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by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 9/2/2010 4:34:20 AM
The Silverlight team today posted some information about what the future holds for rich Internet apps and where we have come with SIlverlight, where we see HTML5 playing a role and how Silverlight will be a part of the future of this next evolution of rich Internet apps. Brad Becker, Director of Product Management, provides some information behind the value of Silverlight in a world where HTML5 will also co-exist: Expect to see more from Silverlight in these areas especially in our focus sc ...
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by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 9/1/2010 5:44:36 PM
Today we released an update to Silverlight 4 (update build is 4.0.50826.0) along with an updated SDK. We appreciate our customers’ patience on working with us to help identify and verify necessary updates to this service release. You can find all the details in KB2164913. Here are the relevant highlights: SDK feature to enable Add New Row capabilities in DataGrid control Improving startup performance of Silverlight applications Adding mouse wheel support for out-of-browser applicati ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/16/2010 5:27:10 PM
Suppose you use Firefox as your default web browser and you are a Silverlight developer using Visual Studio. You may have been frustrated at times in being able to get the debugger to attach to your breakpoints. You’ve triple-checked that you are in debug mode, that the Silverlight checkbox is marked in the hosting web application’s property pages and it still is not breaking for you. You stare at the dreaded empty red circle in Visual Studio reading the tooltip of “No debug symbols have been ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/13/2010 11:13:06 PM
One of the biggest discussions I started getting into when Windows Phone development was announced to the world was sparked with this single question I posed to our internal Windows Phone developer teams: What is the use case for when you would want to use a Pano versus Pivot application layout? I asked this in the context of an application for Yelp that I was writing. Information was similar but not identical. It was only similar in the sense that the data was all about user reviews and ven ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/11/2010 4:44:19 PM
I recently got a note about a nagging issue in using StringFormat in XAML binding expressions and how it doesn’t honor the current user’s culture settings. This is true that there is an issue in that it doesn’t in WPF or Silverlight. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Silverlight introduced the ability to use StringFormat in data binding expressions (WPF has had this since 3.5 SP1) so you could do some formatting in-line in your binding. Like this: 1: <TextBlock Text="{B ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/9/2010 6:47:04 PM
Last week or so the PivotViewer control was released, which is from the Microsoft LiveLabs team. It’s a Silverlight control that enables you to visualize data information in a DeepZoom type experience. Be sure to check out the PivotViewer learning section for some initial information if you haven’t seen any demonstrations. I received an email a few days back hoping for a more quick “how to” on using this control. After all, it is a control for Silverlight and requires some implementation. H ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/8/2010 9:44:14 PM
Yesterday (7-Jul-2010), the Silverlight Media Framework v2 was released on Codeplex (yeah, it’s Open Source). If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a Silverlight framework encapsulating the best practices for media playback for Silverlight applications. It is both a framework and, in v2, they also provided compiled simple player XAPs that you can just drop in HTML. If you are building apps, you’ll want to take a look at the framework in more detail, but if you want a solid media player experi ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/6/2010 6:32:49 PM
SilverlightShow.net is one of those great community sites providing information, tutorials and general developer information around Silverlight. They’ve done a great job providing a spectrum of beginner to advanced topics on Silverlight development. At MIX10 I was talking with one of the brains behind the site (and Silverlight MVP), Emil Stoychev, one one of the ways they had been displaying book recommendations on their site. It was a bookshelf view that I thought was cool and I wanted to ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 6/30/2010 5:46:21 PM
A while back I had sent out an update on Twitter that I was sitting in a meeting reviewing some “top issues” for Silverlight as reported through various channels (official support, forums, social media outlets, blogs, incoming emails, etc.). It really seemed to be a holistic view of incoming feedback from all over the place. People asked if I’d share the issues we discussed and I thought it would be interesting to see what people are facing. Interestingly enough, almost all of these are solva ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 6/10/2010 11:04:58 PM
In the Silverlight world, there are two types of “cross-domain” things that may leave some banging their head against a wall for a while. The first involves making network-based calls (WebClient, HttpWebRequest, etc) to services hosted on a domain other than the one that is the site of origin for the XAP. This is solved by ensuring the service provider enables a clientaccesspolicy.xml file for their service. More information here: Cross Domain Policy Files with Silverlight. NOTE: “site of or ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 6/7/2010 3:31:30 PM
Today (7-Jun-2010) at Internet Week in New York, Microsoft announced the general availability of Expression Studio 4 which includes upgraded versions of Expression Blend (including Sketchflow), Encoder, Web (including SuperPreview) and Design. You can find out the details of each product and download a trial at http://www.microsoft.com/expression right now. With this release comes a free Upgrade for licensed version 3 (Studio or Web) users! All you need to do is install the trial version of v4 ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 6/4/2010 9:44:19 PM
The feedback from the Silverlight 4 application themes released and the latest in process have been overwhelmingly toward the positive. We appreciate the feedback and hopefully you appreciate the transparency in the process. As a developer I want my fellow brethren to appreciate good design and use it whenever possible … even as a default if you don’t have designers on board. In the initial release we had some issues getting the RIA Services ones out at the same time but we’ve got those finis ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 6/3/2010 8:59:37 PM
Today we released a service update for Silverlight 4. This is a minor release that addresses some items found immediately after release that have now completed our test passes with those who reported them. Most of the items found won’t affect all users, but media developers will want to get this update for their applications and encourage their users to upgrade. This update (4.0.50524.0) addresses a few media-related items found by some of our media customers. A few items were serviced for D ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 6/1/2010 10:45:06 PM
Building on the positive feedback of the previous Silverlight application themes released last month (Cosmopolitan, Accent Color, and Windows) the design team is working on another theme targeting business application developers. We don’t yet have an ‘official’ name for this one yet (and to mitigate the confusion of internal code names again, I’ll spare you the code name), but I wanted to put up a preview. We’re turning this theme around FAST and I wanted to throw it out here in an initial ite ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/17/2010 7:24:31 PM
This morning we published the final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio and WCF RIA Services. In April, when Silverlight 4 was released, the tools were still in “RC” status. Today, they are no longer and are officially released. There is no new update to Silverlight itself, but these tools are the final bits of this version. Get the Tools If you have a clean machine you can get everything you need using the Web Platform Installer by clicking on the link at the Silverlight c ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/5/2010 10:15:16 PM
And the offers keep coming in! Another one of our key partners for testing XAP signing for trusted applications was Thawte. Their group helped provide us with valid certificates to verify their process and signing worked as expected (and verified) for Silverlight 4. Today I just got an email from their marketing department that they would like to offer Silverlight developers a discount on Thawte code-signing certificates to $89 for a 1-year…about 70% off their current rate. That’s pretty ama ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/3/2010 5:58:05 PM
There are a few ways to give feedback on Silverlight. I wanted to share my thoughts on them as some are obvious and some aren’t. First and foremost, the team is currently (Apr-May 2010) conducting a public survey on the next version planning. We’ve put up a survey (yes it’s legit from Microsoft) for you to help provide some direction and help us further understand use-cases of Silverlight. Please take a few moments and complete the survey for me…I’d appreciate it: Survey: Feedback on future ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/3/2010 5:24:59 PM
NOW OFFICIALLY RELEASED: DOWNLOAD HERE A while back I posted a sneak peek preview of 3 new themes that we were working on for Silverlight 4 applications. Our team wanted to do more than just the overall base theme and provide the themes for the core, SDK and some Silverlight Toolkit controls as well. In addition, there was a lot of internal chatter about how cool these new themes were and a lot of teams wanting to adopt them as default, including WCF RIA Services. While we finalize a better d ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/23/2010 7:54:40 PM
A little bit of hidden gem in the Silverlight 4 release is the ability to modify the Authorization header in network calls. For most, the sheer ability to leverage network credentials in the networking stack will be enough. But there are times when you may be working with an API that requires something other than basic authentication, but uses the Authorization HTTP header. The Details Basically you just set the header value. How’s that for details :-). Seriously though, here’s a snippet ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/21/2010 10:59:32 PM
One of the new features in Silverlight 4 is the ability to sign your XAP applications so that your out-of-browser trusted applications look more friendly (trusted) to your users, they come from a verified publisher, and they can take advantage of the auto-update APIs in Silverlight. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s some resources for some background: XAP Signing in Silverlight 4 HOWTO Video: Sign Silverlight 4 Applications Basically if you are writing a Silverlight 4 ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/16/2010 6:57:15 PM
This week, Seesmic announced a new Seesmic Desktop platform. They finally revealed more details to the public and released developer previews of their shell, SDK and some sample plugins. You can get them on the Seesmic Developer Wiki. The best part? It’s built on Silverlight 4 and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)! This is awesome news for those of us who have been using various clients that have been locked down to specific use scenarios. There always is a few things I want/need ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/15/2010 9:25:09 PM
Each release of Silverlight it is the goal to make sure existing Silverlight applications continue to work. Since I think what this means causes some confusion I’m going to do my best to explain what we mean by this. Silverlight 3 application working with Silverlight 4 Okay, scenario 1 is I have a Silverlight 3 application (XAP), will that still work as-is in Silverlight 4? Yes, this is the situation we refer to as backward compatibility. What this means is that existing compiled XAPs und ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/15/2010 5:48:31 PM
Yet again, we’ve updated the Silverlight Client for Facebook for the Silverlight 4 release version. In order to use the updated one, you must follow these instructions: First, uninstall the previous version you have. This can be done in Add/Remove Programs on Windows or by just deleting the app on Mac. Ensure you have Silverlight 4 installed. If you are using the development tools and have installed Silverlight 4 developer tools, that’s fine. If you are not a developer, visit http:// ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/15/2010 5:30:12 PM
Today’s the day! Tuesday at DevConnections in Las Vegas, Scott Guthrie just announced the ‘launch’ of Silverlight 4. We wanted to take the opportunity at DevConnections to let a large audience of our customers online/offline know that we’re done and shipped Silverlight 4. As of today it’s now available for you to download/use. Here’s some helpful quick update information for you: Download the bits Understanding what is in the bits RIA Services Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/9/2010 9:10:04 PM
I recently got an inquiry to my Microsoft Translator sample on if this would work with the Silverlight in the Windows Phone 7 SDK. I hadn’t tried it before, so I created a sample Windows Phone 7 application and copied the code over. I used a basic UI to mock up the similarities: And then clicked the button. The text translated fine, but no audio. I didn’t get any warnings that the WaveMSS code sample I was using wouldn’t work. Then I remembered about XNA. NOTE: I actually think this ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/7/2010 8:23:46 PM
Next week on 13-April at 8:00 AM PST Scott Guthrie will deliver a keynote address for the DevConnections conference being held in Las Vegas, NV. Scott will provide updates on the progress made in Silverlight 4 and will provide the details of availability of the developer tools, runtime and other news. Mark your calendars and return to the Silverlight community site to tune into the LIVE event. After the keynote, Channel 9 will be hosting interviews with Scott and other key members of the Si ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/5/2010 5:54:06 PM
You’ve written your service. You’ve written your Silverlight application. You Add Service Reference to your application and got the client proxy code. Your app ‘works on your machine’ and you push it out. FAIL. NotFound. Crap. You forgot that your service reference had your local URI endpoint in there and when you moved it to staging and/or production it failed. You start cursing Microsoft and the Silverlight team and add to the threads in the forums or perhaps initiate a new wishlist ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/29/2010 5:24:15 PM
This morning I was on a weekly (new) radio show from MSDN, hosted by Mike Benkovich. The show, MSDN Radio, features live call-in questions that you can ask. It was a better format than the typical live meeting text-based QA I thought. I think hearing questions gives you a better chance of articulating your inquiry more. Thanks to all those who listened and asked questions. I know it seemed short and there were a few more questions in the queue – feel free to send me questions you may have. ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/25/2010 9:50:10 PM
One of the features we are introducing in Silverlight 4 is a ‘silent install’ mechanism for out-of-browser applications. Currently every out-of-browser application (trusted or not) starts from an in-browser mechanism. In some instances where you want to deploy the app via managed desktop software or perhaps via CD-ROM, you don’t want to have to tell the user to start on an HTML page first. Now I’m not going to write here about the merits of why you might want to do this other than to point out ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/22/2010 9:34:23 PM
If you installed the Silverlight Client for Facebook, and also upgraded to the release candidate for Silverlight 4, you may have noticed it stopped working :-). NOTE: Applications compiled on Silverlight 4 beta will not work on machines with Silverlight RC runtime. This is known/expected. As with all pre-release software, this type of breaking can be expected. We’ve recently updated the Facebook application, and you will have to re-install. Follow these steps: Uninstall the Silverlight ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/22/2010 5:12:26 PM
One of the announcements that happened during the MIX10 conference was the availability of the V2 of the Microsoft Translator API. This is the engine that powers the translation behind http://www.bing.com/translate and some other Bing-related properties as well. A lot of research has gone into the engine from Microsoft Research and others. Language translation isn’t an easy task especially taking into consideration cultural significance of words, etc. I have heard that the most challenging i ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/15/2010 6:00:12 PM
So the news is out! Silverlight IS the platform for Windows Phone 7 Series development! Sweet. We also made available an update to Silverlight 4 that you might be interested in too! You may be wondering how you get started. If you are new to Silverlight, I recommend getting familiar with Silverlight first. You can find all the tools you will need at the Silverlight community site. In addition to the core tools you’ll want to get the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. This will add to you ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/15/2010 5:24:28 PM
At MIX10, Silverlight 4 released an update, the Silverlight 4 RC (release candidate). A few things have changed since the beta which was released in November. If you haven’t read my guide to Silverlight 4 you may want to check that out. The features still exist, but there are some changes to the implementations of some of the features as well as some new ones. Please go read the previous post to familiarize yourself with the features. This post will be complimentary to that and identify new ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/12/2010 12:22:28 AM
‘Twas the week before MIX, when all through the tubes Not a developer was sleeping, not even the noobs. The laptops were paved removed of their glitz In hopes that they soon will get some new bits. A developer was coding, building an app Trying to build the next greatest XAP Battleship gray?! Now that’s obscene Check our designers’ latest theme Okay, so I’m not going to win any poetry awards. Our UX design team for Silverlight has been thinking about app building a lot this ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/4/2010 9:17:04 PM
Quick, what’s the most popular thing in XAML development? Yeah, thought so…MVVM or Model-View-ViewModel. It’s one of the most popular subjects I hear about when people talk about developing applications with WPF and Silverlight. However, as much as it is talked about and as much as frameworks are born every day, there isn’t a ton of just simplified ‘here’s how you do it’ information in one place. I mean, sure there *is* information, but I have to admit I think it is a bit scattered all over. ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/18/2010 7:35:04 PM
This week at Microsoft we are hosting roughly 1,300 of our top community experts around the world in various technical competencies. For Silverlight, we have about 80% of our group in attendance from all over the world. At the beginning of the year the Silverlight team asked our MVP group to identify the individuals within their group have done a lot for Silverlight community and that they would consider worthy of being named an ‘MVP of the year’ award. First to be clear, ALL of our MVPs ar ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/10/2010 6:09:06 PM
If you aren’t aware of the Silverlight Media Framework, you should take a look. This is a media playback framework for Silverlight that is based off of a lot of best practices from such implementations as the NBC Olympics, Sunday Night Football and others. It has a lot of features built-in to the framework such as: Logging DVR-style features Fast forward Slow motion Media Markers etc Basic stuff plus some great included features and extensibility points. Missi ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/9/2010 3:37:07 PM
Yesterday Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate was available for MSDN subscribers and would be generally available on 10 February 2010 for the public. This release represents a significant improvement in the overall Visual Studio product and a lot was based on beta tester feedback. Of course, as a Silverlight developer you will be wondering: Can I still develop Silverlight 4 applications with the VS2010 RC? Here’s the simplest form of a FAQ I could provide for you: Q ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/4/2010 5:27:29 PM
A developer asked me this question and while a simple answer, I thought it would be a good quick tip to share for those who may be in similar situations. The scenario is the classic master-details scenario where perhaps you have a grid of data and when a user selects the row, the details are enabled in a form (or perhaps the child of the element) for editing. Maybe something like this: See you can see the row clearly selected (note: this is using the default DataGrid styling). But watch what ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/30/2010 10:38:00 PM
I’m working on a little sample application for music management in Silverlight using WCF RIA Services and some other new Silverlight 4 features. One thing that I wanted to add to the application was the ability to drag an audio file and either lookup the data and/or add a new album/artist/song to the library automatically. Audio formats have a ‘tag’ format known as ID3. It’s a format used for audio file metadata that is used in Windows Media Player, iTunes, and various hardware devices as wel ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/25/2010 8:39:29 PM
Remember the final moments of the Scott Guthrie keynote presentation at PDC09? Where Brian Goldfarb came on stage and demonstrated a completed application using a lot of the features of Silverlight 4? Yeah, that Facebook application. Well, it’s here now! The Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook has been released as a developer preview sample. In order to use it you must have Silverlight 4 developer builds installed. NOTE: When you run this application you’ll be installin ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/6/2010 12:02:10 AM
As we’ve all been guilty, when you see demonstrations of technologies most of the time the data samples show single table solutions. When was the last time you’ve developed a single-table system? :-) Thought so. In RIA Services demonstrations, most of them have been single-table samples as well. So how do you go about retrieving relational data (master/details type) with RIA Services? Here’s an option. I’m using VS2010, Silverlight 4 and the WCF RIA Services preview using the below sample. ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/4/2010 7:00:01 PM
Happy new year to all! I hope you enjoyed a safe celebration whether that be playing a board game with friends, toasting the new year with some bubbly, throwing things at Ryan Seacrest on TV, or whatever. Each quarter, new MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) candidates are awarded. January 2010 is the first awards of the year and so I present the new/moved/re-awarded Silverlight specific MVPs: Jeff Prosise – If you aren’t subscribed to Jeff’s blog, stop and do so now. It’s filled ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 12/10/2009 8:42:09 PM
So you’ve been playing around with Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (the artist formerly known as .NET RIA Services) and you are ready to deploy. You’ve been living in your happy Visual Studio environment, perhaps even relying on the built-in web server (a.k.a. Cassini) to serve up your pages/XAP to test. All has been well, you’ve done your testing and you are ready to publish to your server. You compile one last time and then right-click in Visual Studio on the web project and click Publish. ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/30/2009 5:45:20 PM
Many have inquired if Silverlight Live Streaming had a replacement since the announcement of it being deprecated. The SLS team blog pointed to Azure as a possible solution. Since it doesn’t seem like anyone except James has really tried this, I decided to dust off my Azure account information and give it a try. First, a note about SLS. As I’ve said before I don’t think the offering was named very well from the start. “Streaming” implies a specific technical connotation to most folks. In fa ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/23/2009 4:38:13 AM
One of the cool features for Silverlight 4 Out-of-browser applications that was announced as a part of the Silverlight 4 beta release is the NotificationWindow class. Most commonly referred to as “toast” these are the little notifications that popup in the system areas of your operating system to provide helpful (and sometimes annoying) information. Any user of Microsoft Outlook no doubt has seen them. They look something like this (Windows system tray area shown here): After reading Corey ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/22/2009 7:23:06 PM
Well, PDC09 is over and it was a blast. What a relief it is to finally be able to show the world what the Silverlight team has been working on since Silverlight 3. Based on the feedback at the conference, people are excited to dig into the new bits and start building solutions. As a round-up of resources from PDC, I’m putting some of my favorites here. Video Content For some of the PDC09 key Silverlight sessions, these are what I recommend: CL01 – Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview (Kar ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/18/2009 6:18:16 PM
At the Microsoft Professional Developer (PDC) conference, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of Silverlight 4 Beta. WHAT?! That’s right, we’ve released an early beta of the next version of Silverlight. It’s really amazing to think what the team is accomplishing at the pace they are accomplishing it! Silverlight 3 released just over 3 months ago and here we are with yet another release full of features that our community has been asking for. This beta release is a developer relea ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/11/2009 11:15:02 AM
Two SDK libraries have released this week, helping developers integrate Silverlight experiences into their applications. Bing Maps Silverlight Control At TechEd Europe, the Bing Maps team released version 1.0 of the official Bing Maps Silverlight Control! This is a replacement for the previous Virtual Earth Javascript control and provides a great DeepZoom experience for using the mapping platform. Here’s some of the great features for Silverlight developers: Built on Silverlight 3! D ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/10/2009 11:14:15 PM
The user experience team for Silverlight is looking to get some feedback on some of their latest designs for Silverlight application templates and perhaps more. Instead of getting this feedback only internally, I thought it would be good to help them get external feedback as well from people using our platforms. You don’t have to go anywhere and don’t have to leave the comfort of your own home. They’d like about 30-45 minutes of your time online to talk and take a look at things. You’ll be an ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/4/2009 6:33:25 PM
I previously wrote about DataGrid grouping using the declarative model of adding GroupDescriptors. Unfortunately that feature (the declarative part) never made it to the release of Silverlight 3. It was pointed out to me that I should update that post and it has been on my //TODO list for a while. Here’s an update… First, I’m still using a sample data class of Person as my test data: 1: using System.Collections.Generic; 2: 3: namespace DataGridGroupingUpdated ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 10/26/2009 1:06:29 AM
As a follow-up to my Silverlight For WordPress plugin, I have just deployed Mark Heath’s Silverlight Audio Player as a WordPress plugin. Thanks to Mark for changing his license to Ms-PL so that I could make this happen. If you are a WordPress user and want to use Silverlight for audio playback, you use some WordPress macro language (in this case slaudio) and put it in. The rendered output is like this: And when you click the play button it expands: Again, most of the actual Silverlight ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 10/22/2009 9:28:07 PM
Previously I made note of things about the release of Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 with regard to Silverlight development. I’ve gotten a few questions about if people should start using it for Silverlight development. Perhaps I can help provide you with the best information I can to make that decision…so here it goes. Go-live support Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 both have “go-live” support as indicated in the license terms (which are available on the VS2010 download). If you have ne ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 10/19/2009 11:51:17 PM
One of the cool things I came across the in the October 2009 Silverlight Toolkit release was the addition of drag-n-drop targets for some of the core controls. Now I know you are thinking great, another drag-n-drop useless control?!? and you’d be wrong. I’m talking about things that make it easy to do do things like moving items from one list box to another, without writing code, but with it actually doing what you expect. Let’s take the simplest example here: ListBox and moving items from one ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 10/19/2009 5:14:05 PM
Yesterday, the Silverlight Live Streaming team (SLS) posted an update on their blog regarding the future of the Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live service. SLS was a beta service to users to have a place to host and deliver their Silverlight-based applications or media to be delivered by Silverlight players. It was launched at the time of Silverlight 2 as a free beta service to users under the Windows Live brand and offered 10GB of free storage to beta users. In summary, the SLS servi ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 10/6/2009 5:40:01 PM
If you’re a pro Silverlight developer, this post isn’t for you. Just a brief update that I’ve updated some of our getting started material for beginners – those who really haven’t done anything. These will be showing up on the Silverlight Community Site soon, but I wanted to post a link to it here first. Getting Started with Silverlight Development is a 7-part series where I aim to do my best in trying to stuff as much as possible about Silverlight development in a simple application we devel ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 10/5/2009 5:51:58 PM
This past weekend during a conversation about Silverlight controls at the San Diego Silverlight Education Day, someone asked about the DatePicker control and why the “15” is there and how come they can’t change it. Here’s the control that was being referred to: The calendar displays an icon to the right of the text box area which, when clicked, displays a drop-down calendar picker. The icon always says “15” and is intended to look like a little calendar date sheet (you know, like those desk ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 10/1/2009 6:37:58 PM
Just a quick shout-out to congratulate the latest Silverlight MVPs to the program. The Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) program is a recognition program that is in place to recognize and reward those individuals who have been identified by individuals (peers, Microsoft staff, etc.) as experts in their technology field and global contributors to the technology. As of today (01 OCT 2009) we welcome some new folks to the Silverlight group: Rick Barraza (@rickbarraza)– wicked int ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 9/29/2009 6:49:53 PM
Mithun just posted that the videos are now available online from the Silverlight Firestarter Seattle event. You can view the videos here in WMV form, but I also took a quick stab at putting them together in a playlist using the Silverlight Expression Encoder templates. Here they are: You can click the little icon in the upper right to see the playlist option and to navigate. NOTE: The offline mode doesn’t seem to work and likely because I didn’t populate the playlist option with the s ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 9/14/2009 6:29:55 PM
I’m a little late to the game posting information about it, but there is a plethora of Silverlight stuff to do this week in the Seattle/Redmond area this week. Sleepless in Seattle…definitely not – Silverlight in Seattle baby! Allow me to interpret Adam’s vector goods… 14 Sep (tonight!): Jesse Liberty is presenting at the .NET DA user group meeting on .NET RIA Services. 15 Sep: Nerd Dinner!!! Just a casual gathering of people who speak in acronyms and like food. Bellevue Crossroads ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 9/9/2009 10:25:23 PM
Just doing some getting caught up from my holiday recently and I was reminded of a “line of business” application that was completed in Silverlight for the United States Army. It is a bit of a supply chain management application…where the supply is soldiers! This is a pretty cool application that was taken from a full client (Windows Forms) application and brought to Silverlight by ProModel. They specialize in supply and demand issues. Take a look at the interview/demo that Adam Kinney did w ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 9/8/2009 11:50:33 PM
I’ve been doing a lot of asking and listening lately…to you, the Silverlight developers! I’ve received a lot of positive feedback and “thank you for asking” comments and it has been real encouraging. If you haven’t seen some of them, here’s some of my recent inquiries: Do you have a need to convert Flash applications (not just assets, but ActionScript)? How do you prefer to learn Silverlight (and how do you decide on choosing Silverlight)? Are you using the provided Silverlight Toolk ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 9/3/2009 7:47:22 PM
A few of us in the Silverlight team have been talking about various things and speculating on how we think the universe works. We’ve been wondering how people best learn at different levels and how they come to decisions on what tools of their trade to use, etc. I had a novel idea – let’s ask them. I’m curious if you might help us stop speculating and get a broad picture of these ideas. If you would, that would be great and help us understand better where we need to fight for prioritization ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 9/2/2009 10:41:46 PM
I saw a note on Twitter come through yesterday about building pixel shaders for Silverlight in Visual Studio. The question, from @blamborn was: Does anyone know if there is a Shader Effects BuildTask like the #WPF one here http://bit.ly/gCkNT only for #Silverlight? I replied that you can use the same build task and thought I had written my work around on how to do that, but apparently I never clicked published somewhere along the line. I recall doing some work for this for a presentation ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 9/1/2009 5:45:52 PM
Small public service announcement here for Silverlight developers…we released a minor update to the runtime and SDK today. You may see this referred to as Silverlight 3 GDR2. Formally it is version 3.0.40818.0. Usually when a release pops up people are curious about what is in it and why there wasn’t some major announcement. NOTE: “GDR” is Microsoft-speak for general distribution release. If you are interested in the full release history for Silverlight it is always available online (click ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/31/2009 4:14:01 PM
One of my colleagues, Corrina, pointed me today to some research her team is conducting on user experience with Visual Studio and Silverlight. From her post today, …that my co-workers on the Visual Studio User Experience Team are doing focused on professional and non-professional web/application developers. The research involves… A short survey A telephone interview to discuss your development experiences A gratuity will be offered to individuals selected to participat ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/26/2009 5:09:46 PM
While I was at the Silverlight Atlanta Firestarter event I had a chance to meet some great people. One of them was Sergey Barskiy. Sergey was doing a session on deployment and while in the speaker area we were chatting about overall feedback on Silverlight. One of the things he mentioned was what he thought was a bug in Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight. It was around RESX files and the modifier setting (Internal, Public, etc.). More on that later. Sergey was using RESX files for localiz ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/21/2009 3:05:43 PM
UPDATE: Michael has posted a comment here and offered himself up to the gauntlet and apologized for his article. He writes below: Tim did me a favor with this article, and his comments on Connected Internet. I have left the article up on Connected, because frankly, I deserve the lumps I get over it. Anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes talking with me, reading this blog, or listening to me on podcasts (Herding Code, Thirsty Developer, Misfit Geek) will know that I LOVE Microsoft. I’m not a ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/13/2009 11:13:49 PM
When Silverlight 3 launched, we also published several additional application themes for the navigation and business application (for .NET RIA Services) templates. I just uploaded two more themes from one of our designers, Corrina, to the Expression Gallery. There are versions for both navigation application template as well as the .NET RIA Services business application template. Mediterranean Sun (RIA Services): Seeing Sound (RIA Services): Additionally, several fixes were made to the ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/12/2009 10:32:23 PM
I have the pleasure of being invited to participate in two Silverlight events coming up soon (one very soon). These are a part of a “firestarter” event that is intended to get you familiar with certain technologies, in this case Silverlight, rather quickly and gain a better understanding for the overall platform offerings. I’m excited to have been invited to participate in both the Atlanta and Seattle events. Silverlight Firestarter Atlanta The first one will be in Atlanta, Georgia on 22-Aug ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/12/2009 4:29:05 PM
One of the features that a lot of developers seem to enjoy is the out-of-browser feature in Silverlight. This is the feature that allows you to take your Silverlight application and run it like a desktop application (without some of the trust levels right now). If you aren’t familiar with the feature, take a moment and familiarize yourself with it…here’s some info: Silverlight 3 Out of Browser developer APIs Sample Application Feature overview (from the PM that owns the feature) ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/10/2009 11:06:10 PM
I was messing around with a new internal application the other day and made a wise crack about some of the features out in the open. And by wise-crack, I mean ‘feedback in the nicest way possible’ of course. On one of my suggestions someone pointed out a RTFM moment that the feature was actually in there but had a dependency. The feature I was requesting was “toast” notifications. What is “toast”? Aside from a delicious breakfast treat, it’s a term that most people refer to those little not ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/7/2009 10:35:58 PM
I was talking with a good friend the other day about some feedback about DataForm. It’s great to get raw and honest feedback…that’s where you improve more than ‘it sucks’ type feedback. One of the use cases he felt would be common with the Silverlight DataForm control (available in the Silverlight Toolkit) was the concept of confirming the delete action. I agreed as well that confirming permanent delete actions is a common line-of-business application pattern. It got me thinking about some t ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/6/2009 11:20:42 PM
It’s getting to be that time of year again…PDC!!! For those who may not know, “PDC” is the beloved TLA for Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference. This is it. The geeks conference. If you are a bit twiddler, this is for you. PDC is where most of the forward-looking stuff is revealed. It is also where certain executives come out for their semi-annual keynote ;-). PDC is in their 14th year! Amazing. The conference, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from 17-19 NOV (with pr ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 8/6/2009 10:27:52 PM
I came across this add-in for Visual Studio the other day that is subtle but added some productivity features to Visual Studio for me. It’s called Tabs Studio. NOTE: I’m not getting a complimentary license for this add-in and have already purchased my own license with my own money. This is an unsolicited opinion. For me Tabs Studio does two things: organize my open content better and enables me to more quickly close/manage the open tabs. Take a look at the before after of the same conte ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/30/2009 9:03:39 PM
One of the new features to Silverlight 3 is the ability to add multi-touch capabilities to your application. When I posed the question on Twitter, I got some responses of ideas people would use this for. Honestly most of them could be accomplished with mouse events today and X/Y calculations. These would be the touch applications that are pretty singular. But I did get some multi-touch ideas that I think I’ll try to explore. First though, let’s look at the basics of what Silverlight provide ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/21/2009 6:57:25 PM
I got enough feedback and suggestions that I figured it would be better just to put the code up on CodePlex rather than package zips on my blog :-). Here it is: FloatableWindow project. The latest build I have is up there which incorporates some feedback that I’ve received. UPDATE: If you like this idea VOTE FOR IT in the Silverlight Toolkit! Basically the ShowDialog() API operates the same way that ChildWindow.Show() does today. No changes there, popup is used. But when you just want some ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/21/2009 3:10:26 PM
I’ve received a few emails about updated code for the Scott Guthrie MIX09 keynote demo referred to as “bouncing plane” Silverlight demo. A screenshot of this demo is seen here to refresh your memory: There really isn’t anything ‘new’ about this demo code for SL3, other than being recompiled. Perhaps the only real change is to accommodate the new requirement that pixel shaders are resources of the project. You’ll see the Effect1.cs code file where the constructor code for the shaders uses: ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/17/2009 9:34:17 PM
As we’ve noted before, Visual Studio 2008 doesn’t have multi-targeting support for Silverlight development. Generally speaking what this means is that if you install the Silverlight 3 tools, you have a Silverlight 3 development environment with VS2008. True multi-targeting for Silverlight in the IDE will come in Visual Studio 2010 (you can see how that works in this post). NOTE: Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 (current version available at the time of this writing) does not fully support Silverlig ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/14/2009 3:33:24 AM
One of the new features I mentioned in my What’s new/changed post on Silverlight 3 is the fact that any application developer can take advantage of the cached assembly functionality provided by Silverlight. Let me show you how and start with the current situation. Current Situation with Silverlight assembly references If you are building a Silverlight application, chances are you are referencing assemblies either from the SDK, Silverlight Toolkit or other great Silverlight third party controls/ ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/10/2009 5:04:31 PM
At last, Silverlight 3 is released! It has been a long road…wait a minute, actually it’s only been 8 months since the last release! Whoa, that’s some wicked supersonic Microsoft time there! Anyhow, we are finally released. A while back I wrote a post on What’s New in Silverlight 3 and it still all applies. I’d encourage you to read that post as well. There are, of course, some subtle changes in a few things from an implementation side of things, but those are all documented in the release. ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/10/2009 5:50:19 AM
With the Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio, developers get access to the Silverlight Navigation Application template. By default the styles (which are located in the project’s Assets/Styles.xaml file) are really good and neutral for the application layout. Now, keep in mind this is an overall application layout style and not control styles/templates. In addition to the default look provided by the tools out of the box with Silverlight 3, we’re providing 7 additional application template th ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 7/8/2009 6:47:32 PM
UPDATE: FloatableWindow is now on CodePlex for easier community contributions and management of latest source and builds. FloatableWindow CodePlex Project. If you like this idea VOTE FOR IT in the Silverlight Toolkit! A while back I wrote a post where I refactored the Silverlight ChildWindow to create a non-modal window and I called it FloatableWindow (you can see why I’m not a good marketer…hey I could have called it Microsoft Silverlight ChildWindow Refactored Edition Express). A few folks ...
UPDATE: FloatableWindow is now on CodePlex for easier community contributions and management of latest source and builds. FloatableWindow CodePlex Project. A while back I wrote a post where I refactored the Silverlight ChildWindow to create a non-modal window and I called it FloatableWindow (you can see why I’m not a good marketer…hey I could have called it Microsoft Silverlight ChildWindow Refactored Edition Express). A few folks found it useful, for which I’m appreciative of the comments. M ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 6/25/2009 8:41:08 PM
I was honored to be asked by ComponentArt to participate in a judging panel for their just now released 2009 Summer Silverlight Coding Competition. The grand prize is USD $10,000. Yes, that’s right: USD $10,000! ComponentArt is even kicking in 2 runner-up prizes of licensing to their products, which is also a sweet deal! The contest is simple, and you are not required to use ComponentArt controls…in their words: Applicants are not required to use ComponentArt's products to enter the com ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 6/5/2009 10:15:27 PM
One of the goals of new versions of Silverlight is to be be backward compatible with previous versions. We make this a priority goal so that people can keep their previous applications deployed while not worrying that people with newer Silverlight will have a broken experience. Silverlight 3 has been out in beta form since March 2009 and hopefully if you are a Silverlight developer you’ve had a chance to work with the new features and tools. If you have existing Silverlight 2 applications tha ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/30/2009 9:13:29 PM
At the Google I/O conference this past week, they announced Google Wave. Almost immediately, I started seeing Twitter replies, blog posts and various articles talking about how Google Wave is going to kill Flash/Silverlight/JavaFX. None of these made sense to me…and at that point I’d yet to see anything about Wave anyway. I posed a few questions on Twitter as to why people felt Wave was an RIA platform killer (that’s what I was reading into a lot of the buzz against things like Silverlight). ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/25/2009 4:19:19 PM
If you looked at the updated RIA Services Business Application template which had the authentication built-in, you may have seen the login screen with a little icon next to the password field: When you hover over this some helpful information displays in tool tip form: So how did that get there? The power of the data annotations. If you look at your model definition, you can add a DisplayAttribute and provide some additional information. Let’s take a look at a simple example. H ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/24/2009 8:36:59 PM
In a previous post I wanted to call attention to the multi-targeting and design surface improvements for Silverlight developers with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. There has been some comments on that post and a few emails and Twitter replies as well with some great follow-up questions. I thought I’d post a sort of what works with what information to help you navigate Betaville as a Silverlight developer. NOTE: We’re talking about Beta technologies here. That means things may not work, that y ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/21/2009 12:23:34 AM
Well today was the public release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. It is the first time developers will have the chance to take it for a spin and kick the tires. I wanted to share some information specific for Silverlight developers with regard to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. Visual Studio 2010 is the first IDE that will support two key features for Silverlight developers: multi-targeted Silverlight development and editable design surface for Silverlight. The second point also comes with things y ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/20/2009 9:12:58 PM
I’ve not hidden my love affair for Netflix both as a consumer and as a Silverlight developer and how they’ve implemented the technology. Long before the instant watch came to the desktop and the XBOX, there were a lot of folks wanting the Netflix experience on their Windows Media Center boxes and extenders. One such person was Anthony Park (who is now with Netflix as of this writing), who picked up a the MyNetflix media center plugin a while back. Well, today Netflix officially has a Media Ce ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/20/2009 5:43:04 AM
For things that aren’t a part of the Visual Studio tools (yet) and things that help me move faster in my development, I like to take advantage of the power of Visual Studio’s templates and snippets capabilities. I’ve created a few and modified a few of others that I use regularly. I’ve shown them in a few presentations and thought I’d package them up in a single bundle for your convenience if you choose to use them. I was going to package Robby’s snippets up as well, but didn’t think he’d app ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/19/2009 4:27:37 PM
We’ve update the .NET RIA Services build for May 2009. The updated May preview can be downloaded here: .NET RIA Services May 2009. You may have to uninstall your previous version before installing this one. What is .NET RIA Services? Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access t ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/12/2009 6:16:39 PM
I’ll be joining Dan Wahlin and Rob Bagby on 18 May in Phoenix for a Best of MIX event. I’ll be presenting Silverlight 3 and building data-driven line-of-business applications. All demo, all tech, all Visual Studio as my presentation tool :-). Come out and join us for the event! Best of MIX Agenda Monday, May 18, 2009 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Wells Fargo Conference Center 100 West Washington Street, MAC S4101-017 Phoenix Arizona 85003 What’s New in Silverlight 3? Are you interested ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/12/2009 4:49:37 AM
We’ve just released an update to our Silverlight Enterprise Deployment guidance/whitepaper. While a lot of the information from the first version of the guidance (targeted at Silverlight 1.0), we made some minor adjustments outlining the specifics for the updated Silverlight installer and documented some of the command-switches and their behaviors. The guidance covers: Using Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) Group policy Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/10/2009 10:08:06 PM
I’ve seen a few comments/requests incoming lately that people like the ChildWindow control in the Silverlight 3 SDK. This is a great control that creates a modal dialog for you. When you use it, it disables your root layout application and shows the dialog you provide: This is great for those true modal needs. It responds to normal windows DialogResult type responses if you have buttons, etc. – great for error dialogs, logins, etc. The request I’ve been seeing is for the same functionality, ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/5/2009 9:20:43 PM
Isn’t RSS great!? Today I saw something wonderful pop in the feed from Jeff Prosise. One of the problems with the ‘contest wheel’ app that Arturo and I did, was the CircularPanel we were using really at the time was only built for demo purposes. There were issues in the spacing when different data items were bound to it. This morning, Jeff released some code for a RadialPanel (same concept). It’s wonderful. I just swapped it out for the contest app quickly and got it working. I’ve updated ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/1/2009 4:20:42 AM
What do you get when you invite 14 companies for 3 1/2 days and throw a bunch of new stuff in their face and ask them to use it? Well, in Wellington, it was called Expression for Art’s Sake. This was a bit of an ‘artist in residency’ program where Microsoft invited some companies to bring their developer and designer staff to this event to learn a little bit about Expression Blend and Silverlight. Coming after WEB09 and ending our Auckland trip with a proper visit to a rugby game (here’s a ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 5/1/2009 3:24:49 AM
I’ve just returned this past week from a trip to New Zealand with Arturo Toledo. We were invited to come by Nigel Parker, who if you live in New Zealand and don’t know him…take a moment and subscribe to his site for information about what’s happening in that area. Our first stop in New Zealand was the WEB09 conference, which was organized by John Ballinger. Prior to the actual conference, John managed to get all the speakers together for a reception and then a dinner afterwards. Within tho ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/30/2009 12:40:47 AM
If your a developer that spends any time with web services, you’ll basically probably end up working in one of two camps: REST- or SOAP-based services. Now with SOAP services you’re likely used to having a WSDL document describing the service, providing type definitions, etc. – something you can use developer tools like Visual Studio to Add Service Reference and get a strongly-typed object model to work with. If you’ve been doing Silverlight or ASP.NET (or any other technology really) developm ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/22/2009 11:17:18 PM
It’s that time of year my friends in Arizona. No, I’m not talking about when the air conditioners start get turned on, nor how the golf green fee rates are reduced or the snowbirds fly away…although those are good things as well. I’m talking geek fest time. Mark your calendars: 26 May 2009 – 8:00 AM The community leaders in the area have organized another big event for your benefit. So who is coming? Here’s the rundown: Glenn Block – come see why you should get addicted to MEF. Don’t k ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/11/2009 12:03:26 AM
I’ve been promising this for a while and I’ve ranted about creating good installation experiences for Silverlight applications before as well here and here. Well, our team rallied and created some new guidance and sample code to provide for you to implement the best possible experience. The guidance whitepaper can be found on the Silverlight Community Site in the whitepapers section and includes: Documentation for defining a good user experience Sample code for media applications Sam ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/9/2009 4:49:01 AM
I got this question on how do you add grouping to the DataGrid in Silverlight without using the RIA Services ObjectDataSource. Frankly I didn’t know off the top of my head either and I’ve since learned it isn’t obvious. Allow me to explain the steps. In my simple app I have a static class that supplies some hard-coded data: 1: public List<Person> GetPeople() 2: { 3: List<Person> peeps = new List<Person>(); 4: peeps.Add(new Perso ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/6/2009 10:10:25 PM
I’ve been playing around with the Silverlight 3 navigation framework some more (thanks for the comments/thoughts on the last post about sharing data). I got a few emails about understanding how the navigation works and people coming up with interesting uses. Let’s take a moment to explore two of these concepts: out-of-browser navigation and controlling your navigation in your app. Navigation Basics If you are using Visual Studio 2008 and the Silverlight 3 tools, you’ll notice that when you c ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 4/3/2009 9:38:19 PM
I got an email the other day about if there was a way to pass an object between the navigation pages in Silverlight 3. The scenario was that the developer wanted to use the same data, but represent it visually in different ways. Silverlight 3 introduces a new navigation framework in the runtime making it easier to navigate to different areas of an application and assist in ‘deep linking’ concepts for applications. More resources: Silverlight 3 Navigation Overview Silverlight ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/30/2009 6:09:36 PM
In a few weeks I’ll be making the journey with Corrina and Arturo from ‘the states’ to Auckland, New Zealand for the WEB09 conference. I’m honored to be joining some great folks like Ryan Stewart, Dan Rubin, Jarred Bishop and more. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from this conference and having discussions about user experience and RIA development. The team at WEB09 released an introductory video for the conference and I must say, someone put a lot of effort into this video: WEB09 Intro ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/29/2009 12:06:36 AM
I’ve made no hiding the fact that my blog is build on Subtext and that I’m very happy with it right now. Lately though my wife has been blogging more (that’s another story) and she also started her own business. Being curious about all the WordPress love, I decided to start checking it out. Thankfully, the Web Platform Installer helped me get started on WordPress without any troubles at all and I was up and running on my Windows server (I didn’t want to start another hosting account anywhere). ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/23/2009 3:49:30 PM
If you are like any other developer, including me, you probably disregard most warnings and are usually the same type that keeps clicking next when installing things without paying attention to detail. That’s okay I do it too. In the release of Silverlight 3 Beta, we noted that this is a developer release and that no “Go Live” licensing was going to be available for this release. What this means is that we don’t recommend putting things in production as we’ve not exposed or wired up the end-us ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/22/2009 9:30:56 PM
One of the new features in Silverlight 3 is providing an application navigation framework via the Frame and Page controls in the APIs. If you saw my guide to Silverlight 3, you may have seen the section on navigation which describes the functionality and as well has a link to a video tutorial about it. I wanted to augment that tutorial with some additional information about URI routing, which I think is one of the great features of the framework. You see typically your UriMapper might have a 1 ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/22/2009 4:34:08 AM
One of the great things about the Silverlight team is that usually in the home stretch most of the feature samples of numerous ‘hello world’ type examples start shaping into creative ideas to demonstrate various features. One such example is a full Silverlight 3 application that Mike Harsh created to actually demonstrate various features and it is what he used to present his session talk as well. He currently calls it Slidentity and it demonstrates: Various skinned control usage Persp ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/18/2009 6:08:20 PM
Well, by now the interwebs are getting busy with the news about Silverlight 3 details announced at MIX09. The team has been hard at work (and still aren’t resting) pushing out this beta release. Over the next week you’ll see lots of blog posts by team members and Silverlight MVPs who have been enthusiastically waiting to share what we’ve been working on and show you some sample applications they’ve been working on. Quite frankly, so will I :-). But in the meantime, allow me to share my though ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/18/2009 6:58:27 AM
I’m sure you’ve heard of the IIS7 Smooth Streaming information and perhaps even experienced it if you watched some of the NBC Olympics streams last year or the Presidential Inauguration this past January. It’s a great experience for online media being able to seamlessly deliver quality media online without constant buffering when latency occurs in networks you don’t control, such as your customers’ ISP accounts. You may have wanted to try out this experience yourself to see exactly what it doe ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/16/2009 3:46:59 AM
I was just thinking the other day that I have some decent subscriber numbers here, but the same volume isn’t matched on my Twitter account. For those who don’t know about Twitter, it’s a great short message service that kind of works like a global messaging system. The best description I’ve heard has been: Twitter is like an ongoing conversation at a party. Come in and listen/participate whenever you want with whomever you want. Leave at your leisure. Come back often if you’d like. I ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/11/2009 12:06:40 AM
Okay, about a month ago I was shown this demonstration by my new favorite friend Ward Bell of IdeaBlade. Why is he my new favorite friend? Well besides being a great guy, wait till you see what he has to show you. I briefly alluded to my excitement via Twitter as a teaser. I previously mentioned that we saw some sneak peeks of Silverlight 3 added features for line-of-business application development with Brad Abrams. Today, check out what Ward has to show you: I am really, re ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/9/2009 7:08:37 PM
Want some sneak peeks at Silverlight enhancements for line-of-business applications? Check out the video with Robert Hess and Brad Abrams where Brad shows some some sneak preview of some feature enhancements. If you want to download the episode above, visit the Channel 9 page here. Be sure to stay tuned for MIX09 for more announcements and updates! tags: silverlight, lob, xaml, wpf, navigation, deep link, deep linkingThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By lice ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/6/2009 11:25:38 PM
Did you know that there are some whitepapers on Silverlight development? Just recently released is one on security in Silverlight development and deployment. You can view some others (some older, but there are still some gems): Security Guidance for Silverlight Applications Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Silverlight Applications Silverlight and Web Analytics Content Protection Silverlight Migration Guide – Upgrading Online Media These can all be found on the Silver ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 3/3/2009 6:41:53 PM
The other day I was given a peek at a company who implemented a full-frame Silverlight application that when I saw it it was one of those “wow” moments. A lot of the public-facing Silverlight examples are very different from one another and sometimes you see some that are full Silverlight applications that really give you a glimpse of how people are thinking about using the platform and how creative you can get. Colaab is one such example that I saw at PDC last year (check it out if you haven’ ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/26/2009 6:50:25 PM
If you are a developer who likes various aspect of testing in your application (beyond the “does it work” testing), you may be interested in a few frameworks for Silverlight. Microsoft Silverlight Unit Test Framework This testing framework was developed by Jeff Wilcox of the Silverlight Toolkit fame among other things. This test framework is used by the Silverlight Toolkit team themselves (as is what is shipped with the source code for the project). This framework runs unit test inside the b ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/26/2009 4:38:52 PM
Our team is working on a new design for the Silverlight Community Site and one of those aspects includes a new media experience for the online media/video portions of the Silverlight, Windows Client, and ASP.NET sites. Today we rolled out the new experience first on the Windows Client community site. It’s a subtle update but hopefully a welcome one. The older experience was a basic playback experience and was a Silverlight 1.0 application. This update brings a few new things, but primarily i ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/24/2009 4:22:51 AM
I actually didn’t plan on “announcing” the winners, but I did want to give some credit to some great contributions and my appreciation for those that attempted given such short notice. Last week I posted a simple quick request for you to be inspired and have some fun with Silverlight and win a chance at a free registration to MIX09. The deadline has come and gone and here are the winners: Winner #1: Matthias and Presidential newspaper timeline. Seriously you have to check this out. Inspired ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/19/2009 4:40:57 PM
Yesterday a minor update to the Silverlight 2 runtime was released. You may see terms of “GDR 1” floating around. That’s pretty much an internal term at Microsoft referred to as “general distribution release” – yeah, I know we have a lot of random terms. Think of it just as an incremental update. If you are curious for Silverlight’s entire release history, you can view that here. So what’s in it? Well, nothing earth shattering if you were expecting feature updates. There were some needed ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/18/2009 6:28:33 PM
The big news in the Silverlight developer world today is the release of Prism v2 (also called the Composite Application Guidance). So what is this? Prism guidance is a set of tools, samples, references and written guidance to help you more easily build modular applications. Generally the “modular” application will feature several screens, flexible user interaction and role-based behavior. Composite applications using these patterns are meant to be loosely coupled and contain independently ev ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/17/2009 8:04:42 PM
Did I mention I’m going to MIX? Will I see you there? I could imagine that some have tight travel budgets, training budgets shrunk, yada, yada. I’m telling you…if you are a Microsoft developer in the web and WPF space, you need to be at MIX09. In an effort to help there are a bunch of ways to reduce some costs…here’s some: Register before 27 Feb 2009 with RSVP code: MIXLastChance and get $300 off the registration fee Share a creative picture about Internet Explorer (details and post ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/12/2009 12:32:49 AM
First a congratulations to the Moonlight team for reaching their official release of 1.0! Miguel and team have done a great job providing parity with Silverlight 1.0 and should be proud of their accomplishments. Miguel, when is Moonlight 2 coming out :-) -- no rest!! But seriously, this is a good accomplishment for the ecosystem. Last month I wrote and recorded my experience of the Moonlight installer/rendering on an OpenSUSE environment. What this demonstrated was that we’d integrated the ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/10/2009 8:26:16 PM
My friend Joel Neubeck is doing a survey on his site about what patterns people prefer for Silverlight development. I’m very interested in these results as well, so if you have 2 seconds, please post your vote: Link: Poll: What separation pattern do you prefer in Silverlight development? tags: silverlight, mvvm, mvc, mvp, xaml, wpf, patterns, m-v-vm, viewmodelThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license. ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 2/9/2009 11:54:03 PM
[previously named "Silverlight as the V in ASP.NET MVC" but changed per comments] One thing that I’m excited about is learning new technologies. Moving to the Silverlight team, I’ve moved away from a breadth of technology knowledge to something a bit more narrow. Now I feel like all other developers trying to keep up with the technologies we are releasing. As such, I’m a beginner for most. One such technology is ASP.NET MVC, which was just released to release candidate stability. I thought I ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/28/2009 9:19:28 PM
I’ve written a few times about some of the controls that have been provided by organizations like Telerik and ComponentOne. I figured it would be a good idea to do a larger dump of those that I’m aware of (and hope you add comments to point me to others so I can amend this list) and help make you aware of them as well. There are a ton of great resources out there for Silverlight developers and I’m always impressed how our developer partners are extending our platforms to make tools for develop ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/20/2009 7:59:14 PM
A company called divelements has had Windows Forms products for a while that produced, among other things, the “docking” effect that you see with some applications, including Visual Studio. This is the ability to drag a window to another area and have it automatically dock to that particular position of the parent window: This product is also available for WPF and for Silverlight. So if you need to add this type of dynamic window moving to your applications, you can check out the SandDock for ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/16/2009 6:52:48 PM
I have to admit, when the first MIX was happening it confused me. Yet another conference? In my usual pessimistic self I tried to convince people that it was wrong, blah, blah. But I was wrong. MIX has become of of my favorite conferences to attend. Not only for the announcements that likely happen, but for the networking with industry folks in an area I’m most passionate about. Enough gushing though. I’m going to MIX09. Will you be there? If you register before 13 Feb 2009, you’ll be a ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/15/2009 10:53:26 PM
The Encoder team has updated their Silverlight Streaming (SLS) plugin for Expression Encoder 2. On the surface pretty much nothing has changed, but it essentially updates the ability to use the plugin to publish Silverlight 2 templates to SLS automatically without getting the random error that you’ve probably seen if you tried. Since the new Silverlight 2 player templates are completely parameter-driven, which is awesome, it did present a small challenge for the plugin. When you use the new p ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/14/2009 8:21:31 PM
One of the great things I like about some of our platform products is that they are building in extensibility more and more. Take Windows Live Writer as an example. It’s no secret on this blog that I’ve got a geek affair with that tool. I use it daily and have customized it (via plugins) and my blogging platform (Subtext) to make it even more of a best experience for me for web authoring. Writing plugins for Writer has been a lot of fun and a great way to get the functionality I want/need in ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/12/2009 7:12:14 PM
One of my favorite implementations is to leverage the initParams feature for the Silverlight plug-in. This enables you to send parameters to your application prior to it starting up. These parameters are in plain text and can be seen in the HTML source of your page, so obviously you wouldn’t want to include any sensitive information there like passwords, connection strings, etc., etc. But it can be very helpful for re-using application logic while providing an configurable experience. You ca ...
by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/10/2009 4:15:28 AM
In an email dialog today I saw someone asking how he could use an existing Encoder 2 template for existing media or streaming URIs when you don’t have something to encode. After a few explanations, he replied that someone should blog this – and I agree :-). So what did he mean? Well, when you use Expression Encoder, you are typically going to be encoding media to a format to consume. Encoder also gives you an additional option in the output settings to generate a media player for that encode ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/8/2009 8:14:47 AM
The source code for the Silverlight 2 controls was just published! This is the source for the controls as shipped in the runtime and the SDK. When you download the project you’ll see the structure: The source, released under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), includes the source for the following controls in the runtime: ButtonBase Button HyperlinkButton CheckBox RadioButton ToggleButton RangeBase ProgressBar Slider ScrollBar Thu ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/6/2009 9:19:24 PM
If you haven’t been aware, there has been a team at Novell working hard to make a version of Silverlight for Linux. This version, called Moonlight, has been in development since WPF/e it was first shown at the MIX conference (which by the way is happening in March with some really exciting stuff, so be sure to register for MIX09!). Moonlight hit beta this past December 2008 and the team has already been working on Moonlight 2 which is the Silverlight 2 compatible version. Right now, Moonlight ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 1/2/2009 10:28:22 PM
Over the holiday this past week I got a ping from Scott Cate about some Silverlight media questions, namely a player and Silverlight Streaming. The gist of the conversation was that the Encoder 2 SP1 templates and the SLS Plugin don’t play nice together (yet). I know that the team has been testing some updates to the plugin for uploading Silverlight 2 templates to SLS, but for now if you tried to do that you’ll get a random error message that won’t make sense to you (something along the lines ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 12/15/2008 6:06:02 PM
Who, didn’t think I’d see “Microsoft Corporation” listed in the Apple AppStore for iPhone this quick. Want to view gigapixel images on your iPhone? The team at Live Labs just announced their approved iPhone App – Seadragon Mobile. So what is Seadragon? it was the original Microsoft Research project that many products are now based on. Most popular probably is the Deep Zoom technology brought first to Silverlight 2. This is the process of taking gigapixel image and providing a smooth view ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 12/5/2008 4:08:10 AM
A few days ago Google announced “event tracking” for their Google Analytics platform. My account was invited to participate in this initial wave so I decided to take a look. The main reason of course is because of a keyword in their email they sent to me (emphasis mine): “Event Tracking allows you to track interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as Flash, AJAX, Silverlight, social networking apps, etc.” I have the script already running on my site for general analytics so I figured ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 12/3/2008 10:45:00 PM
One of the things that we have heard in feedback is the need to surface more end-to-end samples. While the atomic learning videos/samples are great as are more in-depth tutorials, there is still a desire to see how to package all these things up into a single application. Seeing from start to finish helps absorb the learning process and see how these atomic things fit together and interoperate. Today we added the “application corner” to the Silverlight community site. Yes, I know the name is ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 12/2/2008 6:24:53 PM
First a word on the “continuum” I keep hearing about for applications. I’d like to apply it to my digital lifestyle. You know that vision where you only have one place to keep your music, but can access it anywhere, etc., etc. I still haven’t hit nirvana like that yet, but for movie watching it’s getting close. I used to be a customer of Netflix when they first launched. To be honest, at that time their pricing was singular and I just wasn’t watching enough movies at home to warrant the cos ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/26/2008 4:15:56 PM
If you want some great Silverlight information, be sure to subscribe to at least two feeds: Microsoft Silverlight Bloggers and Silverlight community feeds. I’ve recently just added a bunch of great feeds to both of these including all the members of the Silverlight Toolkit team and some Silverlight MVPs such as John Papa. There are also a bunch of resources being added to the Silverlight community site over the next month. We also added 27 new showcase entries to the Silverlight Showcase on t ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/10/2008 10:12:30 PM
At PDC the WPF Tookit was made available which provides several new controls to WPF to help bring even more compatibility to the WPF and Silverlight story. The new controls were the DatePicker, Calendar, DataGrid and the VisualStateManager concept to WPF. Ribbon controls were also provided to the WPF Toolkit, but are not covered here. With the introduction of this toolkit, developers now have a way to get some even more common XAML code-base between projects. Let’s take a look at a very simp ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/5/2008 11:30:30 PM
Sometimes I think reading materials get overlooked in SDKs and we miss some hidden gems. One such gem I’d like to bring to your attention is the ability to add some subtle styling to an AutoCompleteBox from the Silverlight Toolkit to provide you with a cheap version of an editable ComboBox. Sure Silverlight 2 has a ComboBox as part of the core controls now, but as I’ve previously noted, the ComboBox in current form exhibits only DropDownList behaviors. I’m sure this will likely change with fu ...
by tim heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 11/3/2008 11:05:57 PM
I received a comment regarding the new Expression Encoder SP1 Silverlight player templates and how they can be used within your own application. Right now the templates appear to stand on their own. That’s only because the output of an Encoder action will be an encoded file, the template you chose (XAP) and an HTML page to host the Silverlight player application. But what if you already have an application and are trying to integrate media playback within it? How can you take advantage of th ...
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