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by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 4/15/2010 10:39:00 PM
You might be aware that when you publish a Silverlight XAP on the web, your source code is very vulnerable to prying eyes. A XAP file is in a ZIP compressed format, and the contents are .NET Assemblies and resources which can be disassembled easily using a tool like .NET Reflector . Although there is no sure-fire way to stop someone from copying your Silverlight application logic, obfuscation can at least make it a bit more difficult to hack through. Babel Obfuscator for .NET There are a few obf ...
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by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 3/28/2010 10:58:00 PM
Thanks to everyone who attended my session at Code Camp 13 in Waltham, "Windows Phone: Silverlight for Casual Games." It's great to see so many people sharing my excitement for Windows Phone 7! In this session, we talked about the new hardware, Silverlight support, the Emulator, GPU Acceleration, monitoring performance, Behaviors, sound support, input, and monetization of your games. As promised, here are my slides and demos from the talk. [DOWNLOAD SLIDES] [DOWNLOAD DEMOS] And here are some ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 3/25/2010 6:48:00 PM
If you’re creating a graphics intensive application (such as a game) for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) using Silverlight, you’re going to want to maximize performance for both the emulator and your Silverlight code. Let’s look at some ways to maximize both of these. WP7/Silverlight Graphics Performance WP7 devices have a separate GPU which is optimized for handling graphics operations such as displaying, scaling, rotating, and 3D. Silverlight on WP7 has the ability to use that GPU, which can greatly inc ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 3/19/2010 2:03:00 AM
The PathListBox control is a cool new addition to the Blend 4 SDK, and allows the elements inside a ListBox to lay out along any Path control shape. You’ll need to install the Blend 4 SDK to get access to the PathListBox control, but note that this is available outside of Expression Blend 4 (you don’t need to purchase or install Blend 4). One of the neat bonus features of the PathListBox is that you can animate the Path that it is bound to, and the items will follow the animation! This gives Si ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 3/18/2010 2:11:00 AM
The Physics Helper Library now supports Windows Phone Development! [DOWNLOAD PHYSICS HELPER] [SEE A TEASER] [DOWNLOAD SAMPLE PHONE PROJECT] * UPDATE 05/17/10: Fixed for April Refresh of WP7 Tools If you want to create some fun physics-based games for this upcoming platform, you’ll first want to first visit the Windows Phone Development site and download the tools you’ll need. The Physics Helper Library is a collection of Behaviors and UserControls that make is easier to create 2D physics g ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 3/15/2010 6:06:00 PM
You’ve probably heard the rumors during the past weeks, but at the Mix10 Keynote this morning, ScottGu and Co. confirmed all of the leaks about Windows Phone 7 Series ! You can download the tools you need now, including Silverlight and XNA development libraries and a Phone Emulator. Microsoft has created a stringent list of requirements for hardware manufacturers, which should keep a consistent experience across devices, while keeping competition high among manufacturers (and therefore pricin ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 3/14/2010 5:17:00 PM
Looking for great free training in Silverlight and Expression Blend? The Expression Blend Evangelism Team at Microsoft has just released .toolbox, an online training source for designers and developers!! One of the unique aspects of the .toolbox training is that it enlisted the talents of real-world design agencies to create the sample applications you use in the training. I think this makes for challenging and realistic training scenarios. I personally created several of the .toolbox training ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 1/7/2010 2:56:00 PM
Many demos of WCF RIA Services show off using the DomainDataSource Class to in a declarative manner to quickly throw together a data-enabled application. And in VS2010, there is added support for using the Data Sources Window to Drag/Drop data entities onto the designer --- this action also adds a DomainDataSource instance into your XAML. For many applications, using a DomainDataSource in XAML is fine and enables RAD development. But some pundits (Hi Shawn!) argue that having direct interaction ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 1/7/2010 1:12:00 PM
Thanks to everyone who attended my WCF RIA Services talk at the CNY .NET Developer Group in Syracuse, NY! In this talk we used Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and WCF RIA Services Beta to develop a line of business application centered around (what else) Beers! If you are in the Rochester, NY area, I'll be repeating this presentation at the Visual Developers of Upstate NY group on Wednesday, January 27th. Download the Demo * requires SL4/VS2010 Beta 2, WCF RIA Services Beta Download the Slides I ha ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 12/13/2009 1:50:00 PM
If you're a fan of Fiddler, you may have used it with prior versions of RIA Services to capture the traffic between your Silverlight client and your server side. This worked great in the past because RIA Services used a (somewhat bastardized) JSON encoding format. But in the latest release of WCF RIA Services, the default encoding format is binary - which is not supported by Fiddler out of the box. Luckily, Samuel Jack has created a WCF Binary Inspector plug-in for Fiddler, which allows for exam ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 11/30/2009 2:46:00 AM
"Froggy Math" is a little educational Silverlight game that I've been picking at when I had a free hour here and there for the past several weeks. The goal was to create something for my kids to practice their math facts (which I learned are now called "combinations"), and at the same time pique their interest in programming. I think the result was pretty good --- at least the kids seem interested in playing for awhile! In Froggy Math, the player feeds worms to a hungry frog - but the correct w ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 11/18/2009 10:29:00 PM
At the PDC Conference today, The Gu unveiled the first public release of Silverlight 4 (Beta). This release has some really great additions, but I am most excited about the advances in Business Application Development for Silverlight.Why will Silverlight 4 be better for Business App Development? RIA ServicesWCF RIA Services (formerly .NET RIA Services) makes it quick and easy to create a Service layer that wraps your Data Access Layer - whether your DAL uses the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, o ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 11/18/2009 10:24:00 PM
The ability to create Implicit Styles has been a sorely missed feature in Silverlight… until Silverlight 4! The concept of an implicit style is very simple – you define how you want ALL instances of a control to look in one place (you can then override those styles if you need to). Setting an implicit style in XAML Let’s say we want all of our TextBox controls in our application to have White text on a Red background. We can step into our App.xaml and add the following XAML: ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 11/18/2009 7:27:00 PM
Silverlight 4 Beta and Visual Studio 2010 add much in the line of Rapid Application Development. Besides adding support for the Cider XAML designer and properties window, we now have Data Sources Window support for RIA Services.In this (quite long) blog post, I’ll walk through the creation a Line of Business-type application using Silverlight 4, RIA Services, and Visual Studio 2010. Contents The Ingredients. 1 Getting Started. 1 Adding a New Page. 2 Adding the Database and Image Assets. 3 Crea ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 11/17/2009 1:21:00 PM
While most Microsoft developers are focused on PDC 2009 this week, my travels took a different direction – visiting our Neighbors to the North to present a session at the Montreal International Game Summit. This conference brings together some of the best game developers in the world, talking about everything from marketing to networked physics. I presented a session on game development with Silverlight , and I was excited to see a great turnout for the talk. My session was titled “Top 10 Reason ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 11/9/2009 12:49:00 PM
Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions at the Tech Valley Code Camp on Saturday 11/7! As promised, here are links to further resources for the sessions: .NET RIA Services .NET RIA Services... and Beer! - If you missed my session, no worries, here is a text walk-through plus demo code. RIA Services Community Site - *NEW* Site aggregating all of the resources for .NET RIA Services! Brad Abrams Intro to RIA Services - Brad starts this series out saying that someone should write a book about R ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 10/19/2009 12:22:00 PM
I was disappointed to get word that the Silverlight Streaming Service is going away, as explained in this announcement. SLS provided an easy, scalable way of delivering Silverlight applications and media. The idea was that Microsoft would handle the delivery of your Silverlight apps using its server infrastructure so that the end-user would have the best experience. I suppose this is why its very important to read any fine print. This is taken from the SLS front page: The service offers we ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 10/9/2009 5:26:00 PM
Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation on Behaviors in Silverlight 3 at the CNY .NET Developer Group! Even if you missed the meeting, no worries - I'll be repeating the talk at Code Camp 12 in Waltham, Mass. And I've included the highlights below! A screencast covering the main demo, project source, and slides: [DEMO CODE] [SLIDES] [VIDEO] The video below is divided into Chapters, so you can skip to the points you need: Adding Properties Propery Tooltips and Categories Property Edit ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 10/6/2009 9:02:00 PM
I'll be out and about talking about Silverlight in the coming weeks. Most of these sessions are free, so if you're in the area come and say "hi." Silverlight 3 Behaviors @ CNY.NET Developer GroupWednesday, October 7th, 2009 6:00pmBehaviors allow you to add interactivity to your Silverlight applications without writing any code. Want to add drag/drop functionality to an element in XAML? Just add in a DragDropBehavior. Want Physics applied to your elements? Just drop in Physics Behaviors! In this ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 9/18/2009 8:38:00 PM
Some weeks ago, Adam Kinney wrote about a nice workaround for creating a Glow Effect in Silverlight using a DropShadowEffect. Since Glow is a common effect, I thought it would be nice to wrap this into a Behavior. Please note, you wouldn’t want to use this behavior in any kind of animation – because the DropShadowEffect is currently rendered in software and will quickly bring a CPU to its knees. DOWNLOAD SOURCECreating the Glow Effect in Code To mimic a Glow effect in XAML, we use a DropShadow E ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 9/12/2009 2:31:00 PM
A new version of the Physics Helper is available for download on Codeplex. This includes a new Fluid Container Behavior to simulate water, as well as a few fixes. The Fluid Container Behavior is based on Jeff Weber's Farseer Water Demo, and allows you to make a fluid simulation by applying a behavior to a XAML element. Video on Fluid Container BehaviorWatch a short video on applying the Fluid Container Behavior in Blend. Fluid Container DemosThese demos show the Fluid Container Behavior in actio ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 8/17/2009 6:34:00 PM
Several people have asked if the Physics Helper Library for Silverlight could also support WPF. While there are lots of similarities between Silverlight and WPF, there are also LOTS of differences, including the way VisualTreeHelper works - which is something the library uses for its boundary detection. While I had it somewhere on my TO DO list to incorporate WPF support, it had always been on the backburner in favor of other tasks. But thanks to a new contributor to the code, Bill Seddon, I'm h ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 7/16/2009 12:21:00 AM
Today I released an initial version of “Physics Helper 3” to Codeplex. This includes a collection of new Behaviors for Expression Blend which makes it very quick to create physics games and simulations in Silverlight using the Farseer Physics Engine. This release requires Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3, which you can get here.DOWNLOAD PHYSICS HELPER 3 Demos There are four new demos using Behaviors, plus the original demos depending on the older User Control model. Note that version 3 still ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 7/10/2009 4:08:00 PM
Silverlight 3 and Blend 3 introduce the concept of Behaviors, which make it easy to add common functionality using drag/drop inside Blend.I’ve been working on creating a set of Behaviors for the Physics Helper Library, and have made good progress. Using these behaviors, you can very quickly put together physics-based games and simulations with little or no code. (Ok, I don’t really believe in the no-code scenario … but you can do some pretty neat stuff without code). Another new feature in the l ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 7/10/2009 1:30:00 PM
One of the high-profile missing features in Silverlight has been Printing support. If you have ever tried to print a web page containing Silverlight content, what you saw on the printed page may be skewed or even missing altogether! So, what if you wanted to print a portion of your Silverlight screen, or take a “snapshot” image of the Silverlight UI to include in a report or other printable format? Silverlight 3 can accomplish these scenarios using the WriteableBitmap API. WritableBitmap includ ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 7/10/2009 1:24:00 PM
With the new Silverlight 3 WriteableBitmap class, it’s possible to do pixel-perfect collision detection (a “HitTest”) on bitmap (raster) images. In a previous blog post, I showed how we can do a HitTest on Vector graphics in Silverlight 2. In this blog post, we’ll enhance the collision detection to handle BOTH Vector graphics and Raster graphics in Silverlight 3. VIEW THE DEMO DOWNLOAD THE SOURCE Looking at the demo code, one of the main routines is the CheckCollisionPoint class, which ...
by andy@andybeaulieu.com via Andy's Blog on 6/9/2009 11:21:00 AM
Brian Peek has a new show on Channel9 called Coding4Fun TV. Brian is the author of the famous Wiimote Library as well as the Coding4Fun Book. I had the pleasure of being Brian's guest for the first episode of Coding4Fun TV! We talked about using the Physics Helper Library to code simulations and games in Silverlight. You can view the episode here. ...
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