Rants Tagged with “Silverlight”
If you want to know more about Silverlight now, you can pick up Chris Sells and Ian Griffith's book, "Programming WPF: Second Edition". The rough cut edition is available now from O'Reilly with the final print edition coming soon. I wrote the Silverlight Appendix for that book. The Rough Cut includes the Appendix (as well as a great WPF) with its old WPF/E moniker, but the release will include the fully silver-lit version.
In addition, i'll have a "Silverlight Short Cut" available soon from O'Reilly in time for MIX (By end of April). I'll let you know in this space when that is available for download! If you're unfamilliar with Short Cuts, here's O'Reilly description from their website:
Short Cuts are PDF documents that spotlight one specific topic, usually in fewer than 100 pages. Whether it's a first look at a brand new technology, a quick reference, or a thorough explanation of a narrow but crucial subject, Short Cuts bring you focused information in an easy-to-use, portable package.
There will be a new home for Silverlight launch on April 30th (for MIX). That site will be at http://silverlight.net. I assume it will be a new site ala asp.net, windowsforms.net, etc.
Note the .net part of the web address...I was confused last night when they launched the new name and noticed that http://silverlight.com was a .mac hosted web page. I wonder if they couldn't get the rights to the domain or they have something tricky up there sleeve.
Speaking tricky, I have talked with the team for months about lots of topics, including the training class I did for them some months back on Silverlight (WPF/E). I asked several times why the host object was called "aghost". They seemed to always avoid the question...now I know why. Mike Harsh explains that they had they name for months now and the "ag" in aghost was in reference to the chemical name for silver (AG). Tricky...
I am really glad to hear the the WPF/E has finally released the real name of the technology as "Silverlight". I think I will grow to like it...it is certaily an improvement over WPF/E. I am just glad it isn't something like "Windows Internet Multimedia Presentation System" like I feared.
.jpg)
I've created a simple template for creating a new WPF/E template for Blend. Simply download the .zip file and extract it your Blend directory (usually c:\program files\microsoft expression\blend 1.0\). Once you do that you can "Add New Item..." and add a WPF/E Asset like so:
Let me know if you have any problems...
Mike Harsh has announced the availability of the new WPF/E samples that are compable with the February CTP of WPF/E. Three new samples are added, including the very cool Grand Piano sample that shows how the new keyboard handling is done. Check out the Grand Piano sample live here (use the bottom two rows of characters on the keyboard to play the piano).
I've updated my video player to include support for the new Full Screen mode in the February 2007 CTP of WPF/E. Click the up arrow button on the app for a full screen version of the video!
The February 2007 WPF/E CTP is out and the changes are significant (and fun). My favorites are:
- Keyboard Events (yippie)
- Simple Text Measurement
- Full Screen Mode (wah!?!)
- Downloader support
- New Children to complete the iteration collection
I was hoping they were adding a "Button" class in this drop, but nope. Perhaps in the next release. Here is the documentation on the changes:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232842.aspx
The February release of the CTP is available (just in time since the old WPF/E timed-out this afternoon). According to Mike Harsh, a new SDK and samples will be available soon. I've updated my examples we well. Here are bunch of key links:
In response to a question on MSDN, I crufted up a really simple SideBar gadget for Vista using WPF/E as the user interface. (It just shows a simple animation when first added to the bar). SideBar (and perhaps Live) Gadgets are likely to be a fun place to use WPF/E. You can download and install it here (assuming you already have WPF/E runtime installed:
WPFE Sample Gadget
Hopefully this is the last fix for a bit. I asked about a better solution for the custom HTTP handler hack that the control used on the Developmentor .NET Mailing Lists (an excellent source of answers for those of you that don't know about it). To my rescue was Efran Cobisi, who pointed me to this great article on using WebResources. This is exactly what I wanted. Works great. The new version uses the WebResource so it no longer requires any modification to the web.config. Wahoo!
Here's a pic of it in action:
