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Two new resources came to my attention recently that could be helpful resources for Flash developers wanting to learn Silverlight. The first has been out there for a bit actually, but the other is new. Let’s start with the new one, Project Rosetta (video). As Adam Kinney said this week while in meetings in Redmond, “because we need another web site.” Project Rosetta describes itself as: Project Rosetta is a site dedicated to helping designers and developers build applications in Silverlight while taking advantage of skills they already know. There are two articles...
I first saw the accelerators (the artists formerly known as activities) during The Code Trip, when Woody created an IE8 activity for Wikipedia. It was a convenient tool to have in your right-click toolbox on IE and I loved it (and still do). Well, now that IE8 Beta 2 is out, I decided (well, my selfishness decided) that I should create an activity accelerator for something that I use often so I introduce you to: IE8 Accelerator for TinyURL. So with a little XML, it was done. Seriously, like < 5 minutes. I ran into one problem...
A new (and great) idea has been making its way across the country. It’s called Startup Weekend. What is it? From their site: Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion? Startup Weekend answers that question and more. A unique three-day experience, Startup Weekend brings the best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams, and develop the product, marketing and revenue model. ...
Had enough media players, games, and animated shapes with Silverlight? How about integrating into some line of business applications? Microsoft produces an application called Microsoft CRM, now in it’s 4th release (those closer to the CRM information can correct me if I’m wrong…I’m actually not too familiar with the roadmap/releases of CRM). What is CRM? What you’d expect, a customer relationship management system…define your use of those systems as you wish. There are many CRM systems out there, but what struck me as interesting about MS CRM is based on a demonstration I saw about a year ago when v4...
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...
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 Binding...
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.com Silverlight 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...
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...
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: ...
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,...
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. ...
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
...
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...
If you already pay attention to the IronRuby dev group and are on the distribution list, apologies for the dupe. I’ve just got back from a camping trip and rifling through all my emails now. I checked in on the IronRuby group and noticed a new project emerging from someone. It’s from Ivan Porto Carrero and he calls it IronNails. It was previously called something else (quite frankly I liked the other name better myself) but there was already a project named after his chosen name. So alas, IronNails it is! Ivan describes this as: ...
I’ve seen the rumbling a few times now about property setting in Silverlight. The rumblings are along the lines of “why do I have to use SetValue for setting simple properties like the x/y positioning?” To those points, I agree from a fundamental standpoint. From a technical standpoint SetValue is there and serves a great purpose for providing a common way of setting properties on XAML elements regardless of the element. As a developer, I like it actually. I do, however, see the point about wanting to set simple properties and it just looks a little verbose. Take for instance...
NDA. Non-disclosure. Hush documents.
Not many people like them. In the technology world they are a necessary evil. Personally I don’t think that way. I think NDA’s are generally a good thing. It’s enabling legalese to let two parties participate in information exchange when they don’t want the rest of the world to know about them. NDA is a general term, of course, and the wording in any non-disclosure agreement is subject to the two parties involved. Heck it could say “We’re going to show you everything and you agree only to not talk about feature X…everything else is fair game.” ...
If you are working with Silverlight and data you most likely are going to leverage data binding at some point and run into some needs to format the data in the XAML. Luckily this can be done using value converters, which have been available for WPF since it’s inception as well. Let’s explore what I’m talking about using a common formatting need: dates. Consider this list box output binding: 1: <ListBox x:Name="FeedList">
2: <ListBox.ItemTemplate>
...
This week I had the privilege of attending and helping with some Silverlight in casual games presentations at the XNA Gamefest conference happening in Seattle. I say helping because the real game experts were there. Two Silverlight presentations were given. One by Bill Reiss/Joel Neubeck and the other by Mike Snow. Between the two sessions we covered concepts in Silverlight game development as well as a walk-through of starting out to create a simple game. I consider these guys to be the foremost experts on the topic given their experience in creating games like Dr. Popper, Stack Attack, Zero...
One of the things that makes Silverlight 2 great is the ability to create a very flexible framework application that others can use and can be embeddable with some dynamic properties. This is the method used in the SL2 Video Player to provide a completely dynamic player that is portable. How? Using the initParams property of the plugin. There are a few ways you can do this. I’ve just uploaded a video demonstrating three of them: Creating App Resources Passing into the root visual constructor...
Now that the Silverlight 2 Video Player is available from Codeplex, I wanted to make it a template for Expression Encoder. I’ll attempt to articulate the steps below. It’s actually pretty trivial. In fact in the current incarnation, you have to throw some extra stuff in there you may not need :-). Step 1 – Creating the template folder While I’ve covered this in previous posts and this is also well documented in the Encoder SDK documentation. First you’ll navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 2\Templates\en and you’ll see the existing template folders. The folders do not represent...
After posting my sample implementation of accessing Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) via Silverlight, I reflected quickly and also chatted with some AWS engineers. Cross-domain Policy One thing that you should never do is just deploy a global clientaccesspolicy.xml file blindly. Often times in samples, we (I) do this. I need to be better about this guidance to be honest, so I’ll start here. As an example, for the S3 cross domain policy file, we really should add some additional attributes to it to make it more secure. Since we know it is a SOAP service, we can...
Two new videos were just posted on the Silverlight learning section. Embedding Custom Fonts in Silverlight 2 This video demonstrates the supported method for embedding your custom font files into your Silverlight applications and how you might use them in your application as well as how to provide fallback fonts for your application. OpenFileDialog and File Upload in Silverlight 2 Two for one. Check out the OpenFileDialog control and how you might even use it with UI-less Silverlight applications. Also, look at OpenFileDialog in conjunction with uploading files via Silverlight 2 applications. Make sure to...
I’ve got a thought lately and curious if I’m thinking crazy. You see, probably the most asked questions I get are around working with services within Silverlight. Although I’ve got some helpful (at least I think they’re helpful) posts on the subject: Silverlight, 404 and some tool help Updates for Beta 2 Working with Syndicated Data Calling WCF/ASMX Services Calling REST Services Cross-domain policy files ...
I ran into an interesting situation last week…the desire to access some of my Amazon S3 services from within a Silverlight application.
Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) is a pay service provided Amazon for object storage ‘in the cloud.’ Although there is no UI tool provided by Amazon to navigate your account in S3, a SOAP and REST API are available for developers to integrate S3 information into their applications or other uses. You can view more information about Amazon S3 on their site.
What is S3?
Since S3 is a pretty flexible service, it can be used for many different things including...
I’m hoping this post will help explain a few things with regard to Silverlight detection scripts that some sites may be using. This is related to the silverlight.js Javascript file that was deployed with a lot of Silverlight 1.0 applications/sites and is also available as a part of the Silverlight 2 SDK tools.
What the heck is this Silverlight.js you speak of?
Simply put, Silverlight.js is a helper file which enables Web sites to create advanced Silverlight installation and instantiation experiences. It was a resource file that was initially shipped along side several templates and helper projects to aid in the detection...
One of probably the coolest casual ‘games’ I’ve ever seen is Line Rider. It’s a fun game, but really gets exciting when you have an artist behind it. Basically it’s a blank canvas for you to draw a route for the main character to hop on his sled and ride. Sound lame? Not when you see what some have come up with. For example, here’s a very popular ‘ride’ on YouTube.
Well, the Line Rider team has recently modified their beta version and implemented in Silverlight 2! They’ve also added some social networking integration using Live Messenger and the ability to...
I suspect we’ll be seeing more of these efforts for Silverlight and I love it. In fact, INETA will be sponsoring the 2008 INETA Silverlight Challenge soon, so you should sign up for more information about that as well. But until then… But until then, check out what some of the community MVPs and leaders are doing on their own! They’ve started the Silverlight Control Builder Contest ‘08. Two main organizers (Page Brooks and Dave Campbell) have put some time and thought into how they can get the community excited about developing solutions for the community and alas...
Are you poking around with the latest ASP.NET MVC (Model-View-Controller) bits? If so, hopefully you are already aware of the resources available to you and the fact that Phil Haack is one of the program manager’s leading those efforts, and Scott Hanselman has been providing the community with some resources to jump start your learning. Well, another member has just joined the ranks on the team I work for. Stephen Walther, pictured here in his best book-cover pose ;-), has joined the team. He actually joined earlier this month, but I’m just now getting around to welcoming him to...
For those of you who use my RSS FeedReader Web Part for SharePoint, it has been updated into an ‘official’ release for the project. Version 3.0.0.2 is now the latest release. It incorporates all the changes from our team’s contributor, Ryan – thanks Ryan!!! You can read the checkin on the Codeplex site or review this previous post for Ryan’s checkin notes. As always, the source code is included on the site, licensed under the Ms-Pl. There has been some emails/work items/debate over the installer. The installation is two parts: ...
Some new videos just got posted to the Silverlight community site. Topics included: IsolatedStorage usage HTML DOM Integration Dynamic Assembly/XAP loading Working with Syndicated Data As always, feedback and ideas are welcome. Ben’s been leaving some great comments here on suggested topics and I’d love to see more. I’ll be starting a new ‘series’ soon…more to come on that in a week’s time. As a reminder, these videos are meant...
As I patiently awaited, here’s what was presented to my browser:
I’ve made my first official “commit” to an open source project that I didn’t start. I feel good. I feel like cracking open a Mt. Dew and going crazy. Honestly though it does feel good (and fun).
My blog engine I use is Subtext. It’s the blog engine I’ve used almost exclusively (I actually started with .Text before scottw sold out went to Telligent to make Community Server. I kid of course, Scott is a great guy, and very smart. But when .Text was seemingly going to get stale, others...
The Silverlight Streaming service has been upgraded to support Silverlight 2 beta 2 applications. As a note to customers who were previously hosting Beta 1 applications for test purposes, as beta 1 is no longer a supported test platform for SLS. Authors should update/upload their applications using the latest Silverlight 2 bits. These are available (with the tools) from the Silverlight community site. Silverlight 1 applications hosted on SLS are not affected by this upgrade and still supported of course. Remember that you can also now directly upload a XAP file to SLS using the Manage...
Over the past few months Joel and I have been back-and-forthing modifications to his original great idea and goal “build a re-sizable video player using no custom user controls, but instead leveraging controls styles and templates.” Joel started in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and implemented using the style method (aka ‘the MIX model’) available at that time.
I took it and added some functionality of scaling and startup parameters. After the VisualStateManager model for styling was released, this project made perfect sense to demonstrate those abilities and thus I transformed the great styling work that Joel did into the VSM...
I’ve been a Wells Fargo customer for a long time. As a financial institution it has served me well. I’ve never really put much thought into the services I use and the interactions I have with their systems. Actually I take that back – I make heavy use of the online banking system and have noticed some likes/dislikes, but overall pleased. Over the past year, the automated teller machines (ATM) have undergone some design changes that, while subtle, have been impressive and welcome additions to the ATM experience for me. It really made me actually notice a change in...
Well today (17 JUN 2008) will be the release of Firefox 3, a seemingly much anticipated browser update. I checked out an earlier build (I think beta 2) and it was a nice browser. I’m not a browser zealot, I use what works for me and IE works for me, has some tools that I like, etc. Firefox is a fine browser as well and I do use some plugins from time to time in my Firefox install.
Today, I assume a lot of people will be downloading FF3 whether by explicit choice or by a prompt from their FF2 browser...
The team att AppDev is providing a free learning CD-ROM for Silverlight 2. They are providing it as a CD-ROM or download and said it represents a $115 value for their training…but are providing it now for free!
If you are familiar with MSDN Magazine, ASPNETPro, and other online/offline publications, the name Dino Esposito might sound familiar. Dino is the one providing the training walkthroughs for you in this offering. It includes roughly 3 hours of training on Silverlight 2 content. Get it now! Thanks AppDev!
UPDATE (30 JUN 2008):
The team at AppDev has heard some feedback and has altered their offer. ...
I’ve just finished updating my modification of Joel’s original concept. Joel had a really great base for me to build off of and used styling and templates to create simple controls for a standard Silverlight media player that could be embedded. I took his sample and made some minor adjustments to accommodate automatic sizing as well as make it a bit more parameter-driven. The end result was (what I think at least) a fairly nice player that could be flexible if needed: Joel made great use of styling primitive controls to be able to leverage core...
One of the things I love about the Microsoft developer ecosystem is the partner channels that are enabled to create great add-ons to our platforms and frameworks. Our partners in this space usually get to the better implementations before we do, taking on the task of filling some gaps in unique implementations while our teams can focus on providing the best framework for enabling that construction. In December of last year, Telerik showed their intentions of making a control suite for Silverlight (then v1.1). Well now that beta 2 is released for Silverlight 2, they’ve updated their RadControls for...
I’ve been getting a few notes on issues relating to people trying Silverlight beta 2 and WCF or other services. The most common issue I’m seeing reported is “my exception is showing a 404-not found error message, but the service is there and works!” Okay, there could be several things happening here, but let’s tackle the “make sure it is plugged in” type situations. I don’t mean to make light of the error, because at first I, too, was banging my head against a wall. Sometimes it helps to have a second set of eyes or a deeper understanding...
Now that beta 2 is out and some of the features or more solid, and a majority of the breaking changes have been announced, there is no excuse to hold back anymore. Oh yeah, and there is a commercial go-live license available now, so no more excuses :-).
So where to get started? Well you should first head over to the Silverlight community site and visit the Get Started section. There you will find a rather simple formula to get started:
Download/install the tools
...
An important note for those using Sockets in Silverlight 2. In beta 1, Sockets were limited to site-of-origin (meaning you could only connect back to the same host that served up the Silverlight application). This has changed in beta 2 to allow your Silverlight application to connect to any server exposing some Socket connections.
One important note, however, is that a policy implementation has been added. This policy implementation affects not only cross-domain Socket calls, but site-of-origin ones as well. So if you are using Sockets, you must have a policy implementation in place.
The policy implementation is done via a similar file...
Um. Whoa.
Okay, DevExpress rocks. I think this will be very well received by the community and you’ll have to watch their page for when it is available and to get your license.
From their site:
As the release of Silverlight draws near, DevExpress has invested the engineering resources needed to deliver a feature-rich grid control for Silverlight. Not just a "preview" of what is possible with Silverlight, the AgDataGrid Suite was developed to fully exploit the power and flexibility of the platform…
It looks like it will support pretty much everything you’d expect in a DataGrid and more…wicked cool. Congratulations and thank you...
Silverlight 2 brings a suite of controls for designers and developers to leverage within their applications. With the Expression tools helping us to be able to skin these controls, also comes some new controls you may not have used yet as well as a new one introduced with the latest release of Silverlight 2.
Introducing TabControl.
UPDATE: Video walk-through is now live.
The TabControl is implemented in the System.Windows.Controls.Extended class library and not in the Silverlight core. To use it make a reference to the Extended assembly and it will be available to you. In Expression Blend you’ll see TabControl in the Custom...
If you’ve heard the news about Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and Expression Blend 2.5 (June 2008 preview), you will notice something else in addition to being able to skin your controls easier. Remember how you may have had to create different states for your element using “MouseOver State" and then create storyboards to transition to states? There’s now a better way. Enter VisualStateManager. Let’s take a look and see if we can simplify this down a bit a basic understanding. Let’s use something that most everyone should be able to relate to with states: Button. A button has...
This has been one of the features that I’ve been excited about for a while since I heard we were changing it. With the release of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and the updated preview of Expression Blend 2.5 (June 2008), skinning and styling controls within Silverlight gets a bunch easier. When Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was released there was the possibility of styling/skinning controls. It wasn’t impossible, but perhaps a bit obfuscated to the eye for people with short attention spans like myself. You can read more about those methods here and here. WPF designers were...
So you want to read an RSS/Atom feed on the interwebs and saw the SyndicationFeed class you could use in Silverlight to give a nice RIA display of the syndicated data. Great, no problem right, just wire up an WebClient, point it to the RSS feed on something like http://silverlight.net or something and boom, done. Wait, what’s this 404 Not Found error? In most cases this is going to be a result of a cross-domain issue. If you haven’t started working with services yet, Silverlight requires a cross-domain policy file to be in place to access remote data not on...
Hot off the press, a new drop of Windows Live Writer was just released. Get it here. This is one of my favorite tools from Microsoft and the update brings a few new changes. First, I’m happy to report that Flickr4Writer and S3Browser still work fine and require no adjustments. The other thing announced today from the Writer team is an updated SDK. This new SDK includes a new type of plugin which enable plug-in activity for pre- and post-publish events. Some of you following me on Twitter may have noticed something every so often that said...
This week I’ll be traveling to Mexico City to meet developers and designers at the local MIX Essentials (English translation here – funny that RIA gets translated to LAUGHS) event. I’ll be presenting two sessions there this week. I was fortunate enough to be asked to kick-off the conference talking about building RIAs with Silverlight 2. I’m particularly excited about this as I have some things to show that haven’t really been shown broadly yet. I will also be speaking on working with data in Silverlight 2 later in the day. This session will cover working with services, servers,...
I just finished up a day attending the Chicago RIApalooza event in, well, Chicago. First, I must say that I love cities with great mass transit systems. I’ve said this before and I keep threatening myself to move to one. For this event I paired up with a super designer Corrina Barber. Corrina works as a user experience designer at Microsoft, is wicked smart and was a perfect compliment to this event. Most of the attendees at RIApalooza I believed to be interactive developers, so most having a knack for design. I figured rather than a developer...
Take a few minutes and look at this video of Jose Fajardo re-demonstrating one of his ReMIX features shown using Silverlight and DeepZoom. Are you kidding me?! Seriously, Jose has a great imagination and an incredible sense for effectively demonstrating things. In this video he answers questions posed to himself like “what if all web images were DeepZoom-able?” and “what if all the documents on the web were DeepZoom-able?” Then he gets crazy and suggests that people could collaborate with a DeepZoom image and demonstrates this using a Silverlight chat experience built using network sockets. I love his context...
Taking another cue from some great stuff Joel is doing, I liked his implementation of the ‘Leopard Screen Saver’ but wanted to make it more ‘real’ for me. So I wired it up to my Flickr account. Result here (using Silverlight Streaming):
I only had to change a few things.
First, in the Page_Loaded event, I removed the timer start function. This was because with interacting with Flickr it was going to be async. I didn’t want the timer to start until I knew the image collection was built.
My BuildCollection function now looks like this:
private void BuildCollection()
{
// get...
A while back the team at the New York Times newspaper produced a digital reader for their content, dubbed ‘Times Reader.’ The technology powering that reader experience (“the digital newspaper that reads like the real thing”) is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), part of the .NET Framework. It is a remarkable experience for viewing digital news in a traditional format. It provided online and offline reading capabilities mixed with some new and innovative ways of viewing related stories. Portions of the reader were even transformed into a starter kit framework: Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit. This kit provides the initial...
I’m very excited to have the opportunity to attend the RIApalooza event in Chicago in a few weeks (31 MAY). What is RIApalooza? RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and "PowerPoint-Free" zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built. source: riapalooza.com I love the PPT-free zone aspect of it. I loving having the maximum time to show some real working code, answer questions and see what...
In February, the SharePoint team released a Visual Studio extensions kit for SharePoint development. Just recently they released a user guide complete with samples and walkthroughs. The sections include:
Starting out in SharePoint Development
Walkthrough of the VS extensions
Team Site project
Blank Site project
List Definition project
Web...
Want a Silverlight-branded XBOX console? Yeah, me too, that would be cool. Well, there isn’t one of those, but there is a chance for you to show your Silverlight prowess and win some cool stuff. The RIA development portal at DevX is currently running a contest (which ends next week, yikes, hurry!) for creating games in Silverlight 2. The contest seems relatively simple: Step 1: Create wicked cool game in Silverlight 2 Step 2: Host it on Silverlight Streaming How simple is that…oh yeah, except for the ‘creating game’ part. There are a few...
There are some really great application concepts emerging using Silverlight. I cam across two that I feel are really demonstrating great use of the technology, both in the code as well as attention to detail in the user interface. Both of these examples make great use of layouts, controls, etc. within Silverlight 2 to show what is possible with some imagination and the platform. The first is the “My Travel Management” site which leverages real travel information to represent the scenario of looking at flight arrangements. It definitely is a twist on the Silverlight Airlines, providing a little more...
Hello readers! If you are a Foxit user, please update your reader software to the latest version ASAP. A recent exploit was found by a security research firm and Foxit turned around an update to their reader within 24 hours. Bravo to the Foxit team for being very agile and getting this rectified. After some further research and discussion with the development team it was found that the ActiveX component used in the PDF Preview Handlers might also be vulnerable. To reconcile this, Foxit has issued a patched (and updated) version of the ActiveX control for the preview handlers. ...
When using media with Silverlight there are a few things that you should be aware of. First, ensure that the media you are planning on using conforms to the VC-1 specification. Your media files just need to then be accessible via streaming or http-based access for progressive downloads. The media files for progressive downloads can be anywhere: any web server, Amazon S3 storage, some HttpHandler, whatever – as long as they can be served. Streaming media is supported via Windows Media Services. If you haven’t set this up before, there are a few things to note with regard...
Wait! Don’t throw out your JSON services!
The Situation
You’ve made an investment in exposing some services for client script consumption. Most likely if you did it in the past 2 years, that involved exposing your data as JSON formatted objects.
What is JSON?
It is a text-based, human-readable format for representing simple data structures and associative arrays (called objects)
Perhaps a search service returns a list of people formatted using your custom “Person” object and you’ve been using this in your AJAX applications for a while now. Maybe your JSON data looks something like this:
[{"City":"Queen Creek","FirstName":"Tim","LastName":"Heuer",
"Website":"http:\/\/timheuer.com\/blog\/"},
{"City":"Portland","FirstName":"Scott","LastName":"Hanselman",
"Website":"http:\/\/hanselman.com\/blog\/"},
{"City":"Redmond","FirstName":"Scott","LastName":"Guthrie",
"Website":"http:\/\/weblogs.asp.net\/scottgu"},
{"City":"New Hampshire","FirstName":"Joe","LastName":"Stagner",
"Website":"http:\/\/joestagner.net"},
{"City":"Boston","FirstName":"Jesse","LastName":"Liberty",
"Website":"http:\/\/silverlight.net\/blogs\/jesseliberty"}]
While Silverlight 2 brings us great capabilities as .NET developers and opens many opportunities for creating rich clients in the browser, it still supports strong media features that have been available since the initial release of Silverlight. The ability to deliver efficient, high quality media in the browser is an increasing need in a lot of sites producing content for their members. Traditional ‘podcasts’ which were historically audio-only, are moving increasingly faster to richer media. This is nothing new of course, but being able to quickly distribute the media on your sites efficiently and provide methods for your users to...
For Silverlight 2, we finally have some native controls to leverage. Most of them are to aid in input scenarios. The text input, however, is currently scoped to be plain text input. Some have desired a richer input control. You knew it wouldn’t be long before someone in the community stepped up to the challenge. Christopher Husse has done just that.
Enter: Silverlight rich text editor.
He posts a detailed description of all the capabilities on Michael Syncs blog. The effort is also posted on Codeplex for you to peruse.
Here is what he calls the ‘incomplete feature list’:
...
This blog runs on SubText. I heart SubText. I know there are others out there but for me SubText has met most of my needs. And when it hasn’t I modify it. Which brings me to this post. There was a thread on an email list I belong to about Windows Live Writer (I heart Live Writer too :-)) and categories (adding new categories on the fly). This got me to crack open the source and hunt. Alas, there was no support for this. I’ve been ranting about WordPress API support for SubText on the developer list and I think...
The first of my Silverlight videos have posted which cover some networking stuff that I’ve been blogging about already. If you want to see a walk through of things you might have already read, please take a look at them:
Cross domain policy files with Silverlight 2
Using WCF and ASP.NET Web Services with Silverlight 2
There are more coming and I’m interested in hearing your comments so please give them. If you have suggestions for things that...
I know ScottGu already did a good sample showing integration with Digg and Silverlight, but check out what Jose did!
Jose does a great job explaining each of the components here and what he is doing to develop this application. A good experience demonstration with a lot going on there with Silverlight. I really encourage you to check out this read and subscribe to Jose’s feed – he’s what I’d call ‘wicked good.’
tags: silverlight, jose fajardo, cynergy, digg, wpf, xaml, ria
I’ve started a dialog with a few of you about getting Silverlight and service integration working, specifically with ASP.NET web services (and even WCF ones). A few have downloaded some of my samples, but others have started from scratch. A few have reported getting some interesting errors, ASYNC_blahblah and NotFound errors specifically. While this was boggling my mind (as I wasn’t getting them), a reader’s comments pointed me along the lines of something…he mentioned “maybe it is because my web service is ASP.NET 2.0 and not 3.5” – of which that shouldn’t be the case, so I went to test...
In my previous post about cross-domain policy files I received some comments about whether or not cross-domain access is allowed on Silverlight Streaming. I think really this is two questions that I'll try to clarify here.
What is Silverlight Streaming?
For those who don't know, Microsoft provides anyone with an account to "stream" Silverlight applications for free. We'll give you 10GB of space to put your Silverlight applications. There are some limitations, which you can read about in the service. The "streaming" name has confused some. It isn't only a "where can I put media files" location, but is a service to...
Je viens en Belgique pour MIX!
In one of my previous posts I made reference to the MIX Essentials event happening in Belgium later this month (24 APR). Well, it turns out that I will be there! I'll be speaking on Silverlight 2 and creating rich applications and am joining the company of Gil Cleeren and Catherine Heller...oh yeah and Ballmer (I tried to catch a ride with him, but couldn't cash in my frequent flyer miles). My session will provide an overview of everything new in Silverlight 2 and how you can start building your applications using it...
Firs, thank you for all that came to the presentation in Anaheim. The room was full, and hopefully you learned something while there (and hopefully it was along the lines that video in text boxes might not be good design, but is doable :-)).
I got a bunch of really great questions and concerns and hopefully answered all of them that were asked. I saw many more hands lifted than we could get to, so if you have more questions, feel free to send them to me, or join the forum discussions as well! The Silverlight community site is a great...
If you are starting to get into integrating web services with Silverlight, you'll notice that you have to have a cross domain policy file in place on the target server, that is to say, the server hosting the service you want to implement. There are some public web services (Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc.) that already have these files in place for Flash, but implement in a slightly different way.
When calling a cross-domain service, Silverlight will check for the existence of clientaccesspolicy.xml first. This is the format defined by Silverlight and provides a pretty flexible way to define who can access...
I've been with Microsoft now for over 3 years and have loved every minute of my time here. For the time leading up to being hired at Microsoft, it was a professional goal of mine to work for the company. Fanboy? Sure, call me whatever you want. I prefer to just call it passion. I joined as a developer evangelist for my community (an area we call desert mountain which spans Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana). This was an easy thing to say yes to because everything I learned I learned from being a part of...
Ever since I released my version of the Foxit PDF Preview Handler, I've been flooded with comments about building a version that works for Windows XP. You see XP doesn't have the preview host that Vista has built into the operating system.
Well, I finally had some time to hunt down some code and get it working, thanks to the help of Ryan Gregg from the Outlook team. I released the sample code I used as a base for this as a part of our Code Trip project. You can view my short screencast explaining one of the core pieces here...
If you are doing Silverlight development, you are no doubt slapping in the <object> tag or using the <asp:silverlight> control (if in ASP.NET) to host your Silverlight content/application. This is all great, but don't forget about deployment!
When I talk about Silverlight I like to relay a story I heard from one of the Silverlight program managers (PM) a while back. The PM was pretty excited about a feature just completed in Silverlight and one of the samples that had been created. He went home to show his wife and told her to 'go to 'dub-dub-dub-dot-something-dot-com' (yelling from the other room...
One of The Code Trip sponsors, InnerWorkings, has teamed up to have a coding challenge for developers. This is open to everyone to participate. The winner gets an annual subscription to InnerWorkings as well as an XBOX 360 game console.
If you aren't familiar with InnerWorkings, consider this a shameless plug. I really do believe in their product as it is a unique learning experience from what we traditionally have (i.e., lab manuals with step-by-step instructions). They have a wide catalog of topics including ASP.NET, WCF, WPF, Silverlight, CSS, etc. for organizations to choose from. You really need to check them...
In a previous post, I wrote about some samples of calling various types of services from Silverlight 2. In the code, I was using constructors in my ASMX and WCF services with specifying a binding type and endpoint address.
It was called out to me that in other demonstrations, people did not use this construct. While the method I demonstrated works (explicitly specifying the binding and endpoint), in some cases it may not be necessary. One such case would be if you only have one endpoint and it is basicHttpBinding.
The error in my code/instructions was about changing the binding information in...
If you are like me, you probably create a lot of projects in Visual Studio that end up getting thrown away and are intended just to test out a theory you have, double-check yourself when you are going mad because you can't find a bug, testing out something you read on a blog post, whatever. Most of the projects I create are web projects. I've started to adopt the "_Delete" mechanism to help me identify what I can truly delete in my folders later. But is not the point here. One thing that I do when creating web projects is...
The MountainWest RubyConf 2008 is upon us just 2 weeks away in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to be there given my travel with The Code Trip. IronRuby, however, was able to be a sponsor of this year's conference as a Gold Sponsor. This sponsorship is one part that enables video production of the conference for afterwards as well as a few other things. The organizers have done a great job getting great sponsors to make this happen, and IronRuby is grateful to be a part of that.
One thing that was recently released was...
Our current route on The Code Trip takes us to Boulder, Colorado on March 18 to the Boulder .NET User Group! I'm really excited about this stop in Boulder, CO as we've managed to get some help from great partners to demonstrate some very cool developer stuff they are working on.
Specifically, Quark and me.dium will be there to talk to the group. Quark will be showing us some stuff they've been working on for WPF and Silverlight. me.dium is a company that I met at MIX08 last week that were showing off some great stuff they've done with Internet Explorer...
UPDATE: Source code posted here.
Now that Silverlight 2 is out to the masses (even in beta form), there are likely a lot of developers looking to wire-up web services with their applications in .NET rather than the Silverlight 1.0 method of Javascript. I thought I'd give you some quick examples of how to do this using some different methods: ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), REST service, and talk about cross-domain calls. These are meant to be examples using very much 'hello world' style services, but demonstrating at least how to execute the call.
If you are an ASP.NET...
Since the beginning of Silverlight you've been able to embed fonts within a Silverlight application. The challenge in version 1.0 was that you essentially had to use a downloader and some SetFontSource methods on a TextBlock (for example) to do it. I wrote about this a while back when using my own handwriting as a font within Silverlight.
It looked something like this:
this.downloader = control.createObject("downloader");
this.downloader.addEventListener("completed", Silverlight.createDelegate(this, this.handleFontDownloaded)); this.downloader.open("GET", "timheuer.ttf");
this.downloader.send();
handleFontDownloaded: function(sender, eventArgs)
{
this.header.setFontSource(sender);
this.itemtext.setFontSource(sender);
...
For about a year now I've been using Amazon S3 services. Mostly I'm using it for image storage for my blog and web site. I decided to stop using Flickr for screenshot stuff and keep it to 'photographs' when I can. I signed up for an S3 account and have been using it for screenshot type stuff since then. If you don't know, S3 is a service that basically enables 'object' storage in the cloud. An object can be anything really, but I'm treating it like a remote host for images.
The one thing Amazon doesn't provide themselves is a tool...
When working with Silverlight 2, most will be working with managed code (c#, vb, etc.). But likely people are working with Silverlight as an additive value to their web application, providing some enhanced user experience to an application. there may be times where you will still need to call back into the hosting html context. For then, you'll want to be familiar with two objects HtmlDocument and HtmlPage.
Both of these objects provide access to the page context hosting your silverlight control. If you need to seek things in the HTML DOM, you could use the HtmlDocument class. For example,...
We're off! Just minutes ago The Code Trip left the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas en route to our first stop in Salt Lake City. It's going to be a late night of coding and editing of some video. Now that we've officially left, I'll share the actual pictures of our bus so you can be on the lookout for us: Tomorrow (late tonight) we roll in to Salt Lake for the combined .NET community user group meeting at the Franklin Covey building. We're going to spend 2 hours talking about what we saw at MIX08. We've got a...
The group that brought you one of the first Silverlight end-to-end games (Zero Gravity) is now featured for some of the work they've done with Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2 for Miniclip.com, the largest online gaming site in the world.
You can view the Terralever case study online here. The Terralever crew is interviewed in four different segments talking about the project from a designer, developer, business and technical perspective.
The team built two casual games for Miniclip.com on both versions of Silverlight. The first, a Silverlight 1.0 game called 'Zombomatic 3000' has been on Miniclip's site for a few weeks now. ...
Wow, it's been a few months now since I thought about doing a road trip talking about the next wave of technologies. I originally thought it would be the "Silvertour" but we've now actually made it happen. I can tell you that the behind the scenes of this has been a long process. It seems so simple and I can hear the people now saying 'why was it so hard, c'mon you are Microsoft and have zillions of dollars.' Sure, maybe that is true about a big company, but that's also the point. We are a company of companies and...
I've gotten a few requests from internal local sales teams, Sharepoint professionals and developers about how to implement Silverlight in Sharepoint. I usually try to explain that since Sharepoint is essentially an ASP.NET application it is relatively simple to implement. Of course, that usually doesn't help :-). What helps is some documentation and samples that show how you would use Silverlight to enhance a Sharepoint experience.
As a part of the Software+Services Blueprints series, a new bundle has been made available to download to provide guidance and source code to help provide some information. In the blueprint you'll get:
...
Along with some of my compadres, Josh Holmes and Peter Laudati, we're helping our MIX team member Drew Robbins organize the Open Space @ MIX area. What is it? Well, sort of whatever you want it to be. If you've never been to an Open Space event format before there are some things you should know...
Four principles of Open Space:
Whoever comes are the right people to be there
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened
...
From the 'does the guy ever sleep' category, ScottGu enlightens us all again with a very great tutorial on using Expression Blend 2.5 (March preview coming soon) to work with Silverlight 2 content.
Scott walks through a tutorial on using the design-time features of Expression Blend 2.5 and some tips along the way to produce a chat-like application using Silverlight:
Definitely worth a look to study before MIX. Someone might want to pull Scott aside about the font choice though...
tags: silverlight, mix, mix08, scottgu, expression, expression blend, silverlight 2, comic sans
Are you a Netflix customer and have a Media Center PC? Check out what one of our Media Center MVPs re-birthed. Anthony Park, a Media Center MVP, has regenerated a project from back in 2004 (originally developed by Ryan Hurst) and released MyNetflix v2.1.
I'm not a Media Center nor Netflix user but the user interface is impressive and done very well to look like a part of the overall Media Center experience. Here's a view of your Netflix queue:
You can see other screenshots of browsing 'top' categories, movie details and he's also now incorporated 'watch now' information as well.
Great work...
When developing Virtual Earth applications I find myself always having the SDK documents open in the background for reference. While this isn't a bad practice, I've historically only used them for parameter reference, etc. I longed for the time that I could get cheater help intellisense for the Virtual Earth API.
When Visual Studio 2008 came out with Javascript intellisense, I figured the day has come. But unfortunately, the Javascript intellisense isn't enabled for external (external==not-the-same-app-domain) files. The thing about the implementation of the Javascript intellisense in VS2008 is that you can just make a reference to a file for...
Ah, the joys of using non-API APIs :-). I say that in jest because essentially my first stab at the MSDN search gadget wasn't using any *real* API, but rather just formatting queries correctly and hoping that the format would stay the same.
Well, when you do this you run the risk of things changing. For MSDN (and TechNet) search, things have changed 3 times now. Mike Ormond points out that another change breaks the default MSDN gadget that I had created. He's posted a fix that works for him (until the next change) and should for others.
Thanks Mike for posting...
If you develop Office applications, then hopefully you've seen some of the great improvements for developing Office applications using Visual Studio 2008. I recently spoke about these at an event in Denver and demonstrated some of the capabilities.
Of the many new features in streamlining the process for creating Office applications, there are two that required some extra hoops. Now granted they are minor, but if you are doing a lot of Open Office XML and Ribbon customization, it was a bit of a snare to always refer back to other applications and documents for reference.
Well, the Office team has released...
Very cool think popped in my RSS reader this morning. Scott Guthrie (now a corp VP, congrats Scott) put up a first look post at Silverlight 2. Not just a 'here's what is coming' but an 8-part tutorial as well as he built a sample application trying to leverage and demonstrate various parts of Silverlight 2.
These tutorials should be extremely helpful for those wanting to understand some of the newer concepts brought to Silverlight. If you haven't done a lot (or any) WPF coding before, some of this should jumpstart your knowledge a bit.
take a look at 'First Look at...
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:
anders hejlsberg
paul vick
wez furlong
tomas petricek
peli de halleux
...
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...
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...
looks like the silverlight tour is giving a free ride for a half-day session on silverlight in dallas. i've sat in on one of the early silverlight tour stops before silverlight even was officially released. i can only imagine that it has gotten more exciting as time goes by.
the dallas event is limited to 32 attendees, so register asap if you can make it. this free session looks to discuss:
Why should I care about Silverlight
What is Silverlight?
...
miniclip.com now has a silverlight 1.0 puzzle game to their catalog.