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Following on very nicely from my last post on deploying Silverlight content to your own production server , I'm pleased to announce that Silverlight Streaming has added full support for Silverlight 2 applications. As well as adding the basic support, the team have put a lot of work into simplifying the process of uploading and validating your application. Here's a basic walkthrough: Create your Silverlight 2 application using Visual Studio or Expression Blend, do all the usual test / debug steps, etc. Create a manifest file named manifest.xml, that describes how you want the control to be hosted. Here's a simple sample you can use as a template: < SilverlightApp > < version > 2.0 </ version > < source > PopTheBubble.xap </ source > < width > 400 </ width > < height > 300 </ height > < background > white </ background > < isWindowless > false </ isWindowless > </ SilverlightApp > Zip your application .xap Read More...
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OK, so you've got all the bits downloaded and installed on your machine. What's the best way to start to get familiar with everything we've added to Silverlight 2? Well, you could do worse than start with the thirty page hands-on lab that I spent part of last week frantically working on! This lab takes you through the various steps of creating and packaging an application, figuring out layout and controls, all the way through to creating a mini-game using Silverlight 2. It's a good lab to get familiar with XAML, Expression and the new Visual Studio tools. Once you're done with that lab, there are a number of others that you can go through to add depth to your knowledge, written by Adam and Laurence . Download them here . And if even that isn't enough for you, there are some tutorials here that Jesse Liberty has been working on. Hopefully that's plenty to get you up and running for now! 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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People frequently ask me how they can learn WPF quickly. Now the technology has been on the market for a while, there are a number of different choices: books from the likes of Petzold , Moroney , Nathan , MacDonald , Anderson and Sells/Griffiths , classroom training from companies like Pluralsight , Wintellect , Developmentor and IdentityMine , and online tutorials like those from Nibbles or lynda.com . I'm excited to announce another choice today: we've made available a three-day virtual training course that covers all aspects of WPF as part of MIX University, and it's completely free ! This course was delivered here on campus in Redmond earlier this year for a small invited audience, and as we drew up the syllabus and speaker list, we realized we had something special on our hands. You'll hear a keynote from Ian Ellison-Taylor , the general manager responsible for WPF, Silverlight and client platform tools; introductory sessions on core WPF topics from external luminaries like Ian Griffiths Read More...
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A couple of months ago, we conducted an experiment where we offered our lab facilities and technical resources here in Redmond to companies building Silverlight sites or applications that wanted assistance in resolving issues. We were really delighted with the results of this venture; we saw some great Silverlight projects and found a few key last-minute bugs. The feedback from the developers who attended was also extremely positive, as the following verbatim examples indicate: "[I] got more accomplished in three days than I did in the past two weeks and now have a clear path to completion" "We enjoyed having access to key team members (both on products and evangelists) and they were more than willing to hear our concerns and help solve our problems." "The hope was to gain further insights into Silverlight technology and to have a chance to spend some focused time with Silverlight. My expectations were met and exceeded." Based on the positive reaction, we've Read More...
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Thanks to all who attended TypeCon's Fonts and Typography in WPF workshop. We had a great time chatting with you all Thursday morning. In the below zip file you can find some of the material we went over in the lab. This includes: 1. The extremely useful WPF Layout and Font Quick Reference which lists and describes common typography and text layout related properties. 2. The completed version of the reflective textbox lab 3. Mikhail Leonov's presentation on WPF font model. Also here are a couple links that may be helpful: WPF Typography SDK page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742190.aspx The Sample OpenType Font Pack: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms746705.aspx WPF forums: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=119&siteid=1 -Christine Ahonen, Chris Han, Mikhail Leonov, and Simon Daniels Read More...
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From time to time, we run development labs in Redmond where folk can bring their applications in and work on them in a secure lab environment, with hands-on support from ourselves and other members of the product group. The next one is taking place on three days commencing July 23rd. These are not training labs - there won't be a full agenda of sessions. Instead, they're issue resolution labs, this one focused on Silverlight 1.0. We'll have some early release candidate builds available for testing and porting beta code; you'll have a private office with multiple machines already set up (plus the ability to bring in your own machines), along with an Internet connection, telephone, and plenty of food and drink available throughout the day. You can work as late as you like - the facility is open until you leave the building. We'll provide great support and technical assistance - you can have someone sit down alongside you to help you with your questions; if you've got a thorny bug, we'll pull 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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I got wind today of a great hands-on lab that demonstrates the steps needed to create a high-quality user interface for business applications using WPF and Expression Blend. Two engineers from Microsoft Switzerland, Ronnie Saurenmann and Ruihua Jin, have put together this 90-page lab that starts at File / New Project and ends with a facsimile of the Outlook 2007 user interface. Along the way they demonstrate the use of data binding, templates, styles, and triggers; show how you can customize the ListView control to create a message listing; show how template binding works, and show how you can use code to customize and sort the list view. There's lots to learn here - if you're wondering if WPF is just about data visualization or consumer-orientated graphical applications, this will help persuade you that it's also a great platform for building more traditional business software. Download the lab manual here ; the source project you'll need to complete the lab can be found here . Read More...
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