Latest Listings

SL2 - Over 100 Million Served - look at SL 3

Managed to someone miss Scott Guthrie's posted a couple days ago.  Things are looking GREAT for SL.  In the first four weeek of SL2, it has beem installed in over 100 million machines! Wow!

With Netflix now pushing Video for both PC and Mac with SL.   Blockbuster is replacing Flash with SL in MOvieLink too! Even that old three letter word, AOL, is getting in on SL, Maybe developers will get the message..  SL is BIG.. No.. BBBIIIGG!

Read more about what is happening along with a glympse at SL 3:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/16/update-on-silverlight-2-and-a-glimpse-of-silverlight-3.aspx

Will it support 3D?  Will it do hardware acceleration?...

Hmm..  Can you handle it?  Can you?  Drum roll....  Visual Studio will be getting a full SL/WPF editor (Blend'ed maybe?)

Can hardly wait for next August and a new release of SL!

Zignals?

"If you have, I’m not surprised given the great visibility and publicity they’ve received for their unique, innovative application and beautiful set of controls, all done in Silverlight.  They also do a great job informing customers through their actively updated blog and recently started sending updates via Twitter as well." [More]

http://blogs.msdn.com/martharotter/archive/2008/09/17/new-irish-silverlight-showcase-app-zignals.aspx

Win 7 grows WPF & SL

The ‘lightweight version of WPF’, Silverlight, will also form a key part of the upcoming Office 14 online suite. The suite will include for the first time cut-down online versions of core applications like Word, Excel and OneNote.

“We’re using Silverlight heavily in building out those web versions,” said Sneath.

“For example, to build a rich text rendering experience in Word, the zoom-in and zoom-out functionality is all being built in Silverlight.”

[More]

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/89119,windows-7-fronts-wider-growth-trend-for-wpf.aspx

Silverlight V 3.0 coming soon!

"The next version is expected to arrive sometime in 2009, but the roadmap of how exactly Microsoft will get there still hasn't gone public. If you want to help the software giant improve Silverlight, take the recently posted Silverlight 2 survey. The battle between Flash and Silverlight is intensifying, and us consumers will be the ones to benefit the most from the competition." [More]

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/11/17/microsoft-starts-to-talk-about-silverlight-3-coming-in-2009

Utilizing SL on a corporate network

"To successfully utilize Silverlight via a corporate network, there are four basic steps that will need to be followed. First, you will need to plan the deployment, and after the planning phase, you will next need to test it. Once you have tested your deployment strategy, you will next need to deploy Silverlight on the network. The last and final step is to maintain Silverlight inside your environment." [More]

http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/silverlight/utilizing-silverlight-corporate-network.html

Uploading SL 2 Content to SL Streaming

A basic walkthrough of posting to sliverlight.live.com:

http://vincenthomedev.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/uploading-silverlight-2-content-to-silverlight-streaming/

Finding the default style

"One of the things I like about Silverlight is the ability to customize existing controls. Just about every control that ships with Silverlight has a default style. You are free to override the default style, create a new style from scratch or if you so choose edit a copy of the default style. Using the new style is as simple as setting the Style attribute  Style="{StaticResource StyleName} where StyleName is the name of the style. For further information on styling refer to the following post.

But where can you find the default style for a control?

Excluding third party tools, I know of at least three ways;" [More]

http://cynotwhynot.com/blog/post/Silverlight-Finding-the-default-style.aspx

How to communicate between Silverlight controls

"A while back I discovered a great post about how to establish communication between Silverlight controls on the same page. I had already known how it could be accomplished using Javascript and an example of this approach is used by my Silverlight Gallery. But this other way caught my attention and I have decided to post about it. Jeff Prosise's Blog contains a series of posts called  Cool Silverlight Tricks. Currently there are only 5 tricks, but, they are all great. Make sure you check them out. I will not be discussing the Javascript approach in the blog post. The reader is referred to this post " [More]

http://cynotwhynot.com/blog/post/How-to-communicate-bewteen-Silverlight-controls.aspx

Line of Business app made easy

"Jamie shows what’s coming in a next version of Silverlight: a new framework to help you build business focused applications:

•Data access with client side ObjectDataSource!
•Silverlight Business Logic Class (used inside Silverlight without adding a service reference!!)
•Validator controls, validation rules enforced by server–side business class
•Navigation workflow, browser history integration
•Login control, roles
" [More]

http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2008/11/15/silverlight-futures-line-of-business-app-made-easy.aspx

Are sockets only suitable in intranets?

"The fact is that Silverlight Sockets requires the policy file to be served on port 943 and sockets only work on ports 4502-4534.  This means that your customers must have those ports open on their Firewall.  In a world of locked down security is this really likely?  I think not!" [More]

http://silverlightuk.blogspot.com/2008/11/are-sockets-only-suitable-in-intranets.html

Billy Hollis: XAML for Developers Part 1

"The one and only Billy Hollis comes to dnrTV from the PDC in Los Angeles to show us some basics of XAML and also some things you may not know. " [More]

http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=128

Rating Control with Theme Support

"If you play around with the toolkit you will quickly stumble on a new assembly called: “Microsoft.Windows.Controls.Theming”.  In a nut shell what this class does is give control developers access to the ability to theme their controls.  One of the key elements of this assembly is the “ImplicitStyleManager”. This class exposes some attached properties that allow designers to specify an external resource file (.xaml) containing styles which can be applied to a control and each of the controls children.

Here is what i did to get my RatingControl to use the implicit style manager. First I added a reference in my page.xaml to the Theming namespace." [More]

http://joel.neubeck.net/2008/11/ratingcontrol-theme/

Infinite hoizontal panning for maps - with source

"The HDView team released a gem of a sample app this week from ICE that amongst other things provide a solution for showing 360 degree panoramas. The solution uses three MSI controls to provide a seamless panning experience.

Now what could be a bigger 360 panorama then the Earth itself?"
[More]

http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/Blog/tabid/73/EntryID/522/Default.aspx

styling a SL Twitter app with Exp Blend 2, to easy!

Just too easy looking!  Take a blah looking application and in a matter of a few minutes, have a friendly looking app without one line of code changed!  Check out this video:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/Celso-Gomes-Styling-a-Silverlight-based-Twitter-application-with-Expression-Blend-2/

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/14/styling-a-silverlight-twitter-application-with-expression-blend-2.aspx

Blend Tips & Tricks

Here is the video listed from Scott's post above:

"See how Expression Blend can be used to design user interfaces for the desktop and the Web using both Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight 2. Learn how to design consistently for both technologies and how the resulting XAML provides elegant workflow between developers and designers." [More]

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC47/

Laurent Bugnion on WPF and SL

"Jon talks to Laurent Bugnion about WPF and Silverlight. Laurent’s an expert on WPF and Silverlight, and is the author of Silverlight 2 Unleashed.

Topics

•Differences between WPF and Silverlight
•Thoughts on Silverlight offline
•Model-View-ViewModel pattern and applications in Blend
•WPF Disciples mailing list
•Why use WPF instead of Winforms
•Non-visual benefits of WPF and Silverlight
•Benefits of the XAML format
•Silverlight’s VisualStateManager compared to WPF triggers
•Laurent’s experiences writing Silverlight 2 Unleashed
" [More]

http://herdingcode.com/?p=91]

Adobe: Do not underestimate Microsoft

"Comments from a meeting last week with journalists at Adobe's (ADBE) headquarters indicate that Adobe's CEO, Shantanu Narayen, thinks Adobe has already won the online video platform battle and that Flash can survive any threat from Microsoft (MSFT). That's a dangerous assumption to make and underestimating Microsoft's ability to challenge any company, in the long run, is never a good idea." [More]

http://seekingalpha.com/article/105867-adobe-do-not-underestimate-microsoft-s-ability-to-compete-with-flash

SL 2 App Dev with LINQ to SQL & WCF

"This is my third article in a series focusing on Silverlight 2.0 (RC 1) development using Visual Studio 2008. In this article, we will create a simple “LINQ to SQL” model, access the model with a WCF Service and consume the same using a Silverlight 2.0 application. Technically, we will have Silverlight 2.0 controls accessing a regular WCF Service and fetch information from the database using the “LINQ to SQL” model." [More]

http://www.aspfree.com/c/a/Windows-Scripting/Silverlight-20-Application-Development-with-LINQ-to-SQL-and-a-WCF-Service/

Fix for simply HTML display in SL

"I updated my HtmlTextBlock sample for RTW last night and got an email from kind reader Ed Silverton this morning pointing out a problem setting FontSize on a standalone instance of the control. (Background reading: HtmlTextBlock Announcement for the Alpha, Improvements, Beta 1 Update, Data Binding Support, Beta 2 Update, RTW Update) Unfortunately, this problem does not demonstrate itself in the sample project, so I missed it. :( Sorry about that! " [More]

http://blogs.msdn.com/delay/archive/2008/11/12/a-fix-for-simple-html-display-in-silverlight-htmltextblock-bug-fix-for-silverlight-2-rtw.aspx

Auto-sizing Canvas for Silverlight and WPF

"Today I work for Microsoft and am partly responsible for Silverlight Charts.  Now that I'm rather comfortable writing layout containers I figured I'd spend a few minutes and bang out a Canvas control that provides all the flexibility that I'd always wanted.  Ladies and gents I present DynamicCanvas. " [More]

http://themechanicalbride.blogspot.com/2008/11/auto-sizing-canvas-for-silverlight-and.html

My new home page

"It's been nearly two weeks since the Silverlight Toolkit's November release. I've been trying to keep up with what's been written about Charting and want to summarize some of the most helpful posts I've seen so far. " [More]

http://blogs.msdn.com/delay/archive/2008/11/10/my-new-home-page-a-collection-of-great-silverlight-charting-resources.aspx

SharePoint Web Part hosting data binding SL app

"In this tutorial I’m going to explain how you can host a Silverlight 2 beta 2 application from within a SharePoint Web Part. The Web Part will pass the URL of the SharePoint site together with the name of the list for which the Silverlight application will show the data. The retrieval of the data will be done by the Silverlight application using the HttpWebRequest technique for calling the SharePoint web services. As the SharePoint web services return a chunk of XML the XML will be handled by using LINQ for XML. The data will be bound to the Silverlight controls." [More]

http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/development/creating-a-sharepoint-web-part-that-hosts-a-data-binding-silverlight-application

MS Labs delivers its first four Live Mesh apps

"One of the tidbits that got lost in the Professional Developer Conference (PDC) shuffle was the quiet delivery of a set of new applications Microsoft has built to showcase Live Mesh. Microsoft is calling this first set of applications — developed and delivered by the company’s Cambridge, Mass.-based Startup Labs unit — the 'MeshPack.' " [More]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1709

MacNewsWorld showing love for SL via Netflix

"While it's certainly not high-definition material, Netflix's streaming video service, now available in beta for Mac, is a decent overall movie-watching experience, according to reviewer John Martellaro. Installing the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in was problem-free, and users with moderate to fast broadband connections should find video streams through nicely." [More]

http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/Smooth-Install-Decent-Picture-Make-For-Slick-Netflix-Streaming-65101.html

SL FAQ from TechDays

"Thanks for everyone who came out to the Toronto and Montreal TechDays. The three Silverlight sessions in both cities are extremely popular with long line-up of people wanting to ask questions about after the presentations. Robert Burke (Silverlight Samurai Skills presenter in Toronto), Laurent Duveau (Silverlight Samurai Skills presenter in Montreal), and I (presented Silverlight Control Framework) gathered some frequently asked questions below and provide our answers to share with you." [More]

http://blogs.msdn.com/canux/archive/2008/11/11/silverlight-faq-from-techdays.aspx

Jade looking at SL and likes what it sees

"In an effort to improve interoperability with Microsoft products, Jade Software is experimenting with Windows Silverlight. It’s also working on its next software release, which will be fully compatible with the .Net platform. " [More]

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/devt/A5ADDA5A7F085EE7CC2574FD0008F2C5

WPF Toolkit and SL compatiblity

"At PDC the WPF Tookit was made available which provides several new controls to WPF to help bring even more compatibility to the WPF and Silverlight story.  The new controls were the DatePicker, Calendar, DataGrid and the VisualStateManager concept to WPF.  Ribbon controls were also provided to the WPF Toolkit, but are not covered here." [More]

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/11/10/sharing-code-and-xaml-between-silverlight-and-wpf.aspx

Windows Embedded next release based on Win 7

"Microsoft has confirmed that the next version of Windows Embedded will be built on Windows 7. Codenamed Quebec, the platform will include Silverlight 2 and Windows Presentation Foundation, and will be compatible with Visual Studio 2010 to support connected devices requiring rich applications and access to web-based services." [More]

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2230144/windows-gets-embedded

SL, It just keeps getting better

"Dave Britton of Vertigo was at Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 and gave a presentation on Silverlight 2.0. Dave highlighted that there is a tight integration between ASP.NET and Silverlight. Silverlight also has rich tooling support with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend." [More]

http://www.juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2008/11/09/silverlight-20-it-just-keeps-getting-better/

Silverlight Game Programming Tutorial - Getting Started

A Silverlight development tutorial that shows you how to create your own 2D web based games. This series attempts to recreate a game originally developed with Flash, and can be used to highlight the differences between the two platforms.

Check it out at http://www.brighthub.com/internet/web-development/articles/14494.aspx

Modifying Animatino Properties

"In my most recent article, I describe how to use code modify an animation’s properties. Earlier this year, I wrote a similar article on how to do accomplish the same task where you write some code to modify an animation’s properties. The reason for two articles is not because I have a lot of free time (Fable II and Gears of War 2 take care of that), but it is because of differences between Silverlight and WPF" [More]

http://blog.kirupa.com/?p=294

Silverlight Glass Button

"Today, I got some time to check his code again and managed to port it to Silverlight. It was very simple. The only difference between the original WPF style and the one that I ported is that I’m using Visual State Manager instead of ControlTemplate.Triggers in this sample. The reason is that Silverlight doesn’t support all kind of WPF triggers (including ControlTemplate.Triggers) except EventTrigger. So, I decided to use VSM in my sample. I hope you find it useful." [More]

http://michaelsync.net/2008/11/08/silverlight-glass-button

Migrate DataSEt to List<Type> for SL2 Grid

"There was very well response to both articles..I got lots of mails from many..But the feedback is how one can do it with DataSet [Traditional Data Container] and pass it over service, without using LINQ or migrating to LINQ.

Well Big thanks to Mr. Mahesh Sabnis who is one of my mentor at consulting department where I am working right now, We did it together and came up with this simple code snippet which is self explanatory and you just need to plug it in your service logic and rest will work fine as it was with LINQ to SQL.
" [More]

http://pendsevikram.blogspot.com/2008/11/migrate-dataset-to-list-for-data.html

Initial Parameters for SL

"When writing Silverlight applications there might one question come up from time to time: Is it possible to "feed" the application with initial parameters and if yes, how can this be done?" [More]

http://www.dotnet-blog.com/index.php/2008/11/07/initial-parameters-for-silverlight/

Modifying SL Animatiosn using code

"This tutorial will show you how to take a XAML animation and modify its properties using C# to create something pretty cool. By the end of this tutorial, you will have created something similar to the following animation:" [More]

http://www.kirupa.com/blend_silverlight/modifying_animation_sl2_pg1.htm

SL and WriteableBitmap

"I’ve just released a library to CodePlex that implements a feature missing from Silverlight: the ability to generate bitmaps from pixels in code at runtime. WPF provides this through its WritableBitmap class, but Silverlight 2 doesn’t have that. My SlDynamicBitmap project offers a solution." [More]

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2008/11/07/silverlight-writeable-bitmap

SL MediaElement Playing a Video in Azure Blob

"There are two things that I want to show in this post:
1. That you can use Silverlight in a Windows Azure Cloud Service
2. That you can stream a movie progressively via http (more about that here) from Windows Azure Blob storage

The code is attached to this blog post.  Note that you will have to add and reference the Common and StorageClient projects that come as samples in the Windows Azure SDK." [More]

http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2008/11/05/silverlight-mediaelement-playing-a-video-stored-in-windows-azure-blob-storage.aspx

Free Teaser chapter for Data Driven Services

"A free teaser chapter is now available for my book Data Driven Services with Silverlight 2. The free chapter, Chapter 8 – Consuming Amazon’s RESTful Services with Silverlight 2, is in the PDF format and includes the rough Table of Contents along with the free chapter. You can download the C# code for this chapter from my site right here (No worries, I will have C# and VB code available for the book when it releases)." [More]

http://johnpapa.net/data-driven-services-with-silverlight-2/free-teaser-chapter-for-data-driven-services-with-silverlight-2/

Clouds, Clouds, Clouds

SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo Keynote:
Cloud Computing Is Essential in Today's Business Landscape

"Building the right infrastructure that can scale up or down at a moment's notice, notes Amazon.com's VP & CTO Dr Werner Vogels, can be a complicated and expensive task. "But it's essential in today's business landscape," adds Vogels, who is the distinguished Keynote Speaker at SYS-CON's upcoming Cloud Computing Expo (November 19-21, 2008), a groundbreaking adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA (19-21 November, 2008). "This applies to an enterprise trying to cut-costs, a young business unexpectedly saturated with customer demand, or a start-up looking to launch," Vogels stresses." [More]

http://silverlight.sys-con.com/node/654775

Cloud Gazing with Silverlight

"In the latest issue of my Data Points column in MSDN Magazine (Nov 2008 issue) I wrote an article titled “Cloud Gazing From Silverlight 2”. It answers some of the most common questions I get when I start talking about Silverlight 2 programs being used for data centric and service driven apps. In the article I address:" [More]

http://johnpapa.net/all/cloud-gazing-with-silverlight/

Notes on PDC: Windows Azure

"After a slightly slow start, with Windows Azure, Microsoft has now placed a strong bet on cloud computing and cloud-based applications. The company now believes that "the systems for cloud computing will be setting the stage for the next 50 years - with new patterns and new models of deployment, and application models for a world of parallel computing."  [More]

http://www.mwdadvisors.com/blog/2008/11/notes-on-pdc-windows-azure.html

Office Live Workspaces & SL

"Office Live Workspace got updated. More languages were added: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Turkish, Portuguese, and Greek. You can change your language with the language switcher at the bottom right of the page if you wish to do so. But that’s not all, they also introduce new features. One gets a particular mention on the Workspace Team Blog and that’s the use of Microsoft Silverlight to add multiple documents/files to your workspace:"

http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2008/11/06/office-live-workspace-utilizes-silverlight-for-multiple-document-uploading.aspx

Web-based Office draws concerns

"When Scott Barker, the director of IT at the UW's Information School, wrote in an e-mail to staff last week that there might be early trials of the Web-based Microsoft Office on campus, his announcement generated concerns."

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/153605.asp

SL 2 - Building Rich Web Apps Today

"A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft released Silverlight 2 as a Release to Web (RTW) product.  For us at Microsoft, this was exciting news because it represented a major milestone in presenting to you as solution developers a platform for building rich, immersive experiences on the web. I'm not going to go through each of the features in Silverlight 2 that you have probably heard already from various sources, but I did want to take some time to talk about a few of the things that you may have missed in all the hype and announcements or not realized was possible with Silverlight in general." [More]

http://blogs.msdn.com/cdndevs/archive/2008/11/05/silverlight-2-and-building-rich-web-applications-today.aspx

Making SL threading powerfully lighter

"Making threading in Silverlight powerfully lighter, Wintellect & Jeffery Richter release new version of their Power Threading Library with SilverLight support" [More]

http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/11/making-threading-in-silverlight.html

SL for Moble - WM, S60 ahoy!

"So far, Microsoft’s Flash replacement called SilverLight was limited to desktops and notebooks running desktop versions of Windows. However, the runtime is now well on its way to conquer the mobile space (where Flash Lite has stuggled) - MSDN’s (SilverLight-powered) channel9 launched a new show covering SilverLight for mobile:" [More]

http://tamss60.tamoggemon.com/2008/11/08/silverlight-for-mobile-wm-s60-ahoy/

SL 2 for Mobile

"In this webcast you will not only learn how to extend your existing Silverlight 2 applications to work on Windows Mobile, but also learn how to build rich mobile Silverlight apps that play media, handle simple gestures, have cool animations, and enable web services." [More]

http://messagebuzz.blogspot.com/2008/11/silverlight-2-for-mobile.html