April 2007 Entries
The drive from Phoenix was reasonably uneventful if you don't mind a bunch of construction zones, absolutely wide-open desert, and a huge tourist attraction somebody built in the middle of the road! On the other hand, the scenery was awesome, it was 280 miles, and I had cell service for most of it. The tourist attraction is Hoover Dam... go figure that I didn't put 2 & 2 together and figure I would be driving over the dam to get here... dam! Very cool and I did take a couple pictures (out the...
Can't get to MIX07? Don't miss out on ALL the fun... the MIX07 folks are putting the keynotes, demos, and who knows what all else up on the web for your viewing pleasure: On the other hand, if you're going to MIX... get in touch so we can
I will be arriving in Vegas for the early registration on Sunday afternoon. I look forward to getting together with as many of the Silverlight folks as I can. Grab my email off My Site, or use the Contact form on this page, and let me know your contact info. I look forward to seeing you at MIX...
As an example of the solution to the puzzler from last night, here is an expanded canvas screenshot: As you can easily see, the blue rectangles are single-pixel. These were drawn using a Path object (left), and line segments (right). 'small_mountain_0705' posted an explanation and xaml file to back it up today on the MSDN Silverlight Forum. Awesome, thanks...
For those not able to attend the webcast, the PPT deck of the presentation and the code is available on Public Sector Developer Weblog. Note the code was written using Visual Studio Orcas. If you follow the original registration link I posted yesterday and also on the blog, you can view the recording...
Look at the image below before taking the link: Without looking at the write-up, just off the top of your head what colors are the rectangles in that image, and what are the relative pixel-widths of the lines? Are the two gray rectangles really gray? Are they wider than the black rectangle? Are they the same width as the red rectangle? In a running discussion on the MSDN Silverlight Forum, Michael Schwarz, Luis Abreu, and this author had a discussion about just this circumstance. You may be surprised...
Announced on Public Sector Developer Weblog for April 24th 2:00P-3:30P EST (11:00A-12:30P PST)
Junior Dev has built a User Control to place Silverlight control instantiations on aspx pages. He has used it in a sample page, and completely explains, with code. Good job, my friend
Mike Harsh displayed the animated Silverlight logo on his blog after returning from the Nation Association of Broadcaster's conference. It looked so cool, I just had to hijack it :) I already had the Silverlight logo GIF on my left sidebar, so I put a Silverlight canvas over the top part of the GIF and put the animation there. That way the Trademarked text on the GIF still shows: http://www.wynapse.com...
I came across a couple very nice Silverlight programs on the Microsoft Silverlight forums: First is a very cool interactive app done on a Mac: http://www.mystart.co.jp/ by Cest la vie... this definitely has some things that would be worth looking into. I really like the 'gadget' idea, and the chat box is very nice! The second one is an Online Kaleidoscope by 'indigoplane'. This works great and is a good (to me) example of thinking outside the box. I can think of the nuts and bolts things, but to...
This came up on the msdn forum, and was answered by Microsoft's Mark Rideout: If a font doesn't support a weight or style we currently (for v1) do not generate algorithmic bolded/italic versions of that font. This is why specifying Bold with the default font doesn't do anything. So if you're trying to get FontWeight to work, choose something other than the default font. I must have been very tired when I did some of my xaml because I have at least 3 files with FontWeight in them :) Here is a link...
Buttons... everybody uses them every day, but how many people actually study how they work? We get so used to 'pressing' inanimate places on our screens that we don't really pay attention to everything that is going on. Knowing what goes into fooling everyone into thinking they're "pressing" buttons will go a long way to giving your Silverlight the 'snap' it deserves. Falling into the category of "Everything You always wanted to know about...", I've written what my University of Phoenix students...
The web has certainly been busy this morning with Microsoft's Silverlight announcement yesterday! Tim Sneath has been posting a lot of Vista lately, but says he's going to be doing more Silverlight shortly. He blogged a Top Ten Reasons to use Silverlight post this morning. Michael Schwarz posted a list of folks blogging about Silverlight. And I'm anxious for the Silverlight Community site to come alive on the 30th...
Announced yesterday at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, Microsoft has named the codename project WPF/E as Microsoft Silverlight - a new, cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for building the next generation of Media Experiences and Rich Interactive Applications Read about it on Somasegar's WebLog, or go to the Microsoft Silverlight Virtual Pressroom, or go directly to the Microsoft Silverlight Page. I've rebranded WynApse.com with the Silverlight graphic, and made a first pass...
The triple-threat of folks like Bryant Likes doing server controls to WPF/E or binding WPF/E output to data, the work being done by Chad Campbell (no relation), and the stunning video player UI done by Mike Harsh, blogged about below, led to me being silent for a while.It's not that I thought I had to step up and 'compete', but with more and better WPF/E being shared around, I kept coming up with more and more elaborate ideas that ate up a lot of what I call spare time.I took a walk around the building...
I really didn't expect to be debugging site issues this morning, and funny that all of a sudden this would appear: Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationExce... Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached. The DiscountASP.net support folks were very helpful to explain I apparently was not closing every connection string, and the site was busy past what...
Mike Harsh celebrated a high score in Lumines Live on his 360, and rather than just tell folks about it, he built a WPF/E video player to show the replay. He used Expression Blend and Visual Studio, and the result is pretty darned cool, or as my buddy Brian would say "For Teh Win": ...
I finally got around to updating my WPF/E Menu system to include a link for the article on radio buttons and checkboxes. While I was at it, I added a menu choice for all the 'applications' I've put up, as opposed to instructional-type things. After seeing Mike Harsh's video player, I was insprired to put my menu over an image and play with transparencies when the mouse is rolled off the menu. NOTE: I got a couple JS errors running this from the office until I did a hard refresh, so if that happens...