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My favorite conference is almost upon us. If I’ve been quiet for a little while on my blog, it’s because this has been a crazy busy season for me and my team, as we put all the pieces in place for PDC2008. PDC is Microsoft’s flagship conference, both because of the scale and depth of content, but also because it’s unique as a time when we open up as a company and share almost everything that’s been under wraps for the previous year or so. This year is more significant than most – it’s been three years since the last PDC. That’s a lifetime in the software world – at PDC05, we hadn’t yet shipped Windows Vista, WPF, WCF, PowerShell, Visual Studio 2005 or SQL Server 2005. It’s high time we provided a set of deep, Level 400 developer sessions on new innovations like LINQ, C# 3.0, .NET 3.5SP1, Silverlight and so on. But PDC isn’t primarily about shipping technologies. PDC is always a coming out party for the platform of the future. In the past, we’ve announced everything from .NET to “Longhorn” Read More...
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I mentioned yesterday that the Hard Rock memorabilia application was live already at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com . The AOL Silverlight-based mail client is not live yet, but they've just opened up their pre-registration site for testers who want to be the first to try out the new application, in just a few weeks' time. You can sign up here: http://ria.mail.aol.com/ . In case you didn't see the demo of this application either at the keynote or online, it's cool because it shows how Silverlight isn't just about flashy gradients or animations, but it's emerging as a solid RIA framework for building web-based applications that have the performance of a desktop application. It's not that you can't build a mail client in AJAX, obviously, but having client-side compiled .NET code, isolated storage for caching and a powerful rendering engine that supports control templates means that you're not relying on a chatty back-and-forth with a high latency remote web server. I've been using the application Read More...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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It's been gratifying to see how much excitement there is out there about Silverlight. We've barely started the engines yet, but we've already had a number of big sites launch their first Silverlight experiences, and of course plenty of stuff underway that we'll be revealing over the coming months. Many .NET developers are naturally interested in the next release, which is when we'll introduce support for C# and Visual Basic development based on the .NET Framework. Although we haven't released any new major updates to the alpha developer preview of this functionality since MIX07, we're opening the kimono a little today to provide a bit more transparency in our schedule. Firstly, we're announcing today that we're renaming Silverlight 1.1 to Silverlight 2.0 . As we've been building out the feature set for Silverlight v.Next, it's been becoming increasingly clear that this is a big release. Adding together the Common Language Runtime, Base Class Libraries, Dynamic Language Runtime, the UI Frameworks, 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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Microsoft today announced the launch of Tafiti , an experimental web site showcasing a different take on the Live Search experience. The site "helps people use the Web for research that spans multiple queries and sessions by helping them visualize, store and share the result." While the search is powered by the Live Search engine, the client experience is built on Silverlight . With Tafiti and Ms. Dewey before it, it is interesting to see development teams at Microsoft move out of the rut of the run-of-the-mill search interface and experiment with specialized usage scenarios with richer visualizations. Read More...
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It's my hope that you're somewhat excited by this Silverlight stuff, and if so, perhaps you're wanting to spread the word amongst your fellow colleagues. To that end, I thought I'd share a couple of presentations that I've given often over the last couple of months. You're welcome to use these slides for your own education or for delivering to others. Creating Rich Web Experiences with Silverlight 1.0 . This presentation provides a technical overview of Silverlight 1.0, explaining the various features and how to use Silverlight to add richer interactions and media to a web site. Building Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight 1.1 . This second presentation follows on naturally from the previous one, and describes how the .NET Framework can be used as a supplemental set of development technologies to build RIAs with Silverlight. It also describes how you can use a language like C# as a programming language for a pure HTML solution. Anyway, feel free to use these as you see fit. Oh, Read More...
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The Silverlight 1.1 alpha bits don't currently have much in the way of controls. The infrastructure is there (you can derive from System.Windows.Control, for instance), and we include a few early sample controls (button, slider and so on, including source code) with the SDK, but the full set of controls won't come until the next public release. In the meantime, Tim Heuer pointed me at an interesting set of controls that have been developed by an organization called NETiKA Technologies. If you go to this demo page , you'll see that they've somehow taken a pretty broad set of Windows Forms controls and implemented them for Silverlight (and Flash). Or at least, I think that's what they've done. It's not entirely clear what's going on under the covers here, since the code you write starts off as a Windows Forms application that the toolkit cross-compiles to Silverlight. The demos are pretty impressive - a little slow (it is alpha code running on alpha code, to be fair), but particularly the Read More...
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In my last post , I promised to provide a more detailed technical explanation of how you can use the .NET capabilities of Silverlight with HTML, allowing full access to the HTML DOM from managed code as well as providing a means for client-side JavaScript to call into a .NET library. All the magic necessary to accomplish this is contained in a new .NET namespace introduced with Silverlight 1.1, called System.Windows.Browser. Here you'll find a number of classes that enable you to manipulate the DOM, in particular HtmlPage (representing the parent browser); HtmlDocument (the root element of the DOM) and HtmlElement (for manipulating the individual elements within a page). Using these methods, it's possible to create an HTML page where all the underlying code logic is written in a language like C# without having to write so much as an event handler in JavaScript. Let's walk through the process. I'm going to assume that you've got a machine already set up with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 (previously Read More...
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I wanted to highlight a Silverlight feature that is often overlooked, relating to the way that Silverlight interacts with HTML. Although most people think about Silverlight as a technology for building web-based user interfaces through XAML, it also offers some attractive benefits to developers who want to work exclusively with HTML. I've started to make use of the figure on the right when I deliver presentations on Silverlight, to highlight the range of choices available with the runtime. The top left corner of course represents the state of web development today: HTML used for presentation markup, with JavaScript providing the "glue" on the client-side that enables interactivity and AJAX-style functionality. Silverlight 1.0 can be summed up fairly succinctly as supplying the box in the bottom left hand corner: using the same JavaScript logic, but instead using XAML as the markup. This works really well for embedded content, since the exact same JavaScript function can target both HTML Read More...
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Mike Harsh , fellow program manager on the team and all-round great guy, was manning the Silverlight booth at the NAB Show, doing demos and talking to customers. He says : "I have never been involved with any technology that has this level of excitement and interest, and I’ve never given demos to so many people who’ve walked away with a smile on their faces. After seeing the demos it sinks in very quickly that Silverlight will let them do incredible things with their existing Windows Media assets using all their existing delivery infrastructure." Read that last statement carefully. It touches on what we think is the essence of Silverlight today. Dave Wolf from Cynergy says "[The] entire RIA market just became real and it is about to explode, and it is thanks in large part to Microsoft and Silverlight... Microsoft just justified and legitimized RIA. That is HUGE." I think Dave makes a great point. With a player like Microsoft advocating the agenda, you will see the company's traditional Read More...
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