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• 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

• 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

• 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