- Posted by christhi on November 19, 2008
If you want to pick apart Expression Blend and see how it was built but don't have the source code here is a great "SPY-like" utility for Expression Blend you can download. You can spy on each control in blend and even get visuals of each component in 2D as well as 3D below ...
http://www.blois.us/Snoop/
- Posted by christhi on November 19, 2008
Many of those who have programmed WPF or SilverLight applications are well aware that Microsoft Expression Blend was written in WPF so that may be old news. However one thing I thought was cool and worth sharing was the fact the Blend 2 SP1 product itself was used to design the Blend itself. Now that also may have been assumed but it is great realization that Blend is plainly capable of handling large projects. Fun Fact: Blend SP1 alone has 300,000 lines of C# and 80,000 lines of XAML all editable in Blend 2 SP1. I've been talking about that for some time now but what I haven't seen was a demo on the editing of the actual Blend 2 source code until now. If you were at PDC 2008 you may have caught this session but for those unfortunate souls who couldn't justify the journay to their managers you can now see if online at:
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC47/
Notice how fast the project loads.. not bad.
- Posted by christhi on November 18, 2008
Although I can't talk about much what I can say about SilverLight 3 is that it will be next year and will include the following:
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Major media enhancements (including H.264 video support)
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Major graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration)
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Major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls).
Next year Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express will also support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight, and add tool support for data-binding. The most interesting by far is 3D support and until now was a tool discussion since supporting 3D really meant at the ability to easily design 3D-like solutions using a 2D space leveraging transforms as an example. This is possible today with SilverLight with libraries such as Kit3D at http://www.codeplex.com/Kit3D but it is not integrated into the Expression toolset so developers will still need to roll up there sleeves a bit.
More to come on future posts....
- Posted by christhi on November 18, 2008
SilverLight is generating a ton of momemtum recently and when I first heard that 1 in 4 computers now has SilverLight installed I was blown away. I knew it would eventually happend but I had no idea it would reach this level so quickly. In my day to day dealings with custom development shops, design agencies, and customers I'm hearing the same thing over and over again that is "we are beginning to look seriously at SilverLight as an option" and not just for video. SilverLight 1 was sort of touted as the "Video" release as building full fledged LOB business applications or RIA were more challenging given the lack of .NET code behind. Now with SilverLight shipping last month that changed and it has changed in a big way. Not only can you develop SilverLight 2 applications with .NET code behind but with the release of SP1 for Expression Blend it is now easier than ever to do so. You have advanced controls such a datagrid and calendars as well as a myriad of other controls being release in the form of toolkits distributed as open source. Check out SilverLight 2 Toolkit at http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight, there you can find a charting control, expander, auto complete box, and treeview to name a few and the list keeps growing.
The SilverLight wave is also directly aimed at providing pure line of business frameworks and samples with the likes of Prism 2.0 (www.codeplex.com/prism) for building composite applications in SilverLight (as well as WPF), and vertically targeted LOB samples such as our Microsoft Common UI for Healtcare which you can also download from codeplex (www.mscui.com to run the demos) and (http://www.codeplex.com/mscui) to download the code samples and source code.
SilverLight is also being deployed at an incredible rate within the firewall at our enterprise customers with Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update so we can deploy SilverLight on the desktops in a seemless fashion.
Aside from the competive advantage of enabling better developer/designer workflow, SilverLight 2 provides other unique features such as support for "adaptive streaming". Adaptive streaming will be integrated as part of IIS7 and "Smooth Streaming" (HD quality video over the web) that will enable video to be delivered at multiple bit rates up to 2.5Mbits. You may have witnessed our adaptive streaming technology when watching the Olympics on msnbc.com which served over 3500 hours of live and on-demand action to over 60 million unique visitors this summer and that was only at a max 1.5 Mbits bitrates imagine with 2.5Mbits will offer.
The net of it is that my customers and partners are taking SilverLight seriously today with v2 and are having tremendous success doing it such as the recent announcement of BlockBuster replacing Flash with SilverLight for its MovieLink application or NetFlix with its instant watch service. I am very much looking forward to what lies ahead in SilverLight 3 (which I will be writing about next).
- Posted by christhi on November 6, 2008
Check out a new deck I put together for a recent conference. This provides a 100 level overview on Expression Blend 2 SP1 our tool for building SilverLight and WPF Applications. I will be blogging about the demo I built for this session shortly so stay tuned...
http://preview.tinyurl.com/5tyaj3
- Posted by christhi on November 5, 2008
Don't take my word for it but hear from a third party source like the following. I'm noticing a major uptake on SilverLight requests and SilverLight skillsets at my customers. The future is bright guys and if you need anything from our team please do not hesitate to contact me.
Microsoft’s Silverlight heats up fight for online video, USA Today
by Jefferson Graham
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-11-04-flash-adobe-microsoft-sliverlight_N.htm
- Posted by christhi on October 24, 2008
Follow me on Twitter and get UX Tips O the day e.g. Blend Debugging Tips, Blend Tricks, SilverLight Dos/Dont's. http://www.twitter.com/uxarchitect
UX Tip O the Day: SilverLight Cross Domain Policy File Format
If your services site (WCF, ASMX) is not in the same domain as your SL application or you are calling an external site from SL such as an RSS Reader would do you will need a cross domain policy file. Here is an example (SL 2.0 final). This can be narrowed down of course. The reason this is "a tip" is because you may be trying to call an RSS feed and getting a security exception for some sites but not others. Rememeber SL supports the Flash domain file format as well so sites like reuters RSS may already have a Flash domain file. If you don't control the site and can't access the RSS feed stayed tuned and I'll show you how to get around this limitation.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<access-policy>
<cross-domain-access>
<policy>
<allow-from>
<domain uri="*"/>
</allow-from>
<grant-to>
<resource path="/"
include-subpaths="true"/>
</grant-to>
</policy>
</cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>
- Posted by christhi on October 24, 2008
Want to join me in Vegas and see some of our new UX and ALM capabilities (finally) from process to tools I'll be sharing the stage with Chris Bernard to review how you can improve UX design and development using Application Lifecycle Management techniques.
Improving UX through Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
Christian Thilmany — Microsoft Corporation; Chris Bernard — Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Expression Studio is the glue that brings together the designer and developer workflows. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is the glue that brings together everyone else on a project team. What a perfect marriage! In this session, we show how you can leverage Expression and Team System to improve your overall application lifecycle, decrease your time to market, and ultimately raise the quality of your applications.
http://2009.visitmix.com/
- Posted by christhi on October 23, 2008
I just put together this sample on creating a SilverLight 2.0 RSS Reader that leverages databinding and observable collections. I will present this at the Minsurf conference in Minneapolis on October 28th, 2008. You can also find this sample in the MSDN code gallery at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/flyover18 .
In a future post I will provide step by step instructions on how I built this to stay tuned...