|
|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » Sample (RSS)
-
Congratulations to Martin Grayson and team for building one of the smartest Silverlight 2 demonstrations I've seen to date . I saw parts of this demo a month ago when I was in the UK, and I'm delighted it's now released. Whether or not you're involved in the healthcare sector, this demo does a great job of showing how Silverlight 2 can transform web-based application development. We're already starting to see many real-world applications using Silverlight 2, even in its beta 1 stage; I'll post a list of the best ones I've collected before the end of the week. With a beta 2 release not far away, momentum is continuing to grow. And keep an eye on this blog first thing Friday morning for a separate exciting announcement (he said elusively)... Read More...
|
-
It can be pretty hard to keep everything up-to-date on a developer workstation these days. With so many CTP releases, betas, and service packs, I know I often realize that my own machine is behind in one area or another. One particularly worthwhile update that might have missed your attention over the last couple of weeks is a new release of the Windows SDK , focused on enhancements in the .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008. Amongst other changes, this updated SDK has new documentation that covers all the new classes in WPF 3.5 (e.g. UIElement3D, System.AddIn, LINQ-based data binding), a variety of new samples for common Windows services such as User Account Control, Windows Search, Windows Error Reporting, Speech, and a range of shell APIs. If you've not installed the Windows SDK before, another incentive is a ZIP file containing over 100MB of sample WPF code (check out %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Samples\WPFSamples.zip). After installing Read More...
|
-
We're already starting to see some cool samples that use Silverlight 2 really effectively. Prior to MIX, we had a small private beta running to get some early feedback on the builds that we were producing, and a few folk made really good use of this time to build some interesting ideas out. This one is one of my favorites: TextGlow is a Silverlight 2 application that reads Word .docx files. The Open XML format is an ECMA-ratified standard, and having a web-based runtime with the power Silverlight makes it possible to accomplish something that I don't think you could do easily with any other technology. TextGlow downloads Word documents asynchronously, opens them as ZIP files, parses them with LINQ-to-XML and then renders them using the WPF-based text and graphics APIs. This is a big deal, and not just because it's a cool Silverlight sample. In years gone by, if you wanted to share a document on the web, you'd typically have converted it to PDF format (assuming you had the full version of Read More...
|
-
After three public preview releases, I'm proud to announce the final version of Video.Show , a ready-to-run solution for hosting video content on the web! You might be interested in Video.Show if: Your company or school wants to distribute e-learning or educational content over the web for internal or external access; You're creating the next YouTube-style site and you want somewhere to start; You want to share home movies with your family and friends via your own personal site, rather than uploading them to somewhere public like YouTube or MSN Soapbox; You're running a conference or event and you want to make the materials available for anyone else to watch; You're a hosting provider and you want to offer your customers a way to store and share videos; You simply want to learn how to build a great AJAX web site experience with Microsoft technologies. We built Video.Show to enable all the above scenarios and many more! Getting started with Video.Show is easy: all you need is a machine with Read More...
|
-
Many of you have seen the New York Times reader application - it was featured as part of the portfolio I've been building up of Great WPF Applications . As I mentioned at the time, the New York Times reader is based on an SDK that we built to allow newspapers and content publishers to create rich, "occasionally-connected" experiences based on the flow layout capabilities in WPF. We've had a private beta program running for a while now, and over the intervening months there have been a number of other newspapers that have gone live with applications using this toolkit. Now we're delighted to announce the public release of the reader toolkit on windowsclient.net . We've made a number of improvements to the kit to broaden its usage; the reader toolkit is now known by the rather more accurate but slightly less memorable name: the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit . This reflects its potential to go beyond a news reading scenario and handle other kinds of data synchronization Read More...
|
-
Around the world, people are preparing to gather together to celebrate the holiday season, to give and receive gifts and to sing carols. This year sees the start of a new tradition that our children and our grandchildren will preserve and pass on: the sending of Silverlight-enhanced Christmas cards! I've received some fun ones - thanks to those who have shared them with me. Here are a few: Season's Greetings from Microsoft UK Online Spotlight, Norway Happy Holidays from ObjectSharp FranksWorld Special Presentation Anyone else got a cool Silverlight Christmas card to share? Read More...
|
-
Here's a cool little Silverlight 1.0 application that our team (specifically Adam ) assisted with over the last week. In the run-up to Christmas, I'm sure a lot of us are told that we're "hard to buy for". Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to give our friends and family a few gentle pointers without having to spoil all the surprise by being prescriptive down to the stock keeping unit level? Enter the Christmas CoolWall . Adopting an idea from the wonderful auto-related Top Gear television program from BBC TV, the CoolWall allows you to find images of different items and sort them into categories of "Seriously Uncool", "Uncool", "Cool" and "Sub-Zero". You can also annotate the images with comments ("the Halo soundtrack is cool, but not on cassette tape please"). Having built a cool wall, you can save it, copy it as an image, or send it via email to a friend. All this is, of course, built in Silverlight 1.0. The application Read More...
|
-
You may be pleased to know that we've just updated Video.Show with a bunch of changes. The 1.0 Release Candidate build is now available for your downloading pleasure from Codeplex. If you haven't seen Video.Show before, I'd encourage you to check it out. Vertigo (the company who we commissioned to build this) have a great web-site with further information and plenty of screenshots. Notable changes in the RC build include: Role management , allowing for hosted installations in which new users do not have upload rights. Users now fall into one of three categories: untrusted users (who can create comments but aren't able to upload videos); trusted users (who also have the "upload user" right), and an administrator role (who can manage other users' roles). This is built using the ASP.NET Membership technology. Basic debugging information is written to the database when video processing (encode, upload to Silverlight Streaming) fails. This is an interim solution; we have longer-term Read More...
|
-
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...
|
-
Thanks to Adam Kinney (again!) for this awesome Halloween greetings card, brought to you by Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming. The full source code can be found on Adam's blog . Read More...
|
-
Adam Kinney wrote a good blog entry last week on the importance for site authors of considering the first-time experience of a visitor. I guess most readers of this blog have Silverlight installed today, but at least in these first months as we focus on getting the plug-in broadly deployed, it's particularly important that site authors take care to test the experience of a visitor who doesn't already have Silverlight on their machine. The Silverlight installation process itself is fairly straightforward: we've done everything possible to minimize the number of clicks between site visit and first-time control instantiation, but our own work with early adopter sites has shown there are best practices that can greatly improve the user experience. To that end, here are a few helpful tips: Use the inplaceInstallPrompt:true parameter in CreateSilverlight.js to present the Silverlight installer directly from the current home page rather than redirecting the end-user to the Silverlight site for Read More...
|
-
As a great example of what you can do today with Silverlight 1.0, I thought I'd bring this sample application, developed by Novera Consulting, to everyone's attention. I first met up with these guys when they responded to my invitation to attend a Silverlight issue-resolution lab that we ran a couple of months ago. In many ways, they're a great demonstration of the value of running labs like this - both of us gained hugely from the interaction and feedback. Incidentally, we're running another similar lab in a month - do you have a Silverlight 1.0-based site that you're working on that you'd like to work with us on? The Novera election site can be found here : after selecting your party, you proceed to a page that looks like the screenshot above, where you can see each of the different candidates, information about their campaign and funding, as well as a link to a cool campaign trail visualization which was created as a Virtual Earth mash-up. In some ways, the app feels like a high-end Read More...
|
-
A new WPF 3.5 feature in the Annotations area is the capability to match annotations with the corresponding annotated objects. For example, you can now implement a document viewing application that has a comments pane, where the paragraph that contains the corresponding comment (a text sticky note in this case) is brought into view if you make a selection. A simplified version of such an application may look like this: The list box is bound to the list of annotations. In particular, it uses a converter (IValueConverter) to turn the content of each annotation (64-bit binary data) into text strings. The following is the implementation of the converter: public class AnnotationDataConverter : IValueConverter { public object Convert( object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture) { // Convert 64 bit binary data into an 8 bit byte array and load // it into a memory buffer byte [] data = System. Convert .FromBase64String(value as string ); using ( MemoryStream buffer = new Read More...
|
-
Now that the API-complete RC releases of Silverlight have been out for a couple of weeks, most developers have moved their Silverlight-based applications over to the new build. Here's an updated list of 50+ samples and applications that run on the Release Candidate builds: 2D Physics Engine , Amazon Search Visualization , Ant Attack , AOL Social Mail Gadget , Beatboxing , Bubble Factory , Bubblemark , Color Picker , Comic Book Viewer , Destroy All Invaders , Digger , Discovery Channel Never Miss TV , DotNetNuke Video Module , Dr Popper , EuroJobWeb , Flowers-For-You , Glyph Map , GOA WinForms Demo , Grand Piano , Infragistics Controls Demo , InkPresenter , JavaScript / .NET Chess , JellyGraph , Khet , Laugh-o-Sphere , Layout Controls , Line Graph , Major League Baseball , Michael’s Journal , Monotone , Nibbles Tutorials , Office Ribbon , Popfly , Python Console , Reflection Builder , Reflector for Silverlight , ReMIX07 Tokyo , Roxio Buzz , Silverlight Airlines Demo , Silverlight Chess Game Read More...
|
-
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...
|
|
|
|