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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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Whenever we run a WPF or Silverlight training event or lab, the one question that is guaranteed to come up relates to the designer / developer workflow on a project team. In the old days of Win32 or Windows Forms, the workflow was straightforward (albeit extremely limiting). A lot of desktop application development teams I've seen, particularly in the enterprise, don't even include a formal role for a user interface designer. Although the development team might include a business analyst or someone in a interface development role who would be doing some basic interaction design and application flow work, the actual interface would be mostly designed and implemented by the same programmer who was writing the underlying logic. On the other hand, for the projects where design was taken more seriously as a core element to the success of the application, the design and development teams were separated into different silos. The design team would often present their output in the form of a color 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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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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Summer's here, and that usually means a bit of a slow-down in the office as folk take off on vacation. It's also a great time for some new skills development and training, and as there's a smorgasbord of WPF and Silverlight-related courses taking place over the next few months, I thought I'd take the opportunity to highlight a round-up of the choices available to you, presented in the form of an events calendar: Date Location Course June 28th-29th Los Angeles, CA Designing Windows Experiences with Expression Blend July 2nd-August 10th Bay Area / Online Windows Presentation Foundation (Foothill College) July 16th-18th Atlanta, GA Silverlight Workshop (Dunn Training) July 16th-20th Boston, MA Essential WPF (Developmentor) July 18th-20th Brussels, Belgium Programming with WPF (U2U) July 24th-25th London, UK Windows Presentation Foundation (JBI Training) July 30th-August 1st Sydney, Aus. Silverlight (Readify) August 2nd-3rd Atlanta, GA Designing Windows Experiences with Expression Blend August 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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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...
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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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