Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Podcast interview on animation

by jesseliberty via Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek on 12/16/2008 7:51:00 PM

I'm pleased to announce that my Sparkling Client interview on Animation is now posted. In honor of that interview, I've created a button with in-state animation that will take you to the podcast, presented here through Silverlight Streaming, and analyzed, briefly, below…

There are two aspects to the button above.

Create the Templated Button

First, creating the button was a quick job of templating a normal button, as explained in these two videos (currently available) and parts 3 and 4, to be posted soon.

        
                      (click on image to go to video)

My quick steps were to open a new Blend project, add a button, make it a template, add simple visual behavior for mouse over, mouse pressed etc., and then add repeat forever animation on not having the focus (annoying, eh?).  I then brought it into visual studio, cleaned up the Xaml a bit, went to add the event handler and realized: oops! wanted that to be a hyperlinkButton and so changed it in the resource definition (fortunately they are very similar) and shazam! 

Streaming

The second aspect is streaming. (you can tell by the big word streaming just above).  Creating an application and displaying it live in the blog is absurdly easy.  The steps are:

1. Make your application work
2. Create an account on Microsoft Silverlight Streaming By Windows Live where you will find not only extensive documentation (see the SDK) but also links to the Admin Site where you can get a free account with 10MB of storage free during the Beta period. 
3. Upload the zap file and let it create a manifest for you (okay, the right way is to upload a zip with the manifest) and it will offer you the iframe code…

There is a second, longer procedure, but this works really well for a blog. (I cut down the height and width for the button above).

That's it. Instant working button.