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• Registering for the AOL Mail Client

  I mentioned yesterday that the Hard Rock memorabilia application was live already at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com . The AOL Silverlight-based mail client is not live yet, but they've just opened up their pre-registration site for testers who want to be the first to try out the new application, in just a few weeks' time. You can sign up here: http://ria.mail.aol.com/ . In case you didn't see the demo of this application either at the keynote or online, it's cool because it shows how Silverlight isn't just about flashy gradients or animations, but it's emerging as a solid RIA framework for building web-based applications that have the performance of a desktop application. It's not that you can't build a mail client in AJAX, obviously, but having client-side compiled .NET code, isolated storage for caching and a powerful rendering engine that supports control templates means that you're not relying on a chatty back-and-forth with a high latency remote web server. I've been using the application first-hand for demos over the last week, and there's nothing like it for performance - being able to flip back and forward in milliseconds from folder to folder takes all the pain out of web-based mail. This application makes AOL a real contender in the free webmail space, and it really raises the bar for the experience that users will expect from a web-based mail interface. Make sure you sign up! Posted Mar 06 2008, 11:27 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: Silverlight, ria, mix08, silverlight 2.0

• Video.Show 1.0 Released to Web

  After three public preview releases, I'm proud to announce the final version of Video.Show , a ready-to-run solution for hosting video content on the web! You might be interested in Video.Show if: Your company or school wants to distribute e-learning or educational content over the web for internal or external access; You're creating the next YouTube-style site and you want somewhere to start; You want to share home movies with your family and friends via your own personal site, rather than uploading them to somewhere public like YouTube or MSN Soapbox; You're running a conference or event and you want to make the materials available for anyone else to watch; You're a hosting provider and you want to offer your customers a way to store and share videos; You simply want to learn how to build a great AJAX web site experience with Microsoft technologies. We built Video.Show to enable all the above scenarios and many more! Getting started with Video.Show is easy: all you need is a machine with Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005 Express and Expression Encoder ; the software is built to guide you through a few simple configuration steps (setting an admin password and obtaining a Silverlight Streaming key), and then you're up and running. The application is broadly licensed for commercial or non-commercial purposes and full source code is available for review or modification. For an end-user, we've designed Video.Show to be straightforward to use, both for uploading new videos and for browsing existing videos. The very first thing you'll see when you visit a Video.Show-based site is the "video wall", which is designed to let you browse through video thumbnails without having to navigate from page to page. You can hover over any thumbnail to see a short preview of the video, or click on it to play the video in a full-size view. One nice touch is the way that the rest of the interface fades down when you play a video - this was designed to subtly imitate the way that movie theaters fade the lights when the show starts. As you're watching a video, you can add comments; but unlike typical sites where the comments stand alone, with Video.Show they are triggered by marker points during the video so you can connect the comment to a specific scene. From a developer perspective, Video.Show was designed to be a showcase of our full web technology platform. It's said from time to time that beautiful code has more to do with art... Posted Feb 11 2008, 02:26 PM by Tim Sneath Filed under: Silverlight, silverlight streaming, sample, ria, web

• Flotzam: Mashing up the Web

  Have you seen Flotzam ? It's a fun mash-up that Karsten and Tim put together that aggregates a bunch of different data sources: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and indeed any general RSS feed. You can install it either as an application or a screen saver, and it's a nice way to see what's going on out there on the "tubes". Karsten has coined the term panopticon to describe it (from the Greek, meaning all seeing ); to me, this feels like it has the potential to form the first step of a project to build the ultimate, pluggable, modular social networking client. Being a WPF application, Flotzam can be easily restyled. From the enter/exit transitions for new items to the overall visual look and feel of the Flotzam interface, you can do almost anything you want just by tweaking the XAML mark-up. And with MIX08 selling out quickly (hope you've registered), the team thought it would be fun to put together a little contest that gives you the chance to experiment with WPF by creating your own custom themes. We'll use the best entries at MIX, both on the keynote screens and on all the PCs around the show; Karsten hopes that walking around the show will be like visiting some kind of art installation with all these different skins appearing. Entering the contest is easy: everything you need to know can be found on the visitmix site . We've even got screencasts available to show you exactly how to use Blend to do the customization. Let your inner artist out - show us what you're capable of! Posted Jan 25 2008, 03:08 PM by Tim Sneath Filed under: WPF, Blend, Design, XAML, ria, mix08, flickr, twitter, contest, digg

• We've Released the News Reader SDK!

  Many of you have seen the New York Times reader application - it was featured as part of the portfolio I've been building up of Great WPF Applications . As I mentioned at the time, the New York Times reader is based on an SDK that we built to allow newspapers and content publishers to create rich, "occasionally-connected" experiences based on the flow layout capabilities in WPF. We've had a private beta program running for a while now, and over the intervening months there have been a number of other newspapers that have gone live with applications using this toolkit. Now we're delighted to announce the public release of the reader toolkit on windowsclient.net . We've made a number of improvements to the kit to broaden its usage; the reader toolkit is now known by the rather more accurate but slightly less memorable name: the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit . This reflects its potential to go beyond a news reading scenario and handle other kinds of data synchronization and display needs. For example, you could use this as the basis of a client for financial data analysis, where the application downloaded stock prices and other financial information and presented it in a rich client experience ( Lab49 , are you listening?!) The great thing about the starter kit is that the source code is available, so you can customize it to your heart's content: changing templates and styles, modifying the way it handles data, adding new features, and so on. We've also created a sample MSDN Magazine reader application built with the starter kit, which is of course also provided with full source code . Even if you're not interested in the reader toolkit itself, you'll find this a really useful application in its own right. Have fun with this - I'm looking forward to seeing the applications people build with this toolkit... Posted Jan 16 2008, 10:58 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: WPF, sample, ria, msdn, new york times

• Share Your Christmas Wishlist / Hatelist with Silverlight

  Here's a cool little Silverlight 1.0 application that our team (specifically Adam ) assisted with over the last week. In the run-up to Christmas, I'm sure a lot of us are told that we're "hard to buy for". Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to give our friends and family a few gentle pointers without having to spoil all the surprise by being prescriptive down to the stock keeping unit level? Enter the Christmas CoolWall . Adopting an idea from the wonderful auto-related Top Gear television program from BBC TV, the CoolWall allows you to find images of different items and sort them into categories of "Seriously Uncool", "Uncool", "Cool" and "Sub-Zero". You can also annotate the images with comments ("the Halo soundtrack is cool, but not on cassette tape please"). Having built a cool wall, you can save it, copy it as an image, or send it via email to a friend. All this is, of course, built in Silverlight 1.0. The application demonstrates a range of capabilities: integration with Live Search and Live ID, HTML / Silverlight integration, reuse of simple controls written in JavaScript, ASP.NET server integration. It's not the most complex application ever written, but it's a bit of fun in this holiday season. The application was originally prototyped with the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha by Dot Net Solutions , a UK-based solutions integrator firm, and as a bit of fun, Adam agreed to try back-porting it to Silverlight 1.0 to see whether everything they'd implemented in C# could be as easily accomplished in JavaScript. I've noticed a certain preconception that Silverlight 2.0 is the "one to wait for" because it's the platform that allows you to use a "proper" language like C# or Visual Basic. Of course, having .NET languages, the base class libraries and technologies like LINQ will make RIA development a ton easier, but it's impressive what you can get out of JavaScript, particularly when coupled with the client-centric Microsoft AJAX Library . We're considering recording a Channel 9 video or something like that where Adam can share some of the more interesting experiences he gained from this application - we'll keep you updated. See the Christmas CoolWall here . You can also see my own (rather fanciful) wishlist, if you're interested . And give it a try! Posted Dec 10 2007, 11:09 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: Silverlight, sample, ria