Pure Blue » Silverlight

Silverlight Beta 2 available

Matthew — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:27:26 +0000

Silverlight Beta 2 was made available late last week which means that anyone who has written samples or projects with Beta 1 has a bit of work to do. Upgrading my Silverlight Surface sample was pain-free, but that was because the code was fairly simple.

One of the changes made to Beta 2 was the further separation of the Silverlight assemblies. The System.Net assembly now contains the WebClient class (previously in System.Windows) and due to a few other changes, it is often the case that a reference to System.Windows.Controls.Extended is no longer required. This reduces the size of your .xap file quite considerably, and so traffic and download times. The Silverlight Surface .xap went from 199Kb down to 70Kb!

TheADOGuy has a blog post which gives a pretty comprehensive list of what to look for when migrating a project.

Extended Silverlight ‘Surface’ sample

Matthew — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:18:26 +0000

Most people will be aware of Microsoft Surface, the multi-touch, table top computer. As a learning aid for Silverlight, I was looking for a great sample project to look at. This is when I came across the Silverlight Surface sample available from Microsoft (take a look here).

So, my aim was to learn from the code and improve on it where I could.

With a strict time limit of one (very wet!) weekend, I extended it by:

Adding support for Video items,
List of Photo’s and Videos to show are retrieved by call to server, leveraging LINQ-to-SQL,
Items can have captions,
Improved code structure.

Click on the image above, or click hereto go to the online version. I will be making the code available too … it’s a great way to learn. I’ve been involved with more ASP.NET applications in recent years than Windows Forms.

What struck me most was how much I really missed the rich, state-ful experience that Windows Forms provides. Now that the same experience is available through a browser using Silverlight, is simply fantastic.

UPDATE: With the recent release of Silverlight Beta 2, this sample has now been updated. If you have problems viewing it, just make sure that you have the latest version installed on your machine.

UPDATE: Thanks to all those that requested the source code for this. I’m pleased to say that it is now (finally) available for download from www.pureblue.co.nz.

UPDATE: With the final release of Silverlight 2.0, the code and demo site has now been updated.

Where’s Blend Express?

Matthew — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:16:12 +0000

Microsoft is ramping up it’s push for Silverlight all the time. The new Microsoft Download Beta site, written with Silverlight, is an attempt to show off what it can do (it’s also a good way to get Silverlight installed on users machines!). Microsoft has the push at the moment of getting designers and developers to collaborate and have two great tools to do that, with Expression Blend (& Blend 2.5) for designers and VS2008 for developers. Realistically though, the designer and the developer are the same person in the majority of cases, at least for the initial phases of a project.

It’s a thought I’ve had for a while now. In the same way that the free Express versions of Visual Studio target the hobbyist developer, the same needs to be done with Blend. If you get the hobbyists onto Silverlight, you’ll start to see it everywhere! Hence, Blend Express!

To get Silverlight more competitive with Flash it’s going to take developer (not designer) acceptance. Silverlight is all about the UI, but it’s just hard work to do that at the moment!

Great Silverlight 2 demos

Matthew — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:39:52 +0000

I’ve not made the switch to developing in Silverlight yet, but look for examples with interest:

Hard Rock cafe example that was shown at MIX08. – http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

“Woodgrove Online Bank” (some nice UI effects in this one)- http://www.cookingwithxaml.com/meals/financials/default.html