Silverlight

Silverlight Cream for September 04, 2008 -- #361

Dave Campbell — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:20:40 GMT

Chris Cavanagh with YouCube, Bart Czernicki with a Multithreading control, Doug Blackmore with a SL2 Combobox, SilverlightShow with a 'glow' effect, SilverlightGirl on making a text appear and disappear, Peter McGrattan with a 3-part series on WCF Polling Duplex Support, IdentityMine with Desklighter, Shawn Wildermuth on the new build of DataServices library, Jonas Follesø with presentation material, and Chris Hay with Manic Miner on Spectrum Emulator.

Yeah... I know I've got a couple database fixups to do tonight... I messed up a couple author names this morning, but they're correct on this post.

From SilverlightCream.com:

WPF 3D web browser: Note this is WPF, but it is definitely interesting... I didn't have a chance to download this before leaving the house, but the screenshot is seriously cool.. what a great demo, and the source is available!
Multithreading Silverlight Controls: Bart demonstrates Multithreading with a Slider control, and the test program definitely points out an advantage... and he provides all the source!
Silverlight 2 ComboBox: Doug Blackmore started a Silverlight blog called WorksightBlog.com ... I've added it to the database, and it's on my daily watch list. His first outing is a SL2 Combobox with the write-up done in tutorial style... the combobox looks and works GREAT... good stuff, Doug!
Creating a Glowing effect in Silverlight 2: The guys at SilverlightShow posted an article about a 'glowing' effect. At first I was expecting something like the 'glow' in the glass button we all fell in love with in SL1.0, but this is more like feathering the edges of a rectangle or ellipse... I can think of good use for this, and besides, I generally get more from looking at the code than anything :)
Fix for: Make text appear and disappear in Silverlight 2: Silverlight Girl had some issues with her code not showing text correctly... she figured out the problem, and blogged the solution... will probably save other developers the same time as well!
Silverlight 2 WCF Polling Duplex Support - Part 1: Architecture: Peter McGrattan Posted a 3-part series on WCF Polling Duplex Support.... he had me a tad confused because all 3 parts were posted the same day :) ... This first one is on the Architecture, then follows Silverlight 2 WCF Polling Duplex Support - Part 2: The Server , and finally Silverlight 2 WCF Polling Duplex Support - Part 3: The Client -- all really good stuff... great pictures, and tons of reference links.
Desklighter: The IdentityMine folks started a new site that I'm also going to be watching called Desklighter ... this is a tool that you point at your xap file and it creates a "Desklight" that you can run without the web... lots of information on their site and Andy Beaulieu has blogged about it as well... go download it, I'll still be here when you get back... you know you want to :)
New Build of Silverlight Library for Data Services!: Shawn Wildermuth blogged about a new build of the Silverlight Library for Data Services that in some part resolves the issues he last reported. He cautions that this isn't a production-ready solution, but if you're playing with the new bits it will put you back in business.
TechEd 2008 – Silverlight 2 for Developers: Jonas Follesø is a Regional Director and very creative guy, and he gave a TechEd 2008 presentation in New Zealand on Silverlight 2. In the process, he fillout a Dive Log sample program that looks awesome... and he's got all the presentation materials on his site!
Manic Miner on Silverlight Spectrum Emulator: Chris Hay is continuing with the Spectrum Emulator... this time he's got Manic Miner running on it... how cool is that??

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for September 02, 2008 -- #360

Dave Campbell — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:23:46 GMT

Koen Zwikstra with Silverlight Spy, John Papa on UserControl from Popup Control, Shawn Wildermuth on his SL2 Data Services Article, Pete Brown with an install experience, Jonas Follesø on Presentation Model and HTML Bridge, and Martin Grayson with Parts 2 and 3 of his Dragging, Docking, Expanding Panels and His Media Player.

From SilverlightCream.com:

New Spy: HTTP Monitor and Install improvements: Koen just keeps making SilverlightSpy better and better ... lots of good improvements in this latest version... awesome, Koen!
Tutorial: Create a Silverlight 2 User Control from a Popup Control: John Papa has an article on Creating a User Control from a Popup Control... essentially, a MessageBox type of popup... very nicely done and entered in the SilverlightShow Write and Win! Contest.. </subtle hint>
Caveats About My Silverlight 2 Data Services Article: Shawn Wildermuth explains why you may be having problems running the code in his MSDN article, and gives links out to other explanatory postings.
Silverlight Install Experience for MSDN East Coast News: Pete Brown is putting a Silverlight site together and has made an awesome install experience for people not having Silverlight onboard... with code, and lots of hints...
Unit Testing, Presentation Model and the HTML Bridge at CodeCamp NZ: Jonas Follesø presented at CodeCamp Auckland, and has all his material on his site plus tons of links to other similar resources
Silverlight 2 Samples: Dragging, docking, expanding panels (Part 2): I had posted part 1 of Martin Grayson's Panels series, but somewhere along the line I forgot about his blog, and was reminded of it by the guys at SilverlightShow. Not only does Martin have Part 2 available, but also has Silverlight 2 Samples: Dragging, docking, expanding panels (Part 3) .
New Silverlight 2 Media Player for my blog!: Martin also has built a Media Player for his blog and has an article for it, and the source too!

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for August 31, 2008 -- #359

Dave Campbell — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:53:37 GMT

Erik Mork interviews Bill Reiss, Terence Tsang with Flash & Sl 3D Text Space, Shawn Wildermuth's ADO.NET & SL2 article in MSDN Magazine, Silverlight SDK reports on tutorials on their site, Christ Hay with a SL2 Spectrum Emulator, Mike Snow on centering your app, and Jesse Liberty on PodCast-a-rama!

Rob Bagby has announced MSDN Events in Colorado, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Las Vegas in September and October 2008 ... I've signed up for the one in Phoenix, so come on down!

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight as a Gaming Platform – Bill Reiss: Wow... a double-- my buddy Erik Mork is interviewing my buddy Bill Reiss... Great choice of interviewees... even if you're not interested in Silverlight Games, give this a listen... and subscribe to Erik's feed, too!
Flash and Silverlight: 3D Text Space: Terence Tsang didn't just say, hey... I can do this like they do in flash... he did them BOTH!... and has source for both... these are very cool... just to play with... and I've got some ideas for a use as well!
My ADO.NET Data Services/Silverlight 2 Article on MSDN Magazine: This is seriously cool... Shawn Wildermuth has an article in MSDN Magazine... then add to it that it's on ADO.NET Services and Silverlight... definitely one to bookmark...
Silverlight tutorials you might not have seen: The Silverlight SDK did some metrics and found some of their Tutorials haven't had much play. I haven't checked to see if I have all these linked, but I aggregate their blog, so I should... take a look at their list, plus they're asking for input.
Silverlight Spectrum Emulator: Chris Hay posted a Silverlight Spectrum Emulator. He says he's going to post the code on CodePlex, so go take a look at what he has... also has some good links on there.
Silverlight Tip of the Day #34 – How to Center your Silverlight Application in your Browser: Mike Snow has been playing with sizing the app with the browser page and all that.. this time he shows us how to center our SL app on the browser page.
Sparkling Client – Monthly Podcast Guest: Erik Mork and Jesse Libert have agreed to do a montly podcast with Jesse ... considering all that is going on with Silverlight ... I think that's a great idea... and Jesse also announced a Podcast with Craig Shoemaker on Pixellated – Podcast Radio Interview and Silverlight

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for August 28, 2008 -- #358

Dave Campbell — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:49:58 GMT

Anna Wrochna on justifying/aligning text, and Ronnie Saurenmann on WCF without a web server.

If you find yourself in Austrailia, take a look at DevSTA Challenge 2008... it hasn't started yet, but it looks cool, and great prizes!

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight and text-align:justify.: Anna takes a pretty good shot at getting text justified on a page... her results are very nice, but wow... what a bunch of work!
Serving Silverlight applications on client PCs without a web server using WCF 3.5: This is a post by Ronnie Saurenmann of the Swiss MSDN Team blog... he's basic it on an embedded machine needing to run without a web server, like for some sort of controller ... I immediately thought of demos or training... definitely worth a good read!

Stay in the 'Light!

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Dave Campbell — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:43:03 GMT

I've resolved an issue that has plagued my home workstation for a while. How long is 'a while'? ... I'm not sure, but I'm thinking since Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

I'm not blaming Silverlight... I think it's a synergy of some sort between what I've been doing on my MasterPage with Silverlight, and something associated with my slightly older Dell.

All I know is after I stopped the Silverlight Logo from continually animating, the problem with my workstation has gone away... It's been over a week since I rebooted, and I only did so this morning to get a LiveMesh update to 'take'.

Check out the article.

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for August 27, 2008 -- #357

Dave Campbell — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:34:21 GMT

Michael Washington with Desktop Instances in SilverlightDesktop, and Mike Snow scaling his entire app to the browser.

Bill Reiss reports that Silverlight Sports Game Contest Registration and Submission now live... and with the dollar value of the prizes, it looks like definitely a worthy goal!

From SilverlightCream.com:

SilverlightDesktop 01.60.00 released. Now features "Desktop Instances": Michael Washington has been busy with his SilverlightDesktop project. This enhancement features Desktop Instances that allow you to enter a name for the instance, Horizontal and Vertical values, and if a module should be AutoLoaded.
Tip of the Day #33: How to Scale your entire App and its Elements to your Browsers Size: In his latest tip-o-day, Mike Snow demonstrates how to scale an entire SL app as the browser is resized... that might create some interesting pages :) ... but it works!

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for August 26, 2008 -- #356

Dave Campbell — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:02:48 GMT

Scott Barnes on Submitting SL Bugs, Shawn Wildermuth on SL Firestarter in NYC, Jason Cooke Templatinging the Calendar, Jonas Follesø on SL2 apps using WCF, and Mike Snow on detecting alt-~~shit~~shift-control-windows and apple keys, delcaring a User Control from a XAML Page, and Creating Smooth Tile Transitions.

Don't forget about the Silverlight Write and Win Contest at SilverlightShow. Ivan reported to me this morning that one of the articles in my SC posts from yesterday was entered in the contest ... go check out the prizes they've got going... no seriously... there.are.great.prizes... :)

Jeff Prosise blogs that all roads lead to Silverlight 2 ... he has updated his very cool magnifying glass app to SL2... go check it out prior to the MSDN article!

Going along with updates, Lester has updated XAMLPadX 4.0... check it out!

Cameron Albert is hard at work on his game, Parenthia, which I suspect is going to be stellar, he has a nice article about Scripting for Games on his site now.

From SilverlightCream.com:

How to Submit a Bug/Feature Request for Silverlight.: Responding to an email about how to get a bug filtered back to the SL Team, Scott Barnes decided to do a quick tutorial on how anyone can accomplish that.
Silverlight 2 Firestarter in the Big Apple!: Shawn Wildermuth announces a Silverlight Firestarter in NYC that he's going to not only be presenting ... he's co-hosting the keynote with Peter Laudati... how cool is that??
Templating the Silverlight Calendar [Jason Cooke]: Kathy Kam turned over her blog to Jason Cooke for a Great tutorial on Templating the Calendar Control... this is some of the good stuff folks!
Configuring Silverlight 2 applications using the WCF configuration file: Jonas Follesø posted this article in response to some other posts about SL2 and WCF. Along the way he gives out some great info and lots of good links.
Tip of the Day #31: How to Detect Alt, Shift, Control, Windows and Apple keys with Left Mouse Down: As usual, Mike Snow seems to be overrunning me :) ... Tip of the Day 31 is how detect all those odd keys that we want to but haven't taken the time to figure out.
Silverlight Tip of the Day #32: How to Declare a Custom User Control from a XAML Page.: Mike's Tip 32 shows how to actually use a User Control you create.
Terrain Tutorial Part 3 - Creating Smooth Tile Transitions using Opacity Masks: Continuing in his Game series, Mike introduces us to Opacity Masks and creating smooth tile transitions... great-looking transitions I might add!

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for August 25, 2008 -- #355

Dave Campbell — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:50:14 GMT

Matt Serbinski on SL and Drupal and RSS, Mark Monster Updating his Tag Cloud, Christian Schormann Cutting Shapes, Jeff Wilcox resizing the plugin to zero, and Page Brooks introducing SilverlightContrib.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight and Drupal: Syndication: Matt Serbinski is going to replicate his Drupal site in Silverlight over a period of blog posts. In this first one, he deals with syndication in Silverlight, but still using Drupal for the data.
The advantage of the TagCloud: Mark Monster revisits his Silverlight Tag Cloud and provides some nice modifications.
Cutting Shapes in Expression Blend: Christian Schormann has a very nice tutorial on Cutting Shapes apart in Expression Blend. Seriously cool information!
Quickly resize the Silverlight plugin to zero pixels in size: Here's a piece of code provided by one of the Test Developers on the HTML DOM bridge, Jeff Wilcox... gotta love THAT sort of sharing :)
Silverlight Contrib: Page Brooks has started a Silverlight Controls project on CodePlex called SilverlightContrib... this looks like a worthy adventure... and could end up being a very nice set of resources... go join!

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for August 23, 2008 -- #354

Dave Campbell — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 23:01:26 GMT

Chris Cavenagh with source for his WPF Photo Print, Rob Houweling on Authentication in SL, Anna Wrochna with a SL 'Tree', Cameron Albert with Farseer Physics Geom Visual Helper Method, Mike Ormond's MultiScaleTileSource Demo code, Dynamically loading ListView Templates again, and DZ and Mandelbrot.

From SilverlightCream.com:

WPF Photo Print - Source code: Not Silverlight, but it's WPF code... so that's close :) ... Chris Cavanagh posted the code to his WPF Photo Print utility... and code is ALWAYS good :)
Authentication in Silverlight using ASP.NET FormsAuthentication: Rob Houweling took a break from working with Jeff Paries' 150 pieces of code that he's writing about for all of us to read, and posted his own article on Authentication in Silverlight. He called it a Tutorial and after looking at it, I agree.. thanks Rob!
Silverlight: time for a little preview: Anna Wrochna posted a short introductory article about a tree control she's been playing with. This is really good stuff... more like what I expect out of Silverlight than duplicating Windows controls. She says she's going to be writing more about it, and I'd like to offer up that the control moves itself around the page as the nodes are opened, because I found it pretty easy to get nodes expanding off the top of my browser window... other than that... I really like the concept.
Silverlight 2 Farseer Physics Geom Visual Helper Method: Ok I've read this post at least twice and I'm afraid it's like talking to my dog: "I ported some ... FarseerPhysics ... UI... debug... vertices... those are the words I understood... :) I'm sure many of you are wanting this, so go get it!
MultiScaleTileSource Demo Source Code: Mike Ormond posted the code to his MultiScaleTileSource Demo... so if you'd been waiting for that, now is the time!
More on Dynamically Loading ListView Templates: Mike also has a follow-on article to his one about dynamically loading listview templates that I blogged about.
Deep Zoom, MultiScaleTileSource and the Mandelbrot Set: And finally, Mike has an article up on DeepZooming the Mandelbrot Set ... seriously fun to play with... and has lots of links out to references... good stuff! Author: Mike Ormond

Stay in the 'Light!

Silverlight Cream for August 21, 2008 -- #353

Dave Campbell — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 06:04:06 GMT

Page Brooks with CoolMenu and Custom Collections for Controls, Bill Reiss on Calling WCF on local server, Mike Snow on Fast Sprite Animation, Tom Fischer on getting a color or brush from a string, Shawn Wildermuth on User Controls Base Classes, Tim Heuer on MS CRM, and Jesse Liberty on Getting Started with SL.

From SilverlightCream.com:

CoolMenu: A Silverlight Menu Control: Page Brooks posted a very nice menu... I'd call it a Toolbar, but in this SL2B2 create-your-own-paradigm world, it is what it is.. and it IS pretty nice looking! -- did I mention source :)
Adding Custom Collections to your Silverlight Controls: Going back one day, Page also has a great example of adding a Custom Collection to SL Controls.
Calling WCF on the server of origin from Silverlight: Bill Reiss discusses calling WCF on the same server as SL and why you may not be getting here from there and what to do to fix that.
Tip of the Day #30: Fast Sprite Animation in Silverlight: Mike Snow is up to 30 tips of the day, and this one is on Sprite Animation. I don't know much about game development, but I keep seeing sprites associated with it... so if that's your thing, here's some more things :)... seriously fun stuff, Mike, thanks!
How to get a Color or a SolidColorBrush from a String (by ColorName) for Binding: This is Tom Fischer's first entry on Silvelright Cream and he has an example of converting string color names to numerical property values.
Base Classes for User Controls: Shawn Wildermuth's students are still playing "Stump the band" with Shawn... this time they gave him a puzzle of sorts surrounding x:Subclass.
Silverlight and MS CRM Services: Tim Heuer reports on Microsoft CRM Services and gives some good links and explanations... definitely worth some time studying!
A Personal Guide to Getting Started with Silverlight: Jesse Liberty took some time to revisit the standard "How do I Learn Silverlight" question and is sharing that info with all of us...

Stay in the 'Light!