Silverlight - 7 Twitter Accounts I Follow (and have found valuable)

While writing Silverlight 2 in Action, I found it difficult to keep up with Silverlight happenings in the blogosphere. A lot of my free time was spent deep in the bowels of the Silverlight SDK and writing sample code to try and test one thing or another. Thankfully, there were several individuals in the Silverlight community that really helped me zero in on the things I was missing through Twitter. Here are the 7 Twitter accounts, in alphabetical order, that I have followed related to Silverlight and have found valuable.

@adkinn - Adam Kinney is a UI Technology Evangelist for Microsoft. He regularly posts great demos of Silverlight and WPF in use in the real world and on Channel 9. I really enjoy seeing how others are using Silverlight and WPF in the real world.

@john_papa - John Papa is the author of the great Silverlight book: Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2. It's really good stuff. John posts very regularly and is very active in the Silverlight community. For some reason I just recently started following him (my bad).

@Pete_Brown - Pete Brown is a fellow Silverlight insider and Microsoft MVP. He regularly posts info about Silverlight and his personal musings which makes for an entertaining Twitter feed. In addition, he has committed to picking up the baton and running with Silverlight 3 in Action. I'm really excited to see what Pete puts together for this book.

@ShawnWildermuth - This is the Twitter account of Shawn Wildermuth. Shawn runs the Silverlight Tour. He does a great job of posting content related to the bleeding edge of Microsoft development platforms on his blog.

@teamsilverlight - This is the official Silverlight Team Twitter feed. This is a great feed to get Silverlight related information straight from the horse's mouth. A lot of times content is posted that links back to the official Silverlight Team blog. What's really cool is that the team regularly responds to individuals through this Twitter feed.

@timheuer - Tim Heuer is a Silverlight team member. He regularly posts information related to Silverlight through his Twitter feed and on his blog. The content of this blog is generally targeted at developers and fairly technical in nature.

@WynApse - This Twitter account posts very regular (near daily) updates of the "Cream of the Crop" in the Silverlight community. The links generally post back to the very valuable Silverlight Cream site. If you want to keep up with the latest in the Silverlight community, make sure you are watching this site.

This is my personal list that I have found valuable. I am sure there are plenty of other Silverlight Twitter folk out there that I am not aware of just yet. You can find more here. Whether I am on your list of Silverlight Twitter accounts is up to you (you can follow me here). Either way, are there any Silverlight Twitter accounts I'm missing? If so, please list them in the comments.

Thanks!

Silverlight 2 in Review and Silverlight 3 (yes Three) in Action Discussion

Silverlight has had some phenomenal success in the past six months. This success has been spread across several categories of experiences including, but not limited to:

• Historical Events
  • The Presidential Inauguration - Silverlight was used to stream the event live on the official presidential inauguration committee site and on CBS. In addition, both CNN and MSNBC used Silverlight to provide a unique view of the event thanks to some help from Photosynth.
• TV and Movie Viewers
  • Netflix is using Silverlight for its Watch Instantly feature
  • Blockbuster will be using Silverlight for it's MovieLink functionality. If the NFL would do the same, I would actually watch the NFL online (Dear NFL: If you want to push advertisements on me, you must at least provide an experience I can endure. I will not use your current viewer. You are losing revenue. You should consider using Silverlight)
• Sporting Events
  • 2008 Summer Olympics
• Utilities
  • Hard Rock Cafe is using Silverlight to display their memorabilia online.
  • AOL is using Silverlight for its rich mail client.
  • Inkubook is using Silverlight to empower individuals to build photo books online.

This is just a small sample of all of the applications that are popping up over the internet. I hope you have had the opportunity to experience one of these incredible Silverlight applications. I also hope you have learned a great deal about Silverlight. Perhaps you even learned a few things from Silverlight 2 in Action. If not, you can still pick up a copy here. Regardless, a follow-up to Silverlight 2 in Action is in being discussed (you can get a sneak peak of the features of SL3 here). I have not decided to what degree I will be involved at this time, that will be discussed at a later time. Regardless, before we get to that point, I wanted to do some refactoring and clean up Silverlight 2 in Action.

Based on the reader reviews on Amazon.com, it seems like most individuals were happy with Silverlight 2 in Action. I know that you cannot make everyone happy (as shown here). However, I do want to try to identify and remedy those flaws in Silverlight 2 in Action. We will attempt to address these flaws in Silverlight 3 in Action. With that said, would you please consider responding to the following questions:

• What was missing from Silverlight 2 in Action?
• What did you not like?

Thank you for reading! I'm sure it will be another exciting six months of Silverlight goodness!

Windows 7 - Silverlight/ASP.NET Development - That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers

Greetings,

NOTE: This article is related to the Windows Beta. The accuracy of this article may change

Today I ran into an exception that stated: "That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers". This exception was thrown when I ran my server code on Windows 7 Beta. However, the same code did not throw an exception while running from Windows Vista. I think this problem is something that other Silverlight and ASP.NET developers may run into. Because of this fact, I decided to toss together a blog post related to it. This post will provide the background of the problem and the solution I came to.

Background
I had a basic Silverlight 2 input form application. This application connects to a standard .asmx running in a Windows 7 Beta environment. This .asmx uses the Enterprise Library to connect to a SQL Server 2005 instance. This SQL Server instance resides in the same Windows 7 Beta environment. When executing the code, I received an exception that stated: "That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers". Significantly, this exact code worked perfectly on Windows Vista.

After searching for the exception, I relized the problem was a bit different than the solutions I had seen. Instead, the Windows 7 Beta seems to do something very interesting with files moved between environments.

When files are moved to a Windows 7 Beta environment, they might be blocked to help protect the computer. I noticed this when I right-clicked on one of the Enterprise Library assemblies in my application and saw the following:



Here is what I did to get my project up and running again.

Solution
In order to solve the problem I did two things. First, I clicked the "Unblock" button. If you do not see an "Unblock" button, this means the file is already unblocked. Regardless, when I clicked the button, the previous text was grayed out as shown here:



To my surprise though, this did not entirely fix the problem. I then restarted IIS. This did not fix the problem. Finally, I resorted to restarting my machine. I'm guessing I need to restart the machine considering Windows 7 is in Beta at this point. Regardless, I am happy to announce that after restarting my machine, I was able to run my code again.

It is also important to recognize that all files the executing code touches may need to be unblocked. For instance, I had to unblock three different assemblies in order to get my code to actually work (I only needed to restart once though).

Do not let this post deter you from Windows 7. The Windows 7 Beta I am running is quite impressive. At first, I did not like the new taskbar. However, I can now say that I absolutely love it. I would defininately recommend giving the Windows 7 Beta a try.

Silverlight 2 - Getting Started with the Chart Control

Getting up and running with the Chart control involves three things. First you must download the Silverlight Toolkit from the CodePlex community site. Then, you have to reference the Chart control in your Silverlight application. Finally, you must instantiate an instance of the Chart control itself. These three steps will be detailed over the course of this section. You can download the code used in this part of series here.

Downloading the Silverlight Toolkit

The Silverlight Toolkit can be retrieved from the CodePlex community site. CodePlex is a web site, provided to the developer community, by Microsoft, to host open source projects. This site enables you to create new projects, contribute to existing projects, and download software and code. The software that is of interest at the moment is the Silverlight Toolkit.
The Silverlight Toolkit can be downloaded from http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight. This toolkit is released under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). This license allows you to distribute compiled code for commercial and non-commercial purposes. This is important because it makes it easy to reference and use the Chart component in your Silverlight applications.

Referencing the Chart Control

Referencing the Chart control in your Silverlight applications can be done in two steps within Visual Studio (Referencing the control in Blend may be covered in another post). The first step involves referencing the necessary assembly. The second step usually involves creating a prefix to access the appropriate namespace in your XAML file. These two steps are shown in the following sections.

Referencing the Assembly

The Chart control is stored in the Microsoft.Windows.Controls.DataVisualzation.Charting assembly. This assembly can be referenced just like any other assembly in Visual Studio. For instance, you can right-click on your Silverlight application and select “Add Reference…” as shown here:

This step will launch a dialog that will let you choose the assembly you want to reference. In the case of this blog post, you want to reference the Microsoft.Windows.Controls.DataVisualzation.Charting assembly (which is part of the Silverlight Toolkit) as shown here:

Once the assembly has been referenced, you will notice it is added to the References folder in your Silverlight application. This is important to notice because the charting control is not part of the actual Silverlight runtime. Instead, the charting control is known as an extended control.

Extended controls are controls whose assemblies must be distributed with your Silverlight application. This will cause your Silverlight application’s .xap file to increase in size. This effect can cause your Silverlight application to take longer to download. Waiting for content to download can be an unpleasant experience. To help remove the pain associated with waiting, you may want to download extended controls on-demand. You can learn about downloading extended controls on-demand and the details of .xap files in Silverlight 2 in Action. Regardless, if you settle on distributing the 200 KB Microsoft.Windows.Controls.DataVisualzation.Charting assembly with your Silverlight application, you must create a prefix to use it in your XAML files.

Creating the Prefix

Creating a prefix to reference the Chart control is easy. The main challenge is just knowing where in the XAML file to do this. In general, you will add the prefix in the root UserControl element. For instance, you could open up the Page.xaml file that is created by default by Visual Studio and add the following line:

<UserControl x:Class="Chart01.Page"
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
  xmlns:charting="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Charting;assembly=Microsoft.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization"
  Width="400" Height="300">
  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
  </Grid>
</UserControl>

This code snippet creates a prefix called charting. This prefix is used to reach into the namespace referenced in the added statement. The charting prefix will be used throughout the other blog posts in this series. You will get your first taste of how this prefix is used when you create your first chart.

Creating a Chart

Imagine wanting to create a column chart that displays the temperatures of several cities. In order to create this chart, you must do two things. First, you must pick your data source. Once selected, you can add a Chart control and bind your data source to that Chart. This section will describe how you can perform these tasks.

Picking a Data Source

Choosing a data source is an important first step. The type of data used will help you determine what kind of chart (column, line, pie, etc) is best suited for your scenario. With Silverlight 2, it is generally best to use CLR objects as a data source. The reason why is because only CLR objects can take advantage of Silverlight 2’s powerful data binding features. To use CLR objects with a Chart, you must first create a class definition. For the sake of our example, imagine having a class called Weather that represents the weather information for a city. That class definition could look like the following:

public class Weather
{
  public string City { get; set; }
  public int HighTemp { get; set; }

  public Weather(string city, int highTemp)
  {
    this.City = city;
    this.HighTemp = highTemp;
  }
}

This class definition uses two automatic properties to create the blueprint for some weather data. This blueprint can be used to build a data source. For the sake of our example, the following method will be used to build the data source that will be used.

private List GetWeatherData()
{
  List weather = new List();
  weather.Add(new Weather("Louisville", 63));
  weather.Add(new Weather("Seattle", 53));
  weather.Add(new Weather("Los Angeles", 87));

  return weather;
}


The GetWeatherData method creates a hard-coded list of Weather items. For a more dynamic data source, you may need to use some of Silverlight’s rich networking and communication APIs. These asynchronous APIs are detailed in chapter 6 of Silverlight 2 in Action. Regardless of how you create your data source though, the data source must implement the IEnumerable interface, which supports iterations over collections. Once your collection has been identified, you can add a Chart control.

Adding a Chart Control

Adding a Chart is a straightforward task. This task can be completed at design-time by using the prefix that was defined earlier and referencing the Chart control. For instance, you could add the following code within the Page.xaml file to create a chart:

<charting:Chart x:Name="masterChart"
  Height="296" Width="596"
  Title="City Temperatures">
  <charting:Chart.Series>
    <charting:ColumnSeries Title="High"
      IndependentValueBinding="{Binding City}"
      DependentValueBinding="{Binding HighTemp}" />
  </charting:Chart.Series>
</charting:Chart>


This code snippet creates a Chart at design-time. Please notice the use of a ColumnSeries. This element, in part, tells Silverlight to create a traditional column chart. This is accomplished with the help of the IndependentValueBinding and DependentValueBinding properties. These properties and the ColumnSeries will be detailed in the next post . But first, I want to show you how to bind the Weather data to the Chart as shown here:


public Page()
{
  InitializeComponent();

  DynamicSeries series = (DynamicSeries)(masterChart.Series[0]);
  series.ItemsSource = GetWeatherData();
}


This code snippet binds a List of Weather objects to the previously created Chart when the Silverlight application starts. Notably, the data is bound to the first Series (which is the ColumnSeries mentioned previously) of the Chart. This may come as a surprise because you may want to bind directly to the Chart itself. In order to understand why you need to bind a Series within a Chart, you first need to understand the components of a Chart.

I hope this post showed you how to get started with the Chart control in your Silverlight applications. You can learn the details of building Silverlight applications in Silverlight 2 in Action (free content, review 1, review 2, review 3, review 4 [and yes, I’m using this series as a way to promote this book :)]). If you like this series, I hope that you will share it with others by either blogging or twittering about it.

Silverlight 2 - Introducing the Chart Control

Silverlight 2 was released on October 13, 2008. Here we are just about two weeks after that date and more Silverlight goodness is being released into the wild. This goodness comes in the form of the exciting new Silverlight Toolkit.

The Silverlight Toolkit is a set of controls and features that enable even richer interactive applications. These applications can be enhanced with the help of some new styling and theming features available in the Silverlight Toolkit. In addition, this toolkit provides a flurry of new controls including the AutoCompleteBox, DockPanel, Expander, Label, NumericUpAndDown, TreeView, ViewBox, and WrapPanel. Each of these controls empowers you to go in new directions with your applications. However, the control that I find most exciting is the Chart control.

The Chart control is a FREE charting solution provided by Microsoft and does not require any additional installation by your users. Currently, this solution empowers you to present data through five different types of charts. These types include bar, column, line, pie, and scatter charts. These five chart types will be detailed over the next three blog posts. But first, take a look at the default look and feel of these charts over some fictional data.

Bar Chart (download)

Column Chart (download)

Line Chart (download)

Pie Chart (download)

Scatter Chart (download)

As you can see, the Chart control can vividly display data in four traditional ways. If there is another way you want to show your data, don’t worry. The Chart control provides an extensible control model that can be leveraged by the community (including you and me). Because of this, it won’t be long before the most highly requested charting features are added. For instance, you may want a pyramid chart, which is not currently available. You, me, or someone else can contribute to the Chart control through CodePlex. Because of this, I would recommend subscribing to the Silverlight Toolkit’s project updates. For now though, I would like to show you how to use the Chart control that is currently available.

I will cover the Chart control in the next post. This post can be found here. Hopefully after this post you will feel primed to use the Chart control in your Silverlight applications. You can learn the details of building Silverlight applications in Silverlight 2 in Action (free content, review 1, review 2, review 3, review 4 [and yes, I’m using this series as a way to promote this book :)]). If you like this series, I hope that you will share it with others by either blogging or twittering about it.

Please Ignore - Testing something for next week

Silverlight 2 - Templating Video

Greetings!

Today we released a free video that covers templating in Silverlight 2. This video is just under eight minutes in length and can be found here. It covers some of the high level concepts of templating in Silverlight 2. A lot more of the technical details can be found in Silverlight 2 in Action.

Thank you for reading and watching!

P.S. I apologize if I sound congested in the video. I was under-the-weather when I shot it. I'm better now though :)

Silverlight 2 RTW - Forward Ho!

Greetings!

I am excited about two things right now. First, as you have probably heard by now, Silverlight 2 has reached RTW (Release To Web). Second, Silverlight 2 in Action is finished. Over the course of this post I will provide you with some details surrounding these two thrilling announcements (at least IMHO).

Silverlight 2 RTW
The lead up to Silverlight 2 has been pretty amazing. In fact, I hadn't realized how amazing it was until I reviewed the official press release. Even more incredible though is the RTW milestone that was just reached. The honest-to-goodness, full-blown, install-it-on-every-machine version is available here! In addition, there are some more goodies coming as described in the press release. These goodies include:

• More controls through the Silverlight control pack. This control pack will be released under the MS-Pl and should be available around the PDC. The controls in this pack include: Accordian, AutoComplete, DockPanel, ViewBox, TreeView, and more to be annnounced later.
• Eclipse Tools for Silverlight. Personally, this makes me think of my Java days. I am very excited to see the Silverlight tool set extend beyond Visual Studio. I believe this will help the Silverlight development community flourish. If you are a Java developer, or know of a Java developer, and have questions about Silverlight, please do not hesitate to contact me. I am more than willing to share my experiences working with Java on a number of levels and comparing and contrasting them to my experiences with .NET / Silverlight and Flash

As excited as I am about the release, I have to say I am personally more excited about the completion of Silverlight 2 in Action

Silverlight 2 in Action
This project started in May of 2007 and the time requirements have steadily increased. Most recently, John and I have been working feverishly to finalize Silverlight 2 in Action, while ensuring technical accuracy with the RTW release. At this time I am pleased to announce that I literally just gave my "go-ahead" to push the print button. Printing will begin tommorow (Wednesday). Print copies will be available at the PDC conference if you are going. If you have ordered it through Amazon.com or another channel, thank-you, and you should receive your copy around the PDC time period. I am sorry, I do not have more specific dates to announce at this time. I am working to get the code for the book posted this week.

There are a lot of individuals to thank. Those individuals are listed in the book itself. However, for the individuals that generally read this blog, I would like to specifically thank the Silverlight team and John Stockton.

The Silverlight team at Microsoft was incredible throughout this process. To those individuals that say Microsoft is not committed to openness and interoperability, I say horse dung. From January of 2007 on I have personally witnessed a commitment to these items. I am confident with the announcment of the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight that this is a direction instead of a reaction to some naysayers. In the future, I hope to write a blog post about my experiences working with Microsoft over the course of Silverlight 2 in Action.

Next up is John. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, John had to sort of step in at the last minute and take the reigns of chapter 6. I think John did an incredible job with chapter 6. I sincerely hope you enjoy John's efforts and I definately appreciate his help with this. He has had to endure quite a bit in a small amount of time. Without John's dedication, I think this book would have been lacking in some areas. However, because of John's commitment, I believe we have a book that we are both happy with and others seem to be happy with as well. If you enjoy it, I hope you'll join us in the Facebook Fan Club.

What's Next
I have been asked what I plan to do next. I really don't like to talk about myself and I think that is beyond the scope of this blog. However, I will share what I plan to do with Silverlight now that Silverlight 2 in Action is done.

First off, I will not be writing Silverlight 3 (or whatever the next version of Silverlight is called) in Action. This experience has taken a lot of energy out of me. It has challenged me in so many ways and pushed me to my extremes. I know it sounds cliche, but I would have never guessed it going into the project. Instead I will be focusing more on the Silverlight platform itself.

This blog will return to its format before Silverlight 2 in Action. Among other things, I would like to post some details on the ListControls in Silverlight. I would like to talk about templating in more detail. I want to blog about my experiences working with MS during Silverlight 2 in Action. This is just a sampling of how I want this blog to focus on Silverlight going forward.

I also plan to more regularly speak and provide webcasts. However, providing all of this content does not directly drive adoption. That is what Silverlight needs now. In order to do that we as developers need to create applications that users want. Because of this, a lot of my time will be focused on a side project I hope to finish in the March 2009 timeframe. This project will use Silverlight and I think it will help drive some adoption. Or maybe I'm just being overly optimistic :)

Either way, go and download Silverlight 2 now. Get your development environment setup. Learn about the details of Silverlight 2 and build something smoking hot! :)