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• Great Silverlight 2 Demo: Healthcare Demonstrator

  Congratulations to Martin Grayson and team for building one of the smartest Silverlight 2 demonstrations I've seen to date . I saw parts of this demo a month ago when I was in the UK, and I'm delighted it's now released. Whether or not you're involved in the healthcare sector, this demo does a great job of showing how Silverlight 2 can transform web-based application development. We're already starting to see many real-world applications using Silverlight 2, even in its beta 1 stage; I'll post a list of the best ones I've collected before the end of the week. With a beta 2 release not far away, momentum is continuing to grow. And keep an eye on this blog first thing Friday morning for a separate exciting announcement (he said elusively)... Posted May 08 2008, 12:14 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: sample, silverlight 2

• Have YOU Updated Your Windows SDK Recently?

  It can be pretty hard to keep everything up-to-date on a developer workstation these days. With so many CTP releases, betas, and service packs, I know I often realize that my own machine is behind in one area or another. One particularly worthwhile update that might have missed your attention over the last couple of weeks is a new release of the Windows SDK , focused on enhancements in the .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Vista SP1 and  Windows Server 2008. Amongst other changes, this updated SDK has new documentation that covers all the new classes in WPF 3.5 (e.g. UIElement3D, System.AddIn, LINQ-based data binding), a variety of new samples for common Windows services such as User Account Control, Windows Search, Windows Error Reporting, Speech, and a range of shell APIs. If you've not installed the Windows SDK before, another incentive is a ZIP file containing over 100MB of sample WPF code (check out %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Samples\WPFSamples.zip). After installing the Windows SDK, you'll want to do two things: Run the new Windows SDK Configuration Tool (Start / Programs / Windows SDK v6.1 / Visual Studio Registration) to ensure that this is set as the default help collection in Visual Studio Follow this workaround to fix a XAML Intellisense bug that will be very irritating if you're a WPF developer. For more information on the Windows SDK, check out the team's blog or visit the recently overhauled Windows Vista development center on MSDN. Posted Mar 10 2008, 11:15 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: WPF, Orcas, sample, windows, msdn, sdk

• A Great Early Silverlight 2 Showcase: TextGlow

  We're already starting to see some cool samples that use Silverlight 2 really effectively. Prior to MIX, we had a small private beta running to get some early feedback on the builds that we were producing, and a few folk made really good use of this time to build some interesting ideas out. This one is one of my favorites: TextGlow is a Silverlight 2 application that reads Word .docx files. The Open XML format is an ECMA-ratified standard, and having a web-based runtime with the power Silverlight makes it possible to accomplish something that I don't think you could do easily with any other technology. TextGlow downloads Word documents asynchronously, opens them as ZIP files, parses them with LINQ-to-XML and then renders them using the WPF-based text and graphics APIs. This is a big deal, and not just because it's a cool Silverlight sample. In years gone by, if you wanted to share a document on the web, you'd typically have converted it to PDF format (assuming you had the full version of Adobe Acrobat on your system). Having two versions of the document meant changes were hard: you had to reconvert the document every time you made a change or the PDF file wouldn't match the current version. TextGlow solves that problem by providing cross-platform access to the source Word document, regardless of whether you have Office installed on your machine or not. The version of TextGlow above is a demonstrator, but there's endless potential for this. I hope the SharePoint team is watching, in particular. TextGlow was written by Intergen , a New Zealand-based partner. You can read more about the way the application was built from one of the developers, James Newton-King . One caveat: the demonstrator currently has rendering issues on Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 (it's an HTML/CSS thing!). Although it works perfectly well, the control is sized too small. For best results, try it out with Internet Explorer 7, Firefox or Safari. Hopefully they'll have that fixed by the end of today. Posted Mar 06 2008, 09:40 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: Silverlight, sample, mix08, silverlight 2.0, office, ooxml

• 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

• 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

• Silverlight Christmas Cards

  Around the world, people are preparing to gather together to celebrate the holiday season, to give and receive gifts and to sing carols. This year sees the start of a new tradition that our children and our grandchildren will preserve and pass on: the sending of Silverlight-enhanced Christmas cards! I've received some fun ones - thanks to those who have shared them with me. Here are a few: Season's Greetings from Microsoft UK Online Spotlight, Norway Happy Holidays from ObjectSharp FranksWorld Special Presentation Anyone else got a cool Silverlight Christmas card to share? Posted Dec 18 2007, 05:20 PM by Tim Sneath Filed under: Silverlight, sample

• 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