Silverlight

South Florida Code Camp 2008 - 2/2/2008

Dave Noderer — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:39:41 GMT

FREE - 4th Annual South Florida Code Camp - Register Now - Spaces are going fast!

To attend this free, all day .NET Developer mini-conference register at: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=122048 ! The Code Camp will be held on Saturday 2/2/2008 and include breakfast, lunch, giveaways, valuable raffle items and of course lots of great content!

The sessions are now listed on the agenda page. A big thanks to all the speakers that have stepped forward and volunteered to come speak at their own expense. We have already scheduled 70 of 72 sessions. There will be something for everyone... from the person who is new to .net to advanced architecture and software process sessions. For the second year we will have an all Spanish track. Dedicated tracks include "Into to .NET", "Silverlight" and "Agile / CI". Sessions include Ajax, MVC, Visual Studio 2008, Powershell, Windows Workflow and .NET reflection.

Find more information at http://codecamp08.fladotnet.com . We have many sessions lined up. The track chairs will get them organized and on the website agenda over the next couple of weeks.

Review: "Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed"

Dave Noderer — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:44:59 GMT

Sams - ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33007-0 by Adam Nathan

This is a nice book in a number of ways... fairly short, limited scope, nice color pictures and full of great tips that could save you some time.

Adam covers the basics of Silverlight 1.0 which is pretty straight forward and will give you a good handle on what it does and does not do. Even though Silverlight 2.0+ is of more interest to most of us, this is a great way to start!

A bulk of the book is about basic XAML as implemented in Silverlight 1.0. If you are not familiar with WPF, this is a good tutorial on both drawing and events. If you are familiar with WPF in depth, a review of this material will show you where Silverlight is different.

An example of the tips, there are a lot of them in shaded boxes throughout the booik, are a pair of warnings.on pages 28 and 29 showing some of the quirks of the syntax where in the Silverlight.CreateObject. In particular the isWindowless must be specified true/false as a string "true" where as inplaceInstallPrompt must not be specified as a string.. true to work.

He also spends a lot of space on handling events, bubbling of events and some of the more suble "features". Although it makes perfect sense, the silverlight control must have focus to receive keystrokes. Only the root silverlight control can receive the gotfocus and lostfocus events.

Anyway a very nice book with lots of examples.

Now give me the CLR and some controls in Silverlight 2.0 and I'll be a happy camper!

My Silverlight Presentation in West Palm Beach on 6/26/2007

Dave Noderer — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:46:22 GMT

Not a big crowd but we were able to pack into the conference room at www.beanstalknetworks.com and it made for a very pleasant and interactive session.

Here are many of the links we explored tonight:

www.silverlight.net - Go to "Get Started" to see what to download and install. You will find many of the demos there.

www.visitmix.com - Mixx Conference had many silverlight presentations, demos and hands on labs.

http://dev.live.com - Free media storage up to 4 gb.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2007/06/07/silverlight1-1-asp-net-photoviewer-application.aspx - Chung Websters Silverlight Pictures demo on Brad Abrams blog

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/ - Not Silverlight but ideas of what could be done with UI

www.ineta.org - For user groups worldwide

www.fladotnet.com - South Florida and Tampa user groups

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/timesreader.htm - New York Times Readerhttp://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb497969.aspx - Developers Mapwww.searchdotnet.com - Dan Applemans customized Google search

Infoworld Quote on Silverlight

Dave Noderer — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 23:51:35 GMT

http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/012275.html

Silverlight Basics

Dave Noderer — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 15:31:46 GMT

Visit http://www.silverlight.net for more information, downloads, samples, etc.
Silverlight is a browser plug-in that runs on IE, Firefox and Safari - Windows and Macs
Silverlight is a vector rending engine that supports an upward compatible 2D subset of WPF graphic description language XAML
Silverlight has built in media support for wmv, wma, mp3, jpeg and png files on both windows and MAC with a few lines of code and WITHOUT media player
The 1.0 Version of Silverlight supports javascript client side scripting in a download a little over 1 mega byte.
Version 1.1 of Silverlight will contain a subset of the CLR allowing client programming with any .net language (yes, Mac too)
From a security standpoint, Silverlight runs in the context of the browser and does not have full access to the client machine.
There will be a DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) add on for Silverlight allowing creating of the client side dynamic language of your choice.
WPF and Silverlight allows even a video to be used as a paint brush texture so you can "paint" items with video.
Using VB.NET or C# instead of JavaScript on the client can be up to 1000 times faster.
Silverlight allows you to progressively play media content from any server or you can point to a streaming server.
Silverlight can work from any server, windows or linux, IIS or Apache.
Silverlight allows you to blend html, ajax and vector graphics.
Silverlight supports hi-def (720p) full screen video.
Version 1.1 of Silverlight will support JSON allowing automatic marshalling of .NET datatypes to/from javascript.