Silverlight - Out of Browser Presentation - Slides and Code

Hello,

I apologize for not blogging for a while. I've been in the process of starting my own company and launching our first startup. Along with that adventure, I have started a new blog. On that blog, you will find slides and code for a presentation I have created called "Silverlight - An Out-of-Browser Experience". The direct link to this blog post is: http://blog.ecofic.com/?p=108

Because I have started that new blog, I will no longer be posting "new" content here. Rather, I will post several redirects to that new blog as new content appears.

Thank your for your readership. It has been a privilege to serve the Silverlight community in this manner. It is not stopping though, rather just changing locations. I hope you'll move your RSS feeders to the new location.

Sincerely,
Chad Campbell

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

This post has been moved to my new blog. You can find this post at http://blog.ecofic.com/?p=155.

Thank you for reading!

Silverlight 2 - Introducing the Chart Control

This post has been moved to my new blog. This post can not be found at http://blog.ecofic.com/?p=133.

Thank you for reading!

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 in Action - RC0 ready!

Greetings,

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the first release candidate of Silverlight 2 was made available late Thursday evening. This exciting release includes a bevy of enhancements and changes from Silverlight 2 Beta 2. A lot of these enhancements and changes are outlined here and here. It is important to acknowledge that Silverlight 2 RC0 is only intended for developers and should not be used for applications that are publicly visible yet. This release is designed to help you migrate your Beta 2 applications to the RTW release, which will be coming in the near future. To further help you in this migration, John Stockton and I have been burning the midnight oil on Silverlight 2 in Action.

Silverlight 2 in Action has been carefully reviewed to ensure consistency with the Silverlight 2 release candidate. Because RC0 is feature complete, we will be printing the book based on this build. If you would like a jump start on the fun, the content is available right now to MEAP customers. If you would like to become a MEAP customer you can do so by visiting here. When you do this, make sure to use the coupon code "slso35 " to save an extra 35%. Please feel free to share this code with others. This is a gift to those of you that are just as excited about Silverlight 2 as we are.

At this point, John and I are running through the book one final time to ensure accuracy before we hit the physical “print” button. There is a lot of content including:

• 12 chapters
• 423 pages
• 295 snippets

A website with all of the code from the snippets and walkthroughs should be available later this week. Because of this, if you are a MEAP customer, you can get the code associated with the snippets very soon.

Chad

P.S. I’m speaking on 2 separate topics at the IndyTechFest on October 4. If you are visiting this great day of events, stop by and say “hey”.

FREE Silverlight 2 EBook Raffle

Greetings,

I've been heads down working on Silverlight 2 in Action over the past couple of months. With the release of Silverlight Beta 2, we are ready to make a couple of announcements. First, I would like to announce a raffle for Silverlight 2 in Action. Then, after providing a brief history of the book, I would like to announce the roadmap for the book.

Raffle

In celebration of the release of Beta, I have been given FIVE (5) coupons for one FREE Ebook to distribute. In order to provide everyone with an interest in Silverlight 2 an equal chance at this content, I have decided to create a raffle. The winners for this raffle will be randomly selected on Saturday, June 21st, 2008.

In order to enter the raffle, please visit www.farfle.com and fill out the form. You will receive a confirmation email after you fill out the form. If you do not receive a confirmation within 10 minutes of submitting, please post a comment on this blog. My web hosting provider has been having some issues, and I want to make sure your entry gets in. Regardless, please note that you may only enter once, duplicate entries will be removed.

On Saturday, June 21st, 2008 I will randomly select FIVE (5) winners. On that day you will receive one e-mail that will inform you if you or another individual has won. If you win, you will have 48 hours to respond. If you do not respond within 48 hours, another particpant will be selected and you will not receive the coupon.

Your e-mail address WILL be kept private. In addition, I will NOT spam you to buy the book. If you do not win, don't worry, you will still have the opportunity to get the content thanks to Manning Publishing's Early Access Program. If you are not familiar with this process you can find out more here.

Silverlight 2 in Action - History

Believe it or not, I started this book in the middle of May of 2007. In other words, this book has been in development for over a year. I spent a lot of time playing with Silverlight and WPF to help me write the content. I want to publicly thank the MEAP adopters that have provided some excellent feedback. Especially Ben Hayat. Ben has been encouraging and a positive voice. He has also provided some excellent feedback. I also want to thank my publisher, Manning Publishing, as well as my editor, Cynthia Kane, for their patience and guidance on this project. But we're not done yet...

Silverlight 2 in Action - Moving Forward

Currently, there are 8 chapters available through the MEAP program. These chapters are going through some finalizations. Because of this, there are still some remnants from SL2 Beta 1. Those will be fixed before we publish. If you see "bugs" in the content, please do not hesitate to let me know. I have some time scheduled to go over the whole book one final time to make sure it is all correct before we actually publish the book. MEAP customers get the updated content as it becomes available.

In regards to the remaining 4 chapters, those will come very quickly. In fact, I just sent off the o.k. to prepare chapter 12 for MEAP-ing. So that should be available next week. Chapter 4 is about 90% complete. Chapter 10 is about 80% complete. I will be focussing on Chapter 10 this weekend and I hope to finish it up. Chapter 6 is sort of in limbo right now. It is a bit of a long story, but I hope to make an announcement around that content during my next blog post.

Thank you and Good Luck!

Silverlight - A Gold Medal Winner

During the Consumer Electronics Show keynote presentation, Bill Gates announced that Silverlight will exclusively be used by NBC for the 2008 Beijing Olympics!

This is REALLY cool. This should definately help to get Silverlight installed on more individuals machines. You can find out more about the announcement here.

Silverlight - Discussion over X-Box Live (Halo 3)

Hello!

As this incredibly busy, yet exciting year winds down, I think some fun is in order.

I would like to once again organize an open discussion on Silverlight over X-Box Live. If you would like to participate, here is some info to put on your calendar:

Who: Anyone
What: Silverlight Discussion
Where: X-Box Live (Halo 3)
When: Thursday, December 27, 2007 @ 10 p.m. EST

If you would like to particpate, please post a comment with

1. Your Gamertag (this will not be published)
2. Anything specific you would like to discuss regarding Silverlight
3. Any game type preferences

Once I have received your comment, I will send you a friend invite using my gamertag. In addition, I will be trying to put together an agenda to make the time valuable and fun for everyone.

Sometime in the new year I will put together an old skool edition with Halo 2.

Merry Christmas,
Chad

Silverlight - Presentation

Hello,

I presented on Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 2.0 (previously 1.1) this evening. The presentation was given at the Kentucky .NET Developers Association meeting. As promised during the meeting, my slides are available here.

Overall, I was really encouraged to see the excitement swirling around Silverlight. The content in the presentation is slightly modified from the presentations I have given in the past. Regardles, there is one thing that I feel I need to reiterate to those who are just reading the slides.

As Tim Sneath has mentioned in his recent post, Silverlight 1.1 is not ready for use in production.

With that said, I hope to turn the content of the presentation into a webcast in the near future. This will allow those outside of the locations I've spoken at to see the content. When this occurs, you can bet I will make a post here. Because of this, make sure you are subscribed to the RSS Feed.

Silverlight - The Interview

Larry Clarkin and Dave Bost are two of Microsoft's evangelists in the midwest area. They have started a new site called "The Thirsty Developer".

As it turns out, they were nice enough to discuss with me the Silverlight presentation I gave at the IndyTechFest. They have since posted the interview here. I should warn you that you will need to have QuickTime (Where's the 'Light :)).

I'm fairly happy with how the interview went. This was my first time doing this kind of thing, and because of it, I do not feel I got the point across I was going for. I wanted to be more explicit in stating how one of the really great things about Silverlight 1.1 is it's ability to work with data and communicate over the internet. Because of this, I feel that Silverlight provides some extremely valuable offerings even if you do not have a need for a rich visual experience. For instance, you could use Silverlight to simply work with your web services, in place of JavaScript (AJAX, DOJO, etc). You can learn more about this in my book (shameless plug, I know).

On an unrelated note, Mike Harsh posted a message mentioning a "Service Release" for Silverlight 1.0. To learn more about the features, go here.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Popfly info and some humor

1. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Popfly has officially gone Beta. In conjunction with this, the invitation approach has been removed, and you only need a Windows Live ID to use Popfly. In celebration of this, a contest for creating Popfly creations has been announced. Personally, I have been using Popfly since about May or June and I'm pretty excited about the potential surrounding it. In addition, I think it is a great tool to show to individuals when they ask about Silverlight.
2. Dave Bost has posted the Buck Foley Speech from the IndyTechFest. Personally, I found this to be a refreshingly humorous opening to a technical event. Great Job Buck!
3. Don't forget to sign up for the FREE Ebook Raffle!

Lastly, this blog feels like it has been a spam machine as of late. Once the "Silverlight 1.1 in Action" book is completed, I promise I will be posting some more valuable content. Thanks for reading, I sincerely appreciate it.

Silverlight - Events

Adam Kinney introduced me to the very useful Silverlight Events Wiki. This is a great way to learn about and post Silverlight related events. Enjoy!

Silverlight - August Presentations

Hello,

Over course of this summer, Jeremy Sublett and I have been organizing a "Day of .NET" event in Louisville. I will be presenting at this event, as well as, at Microsoft's DevCares event on Silverlight. The dates and links to events can be found here:

Date	Location	Event	Topic
08.28.07	Indianapolis	DevCares	Microsoft Silverlight In-Depth
08.31.07	Louisville	KY - Day of .NET	Silverlight Up The Web

I hope to see you there. Don't be shy, feel free to introduce yourself. I look forward to meeting you.

Silverlight 1.0 - How to show a line being drawn

Recently in the official Silverlight forum, several individuals have asked how to dynamically show a line being drawn. This post contains code that will animate a line to look just like the following:



The Silverlight model makes this type of animation very simple. Everything is handled within the XAML code. The XAML code looks like the following:

<Canvas xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Width="300" Height="200">
<Canvas.Triggers>
<EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Canvas.Loaded">
<BeginStoryboard>
<Storyboard Name="lineStoryboard">
<DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="mainLine" Storyboard.TargetProperty="X2" From="1" To="290" Duration="0:0:8" AutoReverse="false" />
</Storyboard>
</BeginStoryboard>
</EventTrigger>
</Canvas.Triggers>

<Line Name="mainLine" Canvas.Left="5" Canvas.Top="5" X1="0" Y1="0" X2="1" Y2="0" StrokeThickness="2" Stroke="#C0504D"></Line>

<Canvas Name="playAgainCanvas" MouseLeftButtonUp="playAgainCanvas_MouseLeftButtonUp" Canvas.Top="10" Canvas.Left="102">
<Rectangle RadiusX="5" RadiusY="5" Width="95" Height="40" Fill="#9BBB59"></Rectangle>
<TextBlock Text="Play Again" FontFamily="Verdana" Canvas.Left="5" Canvas.Top="10" FontSize="14" FontWeight="Bold" Foreground="white" />
</Canvas>
</Canvas>

The steps, which are derived from the Silverlight SDK, are as follows:

1. Create a DoubleAnimation. In our case, we are concerned about animating the line being drawn, so the following are key attributes are set:
   • StoryBoard.TargetProperty - Set to X2 because we want to make the line grow in length.
   • From - Set this value to the default X2 position.
   • To - Set this value to the end result (290)
   • Duration - Set this value to 8 seconds just to make it easy to see the line grow.


2. Place the DoubleAnimation inside of a Storyboard. We give the Storyboard a Name so that we can access it from the client-side code-behind file. This allows us to restart the animation through an event handler associated with the "Play Again" button.


3. Begin the Storyboard when the Canvas is loaded. This is accomplished through the use of a Trigger

Animation will be covered in Chapter 4 of my upcoming book "Silverlight 1.1 in Action".

I want to apologize to anyone who has been trying to access code samples over the past couple of weeks. I use StreamLoad to host my code samples and they have had some problems over the past couple of weeks. Everything seems to be working better now. If the problems persist, I will look into an alternative solution.

Project Information
Source Code:	here
Requirements:	Silverlight 1.0

Silverlight 1.1 in Action - The Book

Hello!

I am currently working on a book that will target Silverlight 1.1, called "Silverlight 1.1 in Action" and I am seeking some feedback from the community. The first half of the book will address the UI elements of Silverlight, while the second half will discuss the .NET Framework provided with Silverlight 1.1.

Because the first half of the book is squarely focussed on UI components, I thought it would be nice to add some additional value to the book by explaining how to create the various UI components using Microsoft Expression Blend. The incorporation of Blend has caused some internal debate between me and myself. However, I feel that incorporating Blend is important because it may introduce readers to a new, productive tool, while at the same time, helping readers build a vocabularly that can help to communicate with designers more effectively. Essentially, for each UI element, I want to provide the following:

• An illustration that shows the UI element that is created
• The XAML that corresponds with the illustration
• A walkthrough of how to use Blend to create the UI element.

My debate is as follows:

Option 1 - Provide all three items (the illustration, the XAML, and the walkthrough) for each UI component. Here are the advantages/disadvantages I see with this approach:

• Advantages
  • Readers do not have to flip to the back of the book for Blend content.
  • Encourages the use of Blend while reading the text
• Disadvantages
  • Takes up a lot of space. This may cause the reader to skip pages to get back into the developer focussed content.

Here is a sample of creating a MediaElement to give you a feel for how this may look in the text if Option 1 is used.

Option 2 - Provide only the illustration and the XAML in the text. Then, reference a walkthrough which is provided in an appendix, instead of in the actual text. Here are the advantages/disadvantages I see with this approach:

• Advantages
  • Keeps the reader focussed on the developer related content.
• Disadvantages
  • Treats Blend as a second-rate citizen (it's not, it is especially helpful if you are creating animations)
  • Causes the reader to flip between the actual text and an appendix, this searching can be annoying.

Here is a sample of creating a MediaElement to give you a feel for how this may look in the text if Option 2 is used:


Personally, I am leaning towards Option 2, however, I wanted to seek some feedback before going too far down this path. I look forward to your comments and thank you for your help!

Silverlight 1.1 - Slide Deck

If you thought I was done posting content this week after the video walkthrough, you were wrong :)! I presented on Silverlight at the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association monthly meeting on June 16, 2007. I created a Point Point slide deck (complete with notes) that provides a high-level overview of Silverlight.

In addition, I also provided a walkthrough of creating a media player using Silverlight 1.1 during the meeting.

Feel free to use the content of the slidedeck, I only ask that if you use it, you please post a comment explaining what works and what didn't work with your presentation.

Personally, I feel this is a pretty solid overview especially given the time constraints of the presentation. Enjoy!

Silverlight 1.1 - How to Create a Media Player

During the June 16th, 2007 Indianapolis .NET Developers Association monthly meeting, I will be presenting an overview of Silverlight. In addition to the overview, I thought it might be helpful to provide a walkthrough of creating a media player using Silverlight 1.1 (the one with the .NET Framework).

In order to prepare for the presentation and provide the content to individuals after the meeting, I decided to create this webcast. Enjoy!

I apologize for the quality of the video, I'm still trying to get the webcast thing down. I wanted everything to be large enough so everyone could read the code. If anyone has some suggestions in terms of how to create a better webcast with Windows Media Encoder, please let me know. I look forward to your feedback and comments on this presentation.

Project Information
Presentation:	here
Duration:	30:58
Source Code:	here
Requirements:	Silverlight 1.1 Alpha