Wednesday, July 15, 2009

30 Great Posts and Tutorials on Silverlight and Blend 3

by Adam Kinney via Adam Kinney on 7/15/2009 7:36:00 PM

I’ve been tracking content that’s been posted since the Silverlight and Expression 3 launch and there is a lot of remarkable content worth sharing.  More great stuff is posted every day and at some point you just have to go with what you have. So here is my current list of favorites with notes on why they are worth checking out.

Silverlight

• Silverlight 3 New Features list – Scott Guthries’s Announcement, Tim Heuer’s Developer view, Jesse Liberty’s Feature Wiki
• Silverlight Controls Sample App – demonstrates each new control in action
• Cached Assemblies – Tim Heuer explains how to share URLs for assemblies
• Silverlight 3 Navigation – David Poll explains how to use the Navigation Framework
• Silverlight Game Loop Optimizations – Nikola talks about GPU Acceleration, Bitmap Caching and CompositionTarget.Rendering
• Silverlight 3 Out-of-Browser Support – Katrien De Graeve explains how to setup OOB applications in Visual Studio
• Silverlight out-of-browser apps: How Updates Work – from Ashish Shetty
• Silverlight 3: Multitouch support on Windows 7 – Alex Golesh provides sample code for multi-touch
• Improved HitTest Method for Silverlight 3 – Andy Beaulieu has continued to refine his HitTest with each version of Silverlight, don’t miss this one!
• "Printing" in Silverlight 3 with WriteableBitmap – from Andy Beaulieu, expecting to see a lot more WritableBitmap action in the future

Blend

• Blend 3 New Feature List – from the Expression blog Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
• SketchFlow Concepts Overview – a great overview from Christian Schormann
• SketchFlow Map: A Mini Tutorial, Part I – a detailed look at the SketchFlow map form Christian
• Dynamic Prototyping book – Chris Bernard and Sara Summers share the first chapter of their book on creating dynamic prototypes with SketchFlow.
• Blend 3 Workspace Customization tutorial – again Chrisitan enlightens us on Blend 3
• Overview of Sample Data in Blend 3 – one of the coolest new features in Blend 3, via Corey Schuman
• Import Photoshop files to Blend 3 – another great “3” feature, via Alex Knight
• New content for Expression Blend 3 and Silverlight 3 – new tutorials from inspirational designer Celso Gomes
• Behavior Templates for Blend and Visual Studio – Kirupa shares some ItemTemplates to help when creating new Actions, Behaviors and Triggers
• Expression Blend Sample Library – Peter Blois shares the list of additional Actions, Behaviors and Triggers available on CodePlex
• Explode Behavior – Peter Blois’ Behavior that explodes UI elements.  Everyone needs one of these.

Encoder

• What’s new in Expression Encoder 3 – the new feature list including Screen Capture!  Encoder is not available yet but it will be soon.

New Samples

• Project Tuva – Dr. Richard Feynman teaching Physics via an enhanced video player
• Experience Smooth Streaming – run a live demo and learn why Smooth Streaming is awesome
• Sobees – a new twitter client in Silverlight 3, running on Azure Services
• Photosynths mapped to Virtual Earth using Deep Zoom – the title says it all
• Matchingo – a new matching game based on v3, very smooth

Expression Branding

Although Expression Studio as whole has not been released (Blend 3 is currently available as an Release Candidate), the Expression site has been updated with a new look that matches the new branding.  Check out the new letter blocks below.