Well, I wish I was going to this event: ReMIX UK!  For one, it would be starting the day of my birthday and would be a great birthday treat!  Secondly, I would be able to meet up with my fellow escamoles chaps and maybe take in some local cuisine instead.

If you are in the UK, or for some reason really wanted to see the current value of the US dollar, make sure you head to ReMIX UK!  The lineup is pretty incredible when you look at it…here’s some Microsoft favorites:

• Scott Guthrie – I mean, duh…this would make it a no-miss.
• Mike Taulty
• Arturo Toledo
• Dr. Neil Roodyn

I also saw on the agenda for the 2 day event that Tim Sneath and Jesse Liberty were listed, so it should be even richer (pun intented) content.  In addition it looks like some great stuff on the designer and creative strategy side of the business as well.  I’m sure there will be enough Silverlight stuff there to keep you going as well as WPF, ASP.NET and others!

By the way, I listed Dr. Neil above as one of my Microsoft favorites.  He’s actually one of our Regional Directors.  If you have never met Dr. Neil…do so.  He’s a great guy, very intelligent and fun to be around.  Ask him about how he manages developer teams and the ‘check-in’ metaphor for people, not just code.  Seriously, he would be a not miss either.

I wish I could travel across the pond for this one, but I’ll be hopefully approximately 25 meters under water in some area of Mexico celebrating with friends.  Have fun though!

I’ve just completed my upgrade to my site of the official 2.0 release of Subtext, the Open Source blogging engine that I use to manage content on this site.  You can read the full announcement from grand poohba Haack himself here.

I’m loving this release because of the improvements made but also a little selfishly because the modifications I’ve made to my own fork I’ve been using have made it into this release!  These modifications really make this the best platform for me when using Live Writer.  This may not make a difference to a lot of you, but it really is exciting for me to see my check-ins make it into the release and to not have to use my custom assemblies anymore!

Thanks to the Subtext team for supporting my contributions and I look forward to seeing how I can participate in v3!  Get your Subtext 2.0 upgrade today!

I’ve had a couple things sitting in my inbox for a week or so and rather than call them out individually and take up your precious aggregation space, I’ll summarize them here.

3rd Party Silverlight Controls

Got a note from Valentin about the roadmap for the Telerik Silverlight controls.  As they’ve previously noted, they are planning a set of controls: Window, Menu, TreeView, TabControl, PanelBar, Cube, ComboBox, Upload, Calendar, DatePicker, NumericUpDown, MediaPlayer, Range Slider, ProgressBar, WrapPanel, DockPanel, UniformGridPanel.  Right now it looks like they are incorporating the feedback provided and doing some polish work like adding Blend tool support for skinning, etc.  They also announced a Grid and Carousel control for Silverlight as well.  I particularly thought their mention of working on something similar to their RadDock for Windows for Silverlight sounded particularly interesting.

Silverlight Sidebar Gadget Template

Microsoft has a program called Student Partners.  These are individuals still in higher education and have shown their enthusiasm toward Microsoft technologies.  I’ve had the pleasure of meeting quite a few of these individuals and appreciate their energy around geekness.  Ioan Lazarciuc is one such Student Partner and took one of my previous samples of a Vista Sidebar Gadget Template for Visual Studio and Silverlight-ified it…enabling a template for creating Silverlight content-enabled Vista Sidebar Gadgets.

Ion’s got a great post about the work and the known issues that he still faces and had to get used to.  Go check it out and give some feedback on the work!

Deep Zoom and Mosaics

Creating Deep Zoom applications seem to be all the rage these days :-).  Another tool is making it more fun (and easier) to create some pretty cool visualizations with Deep Zoom and images.  The tool is Andrea Mosaic and is a tool to take a set of images and make a mosaic picture out of the images.  Then taking those mosaic collections and Doom Zoom-ifying them.  One hilarious implementation is the DeepLOL, using the various LOLCat phrases/images.  Take a look at what Rob Burke did (via Silverlight Streaming – hint: move your mouse and zoom in with the scroll wheel):

NBCOlympics.com

Of course you’ve probably heard of the Olympics on NBC.  The NBCOlympics.com by MSN site is serving over 3,600 hours of online content live and on-demand for your viewing pleasure.  If you install Silverlight you’ll get to enjoy the enhanced player experience that will deliver HD-quality content to your computer in the comfort of your own home.  I’m pretty excited to see some of the Olympics this year and will have to check out this experience for some of the live events.  I already like the HD experience I’ve seen so far…check it out!

That’s a few I had in my queue…more to come!

With the Olympic ceremony only days away and being able to enjoy the Olympic experience online via Silverlight, why not get a little excited and play some casual games, Olympic style.  All of these were build using Silverlight and the Popfly game creator:

• Torch Lighting
• Soccer
• Track and Field
• Archery
• Long Jump
• Weightlifting
• Boxing
• Gymnastics
• Diving
• Synchronized Swimming

I played them and they are pretty fun and amazing what can be done using a non-programming tool for gaming and Silverlight!

Have you seen those television commercials about used car markets and someone standing in a white background and as they vocalize their automobile preferences the selections fly in and around them.  That’s what I was reminded of when I came upon the new feature on Kelley Blue Book’s comparison feature on their site.  I had previously written about some innovative uses of DeepZoom with Jose’s samples and I like what KBB has done here as well.

They’ve leveraged Silverlight with DeepZoom in a way that provides some good user functionality but at the same time provides a line-of-business application for their organization.  You can get to the comparison feature by starting at their Perfect Car Finder® section of their site and clicking the Photo Edition near the bottom of the application.  Once launched you are presented with an array of vehicles which you can start trimming down by using the controls to specify your preferences.  As you enter options the images of vehicles filter and wrap into a new grid view.

I saw something that I’ve been working on as well for a blog post used in this application…a range control:

I did some snooping and was able to spend some time chatting with the developers of this beta application for KBB.  It was great to hear how they’ve got to this point in such a short time (abt a week) and with a developer who said this was his first Silverlight application.  I like that they had a need for a custom control and built it.  If you play around with it on the site you can see that it is basically the Slider functionality with two Thumb controls (which is the direction of my sample as well).  Changing these slider values also filters the car selections as well.

The car pictures are the DeepZoom portion of the application and do what you’d expect any DeepZoom app to do at this point with some great resolution photos.  One thing that KBB has done here is monitor where you (the user) are viewing within the DeepZoom collection and provide some highlighting of the car you are looking at (via a border).  Once you click on a specific vehicle it also zooms directly into that vehicle to provide you additional information.

They are making use of knowing where the user is as well as where in the collection that car exists to provide the best functionality to the end user.

I think this is another great use of Silverlight and DeepZoom together to provide some business functionality that is fun for the customer and functional for their organization.  It’s a great mix of services and client technology.  In talking with their developers I made a few suggestions that I think could even enhance the overall user experience and they understand they have some refinement they are desiring to do as well.  But from nothing to an integrated experience in a short time is great!  I’m looking forward to see how this application evolves.  Go check it out and tell them what you think.  Great job KBB team!