Silverlight Guide

See Silverlight 2.0 put to use in innovative ways in this week’s additions to the Community Gallery.

Visit the Silverlight Showcase to build and email a Valentine card, use the Weather Widget to return a forecast, get the source code for a Slide Show control, plus more!

See the rest here:
Twelve New Items in the Showcase

Community members have contributed new controls to the Gallery, including Slide.Show, Countdown Timer, and Draggable Window. See Silverlight forms controls in action with Silverlight Controls, and use Silverlight to Colour
the World.

View post:
5 New Controls in the Gallery

With the new year comes a fresh battle for the hearts and minds of developers. Microsoft clearly set the stage for a showdown with Google Inc. with the launch of its Volta toolset just as 2007 was winding down. The company conveniently launched Volta in early December just as Google hosted its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) Conference, a three-day educational confab for those wanting to gain proficiency with the GWT. Both the GWT and Volta allow developers to use their existing expertise in Java- or .NET-supported languages, respectively, to write applications that will run on any device supporting JavaScript.

And thus the Java versus .NET debate enters a new phase.

The JavaScript Problem
“Microsoft has saturated the enterprise market with Visual Studio and the other part of that market is owned by Eclipse,” says Dave Thomas, founder and chairman of Ottawa-based Bedarra Research Labs Ltd. Thomas is a longtime programming expert and is taking a look at Volta, which will probably end up being an enhancement or add-on to Visual Studio.

Microsoft’s tools battle has now moved outside the enterprise to the world of rich Web applications, where it’s by no means a shoe-in. There it faces entrenched market-leading tools from Adobe Systems Inc. and extremely popular new-age tools from such companies as Google and eBay Inc.

The common denominator for the latest Microsoft-Google salvo is down-and-dirty JavaScript. The appeal of both toolsets will be for the many developers who really “hate JavaScript,” Thomas says.

“They’re very agitated but they have to use it,” he continues. “This is historically problematic because the browsers have been incompatible and lack fancy development tools.”

The problem with JavaScript is that most developers have to “program by experimentation,” Thomas adds. “JavaScript is simply not considered a serious language by mainstream development types. That’s a problem because JavaScript is everywhere.”

Google acknowledged this with the initial release of the GWT in May 2006. The stated goal at the time was to make development of AJAX apps easier. Google Maps and Gmail, unsurprisingly, were cited as examples of good AJAX implementations.

“Writing dynamic Web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90 percent of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between Web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing and re-using AJAX components difficult and fragile,” read the GWT blog on the day of launch. “[The] GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front-end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.”

Contrast that to the Volta message: .NET developers can use their language of choice (if it’s .NET-supported) and once it’s in Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) form, Volta will parse that out to JavaScript.

“The idea with Volta is you have C# developers who are used to doing their own thing with Windows, and as long as they compile to the Microsoft runtime, Volta can spit it out for JavaScript,” says Sean Christman, experience architect for EffectiveUI, a Denver-based expert in developing multimedia Web applications such as the eBay Desktop.

Competition Heats Up
The interesting thing about Volta and its Silverlight cousin is that it’s an acknowledgement by Microsoft that it doesn’t control every client device. Silverlight is Microsoft’s plug-in for creating dynamic cross-browser, cross-platform .NET applications.

“Microsoft has had this environment, which is where they’ve kept developers for a long time,” Christman says. “Microsoft wants all of its developers to stay with its toolset and output to other things — so you export to Silverlight or a mobile device but your core development remains in the Windows world.”

As evidence that this Visual Studio/Windows dominance is being challenged, an Evans Data Corp. survey this summer found that of 400 developers surveyed, 64.8 percent were targeting Windows this year, down from 74 percent last year. And, that percentage is expected to drop another couple of points this year.

Evans CEO John Andrews says the reason goes back to scripting languages, of which JavaScript is the most widely used: It has three times more developers than PHP, Ruby or Python, according to the Evans report on North American developers. “JavaScript is just huge and one reason is its maturity,” Andrews says.

The other interesting fracture line in app development is the race between Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe, which now includes the Macromedia Flash and Flex franchises, is the darling of the Web development set, and Microsoft’s desire to win over companies like EffectiveUI is one huge motivator behind Silverlight. However, Silverlight, unlike Volta, requires a download of Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime and thus has a substantial footprint, where Volta only needs the JavaScript virtual machine on the end device.Via Redmond Developer News

On February 12, Microsoft will deliver, via its Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) automatic update mechanism for businesses, an update to Internet Explorer 7 that is Windows-Genuine-Advantage-free.

Microsoft made the IE release — known as the IE 7 Installation and Availability Update — available  on its software download site in October 2007. Microsoft did not push the update automatically to customers at that time.

The new update disables the WGA validation checking process that has been required for IE 7 installation, enabling IE 7 to run on Windows builds that are not deemed to be “genuine.” WGA is the anti-piracy mechanism Microsoft uses to check whether users are running non-pirated  Windows before allowing them to download certain product updates, fixes, white papers and other related information.

The IE 7 Installation and Availability Update includes other new features, as well. The menu bar is on by default in this new update. A “first run experience” page for new users is added, as well. The page prompts users to select a default seach provider, set phishing-filter settings, opt into using ClearType, etc.

via ZDNet Blogs

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You can achieve the startling effect of introducing sharp lines within a linear gradient by adding two GradientStops at the same offset, using different, and reinforcing colors.

Full tutorial

Silverlight Fire Starter is a one day event introducing Silverlight to both developers and designers

The original Fire Starter presentations given at the Redmond campus are now available for viewing or downloading at Mix University

Silverlight, like the rest of the Common Language Runtime, is in theory language-agnostic. In the past it has posed some problems for dynamic languages, which lead to the development of the Dynamic Language Runtime or DLR. The DLR provides a unified object model for dynamic languages and the ability to host just-in-time compilers needed for so-called scripting languages.

Tomas Petricek is leveraging Silverlight and the DLR to allow PHP developers to use their current skill set and libraries on the client. The core of this setup is two files, PhpNetCore.dll and PhpNetClassLibrary.dll. The first is a PHP compiler for .NET, the latter a collection of common PHP functions. When referenced from an XAML file, they allow PHPX files to be loaded and run from within Silverlight.

You can learn more about Silverlight/PHP integration on Tomas Petricek’s blog.

For this, you will need to install Expression Encoder to encode the mp3 and apply all the cool touches to it. For this, I didn’t want to use any of the built in players that come with Encoder because they were all intended for videos, so I wanted one that was specifically for audio, so one quick search later took me to the Silverlight Audio Player. Download the most recent source code, and in the zip file you download will be a folder called “SilverlightAudioPlayer”; copy that folder into your %Program Files%\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 1.0\Templates\en\ folder (or whichever language you have installed). Now we can begin.

Import your audio file into the open job (File > Import…), and on the right hand side in the settings section, we need to make sure that the final file size is less than 22mb, so adjust it accordingly:

Next we need to set what the output is going to be like, so go to the output section:

You’ll see that the template selected is the AudioGrey one, this is the audio player we added to our template folder earlier.

In my interview, you will note that I added chapter points to the areas specified in the blog entry, to do this we go to the Medadata section. At the specific points of the audio, add a marker and that will be your chapter point:

Once the chapter points are all done we and you’re happy with everything else, you can then encode the project by simply clicking Encode.

Packaging your project for Silverlight Streaming

After the encoding has finished, go to the output folder, and create a new xml file and call it manifest.xml. Now this is the part that I had to spend some time looking up, as I could find no information on dev.live.com about the manifest file and what needs to go in it, in the end I found something on Tim Sneath’s blog about it and went from there. So how should this xml file look? Like this:

<SilverlightApp>
<loadFunction>StartWithParent</loadFunction>
<jsOrder>
<js>MicrosoftAjax.js</js>
<js>PreviewMedia.js</js>
<js>EmePlayer.js</js>
<js>player.js</js>
<js>startPlayer.js</js>
</jsOrder>
</SilverlightApp>

To get the information that goes in here we need to look at the html file that got created when we encoded using Encoder and each javascript file needs putting in as a <js> element in the xml file, making sure you put them in the correct order. The <loadFunction> tag uses the function that’s called to load the Silverlight app:

Now for my player, this is where I deviated from what’s in the html file, I didn’t use StartPlayer_0 as that wasn’t working for me that great and went with most of the others which uses StartWithParent. To find whether I could use StartWithParent, I went into StartPlayer.js; whilst in there, I also changed the app to not autoplay by setting the autoPlay property to be false:

So my final manifest.xml file looked like this:

<SilverlightApp>
<loadFunction>StartWithParent</loadFunction>
<jsOrder>
<js>MicrosoftAjax.js</js>
<js>Silverlight.js</js>
<js>BasePlayer.js</js>
<js>PlayerStrings.js</js>
<js>player.js</js>
<js>StartPlayer.js</js>
</jsOrder>
</SilverlightApp>

Now we come to actually package the project, in the output folder select all the files that aren’t *.csproj files or *.html files:

Add these files to a zip file (Right click > Send To… > Compressed zip folder), and then we head on to http://silverlight.live.com/ to upload the project. If you haven’t created an account on the Silverlight Streaming site, you will need to do that. If you have an account, then click on Manage Applications and then Upload Silverlight Application; give the application a name, and point to the zip file we created, and simply upload that.

When that has uploaded, you will then get a page that shows you how you can put the application into your website:

For our site though, this isn’t a possibility, and it might not be for you, so this is where we can use the iFrame link:

<iframe src=http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/<user_id>/<app_name>/iframe.html frameborder=”0″ width=”415″ scrolling=”no” height=”50″></iframe>. The user_id can be got from going to the Manage Account page, it’s the shorted of the two, and the app_name is whatever you gave the name when you uploaded.

And that’s it. Put that iframe code in your page and you’re now streaming your Silverlight App right on your website.

via Liveside