January 2008 Entries
I had to take the code out again tonight... and I'm leaving it out for now anyway. Adam Kinney's site and Jesse Liberty's site up at the same time locked up my machine... both trying to get updates from twitter. I tried to log into twitter with my phone and it could not get there, so I knew what was going on. As soon as I could nuke everything running, I fired up VS2008 and rebuilt the site. I'll just have to work on a different way to display that, because I certainly can't depend upon twitter to...
Late Cream today: Two posts by Adam Kinney, a reference to a new SL Site, HelloSecureWorld.com, and a discussion of SLEvents on Upcoming, then part 2 of Scott Guthrie's MIX08 preliminary videos... this one talking just a bit about SL2.0 info From SilverlightCream.com: HelloSecureWorld.com - A new Silverlight-based site I had trouble bringing this site up, but it could be firewall issues. Adam speaks very highly of it in his blog post, so that's good enough for me! SLEvents persisting on Upcoming...
Jesse Liberty's "Silverlight for Total Novices" webcast materials, Shawn Wildermuth on changing Storyboard info at runtime in SL1.1, a SL interview with Shawn, Pete Brown shares the material from his Silverlight For Developers talks, and Brad Abrams posted the video and materials for a presentation he gave on Media/SL. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight For Novices - Web Cast Follow Up Jesse has posted his material for his webcast "Silverlight for Total Novices" the recording will follow, but...
So Twitter pooted last night and I turned the code on my site off overnight so it wouldn't ripple back to me. Now today Twitter is pooting again, and of course I've got the code turned back on because at 5:30 this morning it was alive. My question is... is this normal for Twitter? I've only been using it a few weeks, but yesterday afternoon and today aren't looking great for them, and it seems like it's taking them a while to come up. For anyone trying to look at my site outside an anal-retentive...
I thought I had a problem with my script on my page, but I saw it running on my wife's machine, so it had to be ok. I ate dinner, came back here and yikes... S L O W and no feed, so I started hacking the page ... but I couldn't get it any better. Finally looked at my wife's machine again, and dang... it's not working. Back in here, and try just to go to twitter to look at the SLNews and can't get twitter.com to open. Finally I got it part way and then it put up a page saying they're having technical...
In yesterday's Silverlight Cream, I talked about Jesse Liberty and Adam Kinney's postings. I tried to put Adam's script onto my GeeksWithBlogs page, but that just wasn't working. I even tried to upload the JS to my site and d/l it from there in the script, but it hit a roadblock trying to talk to the HTML tag, so I removed it. Oh.. and that was interesting in itself, because I also dropped a closing > from a br at the end and wow... my entire blog was one-word wide down a LOOOONG page ...
Guess it's late enough that I can't say it's Monday *somewhere*, huh? ... so 'Silverlight Monday' definitely took a hit this week On the plus side, I now only have one University of Phoenix class going, and I got feedback out for both on time over the weekend, and grades out for the one finishing... overlapping by 2 weeks is 2 much! My plan was to start in a multi-week project, and then maybe use that same project after MIX as a 2.0 experience. I have two in mind and after Pete Brown's article about...
Ok so my editor (VSE) is just a little off the latest, but hey, so am I! ... I just checked and I have version 7, they're now selling version 2007 ... so hard telling how far off I am. I know 2 years ago they no longer supported 7. Oh well... it's like an old pair of boots... it just feels right, and I see no reason to upgrade :) Back to the reboot thing. Running VS2005 finally at the office, and merging two huge projects. Now and again I try to rebuild and it poots telling me that it can't replace...
Late Cream for today: Koen Swikstra of FirstFloor submitted a very nice proof of concept of a EMF to XAML tool From SilverlightCream.com: EMF support in Silverlight Koen submitted this demo of a interesting tool to convert Enhanced Metafiles into XAML ... guess I've been around long enough to know what those are :) ... great job, Koen, thanks! Stay in the 'Light! Silverlight News on Twitter | Silverlight Tagged Web Articles | My Articles | My Tutorials | My Tooltips | SilverlightCream...
Pete Brown shows a way to add drop shadows to objects in Expression Design and staying 100% vector, and Jesse Liberty has a great cookbook on how to stream Silverlight From SilverlightCream.com: Simulating Drop Shadows in Silverlight using Expression Design Pete Brown of Irritated Vowel demonstrates usig Expression Design to put drop shadows on objects using 100% vector effects which is interesting because a discussion about that just came up on the forum! -- and Pete, I like the Silverlight animated...
Two submittals today: Tamir Khason puts Silverlight and SVG head-to-head, and Jose Fajardo shows how to create gold sparkly text in Blend From SilverlightCream.com: SVG vs. Silverlight head-to-head fight This is a great page of examples of SVG and Silverlight and what it takes to do the effect, and how they look... very cool, Tamir! Blend Candy: How to create a Gold and Sparkly effect Jose (LiquidBoy) continues to amaze us all with very cool Blend tutorials. Gold text is something the Paint Shop...
Jesse Liberty posted a Key Frame Animation article From SilverlightCream.com: Key Frame Animation Jesse Liberty is trying out blogging at GeeksWithBlogs and continues his investigation of Silverlight Animation from there... great article, Jesse! Stay in the 'Light! Silverlight News on Twitter | Silverlight Tagged Web Articles | My Articles | My Tutorials | My Tooltips | SilverlightCream...
Valentine greetings courtesy of the Silverlight Team, Silverlight Pirates! from Cameron Albert, and Imran Shaik AKA Cass on the forum has a nice SL blog and interesting articles going. From SilverlightCream.com: Share the Love from the Silverlight Team Build and send your Valentine a Silverlight card, provided by the Silverlight Team Silverlight Pirates! Prototype I came across this via a post by Tim Heuer, and it looks like it's been in progress for a while... good reading, I haven't had a chance...
Early Cream today from Emil Stoychev about another video of Jason Beres From SilverlightCream.com: Building Next Generation RIA's with Silverlight At first I thought this was a resubmittal, but it's another video of Jason Beres, this time talking to the Sofia .NET Users Group... thanks for the video and submittal, Emil! Stay in the 'Light! Silverlight News on Twitter | Silverlight Tagged Web Articles | My Articles | My Tutorials | My Tooltips | SilverlightCream...
Tim Sneath discusses the Update capability just released for SL 1.0, Shawn Wildermuth gives us a *very nice* SeeqPod player, the Expression Blog folks talk about Clip Path Editing in Blend2, and 2 articles of note in Jesse Liberty's Did You Know series. From SilverlightCream.com: Making Silverlight Easier for Systems Administrators to Install... Tim Sneath announced this yesterday for those that may have missed it. Not only easier to install, but it's going to be part of Windows Update. Silverlight-Based...
If you don't read Scott's Blog, you're probably getting the info from someone else like me re-blogging it. If you've never seen Scott present, then you *gotta* be in Scottsdale on March 11, because it's pretty much the most fun you'll have in Visual Studio! Always a great presentation and good information straight from The Man... so join us on March 11, for the big spring event: Scott Guthrie in Scottsdale, AZ on March 11, 2008 Stay in the 'Light! Silverlight Tagged Web Articles | Silverlight Articles...
Some early cream today by submittal: Andy Beaulieu sent me his latest Farseer Physics demo... gotta see this! From SilverlightCream.com: Advanced Physics with Silverlight and Farseer People were just talking on the forum the other day about drawing objects in Silverlight. Andy apparently had this in the works, and it's very cool... draw some object, like a ball... when you complete the object, it falls to the ground... now draw a log to fall over it... it falls and interacts with the ball. This continues...
On Monday morning, when I blogged about testing Loaded=, I said I would revisit the post and comment about any improvements in IE6. My GlyphMap utility seems *very* solid now that I've modified the code that injects the JS for the Silverlight articles. I kept clicking refresh, and it never failed. I could not do that prior to the change. Sometimes I couldn't get it to display the Glyph content at all! I didn't comment on this yesterday because there was one hold-out and I wanted to get a look at...
Dan Wahlin has put up his code, ppt, and a 57 minute video about his Desert Code Camp presentation a couple months ago... good stuff! From SilverlightCream.com: New Video: Integrating Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX I was at Dan's Desert Code Camp presentation in September, and it was very good. I can't believe he has produced a 57 minute video showing us how to do all that... wow... like attending the session again... so don't miss this! Stay in the 'Light! Silverlight News on Twitter | Silverlight...
One submittal this morning: A presentation page (in French) done in Silverlight From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Presentation If I ever had any French skills they're severly lacking now, but I can certainly tell Silverlight when I see it :) This page has some expand-out sections and a 'screen' that has the appearance of being rolled up. Everything takes you to non-Silverlight pages (I think), but I like the Silverlight use, and also some of the small touches, like the tassel on the screen swinging...
If you've been following along reading my postings, you'll know that I've been casting aspersions about the canvas Loaded= event at least on IE6 and maybe FireFox. I've got a couple Silverlight applications that just are not solidly functional in IE6 and FIreFox (at least) and the only thing that made sense was that Loaded= didn't always fire. So to finally 'put that to bed', I decided to write a simple little demo to test that, and as long as I was doing so, I included the OnLoad event as well:...
Late Cream for today: Ink Drawing by Julia Lerman, Seema Ramchandani exposes EnableRedrawRegions, and Shawn Wildermuth exposes a Clipping Path Transform problem. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight and Ink: Drawing Another old post, this one from Julia Lerman. I found this while searching for an answer for someone on the forum about drawing complex objects. At first I thought this was simply (yeah right) an Ink drawing app, but there are multiple pages, and it becomes much more and very cool.....
Some early Cream from submittals: Simon of BinaryJam pointed me to a SL Image Viewer Webpart fo Sharepoint that he did last June and Michael Sync has a great-looking Silverlight Listview done using the new ADO.NET Data Service Extensions. From SilverlightCream.com: Sharepoint Silverlight Image Viewer A somewhat older article from Simon at BinaryJam building a Silverlight Viewer as a WebPart for Sharepoint. With code, so with all the SharePoint articles I'm seeing lately, this could be very useful!...
Video Interview with Flash Guru Jesse Warden, Tim Heuer discusses issues surrounding moving files around in build folders, Steven Smith takes aim at Hyperlinks in SL 1.0, Shawn Wildermuth gives a workaround to some problems with the SL Template, Mike Taulty has a good ADO.NET/SL WebCase, and Michael Palermo has 2 WebCasts dealing with debugging SL and ErrorHandling in SL. From SilverlightCream.com: A Flash Guru Talks about Silverlight Jesse Warden, a hard-core flash designer met with the MS folks...
As the only submittal today, Dan Birch of VectorLight earns himself his own post for a demo of VectorLight's SL 1.1 Controls From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Controls Looks like VectorLight has been putting out controls since November, and thisis my first time knowing about them :( ... Dan Birch sent me a very nice demo and then I realized it's from the site that is producing them, and I have to say I'm impressed. They're 1.1, so will be changing in all liklihood, and Dan has the source in...
Silly me... when I posted about issues with Loaded=, I didn't try *everything* on my site under IE7, and, well, I still haven't ... but I DID try the drag on the glass button on my article: Silverlight Buttons and Pushbutton Discussion I suppose you can't fault me for being consistent. Clueless maybe, but inconsistent, no... I had decided when writing the Buttons article, that the mouse up, down, and move code for the glass button would be named "MouseUp", "MouseDown", and "MouseMove". Spin forward...
Free SL 1.0 Training at Lynda.com & view of facilities from Mike Harsh, Jon Galloway describes Inkscape's new XAML export support, Infragistic's Jason Beres video interview, Shawn Wildermuth with a WCF solution to cross-site scripting, and Adam Kinney announces Silverlight News on Twitter. From SilverlightCream.com: Free Silverlight v1.0 Training on Lynda.com This is a bit of old news from Mike Harsh, but if you haven't gone to Lynda.com and gotten the free SL1.0 content, go now! ... so it is...
OK I admit it, I thought it was something I was doing incorrectly... or something I was doing caused by being in and out of various versions of various software or something, but I've got a collection of .chm files that won't open. I found that tapping on the monitor didn't help anymore than yelling did either, except in some cases, yelling made me wipe off the monitor and that got rid of all that dust :) Point being, there's a reason why I can't open them, and it has nothing to do with ME.. woohoo!...
I plan on putting a Silverlight Marquee on my site to announce upcoming meetings, events, etc. I want to read the info from the database and display it appropriately, with a link out to whatever is going on. To get ready to do that, I built a single page that has a marquee on it. After it was done, it turns out it wasn't a big deal. If I didn't have intensions of putting it on my site sometime soon, I may not even have posted it: Silverlight With Java Script [1.0] Tutorial 12 - Silverlight Marquee...
One submittal that's not really Silverlight, but it's WPF, and pretty cool from Rick Barraza at Cynergy Systems From SilverlightCream.com: Connecting to the Wii Control with WPF Rick Barraza of Cynergy Systems submitted this, and as I said, it's not Silverlight, but it's WPF and it's cool if you've got a Wii Stay in the 'Light! Silverlight Tagged Web Articles | Silverlight Articles | Silverlight Tutorials | Silverlight Tooltips | SilverlightCream...
Read all about it on Tim Heuer's blog. Only posting here in case there may be someone that doesn't read Tim's blog, and if you don't, you should! Stay in the 'Light
This is primarily in Europe right now, but I'm sure we're going to see it in the US soon. As always, forewarned is forearmed: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/
Scott Barnes discusses and gives a good reference to Michael Scherotter's webcast of Workflow and Expression Encoder, Brad Abrams reports the Firstarter Video site is fully functional, and LiquidBoy goes way over the top with his iPod-Touch-style color picker. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight: Instant YouTube out of the box Scott Barnes of Mossy Blog discusses the 'youtube-out-of-the-box' button syndrome a bit, then redirects us to a page by Michael Scherotter that has a webcast for Windows...
This webcast from the Public Developer Weblog is this morning at 10AM PST, and living in Arizona, I'm TimeZone challenged, so I just checked and that is a little over 2 hours from now, so we all should be able to make it. If you can't make it, the same link should get you to the downloadable version within 24 hours. See you there.. I'll be the one with the Groucho Glasses, nose, and moustache. Well, that was not fun... apparently it needed something I didn't have installed here, so took about 10...
SL for Designers Webcast, Pete Brown on how SL 2.0 will change how we build Apps, Tim Heuer reports on SL Streaming changes, and Rik Robinson posts a very nice clean "Weather Widget" From SilverlightCream.com: Microsoft Silverlight for Designers From Public Sector Weblog. I can't get to it from inside my client's facility to give more info right now. Why Silverlight 2.0 will Change How We Build Applications On the heels of his blog about moving back to 1.0 from 1.1, Pete Brown blogs about 2.0 silverlight...
Well, I made the first one :) I blogged that I was going to make a concerted effort to blog some new Silverlight of my own every Monday. The idea being work on something during the week, get it together on Sunday and put it on the site. Of course last week didn't work that way, so I did this one this evening: Silverlight With Java Script [1.0] Tutorial 11 - Intuitive Object Dragging This is the part 2 extended from Tutorial 10. This part of the Silverlight Drag covers changing the Canvas.ZIndex,...
Some more SL I've found in my 'Interweb' travels: Koen at FirstFloor discusses Silverlight Spy in 2008, puts his Slideshow into CodePlex, and releases a P2P libarary for SL 1.1!, Jesse Liberty continues his daily "Did You Know" series, Robby Ingebretsen releases KaXAML, including source, Pete Brown discusses his reasons for going back to 1.0, and Tim Heuer reports the Seattle Firestarter videos are online. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Spy in 2008 Koen discusses progress and problems with...
I guess I need to commit to posting non-submitted stuff more regular. I stopped doing that a while back, and some good stuff rolls off the end, such as: Frank LaVigne's Christmas Card tutorials, Resizing SL apps revisited, without JS, Falling Snow in WPF, using SL in a business app, what the FF unresponsive script message means, and Windows Media Player 11 as a UI to emulate. From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 1.0 Tutorial and Lessons Learned from Frank La Vigne This is an aggregation by Pete...
It appears Michael Schwarz might be blogging Silverlight again, so we might be in store for some good in-depth articles like the ones he was doing last year! I'll blog it in a Cream post later, but he brought up the "Rectangles, Path, and Line" comparison again that we'd discussed at length back when Silverlight was still WPF/E. I have an article and a tooltip about this on my site, and even with the latest versions of Silverlight, the issue holds true. The first one came out of the forum discussion...
See all these 2X4's? That is why I posted no Silverlight of my own during the holidays.... none of that framing was there on Dec 23rd, and shortly it will all be painted white and be screened in... 350 square feet of "Arizona Room", and boy am I glad I don't do THAT for a living! After reading Mike Palermo's Post about tripling his blog posting in 2008, and Jesse Liberty's Post about posting a Tip of the Day at least 5 days a week beginning today, I thought I'd take that challenge myself :) With...
I did this from home early this morning (probably at the same time that I messed up Daniel Vaughan's name in my Silverlight Cream post). By the time I got everything fired up here, the blog post I used had rolled off my blog roll, but I found it again here from Tom Mertens. The implication is that you can get all 3 eBooks, but what I actually got was selected chapters of the ASP.NET Ajax book and the Silverlight book, but was able to download the LINQ book complete, and I figure that's great! If...
First submittal of 2008, and therefore first Cream of 2008 is "Legion: Build your own virtual super computer with Silverlight" by Daniel Vaughan it was submitted to me by Sean Blakemore -- sorry for the confusion, I should do this when I'm awake From SilverlightCream.com: Legion: Build your own virtual super computer with Silverlight Daniel Vaughan has a large article at Code Project that is best described by Daniel himself: "Legion is a grid computing platform that uses the Silverlight CLR to execute...