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Here's a consolidated list of all the key downloads you'll need to update your developer workstation to the latest and greatest technologies announced this morning: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 (x86) Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 (x64) Windows XP (x86) Windows Server 2003 SP2 (x86) Windows Server 2003 SP2 / Windows XP (x64) Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Runtime Silverlight 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 and SDK Expression Studio 2 Beta (contains Blend, Design, Encoder, Media and Web) Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 A couple of tips: The Silverlight 2 Tools release (third item above) includes Silverlight 2. You don't need to install the runtime separately first: just run the tools installer and you'll have everything you need. The Visual Studio extensions don't work with the Express editions - make sure you've got the full Visual Studio 2008 installed before attempting to install them. If you installed Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, uninstall Read More...
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At last, the mad rush is over. The run-up to a conference like MIX is always frantic: for me, the first three weeks in February involved a constant juggle of competing priorities. With the exception of one last-minute firedrill, the worst was over by late Friday afternoon. Now it's the calm before the storm; it's too late to fix bugs, to rewrite labs, to rearrange the schedule! Instead, it's a perfect time to write a few blog entries. I'm looking forward to meeting a number of you at the event (do stop me and say hi if you see me!), but I know that the vast majority of folk reading this aren't able to join us in Las Vegas for various reasons. It's therefore my goal over the next few days to relay as many of the highlights as schedule permits. So what's worth looking out for over the next day or two? Firstly, if you haven't seen Scott Guthrie's blog over the last week, you should check out his two most recent posts on Silverlight 2. I never understood how Scott managed to write such in-depth Read More...
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One of the favorite things about my job is being able to share really cool new content with you all, and so today is a good day to end the week on! Since we completed the Family.Show WPF reference sample, we've been working away in partnership with a great developer team from Vertigo Software on a Silverlight video scenario, and today is the day when we get to open it up to the developer community in the form of a first public beta. Video.Show is an end-to-end solution that provides a reference-quality sample for user-generated video content sites. Taking advantage of all of our latest technologies: .NET Framework 3.5 , ASP.NET AJAX , LINQ , Silverlight , Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming , Video.Show provides support for uploading, encoding, tagging, viewing and commenting on videos. Since not many people are building video sites like YouTube that have millions of videos, we've optimized the experience for sites with tens to thousands of videos. The version published today is Read More...
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As indicated in a previous post , we're homing in on the launch of Silverlight 1.0, and today marks another milestone with the launch of the first release candidate. Since the beta we released at MIX, we've fixed approximately 2000 bugs and work items and we're now feature complete with the final JavaScript-based API. This version of the runtime is vastly more stable than the beta release: our stress test runs show improvements of two or three orders of magnitude in many cases, and the product demonstrates the polish one might expect from a near-final release. Along with the 1.0 RC1 release, we've also refreshed the 1.1 bits. We've not exposed any significant changes in the .NET extensions, but the 1.1 "alpha refresh" includes the same core runtime as 1.0 RC1. A note on installation: if you have the beta release on your machine, there's no need to uninstall - simply run the RC1 installer and it will overwrite the existing binaries on your machine. Here's the runtime itself: Silverlight Read More...
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Three months ago, we launched Family.Show, our first end-to-end reference sample for WPF. Family.Show is a genealogy program that demonstrates the usage of WPF for a complex, realistic scenario. If you're a fledgling WPF developer who wants to pore over some code that demonstrates best practices for application construction, there's nothing better out there today. In the intervening months, we've had many thousands of downloads of both the binary and the source code. We've had several offers to localize the application into languages ranging from Spanish to Russian, many people have sent in feature requests, and we've had some great feedback about the application itself. Here's a few examples: "This is incredible application. So nice and powerful. That is exactly what I am searching for in applications: Simplicity, Power and Beauty... You cannot imagine how many people was impressed by it, including myself." "This is just a gorgeous program. The graphics are extremely scalable, the visuals Read More...
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Celso Gomes is an amazing interactive designer working at Microsoft who is responsible for the beautiful sample applications that ship with Expression Blend and did some of the earliest design explorations for Silverlight. Now he's come up with Nibbles : a series of "snack tutorials for hungry designers" that cover the use of Expression Blend to build WPF and Silverlight content. The site itself is a stunning example of Silverlight, with faded animations and transitions and accordion bars: it makes my own work seem feeble by comparison. Make sure you check it out - it's inspiring... Read More...
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Arturo Toledo (one of our ace designers) posted a reminder on an internal email list that lynda.com have heaps of free training on Expression Blend and Expression Design available as screencasts. The Expression Blend material is presented by Lee Brimelow (author of the well known blog thewpfblog.com ) and progresses through from a basic overview of the tool to specific techniques for dealing with text, animation, 3D, media, layout, controls and data. There's just over sixty individual nuggets - Dr Sneath prescribes that you take two a day for a month and you'll feel great! I haven't looked so closely at the Expression Design material , but it's similarly comprehensive if the syllabus is to be believed. Ted LoCascio is the author of the six and a half hours of material available here. They also have paid-for material on many other topics, including Expression Web. My only frustration is that they missed a trick by producing the material in QuickTime format. Hopefully they'll see the light, Read More...
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It's been a busy day of announcements! Amidst the hubbub of the introduction of Silverlight, complete with industry pundits drooling with glee at the thought of a titanic clash between Adobe and Microsoft, we also announced a key new media utility as part of the Expression Suite. Expression Media Encoder is aimed at video and audio professionals who want to generate rich media content for use within Silverlight. Having imported a raw video file, you can set a plethora of encoding options: output size, format, bit rate, key frames, overlays, cropping; you can do A/B comparisons of different encoding settings to identify the appropriate trade-off between bandwidth and quality; you can add markers to the video that can be used for subtitles, chapter headings, or even firing off script events; and lastly, you can save all these settings to an XML file for batch operation from a command line. It's pretty hard to describe a video tool in words alone, so instead I brought the Channel 9 camcorder Read More...
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We had a pretty successful online technical chat in December , where we brought about twenty members of the WPF team together to answer your technical questions and listen to your feedback. Based on the response, we're going to host a similar event at the end of this month, covering both WPF and Expression Blend. If you're working on a WPF application as a developer or designer, or even just thinking of using WPF, you'll get a lot of value out of this, I think. Specifically in this chat, as well as general technical Q&A, we'd love to hear even more in the way of feedback from yourselves on what we're doing right and wrong with WPF. What would you like to see in the next release of WPF? We'll hopefully give you a bit of information about our current plans and invite feedback. The chat takes place on Wednesday, February 21st 2007 at 11am Pacific (that's 2pm Eastern, 7pm UK/GMT, 8pm Europe). Use this link to add an appointment to your calendar, and use this link to enter the chatroom on Read More...
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The first show of a potentially great new series on WPF and Expression has just hit the wires . Andrew and Dax are going to do a series of screencasts covering the use of .NET Framework 3.0 presentation technologies over the next few months. In this first episode, they use Expression Blend to bind a Flickr RSS feed to a WPF application. This looks like a very promising series... One small piece of constructive criticism - I'm not hugely enamored of the way the WMV files are compressed with a utility that requires admin rights to open it. Judging from their website, it looks like you should be able to extract the movie with WinRAR as an alternative. Maybe they'll switch to something simple and ubiquitous like zip moving forward... (hint, hint!) Read More...
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Momentum is starting to build around the expression tools . There's a nice write-up in InfoWorld covering the ExpressionSession07 events that kicked off this week. Read More...
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