Installing Silverlight?
This guide helps you to plan and carry out a corporate deployment of Silverlight. The guide describes the system requirements and deployment methods, as well as the techniques to maintain and support Silverlight after deployment.
Silverlight Enterprise Deployment Guide
Author : David Tesar
Direct download link.
Interesting (and not Silverlight-related) heatmap showing which parts someone may glance at on your web site.
Facebook recently announced $10M in grants for startups dedicated to building Facebook apps... MS should publicize their partner marketing like this. Why not give registered developers an opportunity to apply for an MSDN subscription grant? How about giving away Orcas & the Expression suite of tools along with $25k in grant funding and some small biz loans for hardware and software to qualified startups?
I guess there's always Microsoft Financing... $781.00/mo will get you $24,000 in hardware and software currently at a competitive rate of 4.6% interest. Plus you can do the $50/month deal with SmartPay.
I wonder if they do sub-prime?
Microsoft in recent weeks approached Facebook with proposals to invest in the startup that could value the fast-growing site at $10 billion or higher, said people familiar with the matter. If those talks bear fruit, Microsoft could purchase a stake of up to 5% in the closely held startup, at a cost in the range of $300 million to $500 million, the people said.
Source: Microsoft Fires Volley At Google in Ad Battle - WSJ.com
I'm on a Facebook thread here... Silverlight posts will return after this commercial for iLike, an app that has more users than the 17 populations of the smallest countries in the world combined.
iLike now has 10,000,000 registered users! :-)
The big news today: iLike now has over 10,000,000 registered users. Thank you everybody to your feedback, support, and help in reaching this incredible milestone. We're just a few weeks shy of our 10-month birthday, it's pretty incredible to be at this size already, thank you!
Source: iLike Team Blog
More info on the Facebook fund, and here's a link to a Web 2.0 Biz Plan Generator.
How does an individual or company apply?
Initially, you can mail your business plan to platform@facebook.com. In coming weeks, we will set up an online submission process. Submissions are being accepted immediately.
What will be the criteria for selection?
We want to see the most innovative and ambitious proposals for building a business on Facebook Platform.How long will it take to hear back from the fund?
The goal is to get a response to the applicant within 30 days of receipt.
My Facebook Biz Plan Idea? A Facebook app that reviews biz plan terminology and selects the best biz plans based on a set of buzzwords in the media. Written with Silverlight.
"My business plan will allow the Halo 3 beta community to watch jerry falwell and melinda doolittle as they discuss kim kardashian and her preakness towards shrek the third. :) "
Speaking of which, Silverlight doesn't seem to solve the issue that Flash has around optimizing content for Google and other search engines, though you could write keywords to an html wrapper outside of a Silverlight app with a bit of work.
One disadvantage I see for adoption of Silverlight is the jumble of javascript, xaml, manifest, etc. dependent files that need to be deployed with an application. FLA or SWF seem to take the advantage over ZIP here.
John Udell has more comments and comparisons with various media formats.
In terms of viewing convenience, the Silverlight example exhibits a nice property that I wasn’t expecting. When you resize the window containing the player, the player scales to fit. I’m pretty sure the embeddable Quicktime and Windows Media players can’t do that. Flash-based media players are more customizable, and can respond to container resize events, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the technique applied to a screencast. It’s a nice idea. A screencast at 1:1 resolution is guaranteed to be legible, but will also consume a lot of screen real estate. So it’s tempting to shrink its width and height in production. But by how much? Any fixed resolution will work well for some people and not others. Resizable screencasts would be great for accessibility.
Hurry up and get to work opening up the $10M in grant opportunities that are available.
Steve Trefethen has created a starter kit for developing Facebook applications using Facebook.NET per a suggestion I had for him some time back. The Facebook.NET release includes a couple of sample hello-world style app, but this starter kit might help if you want to start with an empty application.
Source: Nikhil Kothari's Weblog : Starter Kit for Facebook.NET
Silverlight and Expression Resources
Here's a veritable cornucopia of resources online related to Silverlight and Expression. Thanks to the India DPE team for pulling this list together.
I'd add one late-breaking item: The Expression Blend 2 September Preview. Cool stuff there!
Webcasts
- https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/Register.aspx?culture=en-IN&EventID=1032339986&CountryCode=IN&IsRedirect=false
- https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/Register.aspx?culture=en-IN&EventID=1032339984&CountryCode=IN&IsRedirect=false
- https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/Register.aspx?culture=en-IN&EventID=1032339982&CountryCode=IN&IsRedirect=false
Websites
- Silverlight on Microsoft.com: www.microsoft.com/silverlight
- Silverlight Community Site: www.silverlight.net
- Silverlight MSDN Developer Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/silverlight
- Microsoft Expression: http://www.microsoft.com/expression
Silverlight Tutorials
- http://silverlightrocks.com/community/blogs/silverlight_games_101/default.aspx
- http://www.nibblestutorials.net
- http://adoguy.com/silverlight/
- http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz/archive/2007/06/06/silverlight-tutorials.aspx
- http://www.wynapse.com/Silverlight_Tutorials.aspx
- http://aspalliance.com/articles/LearnSilverlight.aspx
Silverlight and Blend Videos
- http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideos.aspx
- http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=38&TagID=209
- http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Expression
- http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Silverlight
Blogs
- Silverlight.net Aggregated Blog: http://silverlight.net/blogs/microsoft/rss.aspx
- Silverlight News: http://silverlight.net/blogs/microsoft/rss.aspx
- Scott Guthrie – http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu
- Mike Harsh – http://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh
- Tim Sneath – http://blogs.msdn.com/tims
- Nick Kramer – http://blogs.msdn.com/nickkramer
- Ashish Shetty – http://nerddawg.blogspot.com
- Vivek Dalvi – http://vivekdalvi.wordpress.com
- Joe Stegman – http://blogs.msdn.com/jstegman
- Janakiram MSV – http://www.janakiramm.net/blog
- Pandurang Nayak – http://www.thinkingMS.com/pandurang
Newsgroups and Forums
- Silverlight.net Forums
www.silverlight.net/forums- Silverlight MSDN Forums
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=318&SiteID=1- Learn Expression Forums
http://forums.learnexpression.com/- Expression Newsgroup http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.expression.discussion&cat=&lang=en&cr=US
- Expression Blend Newsgroup http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.expression.interactivedesigner&cat=en_US_5247A136-A420-80AA-EB1D-D7109FC029B4&lang=en&cr=US
- Expression Design Newsgroup http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.expression.graphicdesigner&cat=&lang=en&cr=US
- Expression Media Newsgroup http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.expression.media&cat=&lang=en&cr=US
- Expression Encoder Newsgroup http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.expression.mediaencoder&cat=&lang=en&cr=US
- Expression Web Newsgroup http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.expression.webdesigner&cat=&lang=en&cr=US
Posted by bradbecker at September 18, 2007 09:44 AM
Here are some of the courses I have taught and the presentation materials that go with them. If you are interested in training, please visit Wildermuth Consulting Services' website.
- Windows Presentation Framework: The Next GDI? (full day)
- A Day of ADO.NET (full day)
- ADO.NET 2.0: Revolution or Evolution (two hour)
- SQL Server 2005: The XML DataType (two hour)
- SQL Server 2005: Introducing the CLR (two hour)
- Introducing Avalon (two hour)
- Data Access with the Compact Framework (two hour)
- SQL Server 2005: A Developer's Introduction (two hour)
- Why ADO.NET (two hour)
- ADO.NET in Action (two hour)
- DataSets Explained (two hour)
- Windows Forms Data Binding (two hour)
- ADO.NET Tips and Tricks (two hour)
- ADO.NET Best Practices (two hour)
10 Things You Should Know About Microsoft's Silverlight
Software developers are busy kicking the tires on Silverlight, Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash. This summary of not-necessarily-technical information will help IT managers identify what's important about the new technology.
10 Things You Should Know About Microsoft's Silverlight - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership
Some upcoming Silverlight events...
In that short time, I've booked talks at
AJAXWorld (September 23-26) in California)
Code Camp: Silverlight Surfer - Waltham, MA (September 29)
Redmond, WA (October)
Huntsville Alabama (November 19)
TechEd Barcelona (November 5-9)
Orlando, Fla (Silverlight Saturday December 15)
Software Assoc. of New Hampshire (December 6)
Wow! Is Silverlight Hot!- All I Did Was Offer... @ .NET DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL
Looks like Justin may have found what I have been looking for - reusable, data bound (sort of) Silverlight controls.
What I don't get is - why XAML? Why can't we use something other than a string blob to represent a control?
How about embedding data-bound Jelly graphs in PowerPoint or maybe Excel?
Jelly graphs are bouncing graphs that could add some zing to a presentation.
Now if only someone had a plugin for PowerPoint...
Rob has found the five products that may change the future of Microsoft. Seadragon is one of the more impressive technologies, though it has been around since before 2002, when MS acquired Seadragon.
http://www.mygeeknewz.com/node/820/play
Seadragon's (originally Sand Codex) founder, and now Photosynth Architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas did a presentation January 6, 2005 on the printing press, Gutenberg, and Movable Type. (not the blog software) Who knew that fonts were so technical?
In terms of the World Wide Partner Conference, I learned an a lot about how Microsoft works. I also discovered a huge range of opportunities that are out there for exploration. I think it was hard to tell which new technology stole the show. The candidates are:
- Microsoft Surface - http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ - This product just blows me away in terms of what it does and how it works.
- Microsoft Silverlight - http://silverlight.net/ - Silverlight just gets better and better. Even in it's infancy, Silverlight is an amazing revolution in web development. Brian Goldfarb's demo during Steve Ballmer's keynote was one of the highlights of the show.
- Photosynth - http://labs.live.com/photosynth/ - Although still mostly a Microsoft Research project, photosynth plus Silverlight is going to create a web 3.0 wave for retail.
- Seadragon - http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx - Wow. From a sheer "cool" factor, Seadragon wins hands down.
Combining these technologies makes me think that in the next 3 to 5 years, almost everything we know about UI and man-machine interface is going to change.
Source: Home - Rob's Blog
Sort of like Reflector, but for XAML.
Download Silverlight Spy
Silverlight Spy is a small WinForm application capable of inspecting Silverlight 1.0 applications.
Hello Silverlight
Event ID: 1032350970
Language(s):
English.Duration:
60 MinutesStart Date:
Monday, September 17, 2007 3:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Event Overview
Drink down a tall glass of genius with Alan, software dev engineer and Brian, group manager in developer marketing, as they discuss one of Microsofts newest innovative products. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NETbased media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Alan, a recent grad from Waterloo, has been working on the hard-core back-end for the past year and Brian has been bringing Silverlight to reality and out in to the world. So pick their enormous brains, and get all interactive with us. Download Live Meeting then find a comfortable chair and maybe grab a Fresca, sit back, relax and find out what its like to work on something as innovative as Silverlight. See you then. Tell all your friends too, dont horde the genius.
Source: Hello Silverlight
How do you embed multiple Silverlight objects with a .NET control?
Perfect for reusability and maintainability.
We have created a SilverlightPanel in .NET that does this for you. Our panel inherits the System.Web.UI.WebControls.Panel, overrides the OnLoad and Render methods and uses the following properties:
Source: web-snippets: Embedding Silverlight using a .NET control
Some comments from a Flash developer.
Fast forward to a couple of hours later, and I corner Jon Harris. Who clearly is a man who likes a challenge. He must do, otherwise he wouldn’t have come to Flash on the Beach last year surrounded by 500 Flashers all wondering what the hell he was doing there.
And he seemed friendly so I asked him the question : why should we start to use Silverlight? The answer that I got was : Video.
MS are pushing this technology heavily on the video side. And Jon told me that it was much cheaper to host streaming video on a Microsoft server than on a Flash Media Server (FMS). Apparently around $2000 compared to FMS which will cost you $4500. Now come on Adobe, that’s really a bit silly huh? No wonder that Microsoft see this as a way in. And I also hear that Microsoft are even offering free hosting to some clients (not sure about the details though). And I suspect that if you’re the BBC or other hugely massive organisation, Adobe may be interested in giving you some sort of discount.
Source: Seb Lee-Delisle » Blog Archive » Flash vs Silverlight
Script# fully supports programming Silverlight 1.0. You can start writing your RIA and associated components and controls in C# rather than in JavaScript... today! This series of posts will build a photo carousel one step at a time to illustrate this approach. Part 1 builds the very basics of this scenario, and is primarily focused on introducing Script# and Silverlight working together.
Source: Nikhil Kothari's Weblog : Programming Silverlight 1.0 with C# - Photo Carousel (Part 1)
Scott Barnes has his son hooked on MLB's Silverlight site.
Oh boy, another Silverlight centric Evangelist to unleash onto the world!
Source: MS MossyBlog
Ted disagrees with Microsoft's Streaming Service advertising.
Personally I think it is wrong to call this streaming. Even worse is that at IBC Microsoft is touting their low cost for "Streaming" solutions. Given this is their definition of "Streaming", then streaming content for Flash Player has always been free by comparison.
Source: Ted On Flex
Ted's site links to the Flex Directory, a listing of consulting firms that provide development services for Adobe Flex.
Microsoft had better start cold-calling these folks now!
I wonder how MS is doing filling the 30 positions that were open in April on the Silverlight team.
Compare that to the 9 positions available in April of 2006 on the Adobe Flex team.
Of course, Flex is Open Source, which probably means they have way more developers working on Flex apps by now.
How many? How about a totally unscientific way of tracking popularity?
1.4M results for "Adobe Flex" from Google.
1.5M results for "Microsoft Silverlight" from Microsoft.
761K results for "Adobe Flex" job. That could be jobs that have flex time and need Adobe skills tho.
420K results for "Microsoft Silverlight" job.
Chad Udell gave his reasons back in April Why Microsoft Silverlight Will Fail.
Hey, it's not MS Bob, alright? Something tells me there's room for two Flash-type plugins, just like there's room for 2 major browsers.
Someone from the Silverlight team must have read Chad's post, as his reasons for failure are getting stale with each release.
Can't you use Expression Blend on a Mac? Just install Parallels & Windows. :)
No Linux Plugin? Moonlight.
Market Penetration? British Museum, CBS, Major League Baseball, Emmy's, MSN, at least 2 case studies... yeah, a ways to go yet.... but can you spell W-I-N-D-O-W-S U-P-D-A-T-E? The Real Silverlight (v1.1) isn't even in release mode yet. And wait for SP2.
Mobile Content? Why not? Silverlight Mobile for Windows?
Maturity? Windows Media (the basis for Silverlight's audio & video functionality) has been around for 13 years.
Developer Community? MS probably has one of the largest communities around. Of course I'm biased because I have never programmed in ActionScript and Visual Studio is something I open almost every day.
Pay-for-situation? What about Flash Media Server? How much is that again?
CS3? Well... Paint.NET isn't quite the competition for Photoshop... and Publisher won't get rid of Illustrator's market dominance, but that's what Adobe's job is supposed to be.
Ted may disagree with the advertising of Silverlight Streaming, and Chad may think MS will fail with Silverlight, but I doubt that will stop Microsoft from directing their billions and evangelist minions toward eventual market dominance. Adobe's Market Cap is $26 Billion. MSFT's is a mere $273 Billion. Kachomp.
MS just needs to buy Apple, or Adobe, or maybe hire Steve Jobs... or Bruce Chizen of Adobe, and somehow convince a legion of Adobe/Macromedia/Mac graphics geeks that they should come to the dark side.
I'm still trying to figure out Silverlight's positioning in the grand scheme of things though. A Windows Developer geek designing graphics and animations? A Mac design geek using Visual Studio? I'm still trying to figure out how the two can work together on the same platform without bumping into each other...
Is that the Silverlight Architecture diagram behind Darth? Nope, must be slide 2.
Kind of reminds me of Presentation Zen's comparison of Bill Gates & Steve Jobs presentation styles.
Building Silverlight Applications with .NET (Part 1 and 2)
This two part session drilled into how to build Silverlight 1.1 applications using .NET. I really like the slide + sample approach of this talk (I first gave it at MIX:Hungary in June), and think it provides a really good way to learn the programming concepts of Silverlight 1.1 using .NET.
- Click here to download the slides from the talk.
- Click here to download the samples from the talk.
Note: All samples are built using the current Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and VS 2008 Beta2 with the Silverlight Tools Alpha Installed.
Building ASP.NET Applications using VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 (Part 1 and 2)
This two part session was primarily a demo driven talk that shows off many of the new improvements for ASP.NET with .NET 3.5 and VS 2008.
- Click here to download the slides from the talk.
- Click here to download the samples from the talk (these require VS 2008 Beta2).
CBS Studios builds a Silverlight-enabled web site for the Emmy's.
View-Source to see the Javascript components used.
Microsoft Silverlight vs Adobe Flex
By Tim
I at Mix07 in London. Having looked in some detail as Adobe Flex and AIR in recent weeks, it is interesting to compare and contrast. I am looking primarily at the developer aspect, rather than video or multimedia.
Silverlight is not a direct competitor to Adobe AIR, in that it does not run outside the browser (though I guess you could do something funky with an embedded browser control). It is a closer competitor to Flex, though there is no exact equivalent to Adobe LiveCycle, which is not needed for Silverlight. However, the two technologies do have a number of parallel features, including the following:
- Cross-platform runtime - Windows, Mac and Linux (the last a recent Microsoft announcement)
- XML language to define the GUI
- Embedded video capability
- Timeline for animations etc.
- Strongly-typed, object-oriented language with just-in-time compilation
- Easy access to XML web services
- Dedicated design tools (Expression Blend for Silverlight, Flash IDE for Flex and AIR)
- Dedicated developer tools (Visual Studio for Silverlight, FlexBuilder for Flex and AIR
So what are the differentiating factors? There are some obvious differences. For example, Flash 9.0, and therefore Flex, runs on Windows 98; Silverlight 1.1 will not. On the Silverlight side, there is the advantage of language choices: Silverlight allows Visual Basic, C#, Python or Ruby. Flex has only Actionscript 3.0.
Source: Tim Anderson’s ITWriting - Tech writing blog » Microsoft Silverlight vs Adobe Flex
Here are all the Silverlight resources that I know about, in a nice somewhat organized collection for easy review. My intention is for this to be something of a Silverlight launch pad. Feel free to share these Silverlight links, and please mention any others you know of in the comments section.
Chris Craft's Blog - Silverlight Links - The Silverlight Launch Pad is Ready for Launch
I'm presenting Microsoft Silverlight and some of the associated technologies to our interface design and usability studio company, schark !
The presentation I did seemed to go over pretty well with the previous developer crowd at my company, though I had way too many demos to show I was glad to find the Halo 3 one at the last minute.
Here's a link to one application for Silverlight, a Vista Sidebar Gadget creation.
Have you ever said to yourself “Hmmmm… I have some ideas for Sidebar gadgets… I should really learn how to create one” Well, the good news is, it’s rather easy to create sidebar gadgets! In fact, it’s easy to create Sidebar gadgets that use Silverlight content. In this post, I’ll show you how to use Silverlight to create an inkable surface on a sidebar gadget
Source: Gavin Gear's Tech Blog
Silverlight's big brother, WPF, is at it again, this time with a replacement UI for Powershell.
PoshConsole is a more modern PowerShell Console. We aim to have a complete open source implementation of the PSHostUserInterface and PSRawHostUserInterface written in WPF and including a custom ConsoleTextBox control which could be reused for other purposes.
Of course, our PowerShell Console will also include lots of powerful features like enhanced tab-completion and keyboard navigation,
PoshConsole will also take advantage of WPF features to make it the prettiest console out there! It is already the only PowerShell Console with a Quake-like mode where the main window snaps to the top of the screen and slides down when a hotkey is pressed, and hides when it loses focus. It has separate options for setting the window's opacity, always on top, and show in taskbar ... and has fully configurable colors.
Source: PoshConsole - Home
If I had a tablet PC this would rock.
Actually it is still amazing.
Here's a link to the blog posting
http://journals.tuxreports.com/lch/archives/004425.html
Here's a link to INK SEARCH!
So if handwriting recognition can be done on the server, how does voice recognition sound? Perhaps Silverlight can enable something like this?
In the declarations the storyboards are wrapped from a simple Animation object. Then the animatables are composed into a ParallelAnimation and a ConditionalAnimation. This are also wraper in a SequenceAnimation. When the begin method of the SequenceAnimation will be called the aniamtables object will run sequentially, parallel or conditional composing a full animation. The mean of the composite animation are:
- Parallel: all the animatables run parallel starting at the same time. A "completed" event will be fired when the last animatable ends.
- Sequence: the animatables run one by one. The second run when the first stop. A "completed" event will be fired when the last animatable ends.
- Conditional: when the animation begin a DecisionRequest event fire and the event handler must set the index of the animatables to start into his array.
The powerful aspect of this library is the classes architecture. All the classes extendes Elite.Animatable and all te classes accept instances of Elite.Animatable as input. So you can compose multiple Animatables one inside the other. Sequence into Parallel, Parallel into Conditional, etc... in this way you may obtain easily every animation behavior.
Source: Silverlight Animation Library -
With some help from Harris Chan and Steve Marx I got MySilverlightTV updated to the latest and greatest bits. It now uses the Silverlight 1.0 RC, .NET Framework 3.5 Beta2, VS 2008 Beta2, ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and ASP.NET Futures (July 2007)
Source: Brad Abrams : MySilverlightTV on .NET Framework 3.5 Beta2
A series of Nuggets (short videos) about features of Silverlight are available at MSDN
In this nugget we show you how to make a Silverlight application break outside the 'chrome' of the browser and take up the complete screen. This is very useful for applications which require more desktop real estate such as video players.
