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• Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Is Here!

  Get it from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?v=2.0 (tools are being propped as I write to http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/ ). Lots of new goodies – keep hitting F5 on Scott Guthrie’s blog for a comprehensive guide. I’m not going to try and compete with him today: my family tell me it’s time for the weekend to start! Posted Jun 06 2008, 06:59 PM by Tim Sneath Filed under: silverlight 2

• 50 New Silverlight Screencasts - Short and Snappy

  I haven't seen these training videos receive nearly the coverage they deserve, so I wanted to try and "bump" them onto the radar. My erstwhile UK colleagues Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond have been hard at work over the last few weeks recording an amazing series of Silverlight 2 training screencasts . All free for the taking, these fifty videos provide a comprehensive guide to all matters Silverlight: from basic topics such as layout, controls, data binding, and styling to advanced topics like sockets, cross-domain requests, multi-threading and HTML interop. If even that's not enough, there are some great tips and tricks that go beyond the documentation: loading assemblies dynamically, embedding fonts and creating custom splash screens. Many screencasts are too long or too ponderous - they don't suit the rapid-fire medium of the Internet. These are all short - mostly just a couple of minutes in length, and they're well edited to remove anything extraneous. Highly recommended - please produce some more, Mike and Mike! Check them out here: http://www.silverlightscreencasts.com . Oh, and of course, you'll need Silverlight 2 Beta 1 to watch them! Posted May 19 2008, 09:22 PM by Tim Sneath Filed under: silverlight streaming, screencast, training, silverlight 2, tips

• 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

• Silverlight UK User Group: Inaugural Meeting April 2nd

  The jolly chaps at Conchango are setting up a user group in London to focus on Silverlight, and the first meeting is tomorrow! By chance I'm actually in the UK right now on something of a customer tour, so I plan to be there myself and give a bit of a status update on Silverlight 2 and WPF. Should be a fun evening - pizza and beer is provided, and the event kicks off at 6:30pm. Full details and registration information are on the Facebook event site or on one of the Conchango blogs . If you're working in London, why not head over to London Bridge and come and say hi? Posted Apr 01 2008, 05:43 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: silverlight 2, events

• Uploading Silverlight 2 Content to Silverlight Streaming

  Following on very nicely from my last post on deploying Silverlight content to your own production server , I'm pleased to announce that Silverlight Streaming has added full support for Silverlight 2 applications. As well as adding the basic support, the team have put a lot of work into simplifying the process of uploading and validating your application. Here's a basic walkthrough: Create your Silverlight 2 application using Visual Studio or Expression Blend, do all the usual test / debug steps, etc. Create a manifest file named manifest.xml, that describes how you want the control to be hosted. Here's a simple sample you can use as a template: < SilverlightApp > < version > 2.0 </ version > < source > PopTheBubble.xap </ source > < width > 400 </ width > < height > 300 </ height > < background > white </ background > < isWindowless > false </ isWindowless > </ SilverlightApp > Zip your application .xap and manifest.xml files together into one file. Go to silverlight.live.com and upload the application. You're done! Now you can embed the resulting content in any web page with an iframe or the sample code provided. As a small example, here's a mini-game called PopTheBubble that you can learn to build by following the Silverlight 2 fundamentals hands-on lab . Click on as many bubbles as you can before the timer runs out - have fun! Posted Mar 18 2008, 06:24 PM by Tim Sneath Filed under: Silverlight, silverlight streaming, lab, silverlight 2

• Configuring a Web Server to Host Silverlight Content

  Deploying Silverlight content to a production web server is a pretty easy process. Despite occasional misconception, Silverlight doesn't require a Microsoft-based web server: Apache can host up Silverlight content just as happily as IIS. But there's one little gotcha: web servers are typically configured to only serve up a limited set of known file extensions as static content. That's all well and good, but Silverlight introduces two new file extensions (.xaml for loose XAML files and .xap for the zip-based binary packaging format). As a result, you need to add the MIME types for those file extensions to your web server so that it recognizes Silverlight content appropriately. Here are the MIME types you need to add to the server configuration: Extension MIME Type .xaml application/xaml+xml .xap application/x-silverlight-app That's all you have to do. Unfortunately, it's not possible to provide generic instructions for how to add MIME types, as it varies from server to server, but here are some links for various common web servers: Apache ( 2.0 , 1.3 ) IIS ( 7 / 6.0 / 5.0 / 4.0 ) lighttpd Sun Java System Web Server While you're updating the list of MIME types served, you might want to also add the relevant types to your web server to support WPF and ClickOnce applications. Here are the additional items you'll need: Extension MIME Type .manifest application/manifest .application application/x-ms-application .xbap application/x-ms-xbap .deploy application/octet-stream .xps application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument But what if you're hosting your Silverlight application on a shared hosting service and your hoster doesn't give you access to change these settings? The good news is that there are two options available to you. Obviously, you could take advantage of Silverlight Streaming , our free hosting service for up to 10GB of Silverlight content. Alternatively, you can "cheat" the web server by renaming the XAP file extension to a compatible MIME type. The XAP container is ZIP-based, so you can simply rename the output file from .xap to .zip and change the source param within the object tag contained in the HTML file to point to the new file location. Click on this hyperlink to see the technique in action - it's a plain HTML file that points to a ZIP file (containing the Silverlight content). One last piece of good news: IIS 7, included in Windows Server 2008, already includes all the relevant MIME types for both WPF and... Posted Mar 18 2008, 05:11 PM by Tim Sneath Filed under: WPF, Silverlight, XAML, silverlight streaming, windows, silverlight 2