Rants Tagged with “Silverlight”
One week left before the Silverilght Tour starts teaching Silverlight 3! If you want to be ready for the next version of Silverlight, this is the place to be. On April 6-8th in Chicago, IL our three-day Silverlight workshop is going to teach the latest features of Silverlight as well as the complete Silverlight 2 stack.
The new features we are covering include:
- Out of the Browser Support
- Pixel Shaders
- Hardware Graphic Accelleration
- Behaviors
- Navigation Framework
- Blend 3
- Binding Improvements
- Secure Web Services
- Binary XML Transport
- RIA Services Client Controls
- Preview of RIA Services
To sign up for the class or hold a seat, visit the registration site:
https://agilitrain.com/workshop/info/Silverlight_Tour_Workshop
You only have one week left to register for our innaugural Advanced Silverlight Workshop. On March 30-31st, we will be holding the class in Atlanta, GA. This new class covers the material that you need to build large, robust applications using Silverlight 2 or 3. The workshop includes coverage of:
- Custom Control and Custom Layout Control Development.
- Testing Your Silverlight Applications.
- Securing Web Services.
- Sharing Entities Between Client and Server.
- Implementing Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) in Silverlight
- Using Inversion of Control Containers with Silverlight
- Composing Large Applications using Prism
If you are headed into a Silverlight project and want to be prepared to successfully architect and design your solution, this is the class for you. For more information visit:
https://agilitrain.com/workshop/info/Advanced_Silverlight
A video of my mini-session at MIX09 is now available. If you're interested in doing Silverlight development in Eclipse (or on the Mac), take a look and let me know what you think:
Here at MIX09, the world got its first view of what Microsoft calls RIA Services. RIA Services is an n-tier solution that supports a variety of scenarios, but in my opinion may be especially important to Silverlight applications.
I've had the priviledge to watch RIA Services during its development over the last few months. Out of this effort comes some of the newest Silverlight Toolkit controls (including ChildWindow, Navigation controls, DataPager, DataForm) as well as the server pieces.
The general idea is that RIA Services will layer over the data access layer to provide additional services including validation as shown in this picture:
Brad Abrams has a great post describing the layer if you haven't taken a look at it yet:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/19/what-is-net-ria-services.aspx
I am not sure Brad mentions this, but it is very early in the development (e.g. its not a Silverlight 3 feature) and they'd love your feedback.
As some others (Barry Gervin in particular), I have had some concerns that only now I could talk about (though I've shared them with the team for a while now). My two biggest concerns:
- The feature uses quite a bit of Visual Studio magic to build the client-side part of the code as the server-side is changed. This is concerning because is assumes that most applicaitons are all in a single solution file and tightly couples projects together which doesn't work in a number of important scenarios.
- Concerned about inventing a new layer instead of using something established (like ADO.NET Data Services).
I had a great conversation with Brad Abrams at MIX09 today and he gave me the confidence to tell you that he's assured me that these two issues will be address. In particular he assured me that:
- While the Visual Studio magic is likely to remain, we will be able to decouple projects and "Add Service Reference" to a non-solution RIA Service which resolves my concern. I don't mind that the magic is default behavior, as long as decoupling works.
- They are aligning with ADO.NET Data Services to make RIA Services become a thin layer over ADO.NET Data Services to provide the type of metadata that is required to do the RIA Services work to the client.
While neither of these are in the current bits, I've been promised they'll arrive by release. I trust Brad's word on these. I hope when my life calms down a little (updating a lot of classes, writing articles and too much travel) that I can do a proper walkthrough of RIA Services for my readers.
What do you think?
The Silverlight Tour is happy to announce that we now include Silverlight 3 features in our normal Silverlight Tour schedule. Our first Silverlight 3 class will be the Chicago, IL class that takes place on April 6-8th. If you are ready to learn all there is to know about Silverlight 2 and 3, the Silverlight Tour is the right place to be. The new content includes changes and improvements to the platform including:
- The Out-of-Browser experience.
- Use Pixel Shaders and 3D transformations.
- Build Behaviors.
- Styling Improvements including Merge Dictionaries and Based-on Styles
- Data Validation using the Control Model
- Working with Binary XML
- Using the new Bitmap APIs
- Blend 3 Preview Coverage
For more information, visit:
https://agilitrain.com/workshop/info/silverlight_tour_workshop
If you are here at MIX09 today, don't forget to stop by my mini-session "Building Microsoft Silverlight Applications with Eclipse". Wednesday, March 18th, 4:25pm in San Polo (3401) on the 3rd floor.
In this 20 minute session, i'll show you how Silverlight applications look like in Eclipse and the basic requirements of getting this to work. (Note that they annonuced Mac support for the Eclipse Plugin today).
Also announced today was a preview version of Blend 3. Blend 3 is going to support better experiences for designers and developers. There will be lots of sessions and videos at MIX09 about these features but for the simple list here I go:
SketchFlow
Blend 3 adds the ability for designers to sketch designs and share them with clients. Clients can add annotations to feedback to the designer from SketchFlow. Sketchflow is part Blend and part Silverlight 3 wrapper.
Tool Support
Illustrator and Photoshop files can be imported directly into Blend without having to use an intermediatary (e.g. Design). This import is much better than Design's import so that layers and objects come in even in Photoshop files.
Application Flow
Blend 3 can help you build the flow from page to page in Silverlight to help know not only which pages are shown but how those pages are transitioned.
Sample Data
Blend 3 also supports the ability to simply create sample data during design so that designs can show controls with sample data to better understand what a design will be look like at runtime.
Silverlight 3 Changes
All the Silverlight 3 features (e.g. Merge Dictionaries, Element to Element Binding, Based On Styles, etc.) are supported in Blend 3.
There is a lot more but too much to cover in a single blog post. You'll see deeper examples of some of these features in the upcoming weeks (or the April 6th Silverlight Tour class which is covering Silverlight 3).
Today at MIX09, Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 3 Beta. This version represents a maturation of the platform instead of the complete change in platform that Silverlight 2 represented. There were a lot of good features announced:
Leave the Browser
Silverlight 3 lets you create applications to let it pop-out of the browser and run as a desktop application. In this mode you can run your application without a network connection (including API's for detecting the state of the connection). While this approach is different than Adobe's AIR product, it represents a way to create rich dual-mode applications (in and out of the browser). These applications also support creating desktop or start menu shortcuts to be run without invoking the browser at all.
Graphic Improvements
Silverlight 3 also supports new improvements to the underlying graphical system. These include programable pixel shader effects (e.g. blur, drop shadow), perspective 3D support, Bitmap API for creating bitmaps on the fly from the render tree or to support pixel-level programming and also support for customizable animation easing.
Control Improvements
The control system now supports controls for validation and UI errors. These controls support the ability to catch and show validation errors through the entire data binding stack. Existing control improvements include multiple selection ListBox and a new SaveFileDialog to allow users to save files to their own desktop environment.
Styling
Two major improvements come to the Styling system. First, merge resource dictionaries are now supported so you can share styling between multiple Silverlight application. Secondly, styles can be applied and changed at runtime as well as base styles on other styles to support cascading styles.
Media Changes
As announced earlier, Silverlight 3 now supports H264 and RAW codecs. In addition, you can build your own video or audio codec to support any non-supported scenarios.
Responsible Applications
Silverlight 3 (a first for a plugin platform) now supports using operating system colors. This means that for partially sighted users that use high-contrast color schemes that work with Silverlight applications.
Performance Improvements
There are number of performance improvements in Silverlight 3:
- Often used Toolkit controls are now available through a shared URI so that the chance of browser cached controls can improve the startup time of your applications.
- Font files can now be zipped up for spedier downloading.
- Silverlight 3 applications can also use operation system fonts to aid in re-usable fonts on the user's machines. This is especially helpful in far-east scenarios where the font files are huge.
- Your applications can now convert part of the render tree to bitmaps to improve rendering speed.
- GPU is now used to render scenes to improve overall render performance.
- DeepZoom has been improved to be able to handle 1,000's of elements.
- Text rendering can be throttled to allow for animated text to be much faster.
- Binary XML is now supported to improve speed between servers and applications.
Wrapping It Up
There are many details in these new features that you can explore by downloading the bits. A couple of caveats:
Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 2 Visual Studio Tools will not work side-by-side. If you need to work with both plugins, you should install Silverlight 3 separately (e.g. on a separate machine).
Silverlight 3 does not come with a go-live license therefore you may not be able to deploy your work. This go-live license should come in a future release (I expect in a release before the full RTW).
Coming up on March 30-31st, we will be holding our first Advanced Silverlight Workshop in Atlanta. This new class expands on the Silverlight Tour Workshop. This new class requires that students have a working knowledge of Silverlight and teaches the next level of Silverlight design, development and architecture.
The class covers:
Building Composite Applications
- Separating Concerns
- View-Model-ViewModel
- Composition with Prism
- Working with Large Teams
TDD with Silverlight
- Using the Test Framework
- Unit Testing
- Integration Testing
- Build Integration
Managing Data
- Picking a Data Layer
- Change Management
- Security of Data in Silverlight
- Integration with Existing Data Layers
Custom Controls
- Why a Custom Control
- Derivation Schemes
- Custom Containers
- Control Templates
- Supporting Blend
Visit the AgiliTrain website to register or just hold a seat for the upcoming class.
I originally had cancelled my talks at the Atlanta Code Camp because I was going to be in San Francisco and didn't think I could fly in the same day and give my talks. At the last minute I asked the code camp guys if they had room for an ad-hoc session and they had a cancellation so it worked out.
After a redeye flight from San Francisco to Atlanta, I finally made my way up to the Atlanta Code Camp (after a lengthy nap at home). I had a bunch of slides, but we mostly avoided the slide-dance and I wrote a data-driven site from scratch for the attendees. It was fun going from WCF to Data Services to separation of the UI in a single talk. I hope the attendees enjoyed the talk.
Here is a copy fo the code if you're interested:
http://wildermuth.com/downloads/AtlCodeCamp2009.zip
I also mentioned my Silverlight 2 example which can be found here:
http://www.silverlightdata.com
