Silverlight

Silvester - A Silverlight Twitter Widget

H. Steele Price, IV — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:48:00 GMT

I have updated the Twitter widget on the right to Silvester.

Silvester - A Silverlight Twitter Widget

I did this for a couple of reason. I really wanted a low impact Silverlight Widget on this page, and Silvester provides the best Twitter interface for a Blog that I have seen so far. I took me a whole 5 minutes to do the update to the markup to place it on the page.

Someday I wall actually update this blog engine to something recent... I don't want to go through the hassle of moving all my content and figuring out how to deal with the permalinks, not that I have so much traffic, I just want to do that because I have links to my own posts referenced all over the place in OneNote and I don't want them to become useless, a permalink is supposed to be permanent. I will write a handler to do it when I have time and enough inclination to change engines.

Silverlight Control Contracts Diagram - For Skinning (Quite useful)

H. Steele Price, IV — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:10:00 GMT

Tired of digging into controls with reflector or wading through the XAML from Blend and trying to figure out what is comment between controls? This diagram is quite helpful when you are creating new styles and wondering what to include.

Silverlight Control Contracts Diagram - For Skinning

This was featured on Silverlight Cream #226 a while ago, but I just discovered it.

Telerik releases a CTP of their Silverlight controls

H. Steele Price, IV — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:31:00 GMT

via Tim Heuer: Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

One of the things I love about the Microsoft developer ecosystem is the partner channels that are enabled to create great add-ons to our platforms and frameworks. Our partners in this space usually get to the better implementations before we do, taking on the task of filling some gaps in unique implementations while our teams can focus on providing the best framework for enabling that construction.
Their controls implement support for DataBinding, the new VisualStateManager model, Templates/Styles, etc. Some of the controls they are providing are some that you may find interesting or enhance the existing control suite from the Silverlight core:

Menu
TreeView
Upload
RadCube
RadNumericUpDn
RadProgressBar
Animation framework

One of their key features is they’ve decided to make these source code compatible with WPF. The full WPF are not yet available. You can download the CTP for free right now on their site and view some sample implementations on their sample site.

I have had the pleasure of working with Telerik for several years and have found their controls indispensable for building my applications. If their Silverlight Controls even remotely compare to the quality of their Asp.Net controls, I will be finding them at the top of my tools list as well.

One of the great things about Telerik is that when you post something on their Forums, they respond quickly, offer demo code to get you going and fix reported bugs (within reason) in the next available version and sometimes will even send you an immediate hotfix. This sort of customer care is what I really admire about Telerik.

I expect to see many more controls coming in the official release, these are just a few to get us started.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Downloads available

H. Steele Price, IV — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:28:00 GMT

Still no sign of Blend 2.5 June CTP yet, will post as soon as I find it.

Jeesh! I don’t know why they seem to make this stuff so hard to find. Here they are, more later:
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Download (4.66 MB)
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Documentation (50.3 MB)
Have fun!

Peter Bromberg's UnBlog: Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Downloads

Note: from the Silverlight Forums -

The reason the links were not publicly announced is that everything is still being tested. Part of that testing includes actual customer deployment scenarios from live servers, so the links are up but not made public before we're actually done. We did find a couple problems during this phase, and recommend that you do NOT install until we actually announce the release. VS Tools and Blend will be available at that time.

To address upgrade questions already appearing in this thread: updating the runtime and VS Tools will not require an uninstall. For Blend, I'm not certain, but installing VS Tools Beta 2 will uninstall the Blend March (Beta 1) preview. The Beta 2 runtime will not be able to run Beta 1 apps due to various breaking changes during this cycle. All the details will be available when we release.

So be patient... they are all coming today.

As they become available, I will append the links here, when they are ALL available nd I have an Install Order I will make a new entry that covers it all.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Runtime:   http://go2.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=115261

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Documentation:    http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=22&p=17&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=&u=%2fdownloads%2fdetails.aspx%3fFamilyID%3dbce7684a-507b-4fc6-bc99-6933cd690cab%26DisplayLang%3den

Silverlight Tools Beta 2:   http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=50a9ec01-267b-4521-b7d7-c0dba8866434&DisplayLang=en
(this is silverlight_chainer which includes the SDK)

Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 2: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ba7b510d-0646-4d06-9834-cb82d669872a&DisplayLang=en

Expression Blend 2.5:   http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32A3E916-E681-4955-BC9F-CFBA49273C7C&displaylang=en

Deep Zoom Composer 0.9.0.3:   http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=457b17b7-52bf-4bda-87a3-fa8a4673f8bf&DisplayLang=en

All these are now working, so we are “Off to the Races“

Go Forth and build something COOL!

UPDATE:

All of the above with instructions are available at: http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

I had an error when I first intalled the Chainer, this is one set of solutions:

http://weblogs.asp.net/bradleyb/archive/2008/06/06/upgrading-to-silverlight-beta-2-and-visual-studio-2008-sp1-beta.aspx

Now Available- Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2 SDK Beta 2 Documentation

H. Steele Price, IV — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:43:00 GMT

For those who can't wait to get started learning the Beta2 changes... Like Me!

Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2 Software Development Kit Beta 2 Documentation

Brief Description

June 2008
The Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2 SDK Beta 2 Documentation

Download details: Microsoft® Silverlight™ 2 SDK Beta 2 Documentation

Skinning Silverlight controls just got easier

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:47:00 GMT

Tim Heuer just posted about Skinning in Silverlight 2 Beta 2. We saw this at the MVP Summit and now that we can talk about it...

This has been one of the features that I’ve been excited about for a while since I heard we were changing it. With the release of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and the updated preview of Expression Blend 2.5 (June 2008), skinning and styling controls within Silverlight gets a bunch easier.

...

You may not realize it but the ScrollBar has a lot of elements that you can skin. The thumb, the handles, the bar, every little detail…so now in Blend 2.5 we can right-click and choose to edit that...

Skinning Silverlight controls just got easier

In the Alpha I had to write a scrollbar from scratch, it sucked. I never realized just how much you had to do to make a scrollbar function properly and then the make it scale properly as well, what a pain. Now it's just there and we can change out the parts to suite our design.

Something more is the new "Parts and States" model that I am totally excited about because it really does make programming controls so much easier. With Parts and States, we can effectively change out state management effects and what gets loaded in a part of a control very easily. This is so much better than other models we have had to deal with in the past. I am in the process of converting an App over to Beta2 and will be posting some interesting demos and code relating to Parts and State soon.

Why do installers need to be painful

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:57:00 GMT

When installing Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 I encountered the following error:

An Error Has Occurred:
Silverlight Tools cannot be installed because one or more of the following conditions is true:
1. Visual Studio 2008 RTM is not installed.
2. The Web Authoring feature of Visual Studio is not installed.
3. A previous version of the Silverlight Runtime is installed.
4. A previous version of the Silverlight SDK is installed.
5. The Visual Studio Update KB949325 is installed.
6. A previous version of Silverlight Tools is installed.
To continue, please install or uninstall the appropriate products and run this installer again.

First of all... This is ridiculous, the installer knows EXACTLY what is missing... so what is it? Why do I need to hunt down one of 6 possible problems? Just tell me EXACTLY what is wrong, or better yet, FIX IT! If I need to uninstall something, then DO IT, obviously that is what I WANT to do to make this work. If I need to Install something, then go get it and install it (unless of course it is VS08 which would make me a complete idiot for trying to install this without that) or point to the Trial Version with a darned link already.

I know that VS08 and the Web Authoring feature are installed...
I already uninstalled the previous Silverlight stuff I have...
I looked in Installed Updates and don't see the referenced KB Update...
I already uninstalled the previous SDK Tools and Rebooted...

So, this "error" is of course, NO HELP.

If companies want to make tools and have them get widespread adoption, then they need to be smart and helpful, not say:

Uhhhh, something bad happened and I can't help you, later dude.

So, where is the log of the installer so I can manually go track down an error that the installer should be intelligently informing me about...

UPDATE:

Apparently the Registry Entry “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ToolboxPages\Silverlight Components” must not exist or the installer fails. After simply removing this entry, the install worked without a hitch. This must not get removed correctly by some versions of the Silverlight Tools.

More information for resolving problems can be found here.

Phoenix Silverlight User Group

H. Steele Price, IV — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:13:00 GMT

Last night Simon and Mike revealed our new logo:

This is going to be a fantastic group to be involved in. Lets see... at last night's meeting I counted 4 MVPs. Any group getting started with a technical background and support from folks like that (as well as the trainers and MS employees there) will be an invaluable resource for any developer.

I am whole-heartedly throwing my support behind this group and hope to see it grow exponentially.

There is some concern that lots of people are still waiting to see what happens when Silverliught 2.0 is released and seem the think that is when it will become “relevant” as a technology. I think that if you really are interested in this, then working in 1.1 will get you 90% there, the new version will just enhance what we already have and make it work better.

One of the topics of discussion that came up was debugging... Simon reminded me of the Sys.Debug class of ASP.Net Ajax. If you place a TextArea on your page with the ID=TraceConsole then you can almost automatically send lots of debugging information there from both Client AND Server which can be really helpful to understand just what the heck is going on in events. I will be looking into how to leverage this with Silverlight in a few days.

ScottGu on ASP.NET 3.5, Silverlight 2.0, and IIS7

H. Steele Price, IV — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:57:00 GMT

.NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7) - ScottGu's Blog

Of Note is the changing of the Release name for the next version of Silverlight:

Previously we've been referring to this .NET-enabled Silverlight release as "Silverlight V1.1". After stepping back and looking at all the new features in it (the above list is only a subset - there are many more we aren't sharing yet), we've realized that calling it a point release doesn't really reflect the true nature of it. Consequently we have decided to change the name and refer to it as "Silverlight V2.0" going forward.

I had some OMG moments when reading this entry.

Significantly on Silverlight 2.0

WPF UI Framework: The current Silverlight Alpha release only includes basic controls support and a managed API for UI drawing. The next public Silverlight preview will add support for the higher level features of the WPF UI framework. These include: the extensible control framework model, layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, and control template and skinning support. The WPF UI Framework features in Silverlight will be a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in last week's .NET Framework 3.5 release.

Currently in Silverlight 1.1, the UI IS NOT compatible with WPF. making it a compatible subset means that you can take a Silverlight App and recompile it in a Windows App and it will work without modification. This is a MAJOR improvement and something I have really wanted, specifically for a project I am working on right now. If I am reading that wrong, someone please enlighten me.

We will be releasing a Beta of Silverlight 2.0 in Q1 of 2008. This Beta will support a Go-Live license that enables developers to begin building and deploying Silverlight 2.0 applications.

Go Live rocks! Thanks Microsoft.

As I get deeper into 2.0 I will be publishing a lot of new tutorials as well. I have been holding up a MAJOR site to put it on Silverlight 2.0. That may release sooner on 1.1 but I sort of doubt it due to time contraints.

"ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions" release. --> WOHOO!

The first public preview of this will be available for download next week on the web.

ASP.NET MVC

I have not been using MVC because it did not provide much benefit for what I do. If Silverlight is going to be upward compatible to WPF, that just might change my mind.

ADO.NET Data Services

I absolutely cannot wait for EF and Astoria to be ready for a Go Live. I NEED IT NOW! I NEED IT NOW! I NEED IT NOW!

ok, I'll settle down now :-)

Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 Available for Download - ScottGu's Blog

H. Steele Price, IV — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:51:00 GMT

This is awesome, they said it would be 2 weeks and they delivered in 1.

"This afternoon we released an updated version of the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha that works with the final release of Visual Studio 2008. You can download it for free here."

I have created New projects and also loaded Projects created in Beta2 without issue.

Now I can merrily go about working with Alpha Code again :-)