction with Microsoft Research presented “Finding Paths Through the World’s Photos” at SIGGRAPH2008. I haven’t read the paper yet, but the video speaks for itself in the advancements of photo recognition and path interpolation to me:
There is some really similar Photosynth and DeepZoom stuff happening here, but a lot more as well. You can visit their site to read more and also download some code from some of the parts of the system.
UPDATE: And when you are done watching this, check out Unwrap "editing video is now as easy as editing a single image." -- Um freaky.
How does 2000+ machines sound? Transforming a Saturday Night Live recording area into a live commentator section full of workstations and bloggers? Scoble had a chance to sit down with Eric Schmidt from Microsoft to talk about some of the behind-the-scenes information about the NBCOlympics.comSilverlight experience. Despite the video quality not being great, the information is very good. I recently saw a few other partners involved in the NBCOlympics.com project talk about things and kept feeling like they were really missing a great opportunity to talk about one of the key aspects in the implementation. Eric covers the basics as well as that key aspect…it’s a good video. Take the 35 minutes to watch it.
I’ve seen a lot of comments on the interwebs both positive and negative about the NBCOlympics.com experience and decisions to choose Silverlight. I’d like to applaud the NBC team myself as I think this is no small feat regardless of whatever technology was to be decided. Thousands of hours of live and on-demand Olympic coverage streamed live and encoded for later on-demand instantly, then pushed to the US across the Pacific…add to that all the normal television and data being sent as well. It’s a technological feat that all partners involved were brave to try. And for Olympic fans in the US, it’s paying off.
Angry that it isn’t available in non-US areas? Well, welcome to media licensing :-). This isn’t Microsoft’s fault or NBC’s fault or anyone’s ‘fault’ really – it’s economics of business…whether you think it is right or wrong…that’s what it is. Blackouts happen all the time in sports…all major sports do it. I hate it too, but it is a reality. The IOC basically sells the rights to broadcast the Olympics. Several companies have purchased these rights…NBC was one of them who did it for the US.
Because of the time difference in Beijing, I’ve been able to see some of the amazing finishes some of the teams have been having in medal rounds, not having to worry about setting up TiVo or anything. Great work to NBC and their partners.
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 Studio 2008 SP1 and your Silverlight projects aren’t working anymore, that’s why!
Please note that this update to the Silverlight tools can be used for Visual Studio 2008 RTM as well as the just-released SP1, but NOT for VS 2008 SP1 beta. Yeah, if that’s mind blurring, let’s boil it down:
Do you want to install VS2008 SP1 (release) and still work with Silverlight 2 applications? If yes, download the updated Silverlight tools and install after you install VS208 SP1.
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 as possible. I’ve seen many questions on forums, through emails, and all over the interwebs about people hitting certain pitfalls with Silverlight and data access. Most of these are common scenarios and you need just a bit of “a-ha!” help to get you over the confusion stump. That’s my aim. I have set aside an hour (would have liked to do it sooner, but just time doesn’t permit right now) to tackle the most common things I’m seeing with data and Silverlight. I’ll create the scenarios that get you stuck and show you what I do to help get you un-stuck from those moments. Stop scratching your head any longer!