Rants Tagged with “Silverlight”
To go with our Australian partner in the Silverlight Tour, I am happy to announce that the New Toronto Group is now a partner to teach the Silverlight Tour in Canada. I will kick it off with a Silverlight Tour stop in Toronto on December 17-19th.
We also have new tour stops through July of 2008. Be sure to stop by and see if I am making an appearance near you!
via Tim Heuer's Blog
This is a great write-up of taking a 3D model (in this case a Jeep) and taking images of it at lots of angles and tying that to mouse moves to give it that Faux-3D sheen. Nice explanation if you want to do it yourself. No Real 3D in Silverlight though...just swapping images...but a great technique.
I've been digging into the Entity Framework and Astoria and decided to create a quick little mashup of Silverlight and those two technologies. The result is this little product viewer using the Northwind database:
The goal of the project was to use Silverlight 1.1 to design the UI, Entity Framework to design the DAL and use Astoria for the client-server communication. I am pretty happy with the result. I am using September previews of Entity Framework and Astoria as well as the Alpha of Silverlight 1.1 so the site may have problems from time to time as these are early releases of the products.
Astoria in particular is a very early build (and they've even changed the search syntax already so when the new version is released I'll change this). The September version of Astoria comes with a Silverlight client data layer that just does not work for me currently. But that wasn't a problem as Astoria (for those who don't know) is a REST-based API for access a data model. Astoria supports returning results in XML, JSON and RDP. So all I did was use the JSON format and Silverlight 1.1's built-in JavascriptSerialilzer to convert the results to in-memory objects.
You can download the source here:
http://www.silverlightdata.com/mashup.zip
UPDATE: Doesn't seem to work with Firefox. I believe this is an issue with Astoria (astoria is changing the search syntax to be more compatible with other browsers). Might also be my resizing logic. I'll see if I can get it working with FF later this week.
Silverlight.net has released another of my videos. This time I am discussing what the XAML looks like for Animations. While Blend is a great tool for creating aniamtions, understanding the XAML structure can help you do some very interesting animation feats.
Click here to view this new video. Or go to my Silverlight page to see all the videos, tutorials and examples I have available:
http://wildermuth.com/silverlight
Come see me and Glen Gordon talk at Phipps Plaza in Atlanta about Visual Studio 2008, "Astoria", Entity Framework and Silverlight...and see them working gracefully together!
Click here to register for the event before it fills up.
There are still a few seats left for the
Silverlight Tour stop in Chicago. If you are interested in learning about Silverlight, from
XAML to Server-Controls, you can sign up today. Please visit
Silverlight-tour.com for more information.
While at ReMIX Boston, I promised I'd provide a link to a good blog entry that discusses the Microsoft presentation technologies and really explains well when to use each.
The root of the question is where the lines are blurred between WPF, XBAP, Silverlight and ASP.NET/AJAX. The chart that is shown in this blog entry is really helpful but not perfect. The reality is that ASP.NET + Silverlight + AJAX is really what Silverlight is going to be about more than just Silverlight alone. I'd like to see a fifth box that discusses that too.
In the big picture I think its important to know that getting the .NET Framework installed for WPF and XBAP is going to be onerous for most far reaching projects. If you intend on having users across many operating systems, you should avoid WPF and XBAP. If you need are developing an enterprise applicaiton where you have some control over the desktop (XP SP2 or better and .NET Framework installed0 then WPF or XBAP are great solutions because the richness of the API makes them easier to develop rich applications than ASP.NET + Silverlight + AJAX.
Two more of my videos have been released on Silverlight.net:
Reminder, For all my Silverlight videos, tutorials and samples, view my Silverlight page.
Silverlight.NET has released three more of my videos. This time its all about how to use Silverlight with ASP.NET! Here are the videos:
Let me know what you think!
I've been digging into Moonlight and with a lot of help on the Olive mailing list I finally got the current build of Moonlight built on Ubuntu 7.04. Here it is on Silverlight.NET's Showcase page:
It it in "Alpha" quality right now but they are making great progress. The promised Release + six month delivery schedule feels about right. I could get sound and drawing working, but aniamtions and video weren't working for me. Luckily I have the machine working so I can get a new build when I want to re-try it.
When I am at ReMIX in Boston, I am hoping to catch up with Miguel de Icaza to discuss the direction of Moonlight as it relates to both 1.0 and 1.1 (especially with the discussion of a non-Mono Moonlight looming).
The Linux story here (for me at least) is more about expanding the audience for Silverlight applciations (not really about developing on Linux). But since Silverlight is just text files, you could do development pretty easily on Linux. I'll stick with Blend and Visual Studio for the time being. In addition, I hope to have some interesting conversations with the LAMP side of the crowd to understand where they fit into the Flash/Silverlight/SVG battle.
