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• Announcing Family.Show 2.0

  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... Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2007 2:26 PM from Tim Sneath | 0 Comments Filed under: WPF, Expression, Sample, RIA, blend

• Snack Tutorials for Hungry Designers

  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... Posted Thursday, June 21, 2007 12:40 PM from Tim Sneath | 0 Comments Filed under: Design, Expression, Sample, silverlight, blend, lab, tutorial, blogs

• Demo: The Power of Silverlight Video

  As we were pretty explicit in declaring at the MIX conference last month, one of the key scenarios for Silverlight 1.0 is delivering rich video experiences. But since the word "rich" is something of a cliché in the web world, I wanted to give a small example of what this means in reality. To include a video file in your Silverlight application, you simply add a line like the following within the XAML content: < MediaElement x:Name = " Video " Width = " 320 " Height = " 180 " Source = " sample.wmv " /> This creates a pretty raw player, but you can then add a custom skin for the player, along with event handlers to add playback control, handle download or buffering, adjust volume or balance, retrieve metadata, or trigger an action on a timeline marker being reached. If you happen to use Expression Media Encoder (currently a free beta) to re-encode your video file, you can have it automatically generate a skin based on a variety of templates - and indeed you can then use Expression Blend Read More... Posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:27 AM from Tim Sneath | 0 Comments Filed under: Sample, silverlight, media, silverlight streaming, media encoder, blend