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Tim Heuer Profile |
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Learning the M-V-VM pattern for XAML development
Tim Heuer
pQuick, what’s the most popular thing in XAML development? Yeah, thought so…strongMVVM or Model-View-ViewModel/strong./p pIt’s one of the most popular subjects I hear about when people talk about developing applications with WPF and a href="http://silverlight.net"strongSilverlight/strong/a. However, as much as it is talked about and as much as frameworks a href="http://simplemvvm.codeplex.com/"are/a a href="http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com"born/a a href="http://caliburn.codeplex.com/"ever [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 4th '10 |
Temporary fix for Foxit Previewer for Outlook 2010 64-bit
Tim Heuer
pAs noted in a a href="http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/09/03/foxit-pdf-previewer-update-office-2010.aspx"previous update post/a on my stronga href="http://timheuer.com/foxit"Foxit PDF Previewer/a/strong for Outlook and Vista/Windows 7, there is an issue in the Office 2010 64-bit Beta (specifically Outlook) for executing 32-bit preview handlers on 64-bit Outlook. I’ve got an update for those temporarily./p pFirst, I can confirm that the issue is fixed in the later builds of Outlook 2010 [read].
Posted: Sun, Feb 28th '10 |
Smashing Magazine March 2010 Windows 7 Theme
Tim Heuer
pIt’s that time again…beginning of a new month! That means that a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com"strongSmashing Magazine/strong/a has released their monthly wallpaper pictures again./p pimg style="display: block; float: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" src="http://storage.timheuer.com/super-mario-bros-1985.jpg" //p pNot as many St. Patrick’s themed ones as I would have expected. Here are yourstrong March 2010 Windows 7 Theme Packs/strong for the wallpapers though…i [read].
Posted: Sun, Feb 28th '10 |
Silverlight MVPs of the Year (2009)
Tim Heuer
pThis week at Microsoft we are hosting roughly 1,300 of our top community experts around the world in various technical competencies. For a href="http://silverlight.net"Silverlight/a, we have about 80% of our group in attendance from all over the world./p pimg style="margin: 0px auto; display: block; float: none" title="" alt="Microsoft Most Valuable Professional logo" src="http://storage.timheuer.com/mvp-h-small.png" //p pAt the beginning of the year the Silverlight team asked our MVP group t [read].
Posted: Thu, Feb 18th '10 |
Big companies changing the English language ndash; an open letter to advertisers
Tim Heuer
pSomething has been bugging me lately. I feel I’ve become complacent. And I think you have as well. We all are surrounded by advertising daily. Whether it be in print, audio or video, it is always near us in everything we do. You cannot escape it…nobody can escape it./p pNot even our children./p pPerhaps this is what is driving my strikefrustration /strikeanger. You see, I have two kids ages 7 and 3. My daughter (7) is in her second year of elementary school. My son (3) is in [read].
Posted: Fri, Feb 12th '10 |
Using Silverlight Media Framework for simple playback
Tim Heuer
pIf you aren’t aware of thestrong /stronga href="http://smf.codeplex.com"strongSilverlight Media Framework/strong/a, you should take a look. This is a media playback framework for Silverlight that is based off of a lot of best practices from such implementations as the NBC Olympics, Sunday Night Football and others. /p pimg style="margin: 0px auto; display: block; float: none" title="" alt="Silverlight Media Framework screenshot" src="http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.as [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 10th '10 |
Quick FAQ on Visual Studio 2010 RC release (February 2010) and Silverlight development
Tim Heuer
pYesterday Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate was available for MSDN subscribers and would be generally available on 10 February 2010 for the public. This release represents a significant improvement in the overall Visual Studio product and a lot was based on beta tester feedback./p pOf course, as a a href="http://silverlight.net"Silverlight/a developer you will be wondering: emCan I still develop Silverlight 4 applications with the VS2010 RC?/em/p pHere’s the simp [read].
Posted: Tue, Feb 9th '10 |
When Blobs attack ndash; understanding cloud storage bursts and viewing logs
Tim Heuer
pHere’s how it started…/p pemLisa (my wife) [shouting from office into the kitchen]: Tim, what’s this Amazon charge for $193?/em br /emMe [thinking what I may have purchased and not remembered]: Um, don’t know…let me look./em/p pI then logged into my Amazon account to see what order I may have forgotten. Surely I didn’t order $200 worth of MP3…that’s ridiculous. Sure enough nothing was there. Immediately I’m thinking fraud. I start freaking out, getting mad, figuring ou [read].
Posted: Mon, Feb 8th '10 |
Silverlight DataGrid quick styling tip: keep selected row focus state
Tim Heuer
pA developer asked me this question and while a simple answer, I thought it would be a good quick tip to share for those who may be in similar situations./p pThe scenario is the classic master-details scenario where perhaps you have a grid of data and when a user selects the row, the details are enabled in a form (or perhaps the child of the element) for editing. Maybe something like this:/p pimg style="margin: 0px auto; display: block; float: none" title="" alt="Master-details Typical view" s [read].
Posted: Thu, Feb 4th '10 |
Smashing Magazine February 2010 Windows 7 Theme
Tim Heuer
pit’s that time again…beginning of a new month! That means that a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com"strongSmashing Magazine/strong/a has released their monthly wallpaper pictures again./p pimg style="margin: 0px auto; display: block; float: none" title="Valentines Disaster" alt="Smashing Magazine February 2010 Wallpaper" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/uploader/images/wallpaper-calendar-february-10/valentines-disaster.jpg" //p pAs you could expect, F [read].
Posted: Sun, Jan 31st '10 |
Reading MP3 metadata with Silverlight and drag-drop
Tim Heuer
pI’m working on a little sample application for music management in a href="http://silverlight.net"Silverlight/a using a href="http://silverlight.net/riaservices"WCF RIA Services/a and some other new Silverlight 4 features. One thing that I wanted to add to the application was the ability to drag an audio file and either lookup the data and/or add a new album/artist/song to the library automatically./p pAudio formats have a ‘tag’ format known as a href="http://id3.org/"ID3/a. It’s a [read].
Posted: Sat, Jan 30th '10 |
Microsoft Store – engaging with consumers directly
Tim Heuer
Standard caveats apply: I’m a Microsoft employee and fanboy. I’m not ashamed. I will say though when the announcements of the Microsoft retail brick-and-mortar stores opening, I was skeptical…no doubtful. I kept (and still do a bit) thinking to myself how are they going to compete with the likes of Best Buy and others?! Nonetheless, I waited patiently to see the plans.
I wouldn’t have to wait long as the first store opened up in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. Scottsdale is a neighbo [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 26th '09 |
Silverlight Audio Player for WordPress
Tim Heuer
As a follow-up to my Silverlight For WordPress plugin, I have just deployed Mark Heath’s Silverlight Audio Player as a WordPress plugin. Thanks to Mark for changing his license to Ms-PL so that I could make this happen. If you are a WordPress user and want to use Silverlight for audio playback, you use some WordPress macro language (in this case slaudio) and put it in. The rendered output is like this: And when you click the play button it expands: Again, most of the actual Silverlight [read].
Posted: Sun, Oct 25th '09 |
Using Visual Studio 2010 for Silverlight development
Tim Heuer
Previously I made note of things about the release of Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 with regard to Silverlight development. I’ve gotten a few questions about if people should start using it for Silverlight development. Perhaps I can help provide you with the best information I can to make that decision…so here it goes. Go-live support Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 both have “go-live” support as indicated in the license terms (which are available on the VS2010 download). If yo [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 22nd '09 |
Silverlight Toolkit adds DragDrop targets!
Tim Heuer
One of the cool things I came across the in the October 2009 Silverlight Toolkit release was the addition of drag-n-drop targets for some of the core controls. Now I know you are thinking great, another drag-n-drop useless control?!? and you’d be wrong. I’m talking about things that make it easy to do do things like moving items from one list box to another, without writing code, but with it actually doing what you expect. Let’s take the simplest example here: ListBox and moving items [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 19th '09 |
A plea to my developer brethren about designer/designers
Tim Heuer
Since we appear to be in another revolution on user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX), I’ve seen a lot of people, companies, sites refer to the designer-developer workflow, including Microsoft. Heck we’re building tools around it for Silverlight and WPF development! One thing I see too often though is the conversation being diminished to UI only. I’ve heard conversations between developers saying things like yeah, now we just need a designer to make things look pretty o [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 19th '09 |
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Silverlight updates
Tim Heuer
Today (19 Oct 2009) the Visual Studio team released the second beta for Visual Studio 2010 to the public. This is a significant milestone for the team and a huge improvement over the previous beta in my opinion as a user. As a developer, you can find out how/when you can download Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 beta 2 from here. After installing the tools, one thing you may notice right away is a different look of branding of Visual Studio going forward for now. Gone is the beloved [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 19th '09 |
Silverlight Live Streaming service update
Tim Heuer
Yesterday, the Silverlight Live Streaming team (SLS) posted an update on their blog regarding the future of the Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live service. SLS was a beta service to users to have a place to host and deliver their Silverlight-based applications or media to be delivered by Silverlight players. It was launched at the time of Silverlight 2 as a free beta service to users under the Windows Live brand and offered 10GB of free storage to beta users. In summary, the SLS service [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 19th '09 |
Updated Silverlight getting started for beginners
Tim Heuer
If you’re a pro Silverlight developer, this post isn’t for you. Just a brief update that I’ve updated some of our getting started material for beginners – those who really haven’t done anything. These will be showing up on the Silverlight Community Site soon, but I wanted to post a link to it here first. Getting Started with Silverlight Development is a 7-part series where I aim to do my best in trying to stuff as much as possible about Silverlight development in a simple applicati [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 6th '09 |
Changing DatePicker in Silverlight to show current date
Tim Heuer
This past weekend during a conversation about Silverlight controls at the San Diego Silverlight Education Day, someone asked about the DatePicker control and why the “15” is there and how come they can’t change it. Here’s the control that was being referred to: The calendar displays an icon to the right of the text box area which, when clicked, displays a drop-down calendar picker. The icon always says “15” and is intended to look like a little calendar date sheet (you know, lik [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 5th '09 |
Congratulations to Q3 NEW Silverlight MVPs
Tim Heuer
Just a quick shout-out to congratulate the latest Silverlight MVPs to the program. The Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) program is a recognition program that is in place to recognize and reward those individuals who have been identified by individuals (peers, Microsoft staff, etc.) as experts in their technology field and global contributors to the technology. As of today (01 OCT 2009) we welcome some new folks to the Silverlight group: Rick Barraza (@rickbarraza)– wicked inte [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 1st '09 |
Windows 7 DVD Audio playback problem for old laptops
Tim Heuer
Last night I decided to mess around with some older laptops. I had an HP Pavillion ze2000 CTO laptop (not sure why they call it “CTO” – I guess the Altec Lansing speakers included makes it an executive ;-)). I installed Windows 7 (32-bit) from my home Windows Deployment Server with no problem. This one took longer than the less-than-20-minute installs I’d been experience. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t terribly longer, but about 30-40 minutes I think. I ran Windows Update and [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 1st '09 |
Visual Studio – A documentary
Tim Heuer
Most of you who are Microsoft developers probably are aware of Channel 9 and have benefited both from the deep technical screencasts to the behind-the-scenes interviews that the team has provided with such luminaries as Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Guthrie, Bill Gates, etc. Tina Summerford and the C9 crew produced what I feel is one of (dare I say number one?) the best Channel 9 pieces of content yet (besides the ScottGu intro video for MIX09). Today they present to you The Visual Studio Documen [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 29th '09 |
Silverlight Firestarter Seattle videos online
Tim Heuer
Mithun just posted that the videos are now available online from the Silverlight Firestarter Seattle event. You can view the videos here in WMV form, but I also took a quick stab at putting them together in a playlist using the Silverlight Expression Encoder templates. Here they are: You can click the little icon in the upper right to see the playlist option and to navigate. NOTE: The offline mode doesn’t seem to work and likely because I didn’t populate the playlist option with the [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 29th '09 |
It’s Silverlight week in Seattle
Tim Heuer
I’m a little late to the game posting information about it, but there is a plethora of Silverlight stuff to do this week in the Seattle/Redmond area this week. Sleepless in Seattle…definitely not – Silverlight in Seattle baby! Allow me to interpret Adam’s vector goods… 14 Sep (tonight!): Jesse Liberty is presenting at the .NET DA user group meeting on .NET RIA Services. 15 Sep: Nerd Dinner!!! Just a casual gathering of people who speak in acronyms and like food. Bellevue Crossr [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 14th '09 |
Army of One…and Silverlight
Tim Heuer
Just doing some getting caught up from my holiday recently and I was reminded of a “line of business” application that was completed in Silverlight for the United States Army. It is a bit of a supply chain management application…where the supply is soldiers! This is a pretty cool application that was taken from a full client (Windows Forms) application and brought to Silverlight by ProModel. They specialize in supply and demand issues. Take a look at the interview/demo that Adam Kinn [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 9th '09 |
Silverlight feature suggestions
Tim Heuer
I’ve been doing a lot of asking and listening lately…to you, the Silverlight developers! I’ve received a lot of positive feedback and “thank you for asking” comments and it has been real encouraging. If you haven’t seen some of them, here’s some of my recent inquiries: Do you have a need to convert Flash applications (not just assets, but ActionScript)? How do you prefer to learn Silverlight (and how do you decide on choosing Silverlight)? Are you using the provided Silverligh [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 8th '09 |
Foxit PDF Previewer update
Tim Heuer
For those that may use my Foxit PDF Previewer (for use with Outlook 2007 or Windows Vista and Windows 7), I wanted to provide a few updates. Blank white screen previews I’ve been getting quite a few reports lately about white screen previews while the PDF file renders fine in other readers. After some research and patient testing with some of you that reported it, it’s been determined that the consistent piece is that the PDFs were documents that were scanned. These documents in the PDF [read].
Posted: Fri, Sep 4th '09 |
Add humor to your OMPL
Tim Heuer
I subscribe to a lot of feeds. I read a lot of them, and a lot I skim. But I also make sure I subscribe to things that break up my day. Here’s some of my favorites if you haven’t seen them before: FAILblog.org – the classic. All things wrong. AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com – stop right now and subscribe. When I’m feeling down I go here. Seriously. I’ve also had a photo of my sister I’ve been threatening to post there. UgliestTattoos.com (warning some NSFW) – I’m am seri [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 3rd '09 |
How you chose and learned Silverlight
Tim Heuer
A few of us in the Silverlight team have been talking about various things and speculating on how we think the universe works. We’ve been wondering how people best learn at different levels and how they come to decisions on what tools of their trade to use, etc. I had a novel idea – let’s ask them. I’m curious if you might help us stop speculating and get a broad picture of these ideas. If you would, that would be great and help us understand better where we need to fight for pri [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 3rd '09 |
Great customer service follow-up: LG Electronics
Tim Heuer
About 2 months ago I wrote about an experience with an electronics company (LG Electronics USA) and some amazing customer service they were providing. The bottom line recap was this: I bought a TV about 5 years ago TV started getting wonky about 8 months ago TV was self-declared dead 2 months ago TV was out of warranty by YEARS I called on a whim to LG support They extended the warranty to cover the full cost of repairs All this process so far, no questions asked. No feeling of guilt. No [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 3rd '09 |
Compiling pixel shaders for Silverlight
Tim Heuer
I saw a note on Twitter come through yesterday about building pixel shaders for Silverlight in Visual Studio. The question, from @blamborn was: Does anyone know if there is a Shader Effects BuildTask like the #WPF one here http://bit.ly/gCkNT only for #Silverlight? I replied that you can use the same build task and thought I had written my work around on how to do that, but apparently I never clicked published somewhere along the line. I recall doing some work for this for a presentation a [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 2nd '09 |
Silverlight minor update released today
Tim Heuer
Small public service announcement here for Silverlight developers…we released a minor update to the runtime and SDK today. You may see this referred to as Silverlight 3 GDR2. Formally it is version 3.0.40818.0. Usually when a release pops up people are curious about what is in it and why there wasn’t some major announcement. NOTE: “GDR” is Microsoft-speak for general distribution release. If you are interested in the full release history for Silverlight it is always available onl [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 1st '09 |
Help drive VS/Silverlight user experience
Tim Heuer
One of my colleagues, Corrina, pointed me today to some research her team is conducting on user experience with Visual Studio and Silverlight. From her post today, …that my co-workers on the Visual Studio User Experience Team are doing focused on professional and non-professional web/application developers. The research involves… A short survey A telephone interview to discuss your development experiences A gratuity will be offered to individuals selected to participate in the teleph [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 31st '09 |
Silverlight community samples – what do you want?
Tim Heuer
I normally hate short posts – but my friend John Papa put a poll up that I wanted to make sure gets some attention…please provide your opinion on this poll: What kinds of samples would you most like to see in a community Silverlight code sharing site? Help John out shape something useful! tags: silverlight, riaservices, ria, xaml, communityThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license. [read].
Posted: Thu, Aug 27th '09 |
Silverlight and localizing string data
Tim Heuer
While I was at the Silverlight Atlanta Firestarter event I had a chance to meet some great people. One of them was Sergey Barskiy. Sergey was doing a session on deployment and while in the speaker area we were chatting about overall feedback on Silverlight. One of the things he mentioned was what he thought was a bug in Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight. It was around RESX files and the modifier setting (Internal, Public, etc.). More on that later. Sergey was using RESX files for l [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 26th '09 |
Silverlight misconceptions, bad reviews, bad comparisons
Tim Heuer
Anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes talking with me, reading this blog, or listening to me on podcasts (Herding Code, Thirsty Developer, Misfit Geek) will know that I LOVE Microsoft. I’m not ashamed to admit it and I’m not ashamed about my passion for the company or technology it produces. I’m also not afraid to admit when and where we suck. I don’t use every Microsoft product…if there are ones that I feel are better for how I use them, then I pick the better tools/technolog [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 21st '09 |
More Silverlight application themes and fixes
Tim Heuer
When Silverlight 3 launched, we also published several additional application themes for the navigation and business application (for .NET RIA Services) templates. I just uploaded two more themes from one of our designers, Corrina, to the Expression Gallery. There are versions for both navigation application template as well as the .NET RIA Services business application template. Mediterranean Sun (RIA Services): Seeing Sound (RIA Services): Additionally, several fixes were made to the exi [read].
Posted: Thu, Aug 13th '09 |
Upcoming Silverlight events
Tim Heuer
I have the pleasure of being invited to participate in two Silverlight events coming up soon (one very soon). These are a part of a “firestarter” event that is intended to get you familiar with certain technologies, in this case Silverlight, rather quickly and gain a better understanding for the overall platform offerings. I’m excited to have been invited to participate in both the Atlanta and Seattle events. Silverlight Firestarter Atlanta The first one will be in Atlanta, Georgia on [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 12th '09 |
An out-of-browser install pattern for Silverlight
Tim Heuer
One of the features that a lot of developers seem to enjoy is the out-of-browser feature in Silverlight. This is the feature that allows you to take your Silverlight application and run it like a desktop application (without some of the trust levels right now). If you aren’t familiar with the feature, take a moment and familiarize yourself with it…here’s some info: Silverlight 3 Out of Browser developer APIs Sample Application Feature overview (from the PM that owns the feature) N [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 12th '09 |
Silverlight 3 “toast” notifications
Tim Heuer
I was messing around with a new internal application the other day and made a wise crack about some of the features out in the open. And by wise-crack, I mean ‘feedback in the nicest way possible’ of course. On one of my suggestions someone pointed out a RTFM moment that the feature was actually in there but had a dependency. The feature I was requesting was “toast” notifications. What is “toast”? Aside from a delicious breakfast treat, it’s a term that most people refer to [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 10th '09 |
Silverlight DataForm and confirming deleting an item
Tim Heuer
I was talking with a good friend the other day about some feedback about DataForm. It’s great to get raw and honest feedback…that’s where you improve more than ‘it sucks’ type feedback. One of the use cases he felt would be common with the Silverlight DataForm control (available in the Silverlight Toolkit) was the concept of confirming the delete action. I agreed as well that confirming permanent delete actions is a common line-of-business application pattern. It got me thinkin [read].
Posted: Sat, Aug 8th '09 |
Silverlight DataForm and confirming deleting an item
Tim Heuer
I was talking with a good friend the other day about some feedback about DataForm. It’s great to get raw and honest feedback…that’s where you improve more than ‘it sucks’ type feedback. One of the use cases he felt would be common with the Silverlight DataForm control (available in the Silverlight Toolkit) was the concept of confirming the delete action. I agreed as well that confirming permanent delete actions is a common line-of-business application pattern. It got me thinkin [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 7th '09 |
Silverlight at Microsoft PDC09 – we will be there!
Tim Heuer
It’s getting to be that time of year again…PDC!!! For those who may not know, “PDC” is the beloved TLA for Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference. This is it. The geeks conference. If you are a bit twiddler, this is for you. PDC is where most of the forward-looking stuff is revealed. It is also where certain executives come out for their semi-annual keynote ;-). PDC is in their 14th year! Amazing. The conference, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from 17 [read].
Posted: Thu, Aug 6th '09 |
TabStudio add-in for Visual Studio
Tim Heuer
I came across this add-in for Visual Studio the other day that is subtle but added some productivity features to Visual Studio for me. It’s called Tabs Studio. NOTE: I’m not getting a complimentary license for this add-in and have already purchased my own license with my own money. This is an unsolicited opinion. For me Tabs Studio does two things: organize my open content better and enables me to more quickly close/manage the open tabs. Take a look at the before after of the same co [read].
Posted: Thu, Aug 6th '09 |
Silverlight 3 Multi-touch: The Basics
Tim Heuer
One of the new features to Silverlight 3 is the ability to add multi-touch capabilities to your application. When I posed the question on Twitter, I got some responses of ideas people would use this for. Honestly most of them could be accomplished with mouse events today and X/Y calculations. These would be the touch applications that are pretty singular. But I did get some multi-touch ideas that I think I’ll try to explore. First though, let’s look at the basics of what Silverligh [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 30th '09 |
FloatableWindow source on CodePlex
Tim Heuer
I got enough feedback and suggestions that I figured it would be better just to put the code up on CodePlex rather than package zips on my blog :-). Here it is: FloatableWindow project. The latest build I have is up there which incorporates some feedback that I’ve received. Basically the ShowDialog() API operates the same way that ChildWindow.Show() does today. No changes there, popup is used. But when you just want some simple MDI type windows, use Show() which will not use Popup but [read].
Posted: Tue, Jul 21st '09 |
Silverlight 3 Bouncing plane gratuitous demo
Tim Heuer
I’ve received a few emails about updated code for the Scott Guthrie MIX09 keynote demo referred to as “bouncing plane” Silverlight demo. A screenshot of this demo is seen here to refresh your memory: There really isn’t anything ‘new’ about this demo code for SL3, other than being recompiled. Perhaps the only real change is to accommodate the new requirement that pixel shaders are resources of the project. You’ll see the Effect1.cs code file where the constructor code for the [read].
Posted: Tue, Jul 21st '09 |
Building Silverlight 2 and 3 applications with Visual Studio 2008
Tim Heuer
As we’ve noted before, Visual Studio 2008 doesn’t have multi-targeting support for Silverlight development. Generally speaking what this means is that if you install the Silverlight 3 tools, you have a Silverlight 3 development environment with VS2008. True multi-targeting for Silverlight in the IDE will come in Visual Studio 2010 (you can see how that works in this post). NOTE: Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 (current version available at the time of this writing) does not fully support Si [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 17th '09 |
Silverlight 3: Cached Assemblies and you can to!
Tim Heuer
One of the new features I mentioned in my What’s new/changed post on Silverlight 3 is the fact that any application developer can take advantage of the cached assembly functionality provided by Silverlight. Let me show you how and start with the current situation. Current Situation with Silverlight assembly references If you are building a Silverlight application, chances are you are referencing assemblies either from the SDK, Silverlight Toolkit or other great Silverlight third party contro [read].
Posted: Mon, Jul 13th '09 |
Silverlight 3 Released! What is new/changed?
Tim Heuer
Alas, Silverlight 3 is released! It has been a long road…wait a minute, actually it’s only been 8 months since the last release! Whoa, that’s some wicked supersonic Microsoft time there! Anyhow, we are finally released. A while back I wrote a post on What’s New in Silverlight 3 and it still all applies. I’d encourage you to read that post as well. There are, of course, some subtle changes in a few things from an implementation side of things, but those are all documented in [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 10th '09 |
Silverlight 3: 7 additional application themes!
Tim Heuer
With the Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio, developers get access to the Silverlight Navigation Application template. By default the styles (which are located in the project’s Assets/Styles.xaml file) are really good and neutral for the application layout. Now, keep in mind this is an overall application layout style and not control styles/templates. In addition to the default look provided by the tools out of the box with Silverlight 3, we’re providing 7 additional application templ [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 10th '09 |
Silverlight 3 Released! What is new/changed?
Tim Heuer
Alas, Silverlight 3 is released! It has been a long road…wait a minute, actually it’s only been 8 months since the last release! Whoa, that’s some wicked supersonic Microsoft time there! Anyhow, we are finally released. A while back I wrote a post on What’s New in Silverlight 3 and it still all applies. I’d encourage you to read that post as well. There are, of course, some subtle changes in a few things from an implementation side of things, but those are all documented in [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 10th '09 |
Silverlight 3: 7 additional application themes!
Tim Heuer
With the Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio, developers get access to the Silverlight Navigation Application template. By default the styles (which are located in the project’s Assets/Styles.xaml file) are really good and neutral for the application layout. Now, keep in mind this is an overall application layout style and not control styles/templates. In addition to the default look provided by the tools out of the box with Silverlight 3, we’re providing 7 additional application templ [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 10th '09 |
Silverlight FloatableWindow update: start position and resizable
Tim Heuer
A while back I wrote a post where I refactored the Silverlight ChildWindow to create a non-modal window and I called it FloatableWindow (you can see why I’m not a good marketer…hey I could have called it Microsoft Silverlight ChildWindow Refactored Edition Express). A few folks found it useful, for which I’m appreciative of the comments. My buddy Karl Shifflett decided to use it in Glimpse as the diagnostic window – thanks Karl! Karl even added some code to it to basically provide a [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 8th '09 |
Shining customer service in a tough business economy
Tim Heuer
One of my little non-technical pet peeves in life is poor customer service. A long while back while working at a booming consulting firm in the ‘.com days’ (which later imploded of course) the company routinely brought in different types of speakers. Some for motivation, some for sales training (anyone who can tell me who ‘peel the onion’ comes from wins a gold star), etc. One that stood out was from Jeffrey Gitomer. He’s probably more famous for his book Little Red Book of Sel [read].
Posted: Mon, Jul 6th '09 |
Silverlight Coding Competition – win USD $10,000!
Tim Heuer
I was honored to be asked by ComponentArt to participate in a judging panel for their just now released 2009 Summer Silverlight Coding Competition. The grand prize is USD $10,000.
Yes, that’s right: USD $10,000!
ComponentArt is even kicking in 2 runner-up prizes of licensing to their products, which is also a sweet deal! The contest is simple, and you are not required to use ComponentArt controls…in their words:
Applicants are not required to use ComponentArt's products to enter t [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 26th '09 |
Silverlight Coding Competition – win USD $10,000!
Tim Heuer
I was honored to be asked by ComponentArt to participate in a judging panel for their just now released 2009 Summer Silverlight Coding Competition. The grand prize is USD $10,000.
Yes, that’s right: USD $10,000!
ComponentArt is even kicking in 2 runner-up prizes of licensing to their products, which is also a sweet deal! The contest is simple, and you are not required to use ComponentArt controls…in their words:
Applicants are not required to use ComponentArt's products to enter t [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 25th '09 |
My move to free HDTV – Part 2: HD HomeRun to the rescue
Tim Heuer
In my previous post on moving to free HDTV, I had talked about my desire to change our home television “stuff” in an effort to remove basically a bill that we weren’t taking advantage of at all. Part of the irony in this whole exploration was that by the time I figured out a solution, the whole digital-TV-signal-broadcast-rule-thing was going to happen. Luckily, I received some good advice and product suggestions. If you read the previous post you’ll notice that I acquired a Philips [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 16th '09 |
My move to free HDTV – Part 2: HD HomeRun to the rescue
Tim Heuer
In my previous post on moving to free HDTV, I had talked about my desire to change our home television “stuff” in an effort to remove basically a bill that we weren’t taking advantage of at all. Part of the irony in this whole exploration was that by the time I figured out a solution, the whole digital-TV-signal-broadcast-rule-thing was going to happen. Luckily, I received some good advice and product suggestions. If you read the previous post you’ll notice that I acquired a Philips [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 15th '09 |
.NET RIA Services roadmap update
Tim Heuer
Today, we posted on the .NET RIA Services forum an updated roadmap for the timing and thoughts around the product offering. What is .NET RIA Services? Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for co [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 9th '09 |
My move to free HDTV – over the air HD
Tim Heuer
About twice a year my wife freaks out (well, my terms not hers) about money, material things, life, etc. It’s a good freak out actually…and it is what has kept me grounded more in life than my past habits (you know, when you felt you *had* to have everything). I’ve learned to not care about things that aren’t worth the trouble. Her balance in my life really has made a good impact in things worldly. Back to the freak out :-) … We’re constantly looking for ways to save money. A [read].
Posted: Sat, Jun 6th '09 |
Check your Silverlight 2 apps for compatibility with Silverlight 3
Tim Heuer
One of the goals of new versions of Silverlight is to be be backward compatible with previous versions. We make this a priority goal so that people can keep their previous applications deployed while not worrying that people with newer Silverlight will have a broken experience. Silverlight 3 has been out in beta form since March 2009 and hopefully if you are a Silverlight developer you’ve had a chance to work with the new features and tools. If you have existing Silverlight 2 applications [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 5th '09 |
Check your Silverlight 2 apps for compatibility with Silverlight 3
Tim Heuer
One of the goals of new versions of Silverlight is to be be backward compatible with previous versions. We make this a priority goal so that people can keep their previous applications deployed while not worrying that people with newer Silverlight will have a broken experience. Silverlight 3 has been out in beta form since March 2009 and hopefully if you are a Silverlight developer you’ve had a chance to work with the new features and tools. If you have existing Silverlight 2 applications [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 5th '09 |
Craigslist scams – fight back with time wasters.
Tim Heuer
Forgive the distraction…I couldn’t help it. I get frustrated when I see these things in the world I live (interwebs). My wife and I were in the market for a truck. We decided on a particular model and started watching local Craigslist postings. One came across our eyes that we simply couldn’t believe…it was a recent model truck with 24K miles and was listed for less than half of what others were listing. Both of us knew either one of two things happened: 1) major typo in the guys [read].
Posted: Wed, Jun 3rd '09 |
Google Wave: the sky is falling and Flash/Silverlight are dead
Tim Heuer
At the Google I/O conference this past week, they announced Google Wave. Almost immediately, I started seeing Twitter replies, blog posts and various articles talking about how Google Wave is going to kill Flash/Silverlight/JavaFX. None of these made sense to me…and at that point I’d yet to see anything about Wave anyway. I posed a few questions on Twitter as to why people felt Wave was an RIA platform killer (that’s what I was reading into a lot of the buzz against things like Silve [read].
Posted: Sat, May 30th '09 |
Google Wave: the sky is falling and Flash/Silverlight are dead
Tim Heuer
At the Google I/O conference this past week, they announced Google Wave. Almost immediately, I started seeing Twitter replies, blog posts and various articles talking about how Google Wave is going to kill Flash/Silverlight/JavaFX. None of these made sense to me…and at that point I’d yet to see anything about Wave anyway. I posed a few questions on Twitter as to why people felt Wave was an RIA platform killer (that’s what I was reading into a lot of the buzz against things like Silve [read].
Posted: Sat, May 30th '09 |
Silverlight DataForm helpers
Tim Heuer
If you looked at the updated RIA Services Business Application template which had the authentication built-in, you may have seen the login screen with a little icon next to the password field: When you hover over this some helpful information displays in tool tip form: So how did that get there? The power of the data annotations. If you look at your model definition, you can add a DisplayAttribute and provide some additional information. Let’s take a look at a simple example. Here’ [read].
Posted: Mon, May 25th '09 |
Clearing some air in Silverlight, Blend and Visual Studio Beta land
Tim Heuer
In a previous post I wanted to call attention to the multi-targeting and design surface improvements for Silverlight developers with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. There has been some comments on that post and a few emails and Twitter replies as well with some great follow-up questions. I thought I’d post a sort of what works with what information to help you navigate Betaville as a Silverlight developer. NOTE: We’re talking about Beta technologies here. That means things may not work, t [read].
Posted: Sun, May 24th '09 |
Silverlight and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1
Tim Heuer
Well today was the public release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. It is the first time developers will have the chance to take it for a spin and kick the tires. I wanted to share some information specific for Silverlight developers with regard to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. Visual Studio 2010 is the first IDE that will support two key features for Silverlight developers: multi-targeted Silverlight development and editable design surface for Silverlight. The second point also comes with things [read].
Posted: Wed, May 20th '09 |
Silverlight powers Netflix in Media Center
Tim Heuer
I’ve not hidden my love affair for Netflix both as a consumer and as a Silverlight developer and how they’ve implemented the technology. Long before the instant watch came to the desktop and the XBOX, there were a lot of folks wanting the Netflix experience on their Windows Media Center boxes and extenders. One such person was Anthony Park (who is now with Netflix as of this writing), who picked up a the MyNetflix media center plugin a while back. Well, today Netflix officially has a Med [read].
Posted: Wed, May 20th '09 |
Silverlight and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1
Tim Heuer
Well today was the public release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. It is the first time developers will have the chance to take it for a spin and kick the tires. I wanted to share some information specific for Silverlight developers with regard to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. Visual Studio 2010 is the first IDE that will support two key features for Silverlight developers: multi-targeted Silverlight development and editable design surface for Silverlight. The second point also comes with things [read].
Posted: Wed, May 20th '09 |
Silverlight powers Netflix in Media Center
Tim Heuer
I’ve not hidden my love affair for Netflix both as a consumer and as a Silverlight developer and how they’ve implemented the technology. Long before the instant watch came to the desktop and the XBOX, there were a lot of folks wanting the Netflix experience on their Windows Media Center boxes and extenders. One such person was Anthony Park (who is now with Netflix as of this writing), who picked up a the MyNetflix media center plugin a while back. Well, today Netflix officially has a Med [read].
Posted: Wed, May 20th '09 |
Silverlight Visual Studio helper files
Tim Heuer
For things that aren’t a part of the Visual Studio tools (yet) and things that help me move faster in my development, I like to take advantage of the power of Visual Studio’s templates and snippets capabilities. I’ve created a few and modified a few of others that I use regularly. I’ve shown them in a few presentations and thought I’d package them up in a single bundle for your convenience if you choose to use them. I was going to package Robby’s snippets up as well, but didn [read].
Posted: Wed, May 20th '09 |
Silverlight Visual Studio helper files
Tim Heuer
For things that aren’t a part of the Visual Studio tools (yet) and things that help me move faster in my development, I like to take advantage of the power of Visual Studio’s templates and snippets capabilities. I’ve created a few and modified a few of others that I use regularly. I’ve shown them in a few presentations and thought I’d package them up in a single bundle for your convenience if you choose to use them. I was going to package Robby’s snippets up as well, but didn [read].
Posted: Wed, May 20th '09 |
Hobby Diversification Update: Guitar Lessons
Tim Heuer
Back in December, I wrote about my attempt at diversifying my hobbies. In October 2008 I started taking guitar lessons because I had a Fender ‘laying around’ that was getting unused. Since then I’ve really enjoyed it and picked up an acoustic (which I actually enjoy playing more). I’ve also picked up some computer equipment (M-Audio Black Box) so that I can mess around with software like GarageBand and actually record some of my practices. I’ve moved quite a long way from my happ [read].
Posted: Tue, May 19th '09 |
.NET RIA Services Update with new Silverlight project template
Tim Heuer
We’ve update the .NET RIA Services build for May 2009. The updated May preview can be downloaded here: .NET RIA Services May 2009. You may have to uninstall your previous version before installing this one. What is .NET RIA Services? Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to d [read].
Posted: Tue, May 19th '09 |
.NET RIA Services Update with new Silverlight project template
Tim Heuer
We’ve update the .NET RIA Services build for May 2009. The updated May preview can be downloaded here: .NET RIA Services May 2009. You may have to uninstall your previous version before installing this one. What is .NET RIA Services? Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to d [read].
Posted: Tue, May 19th '09 |
Hobby Diversification Update: Guitar Lessons
Tim Heuer
Back in December, I wrote about my attempt at diversifying my hobbies. In October 2008 I started taking guitar lessons because I had a Fender ‘laying around’ that was getting unused. Since then I’ve really enjoyed it and picked up an acoustic (which I actually enjoy playing more). I’ve also picked up some computer equipment (M-Audio Black Box) so that I can mess around with software like GarageBand and actually record some of my practices. I’ve moved quite a long way from my happ [read].
Posted: Mon, May 18th '09 |
Silverlight Best of MIX in Phoenix
Tim Heuer
I’ll be joining Dan Wahlin and Rob Bagby on 18 May in Phoenix for a Best of MIX event. I’ll be presenting Silverlight 3 and building data-driven line-of-business applications. All demo, all tech, all Visual Studio as my presentation tool :-). Come out and join us for the event! Best of MIX Agenda Monday, May 18, 2009 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Wells Fargo Conference Center 100 West Washington Street, MAC S4101-017 Phoenix Arizona 85003 What’s New in Silverlight 3? Are you interested in buil [read].
Posted: Wed, May 13th '09 |
Silverlight Best of MIX in Phoenix
Tim Heuer
I’ll be joining Dan Wahlin and Rob Bagby on 18 May in Phoenix for a Best of MIX event. I’ll be presenting Silverlight 3 and building data-driven line-of-business applications. All demo, all tech, all Visual Studio as my presentation tool :-). Come out and join us for the event! Best of MIX Agenda Monday, May 18, 2009 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Wells Fargo Conference Center 100 West Washington Street, MAC S4101-017 Phoenix Arizona 85003 What’s New in Silverlight 3? Are you interested in buil [read].
Posted: Tue, May 12th '09 |
Silverlight Enterprise Deployment Guidance
Tim Heuer
We’ve just released an update to our Silverlight Enterprise Deployment guidance/whitepaper. While a lot of the information from the first version of the guidance (targeted at Silverlight 1.0), we made some minor adjustments outlining the specifics for the updated Silverlight installer and documented some of the command-switches and their behaviors. The guidance covers: Using Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) Group policy Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Manual i [read].
Posted: Tue, May 12th '09 |
Silverlight Enterprise Deployment Guidance
Tim Heuer
We’ve just released an update to our Silverlight Enterprise Deployment guidance/whitepaper. While a lot of the information from the first version of the guidance (targeted at Silverlight 1.0), we made some minor adjustments outlining the specifics for the updated Silverlight installer and documented some of the command-switches and their behaviors. The guidance covers: Using Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) Group policy Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Manual i [read].
Posted: Tue, May 12th '09 |
Refactoring Silverlight ChildWindow for a non-modal use
Tim Heuer
I’ve seen a few comments/requests incoming lately that people like the ChildWindow control in the Silverlight SDK. This is a great control that creates a modal dialog for you. When you use it, it disables your root layout application and shows the dialog you provide: This is great for those true modal needs. It responds to normal windows DialogResult type responses if you have buttons, etc. – great for error dialogs, logins, etc. The request I’ve been seeing is for the same functi [read].
Posted: Mon, May 11th '09 |
Refactoring Silverlight ChildWindow for a non-modal use
Tim Heuer
I’ve seen a few comments/requests incoming lately that people like the ChildWindow control in the Silverlight SDK. This is a great control that creates a modal dialog for you. When you use it, it disables your root layout application and shows the dialog you provide: This is great for those true modal needs. It responds to normal windows DialogResult type responses if you have buttons, etc. – great for error dialogs, logins, etc. The request I’ve been seeing is for the same functi [read].
Posted: Sun, May 10th '09 |
Silverlight Contest app updated with new RadialPanel
Tim Heuer
Isn’t RSS great!? Today I saw something wonderful pop in the feed from Jeff Prosise. One of the problems with the ‘contest wheel’ app that Arturo and I did, was the CircularPanel we were using really at the time was only built for demo purposes. There were issues in the spacing when different data items were bound to it. This morning, Jeff released some code for a RadialPanel (same concept). It’s wonderful. I just swapped it out for the contest app quickly and got it working. [read].
Posted: Wed, May 6th '09 |
Silverlight Contest app updated with new RadialPanel
Tim Heuer
Isn’t RSS great!? Today I saw something wonderful pop in the feed from Jeff Prosise. One of the problems with the ‘contest wheel’ app that Arturo and I did, was the CircularPanel we were using really at the time was only built for demo purposes. There were issues in the spacing when different data items were bound to it. This morning, Jeff released some code for a RadialPanel (same concept). It’s wonderful. I just swapped it out for the contest app quickly and got it working. [read].
Posted: Tue, May 5th '09 |
Windows 7 and Foxit PDF Previewer
Tim Heuer
Public service announcement – if you don’t use my Foxit PDF Previewer, please move along…there is nothing to see here :-). When Windows 7 Beta came out (build 7000), there was indeed a confirmed issue where the Foxit PDF Previewer would not work at all on 64-bit versions. There were no install warnings, it just wouldn’t work. It turns out this was a Windows 7 beta bug for 64-bit (some COM registering stuff if you care to know). This was found immediately and was fixed in later Wind [read].
Posted: Sun, May 3rd '09 |
WEB09 – Silverlight and Blend in Auckland, New Zealand
Tim Heuer
I’ve just returned this past week from a trip to New Zealand with Arturo Toledo. We were invited to come by Nigel Parker, who if you live in New Zealand and don’t know him…take a moment and subscribe to his site for information about what’s happening in that area. Our first stop in New Zealand was the WEB09 conference, which was organized by John Ballinger. Prior to the actual conference, John managed to get all the speakers together for a reception and then a dinner afterwards. W [read].
Posted: Fri, May 1st '09 |
Expression for Art’s Sake – Silverlight and Blend in Wellington, New Zealand
Tim Heuer
What do you get when you invite 14 companies for 3 1/2 days and throw a bunch of new stuff in their face and ask them to use it? Well, in Wellington, it was called Expression for Art’s Sake. This was a bit of an ‘artist in residency’ program where Microsoft invited some companies to bring their developer and designer staff to this event to learn a little bit about Expression Blend and Silverlight. Coming after WEB09 and ending our Auckland trip with a proper visit to a rugby game (h [read].
Posted: Fri, May 1st '09 |
Paste your REST API definition as strong types
Tim Heuer
If your a developer that spends any time with web services, you’ll basically probably end up working in one of two camps: REST- or SOAP-based services. Now with SOAP services you’re likely used to having a WSDL document describing the service, providing type definitions, etc. – something you can use developer tools like Visual Studio to Add Service Reference and get a strongly-typed object model to work with. If you’ve been doing Silverlight or ASP.NET (or any other technology really) [read].
Posted: Wed, Apr 29th '09 |
Paste your REST API definition as strong types
Tim Heuer
If your a developer that spends any time with web services, you’ll basically probably end up working in one of two camps: REST- or SOAP-based services. Now with SOAP services you’re likely used to having a WSDL document describing the service, providing type definitions, etc. – something you can use developer tools like Visual Studio to Add Service Reference and get a strongly-typed object model to work with. If you’ve been doing Silverlight or ASP.NET (or any other technology really) [read].
Posted: Wed, Apr 29th '09 |
Adding jQuery to your site with Glimmer
Tim Heuer
Last week I was wanting to do something on my site sort of a ‘breaking news’ style banner that would span the entire site width but only when I wanted it too – based on a cookie or something else. And I didn’t want to do something server side, because I was sick of doing stuff like that. Not having played with jQuery, I thought I’d take a dive. Prior to MIX09, I’d been testing something that the MIXOnline team had been toying with, which has just been released: Glimmer. Glimmer [read].
Posted: Wed, Apr 29th '09 |
Adding jQuery to your site with Glimmer
Tim Heuer
Last week I was wanting to do something on my site sort of a ‘breaking news’ style banner that would span the entire site width but only when I wanted it too – based on a cookie or something else. And I didn’t want to do something server side, because I was sick of doing stuff like that. Not having played with jQuery, I thought I’d take a dive. Prior to MIX09, I’d been testing something that the MIXOnline team had been toying with, which has just been released: Glimmer. Glimmer [read].
Posted: Wed, Apr 29th '09 |
Arizona: Silverlight, MVC, MEF, WPF
Tim Heuer
It’s that time of year my friends in Arizona. No, I’m not talking about when the air conditioners start get turned on, nor how the golf green fee rates are reduced or the snowbirds fly away…although those are good things as well. I’m talking geek fest time. Mark your calendars: 26 May 2009 – 8:00 AM The community leaders in the area have organized another big event for your benefit. So who is coming? Here’s the rundown: Glenn Block – come see why you should get addicted to [read].
Posted: Wed, Apr 22nd '09 |
Learning WPF at the WPF LOB tour and XAMLFest events
Tim Heuer
There seems to be a lot of buzz around Silverlight lately and I admit, I like it :-). But I also think that there is a huge misconception about Silverlight “replacing” WPF. I get emails a lot about people asking me questions about Silverlight and after a bit of prodding, I see that their target platform for their application is Windows. I then begin my rant on why it should be WPF if that is the target platform. I’m usually met with some weird looks being that I do a lot of Silver [read].
Posted: Thu, Apr 16th '09 |
Silverlight installation experience guidance posted
Tim Heuer
I’ve been promising this for a while and I’ve ranted about creating good installation experiences for Silverlight applications before as well here and here. Well, our team rallied and created some new guidance and sample code to provide for you to implement the best possible experience. The guidance whitepaper can be found on the Silverlight Community Site in the whitepapers section and includes: Documentation for defining a good user experience Sample code for media applications Sample [read].
Posted: Fri, Apr 10th '09 |
Technology, Social Media seeping into my home
Tim Heuer
All your base are belong to us. The year was nineteen ninety something. A strapping young chap entered the world of technology. With overpromises from tech leads, undertrained programmers, and caffeine, there was nothing we couldn’t conquer. Or something like that. I’ve pretty much been in technology all my “professional” life…save it being a small sting of leadership consulting right out of college that a totaled car at Duquesne solved that decision for me….but that’s anoth [read].
Posted: Thu, Apr 9th '09 |
Grouping data in Silverlight DataGrid
Tim Heuer
I got this question on how do you add grouping to the DataGrid in Silverlight without using the RIA Services ObjectDataSource. Frankly I didn’t know off the top of my head either and I’ve since learned it isn’t obvious. Allow me to explain the steps. In my simple app I have a static class that supplies some hard-coded data: 1: public List GetPeople()
2: {
3: List peeps = new List();
4: peeps.Add(new Person() { FirstName = "Tim", LastName="Heuer", Gender="M", AgeGroup="Ad [read].
Posted: Thu, Apr 9th '09 |
Startups welcome here – get a jumpstart with software you need
Tim Heuer
Are you a startup organization? Perhaps your the next greatest Silverlight control vendor or have a great app? I want to help. If you’re a Silverlight startup (or any startup really for that matter), reach out to me. If you haven’t heard of BizSpark yet, you’re potentially missing out. If you meet the following criteria: privately held company in business less than 3 years generate less than USD $1 million in revenue you may qualify to get access to production licenses for develo [read].
Posted: Wed, Apr 8th '09 |
Managing Silverlight 3 navigation behavior
Tim Heuer
I’ve been playing around with the Silverlight 3 navigation framework some more (thanks for the comments/thoughts on the last post about sharing data). I got a few emails about understanding how the navigation works and people coming up with interesting uses. Let’s take a moment to explore two of these concepts: out-of-browser navigation and controlling your navigation in your app. Navigation Basics If you are using Visual Studio 2008 and the Silverlight 3 tools, you’ll notice that when [read].
Posted: Mon, Apr 6th '09 |
Share DataContext among navigation pages in Silverlight 3
Tim Heuer
I got an email the other day about if there was a way to pass an object between the navigation pages in Silverlight 3. The scenario was that the developer wanted to use the same data, but represent it visually in different ways. Silverlight 3 introduces a new navigation framework in the runtime making it easier to navigate to different areas of an application and assist in ‘deep linking’ concepts for applications. More resources: Silverlight 3 Navigation Overview Silverlight 3 Navigati [read].
Posted: Fri, Apr 3rd '09 |
WEB09: Silverlight coming to Auckland!
Tim Heuer
In a few weeks I’ll be making the journey with Corrina and Arturo from ‘the states’ to Auckland, New Zealand for the WEB09 conference. I’m honored to be joining some great folks like Ryan Stewart, Dan Rubin, Jarred Bishop and more. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from this conference and having discussions about user experience and RIA development. The team at WEB09 released an introductory video for the conference and I must say, someone put a lot of effort into this video: [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 31st '09 |
WEB09: Silverlight coming to Auckland!
Tim Heuer
In a few weeks I’ll be making the journey with Corrina and Arturo from ‘the states’ to Auckland, New Zealand for the WEB09 conference. I’m honored to be joining some great folks like Ryan Stewart, Dan Rubin, Jarred Bishop and more. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from this conference and having discussions about user experience and RIA development. The team at WEB09 released an introductory video for the conference and I must say, someone put a lot of effort into this video: [read].
Posted: Mon, Mar 30th '09 |
Silverlight for WordPress
Tim Heuer
I’ve made no hiding the fact that my blog is build on Subtext and that I’m very happy with it right now. Lately though my wife has been blogging more (that’s another story) and she also started her own business. Being curious about all the WordPress love, I decided to start checking it out. Thankfully, the Web Platform Installer helped me get started on WordPress without any troubles at all and I was up and running on my Windows server (I didn’t want to start another hosting account [read].
Posted: Sat, Mar 28th '09 |
Web platforms installed in one click…seriously.
Tim Heuer
Ok I’ve seen all the announcements and read all the buzz. I know some folks on the team as well and had heard all their raving about their offering. It wasn’t until today where I really realized what was going on. In fact I was thinking about titling this post: WordPress installed and configured in under 5 minutes, but it’s much more than just that. Introducing: Web Platform Installer 2. The team at Microsoft has been working hard to make getting your web platform (server and client [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 26th '09 |
Web platforms installed in one click…seriously.
Tim Heuer
Ok I’ve seen all the announcements and read all the buzz. I know some folks on the team as well and had heard all their raving about their offering. It wasn’t until today where I really realized what was going on. In fact I was thinking about titling this post: WordPress installed and configured in under 5 minutes, but it’s much more than just that. Introducing: Web Platform Installer 2. The team at Microsoft has been working hard to make getting your web platform (server and client [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 25th '09 |
Silverlight 3 Beta install experience for users
Tim Heuer
If you are like any other developer, including me, you probably disregard most warnings and are usually the same type that keeps clicking next when installing things without paying attention to detail. That’s okay I do it too. In the release of Silvelright 3 Beta, we noted that this is a developer release and that no “Go Live” licensing was going to be available for this release. What this means is that we don’t recommend putting things in production as we’ve not exposed or wired u [read].
Posted: Mon, Mar 23rd '09 |
Silverlight 3: Navigation URI Routing
Tim Heuer
One of the new features in Silverlight 3 is providing an application navigation framework via the Frame and Page controls in the APIs. If you saw my guide to Silverlight 3, you may have seen the section on navigation which describes the functionality and as well has a link to a video tutorial about it. I wanted to augment that tutorial with some additional information about URI routing, which I think is one of the great features of the framework. You see typically your UriMapper might have a [read].
Posted: Sun, Mar 22nd '09 |
Silverlight 3 Sample Application: Slidentity
Tim Heuer
One of the great things about the Silverlight team is that usually in the home stretch most of the feature samples of numerous ‘hello world’ type examples start shaping into creative ideas to demonstrate various features. One such example is a full Silverlight 3 application that Mike Harsh created to actually demonstrate various features and it is what he used to present his session talk as well. He currently calls it Slidentity and it demonstrates: Various skinned control usage Perspe [read].
Posted: Sun, Mar 22nd '09 |
ClearRx Medical Prescriptions and Software Design
Tim Heuer
I understand that there was some folks at MIX09 who weren’t happy (or maybe ‘were bored’ is the better term here) about the day 2 keynote session with Deborah Adler, a designer from New York who created the ClearRx system for medical prescriptions. Yes, it was not your typical Microsoft keynote presentation and in fact, followed by IE8 announcements, had nothing to do with releases, Silverlight or anything like it. Sort of. Robby said it was the best MIX keynote ever, and if I wasn [read].
Posted: Sat, Mar 21st '09 |
ClearRx Medical Prescriptions and Software Design
Tim Heuer
I understand that there was some folks at MIX09 who weren’t happy (or maybe ‘were bored’ is the better term here) about the day 2 keynote session with Deborah Adler, a designer from New York who created the ClearRx system for medical prescriptions. Yes, it was not your typical Microsoft keynote presentation and in fact, followed by IE8 announcements, had nothing to do with releases, Silverlight or anything like it. Sort of. Robby said it was the best MIX keynote ever, and if I wasn [read].
Posted: Fri, Mar 20th '09 |
Silverlight 3 Out-of-browser Update Model
Tim Heuer
Wednesday at MIX09 was a great day. I was exhausted, but after the keynote I was so high on excitement it was great. Throughout the day Twitter was buzzing (or is it fizzing?) about all the news around Silverlight 3. In one conversation around the out-of-browser experiences with Silverlight, I caught a conversation on Twitter about it with questions about the update model. I jumped in which resulted in this twittersation (sorry, couldn’t resist): So, instead of trying to cram it in 14 [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 19th '09 |
A guide to Silverlight 3 new features
Tim Heuer
Well, by now the interwebs are getting busy with the news about Silverlight 3 details announced at MIX09. The team has been hard at work (and still aren’t resting) pushing out this beta release. Over the next week you’ll see lots of blog posts by team members and Silverlight MVPs who have been enthusiastically waiting to share what we’ve been working on and show you some sample applications they’ve been working on. Quite frankly, so will I :-). But in the meantime, allow me to shar [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 18th '09 |
Silverlight Smooth Streaming: UX Simulator
Tim Heuer
I’m sure you’ve heard of the IIS7 Smooth Streaming information and perhaps even experienced it if you watched some of the NBC Olympics streams last year or the Presidential Inauguration this past January. It’s a great experience for online media being able to seamlessly deliver quality media online without constant buffering when latency occurs in networks you don’t control, such as your customers’ ISP accounts. You may have wanted to try out this experience yourself to see exactly w [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 18th '09 |
Follow Silverlight updates on Twitter
Tim Heuer
I was just thinking the other day that I have some decent subscriber numbers here, but the same volume isn’t matched on my Twitter account. For those who don’t know about Twitter, it’s a great short message service that kind of works like a global messaging system. The best description I’ve heard has been: Twitter is like an ongoing conversation at a party. Come in and listen/participate whenever you want with whomever you want. Leave at your leisure. Come back often if you’ [read].
Posted: Sun, Mar 15th '09 |
Silverlight Business Application Development faster with IdeaBlade
Tim Heuer
Okay, about a month ago I was shown this demonstration by my new favorite friend Ward Bell of IdeaBlade. Why is he my new favorite friend? Well besides being a great guy, wait till you see what he has to show you. I briefly alluded to my excitement via Twitter as a teaser. I previously mentioned that we saw some sneak peeks of Silverlight 3 added features for line-of-business application development with Brad Abrams. Today, check out what Ward has to show you: I am really, r [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 11th '09 |
Silverlight Sneak Peek: Building line-of-business with Silverlight
Tim Heuer
Want some sneak peeks at Silverlight enhancements for line-of-business applications? Check out the video with Robert Hess and Brad Abrams where Brad shows some some sneak preview of some feature enhancements. If you want to download the episode above, visit the Channel 9 page here. Be sure to stay tuned for MIX09 for more announcements and updates! tags: silverlight, lob, xaml, wpf, navigation, deep link, deep linkingThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By licen [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 10th '09 |
Using Silverlight for workflow creation
Tim Heuer
The other day I was given a peek at a company who implemented a full-frame Silverlight application that when I saw it it was one of those “wow” moments. A lot of the public-facing Silverlight examples are very different from one another and sometimes you see some that are full Silverlight applications that really give you a glimpse of how people are thinking about using the platform and how creative you can get. Colaab is one such example that I saw at PDC last year (check it out if you [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 3rd '09 |
Testing Silverlight Applications
Tim Heuer
If you are a developer who likes various aspect of testing in your application (beyond the “does it work” testing), you may be interested in a few frameworks for Silverlight. Microsoft Silverlight Unit Test Framework This testing framework was developed by Jeff Wilcox of the Silverlight Toolkit fame among other things. This test framework is used by the Silverlight Toolkit team themselves (as is what is shipped with the source code for the project). This framework runs unit test inside t [read].
Posted: Thu, Feb 26th '09 |
New Silverlight media experience for WindowsClient.net
Tim Heuer
Our team is working on a new design for the Silverlight Community Site and one of those aspects includes a new media experience for the online media/video portions of the Silverlight, Windows Client, and ASP.NET sites. Today we rolled out the new experience first on the Windows Client community site. It’s a subtle update but hopefully a welcome one. The older experience was a basic playback experience and was a Silverlight 1.0 application. This update brings a few new things, but primari [read].
Posted: Thu, Feb 26th '09 |
MIX09 ticket winners
Tim Heuer
I actually didn’t plan on “announcing” the winners, but I did want to give some credit to some great contributions and my appreciation for those that attempted given such short notice. Last week I posted a simple quick request for you to be inspired and have some fun with Silverlight and win a chance at a free registration to MIX09. The deadline has come and gone and here are the winners: Winner #1: Matthias and Presidential newspaper timeline. Seriously you have to check this out. I [read].
Posted: Tue, Feb 24th '09 |
Get yourself a Windows Home Server
Tim Heuer
After reading James’ story just now, I’m so glad that a Windows Home Server is a new addition to my home. It’s funny…about 4 years ago I think I had 6 active machines in my house. Now we’re down to my work laptop, my MacBook, my wife’s laptop and a new desktop for my wife’s photography and graphics stuff. Okay, I guess that’s not down much, but they all aren’t “active” that much anymore. Back then I had no backup strategy. In fact, I’ve still got a laptop drive th [read].
Posted: Sat, Feb 21st '09 |
Get inspired for web, photography, anything – SmashingMagazine.com
Tim Heuer
If you’re like me then you probably are more geekier than you are artistic. I don’t think of myself AT ALL as a designer, but rather one who appreciates both good design and good user centric design. You may look at this site here and say it doesn’t, and that is okay…I’m trying my best :-). But often I find that I need some tweaks, icons, templates, application design inspiration for a Silverlight application, whatever and just want to do it myself. I’ve found the one place now [read].
Posted: Fri, Feb 20th '09 |
Silverlight 2 gets minor update
Tim Heuer
Yesterday a minor update to the Silverlight 2 runtime was released. You may see terms of “GDR 1” floating around. That’s pretty much an internal term at Microsoft referred to as “general distribution release” – yeah, I know we have a lot of random terms. Think of it just as an incremental update. If you are curious for Silverlight’s entire release history, you can view that here. So what’s in it? Well, nothing earth shattering if you were expecting feature updates. Th [read].
Posted: Thu, Feb 19th '09 |
Prism v2 – Guidance and Patterns for WPF and Silverlight
Tim Heuer
The big news in the Silverlight developer world today is the release of Prism v2 (also called the Composite Application Guidance). So what is this? Prism guidance is a set of tools, samples, references and written guidance to help you more easily build modular applications. Generally the “modular” application will feature several screens, flexible user interaction and role-based behavior. Composite applications using these patterns are meant to be loosely coupled and contain independen [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 18th '09 |
ISP and DNS providers stealing search traffic
Tim Heuer
Okay, I think this is pretty crappy. Say what you want about Microsoft and you hate the company fine, but outright ignoring user expectations and preferences is wrong. Scott Cate had found something weird happening on his experience with using browsers and the address bar search behavior. Most modern browsers have a feature that if you type something into the address bar (not the search bar that they all also have), that it will execute a search using your configured provider and display the [read].
Posted: Tue, Feb 17th '09 |
Get a free ticket to MIX09 for having fun with Silverlight
Tim Heuer
Did I mention I’m going to MIX? Will I see you there? I could imagine that some have tight travel budgets, training budgets shrunk, yada, yada. I’m telling you…if you are a Microsoft developer in the web and WPF space, you need to be at MIX09. In an effort to help there are a bunch of ways to reduce some costs…here’s some: Register before 27 Feb 2009 with RSVP code: MIXLastChance and get $300 off the registration fee Share a creative picture about Internet Explorer (details an [read].
Posted: Tue, Feb 17th '09 |
Moonlight 1.0 Released, Silverlight script updated – and a Chrome hack
Tim Heuer
First a congratulations to the Moonlight team for reaching their official release of 1.0! Miguel and team have done a great job providing parity with Silverlight 1.0 and should be proud of their accomplishments. Miguel, when is Moonlight 2 coming out :-) -- no rest!! But seriously, this is a good accomplishment for the ecosystem. Last month I wrote and recorded my experience of the Moonlight installer/rendering on an OpenSUSE environment. What this demonstrated was that we’d integrated [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 11th '09 |
POLL: Silverlight developer patterns
Tim Heuer
My friend Joel Neubeck is doing a survey on his site about what patterns people prefer for Silverlight development. I’m very interested in these results as well, so if you have 2 seconds, please post your vote: Link: Poll: What separation pattern do you prefer in Silverlight development? tags: silverlight, mvvm, mvc, mvp, xaml, wpf, patterns, m-v-vm, viewmodelThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license. [read].
Posted: Tue, Feb 10th '09 |
My Blogging Toolbox
Tim Heuer
From time to time I’ve gotten a few inquiries as to what platform my blog is, what tools do I use, etc. After a recent trip to Redmond and visiting with the Live Writer team, I got another inquiry while talking with a customer. I thought I’d just spit out my thoughts. First, my platform. Yes there are many platforms out there for blogging. Probably the most popular are Wordpress and Blogspot. I think those are popular because you can get up and running for free and have it hosted. [read].
Posted: Mon, Feb 9th '09 |
Silverlight as the V in ASP.NET MVC
Tim Heuer
One thing that I’m excited about is learning new technologies. Moving to the Silverlight team, I’ve moved away from a breadth of technology knowledge to something a bit more narrow. Now I feel like all other developers trying to keep up with the technologies we are releasing. As such, I’m a beginner for most. One such technology is ASP.NET MVC, which was just released to release candidate stability. I thought I’d play around with it in the context of Silverlight and use Silverlig [read].
Posted: Mon, Feb 9th '09 |
Presto – a great device for less technically inclined
Tim Heuer
I’m sure I’m not unlike most people who have more “experienced in years” relatives. Sadly it seems that generation has been slow(er) to adopt current technology advancements. I think this issue is exasperated, for me at least, when those relatives are not in close proximity so that you can force help them move into that age of technology. Just recently my father asked me how easy it was to set up a webcam so that he could talk/see my nephew and sister who live in Denver, Colorado. [read].
Posted: Tue, Feb 3rd '09 |
A comprehensive list to Silverlight Controls for developers
Tim Heuer
I’ve written a few times about some of the controls that have been provided by organizations like Telerik and ComponentOne. I figured it would be a good idea to do a larger dump of those that I’m aware of (and hope you add comments to point me to others so I can amend this list) and help make you aware of them as well. There are a ton of great resources out there for Silverlight developers and I’m always impressed how our developer partners are extending our platforms to make tools for [read].
Posted: Wed, Jan 28th '09 |
Customize your Garmin Nuvi with photo radar warnings and more
Tim Heuer
I love my Garmin Nuvi. As I’ve mentioned before it’s one of the best pieces of technology I own for use, form factor, fun, and coolness factor. I’ve got the 260 which suits me fine, but if I had to buy a new one, I’d get the 760 now. One of the weird things is that I keep it on all the time when I’m driving, even if I know where I’m going. The points of interest (POI) feature is awesome and has helped me discover new places to eat every once in a while. There are other custom [read].
Posted: Sat, Jan 24th '09 |
FeedBurner move to Google, MyBrand and 404 errors hooray!
Tim Heuer
Well the move was inevitable. Which move? Well if you are a FeedBurner user and haven’t been paying attention for the past year, you may not have known that Google bought them and are transitioning the service to their infrastructure. What does this mean to you? It depends. If you use the core FeedBurner service and use the “feeds.feedburner.com” URI for your subscription links, then generally speaking you should be fine. Google has planned to redirect that URI to their updated o [read].
Posted: Fri, Jan 23rd '09 |
Silverlight Docking and Ribbon controls
Tim Heuer
A company called divelements has had Windows Forms products for a while that produced, among other things, the “docking” effect that you see with some applications, including Visual Studio. This is the ability to drag a window to another area and have it automatically dock to that particular position of the parent window: This product is also available for WPF and for Silverlight. So if you need to add this type of dynamic window moving to your applications, you can check out the SandDoc [read].
Posted: Tue, Jan 20th '09 |
Visual Studio tricks in video form
Tim Heuer
Over the past year Sara Ford had created a Visual Studio tip-of-the-day feature of her blog that eventually was aggregated pretty much everywhere and also in the Visual Studio community page displayed within the product itself! The tips were plenty and great…a ton of gems that you may not have known before and a subtle reminder that there is so much more to learn. This year Scott Cate has decided to take this one step further. He’s begun taking this tips concept and providing actual walk [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 19th '09 |
I’m going to MIX09, will I see you there?
Tim Heuer
I have to admit, when the first MIX was happening it confused me. Yet another conference? In my usual pessimistic self I tried to convince people that it was wrong, blah, blah. But I was wrong. MIX has become of of my favorite conferences to attend. Not only for the announcements that likely happen, but for the networking with industry folks in an area I’m most passionate about.
Enough gushing though. I’m going to MIX09. Will you be there? If you register before 13 Feb 2009, [read].
Posted: Fri, Jan 16th '09 |
Updated SLS Plugin for Encoder Available
Tim Heuer
The Encoder team has updated their Silverlight Streaming (SLS) plugin for Expression Encoder 2. On the surface pretty much nothing has changed, but it essentially updates the ability to use the plugin to publish Silverlight 2 templates to SLS automatically without getting the random error that you’ve probably seen if you tried. Since the new Silverlight 2 player templates are completely parameter-driven, which is awesome, it did present a small challenge for the plugin. When you use the ne [read].
Posted: Thu, Jan 15th '09 |
Amazon S3 Publishing Plugin for Expression Encoder
Tim Heuer
One of the great things I like about some of our platform products is that they are building in extensibility more and more. Take Windows Live Writer as an example. It’s no secret on this blog that I’ve got a geek affair with that tool. I use it daily and have customized it (via plugins) and my blogging platform (Subtext) to make it even more of a best experience for me for web authoring. Writing plugins for Writer has been a lot of fun and a great way to get the functionality I want/n [read].
Posted: Wed, Jan 14th '09 |
InitParams in Silverlight Live Streaming services
Tim Heuer
One of my favorite implementations is to leverage the initParams feature for the Silverlight plug-in. This enables you to send parameters to your application prior to it starting up. These parameters are in plain text and can be seen in the HTML source of your page, so obviously you wouldn’t want to include any sensitive information there like passwords, connection strings, etc., etc. But it can be very helpful for re-using application logic while providing an configurable experience. [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 12th '09 |
Give feedback on Windows 7 Beta
Tim Heuer
Now that Windows 7 beta has been released, there are quite a few people using it and I’ve seen pretty positive feedback about it. I’ve been running it for about a month now and am impressed with the performance over Vista mostly. All my programs continue to run fine (only exception is MagicDisc ISO mounter, but found another option – why isn’t ISO mounting a part of Windows – vote here?!?!?!) and I was able to set up a perfect Windows Deployment Server image to quickly image my lap [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 12th '09 |
A humble reminder about what it’s really about
Tim Heuer
[Warning: A total, off-the-grid post for normal topics here] Today, after 2 pretty long days with my kids while the wife was out with friends, I had lost a lot of patience. My daughter fell asleep in our bedroom as she does sometimes, and I was preparing to bring her into her room. I usually go into her room first and get it all ready so that I can quietly just pick her up from ours and put her in her bed. Tonight as I did this routine, I pulled the sheets back and discovered something pokin [read].
Posted: Sun, Jan 11th '09 |
Using Encoder 2 templates for existing media
Tim Heuer
In an email dialog today I saw someone asking how he could use an existing Encoder 2 template for existing media or streaming URIs when you don’t have something to encode. After a few explanations, he replied that someone should blog this – and I agree :-). So what did he mean? Well, when you use Expression Encoder, you are typically going to be encoding media to a format to consume. Encoder also gives you an additional option in the output settings to generate a media player for that [read].
Posted: Sat, Jan 10th '09 |
PayPal screws sellers by holding payments
Tim Heuer
I wish to tell you a story. A while back I purchased a Nokia E71 mobile phone. It’s one of the latest from Nokia and has been given rave reviews for a smart phone. I ultimately didn’t like it as it wasn’t for me. After a few weeks, I listed it on eBay as I’ve done approximately 100 times before with other items around the house. Now the item sold quickly and sold for roughly USD $490. I demand in my eBay listings that the buyers use PayPal and that they have a verified PayPal [read].
Posted: Sat, Jan 10th '09 |
Source code for Silverlight controls published
Tim Heuer
The source code for the Silverlight 2 controls was just published! This is the source for the controls as shipped in the runtime and the SDK. When you download the project you’ll see the structure: The source, released under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), includes the source for the following controls in the runtime: ButtonBase Button HyperlinkButton CheckBox RadioButton ToggleButton RangeBase ProgressBar Slider ScrollBar Thumb and the following from the SDK (part of the Silver [read].
Posted: Thu, Jan 8th '09 |
Why won’t iTunes behave?
Tim Heuer
In a recent Twitter conversation I was having with Peter Laudati, it reminded me of another problem I’ve been having with iTunes and wondering why it isn’t working this way. First, here’s my setup (and logic): I have one server (Windows Server 2008) at my house that manages my backup, music, photos, etc. (no it is not a Windows Home Server (yet)). I have a public share there with Everyone read/write priveleges called “music” and it is shared out an accessible. In each client comp [read].
Posted: Wed, Jan 7th '09 |
Screencast of Silverlight installation on Linux
Tim Heuer
If you haven’t been aware, there has been a team at Novell working hard to make a version of Silverlight for Linux. This version, called Moonlight, has been in development since WPF/e it was first shown at the MIX conference (which by the way is happening in March with some really exciting stuff, so be sure to register for MIX09!). Moonlight hit beta this past December 2008 and the team has already been working on Moonlight 2 which is the Silverlight 2 compatible version. Right now, Moonli [read].
Posted: Tue, Jan 6th '09 |
SilverlightShow contest: Write and Win!
Tim Heuer
Got a great concept about Silverlight use, an application, utility, or just some knowledge you want to share but never had the place to put it? The team at SilverlightShow have been having a contest they call Silverlight: Write and Win! and you can get some great Silverlight-related prizes such as Telerik and ComponentOne control licenses for Silverlight and WPF applications. You have to simply write an article about your concept (application, control, whatever) related to Silverlight 2 and pr [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 5th '09 |
Hosting Silverlight content on a CDN
Tim Heuer
Over the holiday this past week I got a ping from Scott Cate about some Silverlight media questions, namely a player and Silverlight Streaming. The gist of the conversation was that the Encoder 2 SP1 templates and the SLS Plugin don’t play nice together (yet). I know that the team has been testing some updates to the plugin for uploading Silverlight 2 templates to SLS, but for now if you tried to do that you’ll get a random error message that won’t make sense to you (something along th [read].
Posted: Fri, Jan 2nd '09 |
Diversifying your hobbies
Tim Heuer
I’ve essentially only had 3 hobbies: computers, golf and SCUBA. The latter is quite a bit hard to maintain living in a land-locked state in the desert. The second (golf), however, is very easy to maintain, but long past are the days of free golf that I used to enjoy while working at a golf course and being a part of golf teams. I now have to actually pay for it :-) -- and sometimes it isn’t a priority to want to go out in 120 degree weather and play golf (although that’s usually when [read].
Posted: Wed, Dec 31st '08 |
My favorite tech stuff for the holidays
Tim Heuer
Having a hard time finding that gift for your techno dweep friend/husband/relative/co-worker? Probably not if you are subscribed here :-). But I thought that I’d highlight my favorite tech things this year that I think will make the perfect gift. Arranged in my order of preference. Garmin Nuvi (model 260 or 760) My first pick is the best technology gift I’ve been given in years. I received it as a father’s day gift this year and wrote how much I love my Garmin Nuvi 260. The funn [read].
Posted: Mon, Dec 15th '08 |
Deep Zoom style on iPhone – Seadragon for Mobile
Tim Heuer
Who, didn’t think I’d see “Microsoft Corporation” listed in the Apple AppStore for iPhone this quick. Want to view gigapixel images on your iPhone? The team at Live Labs just announced their approved iPhone App – Seadragon Mobile. So what is Seadragon? it was the original Microsoft Research project that many products are now based on. Most popular probably is the Deep Zoom technology brought first to Silverlight 2. This is the process of taking gigapixel image and providing [read].
Posted: Mon, Dec 15th '08 |
Event (analytics) tracking in Silverlight
Tim Heuer
A few days ago Google announced “event tracking” for their Google Analytics platform. My account was invited to participate in this initial wave so I decided to take a look. The main reason of course is because of a keyword in their email they sent to me (emphasis mine): “Event Tracking allows you to track interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as Flash, AJAX, Silverlight, social networking apps, etc.” I have the script already running on my site for general analytics so I fi [read].
Posted: Fri, Dec 5th '08 |
The Silverlight Application Corner
Tim Heuer
One of the things that we have heard in feedback is the need to surface more end-to-end samples. While the atomic learning videos/samples are great as are more in-depth tutorials, there is still a desire to see how to package all these things up into a single application. Seeing from start to finish helps absorb the learning process and see how these atomic things fit together and interoperate. Today we added the “application corner” to the Silverlight community site. Yes, I know the n [read].
Posted: Wed, Dec 3rd '08 |
Silverlight install experience best practices
Tim Heuer
First a word on the “continuum” I keep hearing about for applications. I’d like to apply it to my digital lifestyle. You know that vision where you only have one place to keep your music, but can access it anywhere, etc., etc. I still haven’t hit nirvana like that yet, but for movie watching it’s getting close. I used to be a customer of Netflix when they first launched. To be honest, at that time their pricing was singular and I just wasn’t watching enough movies at home to [read].
Posted: Wed, Dec 3rd '08 |
New Silverlight Showcases and Feeds
Tim Heuer
If you want some great Silverlight information, be sure to subscribe to at least two feeds: Microsoft Silverlight Bloggers and Silverlight community feeds. I’ve recently just added a bunch of great feeds to both of these including all the members of the Silverlight Toolkit team and some Silverlight MVPs such as John Papa. There are also a bunch of resources being added to the Silverlight community site over the next month. We also added 27 new showcase entries to the Silverlight Showcase o [read].
Posted: Wed, Nov 26th '08 |
Øredev 2008 Summary
Tim Heuer
Sharing Knowledge. That was the theme of the Øredev conference held this past week in Malmö, Sweden. I was invited this year to participate in this conference in the Scandanavian area to speak on Silverlight technologies. I am very humbled to have been invited. This was truly a great conference and let me tell you my impressions. I’ve attended Microsoft’s PDC, TechEd, VSLive, DevConnections, etc. I’ve got most of them all under my belt (as an attendee). They are all good in t [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 24th '08 |
WPF Toolkit and Silverlight compatibility
Tim Heuer
At PDC the WPF Tookit was made available which provides several new controls to WPF to help bring even more compatibility to the WPF and Silverlight story. The new controls were the DatePicker, Calendar, DataGrid and the VisualStateManager concept to WPF. Ribbon controls were also provided to the WPF Toolkit, but are not covered here. With the introduction of this toolkit, developers now have a way to get some even more common XAML code-base between projects. Let’s take a look at a very si [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 10th '08 |
Flickr4Writer Service Pack update
Tim Heuer
This is a public service announcement for my Flickr4Writer project. It was recently brought to my attention that Flickr has some privacy settings that users can opt-in for in their account to protect their images. Some users felt that my plug-in for Writer was not honoring these settings. Truly, I didn’t know about them. You can read the thread on the discussion lists here if you are so inclined. For me it came down to a couple of items: Flickr enables users to set a flag to preven [read].
Posted: Fri, Nov 7th '08 |
Hey Startups – get some BizSpark
Tim Heuer
Remember DreamSpark, the program for students in higher education to get access to the developer tools and platforms from Microsoft at no charge? How about some love for individuals in startup organizations trying to create the next great innovation in technology as a service, an application, some Silverlight love perhaps :-)? Done. A new program has just launched for startups. From the site it is described as: Microsoft® BizSpark™ is a global program designed to help accelerate the su [read].
Posted: Wed, Nov 5th '08 |
Silverlight 2 Launch Party in Portland
Tim Heuer
PDX baby. That’s where I’m headed next week. The Portland area user experience group (a SIG formed out of the Portland .NET user group) is hosting a Silverlight 2 launch party next week (11 NOV 2008). They’ve invited me to attend and share some fun stuff about Silverlight 2. I’m very excited to be going there because Portland is one of my favorite towns. It has some of the best public transportation there and I think that makes for a great downtown experience and a lot of perso [read].
Posted: Wed, Nov 5th '08 |
Use Styles for an editable Silverlight ComboBox
Tim Heuer
Sometimes I think reading materials get overlooked in SDKs and we miss some hidden gems. One such gem I’d like to bring to your attention is the ability to add some subtle styling to an AutoCompleteBox from the Silverlight Toolkit to provide you with a cheap version of an editable ComboBox. Sure Silverlight 2 has a ComboBox as part of the core controls now, but as I’ve previously noted, the ComboBox in current form exhibits only DropDownList behaviors. I’m sure this will likely change [read].
Posted: Wed, Nov 5th '08 |
Using Silverlight AutoCompleteBox on custom types
Tim Heuer
The other day I wrote a simple little Silverlight application using a DataGrid to help navigate the TechEd DVD contents. My code was admittedly quick and dirty. I loaded up some data, and based on some events re-filtered and re-bound that data. After thinking about it I am not sure why I didn’t just use some existing controls to help me do that work. I found that AutoCompleteBox from the new Silverlight Toolkit would do this for me.
One thing that the AutoCompleteBox d [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 3rd '08 |
Using Encoder Templates in your Silverlight Application
Tim Heuer
I received a comment regarding the new Expression Encoder SP1 Silverlight player templates and how they can be used within your own application. Right now the templates appear to stand on their own. That’s only because the output of an Encoder action will be an encoded file, the template you chose (XAP) and an HTML page to host the Silverlight player application. But what if you already have an application and are trying to integrate media playback within it? How can you take advantage o [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 3rd '08 |
Aggiorno, XHTML, your site and added value
Tim Heuer
My friend Gilbert Corrales has been working for a company called ArtinSoft who has a product Aggiorno. They describe Aggiorno as: Aggiorno is an automated HTML, XHTML, ASP.NET, PHP… expert that transforms Web site code into fully accessible, Web standards compliant, fast-loading dynamos. A few clicks will analyze your pages and perform any number of time-saving code Transformations that will improve the quality and reach of your Web sites. The best part? You don’t have to be a rocket scie [read].
Posted: Sat, Nov 1st '08 |
Expression Encoder SP1 now available
Tim Heuer
Apparently “soon” means “the next day” to the Encoder team :-). On 28 OCT James Clarke told us all about the goodness that is coming to Encoder SP1 and noted it would be available “real soon.” Little did we know he had already clicked the publish process to the download servers. What are you waiting for, go start the download for Encoder SP1 and I’ll share my thoughts on some things here. What’s in it? I’ll pick my favorites: New Silverlight output templates, H.264/AAC s [read].
Posted: Sat, Nov 1st '08 |
TechEd 2008 North America DVD Update
Tim Heuer
Thanks for all the feedback on the TechEd North America DVD issues with viewing the content once Silverlight 2 released. In trying to do a good job providing a good user experience to viewing the content easily, the TechEd team created a Silverlight 2 Beta 2 player for the TechEd Online site as well as the offline DVD content.
Obviously, when Silverlight 2 released and people installed the final version on their machines, the DVD Silverlight player stopped working and presented you with an & [read].
Posted: Sat, Nov 1st '08 |
Silverlight Tools RTW
Tim Heuer
Sorry for the short post, this is more of a public service announcement. When the Silverlight 2 runtime shipped, we shipped the Visual Studio tools along with it. The tools download was labeled “RC1” and caused some confusion. There were some reasons for this, but regardless it still targeted the Silverlight 2 release runtime. Today we released the RTW (Releast To Web for those who are wondering what that means) of the tools. There is no need to re-download the runtime or anything. [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 29th '08 |
Silverlight Toolkit Released – More controls!
Tim Heuer
Today at Microsoft PDC, Scott Guthrie demonstrated some of the new controls that have been provided as a part of the Silverlight Toolkit. The Silverlight Toolkit was what was previously named the Silverlight Control Pack in the press release when the runtime was released. This toolkit provides a set of controls and themes for Silverlight 2. In this initial release, they are: AutoCompleteBox Chart DockPanel Label Expander TreeView UpDown ViewBox WrapPanel ImplicitStyleManager [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 29th '08 |
Windows on Amazon EC2
Tim Heuer
Amazon just released into public beta their EC2 features of enabling Windows instances. I’m a fan of Amazon’s services and the route they’ve been taking. I use S3 a lot, even only if as a file storage for now. I’ve written a plugin for Live Writer so that S3 is basically my repository for everything non-text on this site and others. Of course, if S3 goes down (like it did hard a while back) I’m screwed. Maybe something like Reserve Chute will help me in the future. I’ve not [read].
Posted: Sat, Oct 25th '08 |
Silverlight 2 Watermarked TextBox Control
Tim Heuer
In the early days of Silverlight 2, one of the included controls was the WatermarkedTextBox. In Beta 2 the control was removed from the runtime for among other things, WPF compatibility. The control source code was made available for people to look at as it was referenced in a few projects, namely ScottGu’s Digg sample application. There was hinting about future plans but nothing concrete. Now that Silverlight 2 is released, the control is not there :-). I’ve gotten enough request [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 23rd '08 |
Silverlight.net updated code samples
Tim Heuer
With the release of Silverlight 2 many people faced the task of ensuring their applications/code written targeting Beta 2 was upgraded to release. The team at the Silverlight community site was no different. We’ve updated almost all the content so far, but I wanted to draw your attention to a few things. Get Started – http://silverlight.net/GetStarted As noted on this page for those getting started, there are links to Scott Guthrie’s 8 part example of building a Digg client in Silverli [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 21st '08 |
SilverlightContrib releases Silverlight 2 Controls
Tim Heuer
Last week I had the pleasure of talking with the crew from the Herding Code podcast. Among the questions was one about the open source community and Silverlight. There was mention about MVCContrib and how that community sprouted almost instantly with the ASP.NET MVC initial releases. I let the Herding Code crew know that I believe there already is a vibrant open source community around Silverlight and pointed to things like DevExpress’ AgDataGrid control which is free and provides source [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 21st '08 |
A response from my Senator
Tim Heuer
A while back I wrote to my elected officials about the passing of H.R. 1424. I tried to be able to write to my elected officials electronically. I submitted an electronic message to my congressman and got a reply that I’d be sent a US postal mail response, which made me shake my head. At any rate, I’ve only got 1 response, and not from my congressman…but from one of my Senators, Jon Kyl. Since he sent it to me via snail mail, I had to find a letter opener, figure out how to hold a pi [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 16th '08 |
Honoring your user’s culture settings with Silverlight
Tim Heuer
One thing that I’m just as guilty as probably most of some of my peers is creating US-centric applications. Forgetting to think globally for your users is something that I think happens too often. We operate in our US-centric worlds and forget that sometimes even the simplest things can make a difference. Take for instance, honoring your user’s culture settings (region/locale/whatever you want to call it). Even if you have a US-based application for a US-company, how do you know that a [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 16th '08 |
Calling secure (SSL) services from Silverlight 2
Tim Heuer
Now that Silverlight 2 has been released, one of the features (or should I say fixes) that is included is the ability for non-secure applications to call secure services. Previously this was not allowed and we referred to it as “cross-scheme violation.” That means that a particular protocol scheme (file, http, https) could not access another. Prior to release this meant that a XAP hosted in an HTTP context could not call a secure service. Now we no longer have that restriction with t [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 15th '08 |
Silverlight and ADO.NET Data Service proxy generation
Tim Heuer
One of the nice little additions to the data client services in Silverlight 2 is the removal of the need to drop out of Visual Studio to do some proxy code generation. Prior to Silverlight 2 release, if you wanted to consume an ADO.NET Data Service (the artist formerly known as Astoria), you had to drop into a command line and execute something like: 1: datasvcutil.exe /out:"MyDataService.cs" /uri:"http://foo.com/MyDataServiceEndpoint.svc"
While that isn’t difficult, it just wasn’t [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 15th '08 |
Silverlight 2 Released: New controls, tools, announcements!
Tim Heuer
Whew, we made it! Silverlight 2 is now released (and available for download)! (Official press release here.) I know we’ve always said “by the end of the year” but the team has worked really hard to get Silverlight 2 released well before then so you can start building and deploying your applications. A lot of people don’t realize that “Silverlight” is actually a team of many that make up the runtime, media, tools, controls, etc. teams. Hats off to all those involved who push [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 14th '08 |
Hey, who took my Chiron?
Tim Heuer
If you’ve been playing around with Silverlight 2 for a bit now, you may have heard about/used the tool chiron.exe. It was a tool in the SDK that shipped in Beta 2 that was responsible (for among other things) at that time for packaging the XAP. Fast forward to release builds for Silverlight 2. No Chiron. Hey, what’s up? Chiron is still available for you if you want it. It is a part of the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK which is available on Codeplex. So if you need/want it, t [read].
Posted: Fri, Oct 10th '08 |
Silverlight in SharePoint web parts
Tim Heuer
Are you using SharePoint and want to know how to leverage Silverlight? Have you seen the Blueprints project on Codeplex? But what if those particular implementations don’t meet your needs and you want to create your own contained web part with your Silverlight 2 application? Kirk Evans writes about a method of doing this in a recent post: Hosting Silverlight in SharePoint. Take a look at Kirk’s post with a step-by-step guide of getting started with his method. In looking at the metho [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 8th '08 |
Update your Silverlight Gallery Samples!
Tim Heuer
Did you know that the Silverlight community site has over 150 Silverlight 2 Beta 2 samples submitted by the community?! These range from short samples of specific functionality to full-fledged applications that people can use. I recently spoke of 2 of the multi-file uploader controls that were features in the gallery. There is a lot of good information being shared by our community. WE NEED YOUR HELP – UPDATE YOUR SAMPLES! Today I sent around a note to those who I could identify who had [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 7th '08 |
XAML Power Toys for Silverlight
Tim Heuer
If you live in the WPF world, you may know the name of Karl Shifflett. If you’ve heard the name, but just not have met the man…next time you’re at a developer conference, look for the guy in the Hawaiin shirt, shorts, some ink on the arms and is probably passionately talking to some other geeks about the innards of data binding in XAML. Recently, Karl has joined Microsoft to work on the “Cider” team. The Cider project is a key part of the developer story for WPF and Silveright. I [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 6th '08 |
Silverlight 2 UI Templates
Tim Heuer
One of the things I hear a lot about it wanting well-designed control templates/styles for developers to use in Silverlight (and WPF). As someone with that missing creativity gene, I agree. While we wait for some of these galleries to emerge (and designers to contribute), there is some hope for the rest of us today. For WPF developers, there has been a commercial resource available (not free) in the templates provided by XAMLTemplates.net. They provide various styles available for purchase [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 6th '08 |
Writing text on a Path in Silverlight
Tim Heuer
One of the things that I’ve wanted to do since Silverlight released was two things with text, enable a Stroke and layout text on a Path. Both of which in Silverlight 2 aren’t readily available. Luckily we have a great ecosystem of developers and MVPs who love to extend our frameworks and create new capabilities for developers. Bill Reiss has done just that. You may recognize Bill from some XNA and Silverlight gaming fame. His game of Dr. Popper still remains my daughter’s favorite [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 6th '08 |
Government is officially inept
Tim Heuer
I don’t know why it has taken me so long to get to this realization. Perhaps I’ve been more aware of my surroundings as I’ve gotten older. I’ve always heard “write your congressman” with regard to political issues and people opposing them. Turns out, writing them is not worth it. Why? Because the offices of our elected officials (in Arizona at least) are lame. Allow me to provide an example. In my latest post I ranted about how Arizona elected officials voted on the ‘bail [read].
Posted: Sat, Oct 4th '08 |
Arizona officials vote on H.R. 1424 Economic Bailout
Tim Heuer
Here’s a letter I just wrote to the Arizona Senators and Representatives that voted on the H.R. 1424, economic ‘bailout’ plan. Here’s their contact information as well if you need it: Jon Kyl, Senator John McCain, Senator Rick Renzi, 1st District Trent Franks, 2nd District John Shadegg, 3rd District Ed Pastor, 4th District Harry Mitchell, 5th District Jeff Flake, 6th District Raul Grijalva, 7th District Gabrielle Giffords, 8th District One a note, even though I’m not a me [read].
Posted: Sat, Oct 4th '08 |
Software Mockups using Balsamiq
Tim Heuer
Lately I’ve been putting more design thoughts onto paper. I used to try to prototype in HTML a lot, but it just got too easy to draw it out. I liked the feel of being ‘less tech’ when it came to mockups, etc. I was turned on to this program recently called Balsamiq Mockups. It is a software program that basically allows you to quickly mock up web/software designs using wire-frame elements. I know there are other methods (please post your favorites in the comments), but there is [read].
Posted: Fri, Oct 3rd '08 |
Silverlight and Web Service Errors
Tim Heuer
When working with data and Silverlight there has often been the questions of wondering why when a service call fails that Silverlight returns the HTTP 404 status code. In fact I’ve written about troubleshooting those types of issues in the past and tools you can use to help investigate some problems. Still people mostly ask "if there is an exception, why is Silverlight telling me ‘not found’ instead of sending me the exception?'” Eugene Osovetsky from the connected systems team aims [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 2nd '08 |
MediaStreamSource sample for Silverlight
Tim Heuer
You may be reading the title and wondering what is MediaStreamSource? MediaStreamSource is a piece of the Silverlight runtime that removes a the influence of a media file's container, giving developers direct access to APIs for manipulating encoded elementary audio and video streams. Huh? Basically it can enable you as the developer to implement file parsers/etc. in managed code instead of Silverlight, enabling support beyond the native built-in formats for media. There hasn’t been much i [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 2nd '08 |
Installing Silverlight RC0 Offline
Tim Heuer
I’ve gotten a few questions (including a great comment) about needing to install Silverlight RC0 under offline or administrative-restricted environments. There are two ways you can install this. First, you’ll still need the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio installer. Next, make sure you download the Silverlight 2 RC0 Developer Runtime (Windows). There is a Mac runtime for developers as well, but if you are wanting to install the developer tools for Visual Studio offline, I’m guess [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 30th '08 |
Silverlight multi-file upload controls and patterns
Tim Heuer
One area where Silverlight can plat an interesting role for your web applications is wherever file uploading to your server needs to be done. This may sound odd to think of it that way, but if you’ve ever done file upload in web apps (for larger sizes, chunking, etc.) sometimes it is no fun and involves a lot of Javascript. There is a video demonstrating on how you can do file upload with Silverlight 2 and also helps demonstrate the OpenFileDialog API within the runtime. I remember seeing [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 30th '08 |
Silverlight 2 RC0 Released for Developers
Tim Heuer
Today we released Silverlight 2 RC0. This release is for a very specific purpose and although the information will likely be repeated, I wanted to try to help answer a few questions.
What is this release?
RC0 is a developer release only! The intent of providing these bits is to provide developers with ample time to have access to the release candidate runtime/controls for Silverlight with the primary goal of making sure that developers with Silverlight 2 Beta 2 applications that are live [read].
Posted: Fri, Sep 26th '08 |
Podcamp, iJustine and Startup Weekend
Tim Heuer
Two great events are happening here in the Valley of the Sun (yes, it’s still 105°F outside here folks) are coming up soon that you should consider taking part in. Startup Weekend Phoenix Startup Weekend is a weekend long event (starting on Friday at about 6pm and ending on Sunday at 6pm) where local techies, entrepreneurs, project managers, or interested people of all types gather in teams to actually create companies that could be viable in today’s marketplace. This isn’t just vapor, [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 25th '08 |
IsolatedStorage as a Silverlight object cache
Tim Heuer
Someone posed this question (“Can you use IsolatedStorage in Silverlight as a more reliable browser caching technique?”) to me and I answered with my usual optimistic “in theory, yes” answer. Of course I had never tried it which is horrible to answer that to someone without trying it. In working on creating some Silverlight business application samples, I figured I should probably look at this scenario to see if a) it would work and b) it makes sense. I’ll at least try to answer [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 25th '08 |
Expression Encoder 2 SP1 Announced
Tim Heuer
The Expression Encoder team has announced the plans for SP1 of their product (announced, not released). You can read all the details on their team blog for more information, but two things caught my attention that are probably of most interest: H.264 encoding and a Silverlight 2 template in the box. The H.264/AAC encoding support is a result of customer feedback (as well as preparing for future Silverlight support). While the profiles in this service pack will be limited and may not meet the [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 24th '08 |
Add mouse wheel support to ScrollViewer
Tim Heuer
As you may know, most wheel support is detected at the browser level. In Silverlight, this makes adding mouse wheel support an interop action with the HTML host. While people have implemented it, it has mostly been for the use of DeepZoom applications. In fact, the latest DeepZoom Composer tool actually adds this support now if you choose to have a Silverlight project as a part of the output of the collection. But what about other controls, namely ScrollViewer? Having content in ScrollVi [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 24th '08 |
Photo Tech is getting really amazing
Tim Heuer
A few weeks ago my wife and I traded “up” to a Canon EOS 40D digital SLR camera. We also invested pretty heavily (for non-professional, borderline rookies) in lenses that we knew we’d use most often. When the Canon Digital Rebel (EOS300D) first came out, I bought it…what can I say, I’m a geek! I paid over USD $1K for the kit and it was/is a good camera. Still, it was the first and probably not even considered ‘prosumer’ grade. Advance about 3 years (maybe 4?), for the sa [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 23rd '08 |
Silverlight Casual Game Series
Tim Heuer
Silverlight MVP and friend, Joel Neubeck, has started a series in the Expression Newsletter. The first article is available now and is part of a 6-part series in building a casual game in Silverlight: Getting Started – Architecture / framework Movement and collision detection Design – Sprites, boards and dialogs Animations and sound Initialization and Deployment Advanced concepts (Physics, Multiplayer, Optimization) This first article talks about some of the framework that will be [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 23rd '08 |
Apple’s AppStore Restricts User Choice
Tim Heuer
Ok, this is getting ridiculous. First the removal of the ‘I Am Rich’ application (which whatever your thoughts on the app itself, it didn’t violate any rules, just that the powers that be at Apple didn’t like the pricing scheme), and now others are being prevented from joining the AppStore. Here’s the latest two I’m aware of: Podcaster Podcaster is a native iPhone app developed by someone in the Apple developer program and not using anything that isn’t permitted in the terms an [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 23rd '08 |
Some Silverlight effects libraries
Tim Heuer
While you can do a lot within Silverlight with effects, as demonstrated by techniques used like seen in Shine Draw, you may also want some helping hands to implement these. It’s not always fun to write some code for when you just want to be able to drop in an effect on your application. You want to concentrate on your application logic and get assistance in creating some of the visual effects. If you didn’t know, there are some libraries out there that can help. I’ll highlight two of [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 9th '08 |
Some cool Surface examples
Tim Heuer
Saw some posts today over at Don’s site about Surface. The Surface SDK is starting to get more visible whereas before it seemed a little black-boxish to me. Turns out (as we all knew) it really is just WPF with some unique Surface-like behaviors in the SDK. Take this quick demonstration from a program manager on the SDK. With using the same concepts that we use in WPF and Silverlight for data binding, etc. you can come up with a quick application using the inherent gesture support from [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 9th '08 |
H.264 and AAC support coming to Silverlight
Tim Heuer
So you want H.264 support in Silverlight? So do we. In fact we will be showing a preview of H.264 and AAC support in Silverlight at the International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) this week in Amsterdam. Scott Guthrie comments on this saying:
“At IBC 2008 we will be demonstrating a technology preview of H.264 video and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio playback support in Silverlight, and H.264 authoring using Microsoft Expression Encoder and Windows Server 2008 for delivery. Until now, [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 9th '08 |
Silverlight in the Big Apple
Tim Heuer
In NYC this weekend and want to hang out and learn some Silverlight? Some community leaders and Microsoft folk are putting on a Silverlight 2 Firestarter event this weekend on 13-SEP. Shawn Wildermuth of the Silverlight Tour will be there for the keynote and giving some sessions as well. It looks like some folks from Infragistics will be there as well…I’d imagine they might have some cool things to talk about! The event is free for anyone to attend and should be a good time hanging out [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 8th '08 |
Silverlight Slider and Absolute values
Tim Heuer
If you use the Slider object in Silverlight (or WPF for that matter) you may have experienced some similar frustration that I have recently. Let’s take a look at what the Slider is first. The Slider is a simple control on the surface providing a track and a “thumb” (if you aren’t familiar with that term) that enables value changing. Some of the key properties are: Minimum – the number that represents the lowest (left or bottom) value Maximum – the number that represents the h [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 8th '08 |
Some Silverlight events coming up
Tim Heuer
I’m pretty excited about the upcoming Fall travels I have. Fresh on the heels of a 3-day session with the entire Silverlight team this past week, I’m rejuvenated and ready to rock. I’ve also got some travels coming up and hope to see some of you at them as well… Troubleshooting Data Services in Silverlight (09 SEP) Tomorrow I’ll be presenting a webcast with the goal of trying to help surface some of the more common ‘gotchas’ in dealing with accessing data in Silverlight. Some [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 8th '08 |
Silverlight install experience too hard?
Tim Heuer
Man, I feel like I’m constantly on this soapbox about creating a good non-installed experience. I’m recently sparked again by reading a recent post from Pascal Leloup entitled “Silverlight – It’s too damn complicated to setup.” These are the times that I wish I could sit next to every developer at the moment they experience this frustration. Part of the time it can be dealing with beta software (as is the case in one of Pascal’s scenarios here), and others I think just take som [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 8th '08 |
NFL, Flash and no technology immunity
Tim Heuer
There has been much a news about the use of Flash for Sunday NFL games on the NBC web site. Some have claimed that NBC “dumped” Silverlight. Whatever. Anyone who thinks only one person at a company the size of NBC makes the decision does not understand corporate America in large companies. NBC is a giant company of companies, probably each operating in their own right and left hands never talking to right hands. That’s not to diminish the work for the NFL site, just a reality of [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 8th '08 |
Silverlight resources for Flash developers
Tim Heuer
Two new resources came to my attention recently that could be helpful resources for Flash developers wanting to learn Silverlight. The first has been out there for a bit actually, but the other is new. Let’s start with the new one, Project Rosetta (video). As Adam Kinney said this week while in meetings in Redmond, “because we need another web site.” Project Rosetta describes itself as: Project Rosetta is a site dedicated to helping designers and developers build applications in Sil [read].
Posted: Sun, Sep 7th '08 |
Further evidence of Android’s possible failure
Tim Heuer
Earlier this year I wrote my thoughts on the current mobile scene and what troubles certain players more than others. I made the assertion that Android will face the same troubles that Windows Mobile is challenged with. That being that Google/Android are providing a platform and not a physical device. I think it would be hard to argue that owning the complete platform and hardware is not a good idea. Apple’s complete control of every aspect of the channel provides them with the ability [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 1st '08 |
IE8 Beta 2 release – my TinyURL Accelerator
Tim Heuer
I first saw the accelerators (the artists formerly known as activities) during The Code Trip, when Woody created an IE8 activity for Wikipedia. It was a convenient tool to have in your right-click toolbox on IE and I loved it (and still do). Well, now that IE8 Beta 2 is out, I decided (well, my selfishness decided) that I should create an activity accelerator for something that I use often so I introduce you to: IE8 Accelerator for TinyURL. So with a little XML, it was done. Seriously, lik [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 27th '08 |
Startup Weekend – A great idea
Tim Heuer
A new (and great) idea has been making its way across the country. It’s called Startup Weekend. What is it? From their site: Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion? Startup Weekend answers that question and more. A unique three-day experience, Startup Weekend brings the best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 27th '08 |
Silverlight and MS CRM Services
Tim Heuer
Had enough media players, games, and animated shapes with Silverlight? How about integrating into some line of business applications? Microsoft produces an application called Microsoft CRM, now in it’s 4th release (those closer to the CRM information can correct me if I’m wrong…I’m actually not too familiar with the roadmap/releases of CRM). What is CRM? What you’d expect, a customer relationship management system…define your use of those systems as you wish. There are many [read].
Posted: Thu, Aug 21st '08 |
Troubleshooting data/service access in Silverlight
Tim Heuer
A while back I pondered doing a “live” debug session with people who were/are working with Silverlight 2 and data access via services, etc. I really like a live concept because it allows people to ask real questions and feels more conversational than a one-way presentation. After some consideration, I’m not sure I could quite guarantee the environment I was looking for to accomplish this type of style. So as a second best, I’ve set up a webcast: Troubleshooting Silverlight Data Acces [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 20th '08 |
4 new Silverlight hands-on labs
Tim Heuer
We just put up 4 new hands-on labs for Silverlight 2. These labs are based around some of the training that partners and early adopters had received over the past few months. A guided lab document and source code (before/after) is provided. The 4 labs include building a web application based around a travel site. Building the UI: using different layout with Grids, StackPanels, etc. Styling the UI: use styles, templates and VisualStateManager…work with default templates in Expression Blen [read].
Posted: Thu, Aug 14th '08 |
Photosynth Gone Wild
Tim Heuer
Remember Photosynth? Remember when you first saw it and your initial smile came across you in that ‘this is cool’ kind of feeling? Multiply that. A team at the University of Washington in conjunction with Microsoft Research presented “Finding Paths Through the World’s Photos” at SIGGRAPH2008. I haven’t read the paper yet, but the video speaks for itself in the advancements of photo recognition and path interpolation to me: There is some really similar Photosynth and DeepZoom stu [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 13th '08 |
Behind the Scenes of NBCOlympics.com
Tim Heuer
How does 2000+ machines sound? Transforming a Saturday Night Live recording area into a live commentator section full of workstations and bloggers? Scoble had a chance to sit down with Eric Schmidt from Microsoft to talk about some of the behind-the-scenes information about the NBCOlympics.com Silverlight experience. Despite the video quality not being great, the information is very good. I recently saw a few other partners involved in the NBCOlympics.com project talk about things and ke [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 13th '08 |
Visual Studio SP1 and Silverlight tools
Tim Heuer
Today Visual Studio 2008 has released SP1 which not only brings some fixes, but also is an added value service pack, bringing some new functionality to WPF as well as enabling a “client” deployment pack of the .NET framework so that those deploying .NET framework with your client applications can have a much smaller footprint (by about 80+%). With the release of SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 today, the Silverlight team has also updated their tools for Silverlight 2 Beta 2. Read again: a tools [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 11th '08 |
ReMIX UK – 18 SEPT
Tim Heuer
Well, I wish I was going to this event: ReMIX UK! For one, it would be starting the day of my birthday and would be a great birthday treat! Secondly, I would be able to meet up with my fellow escamoles chaps and maybe take in some local cuisine instead. If you are in the UK, or for some reason really wanted to see the current value of the US dollar, make sure you head to ReMIX UK! The lineup is pretty incredible when you look at it…here’s some Microsoft favorites: Scott Guthrie – I [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 11th '08 |
Woohoo! Subtext 2.0 released!
Tim Heuer
I’ve just completed my upgrade to my site of the official 2.0 release of Subtext, the Open Source blogging engine that I use to manage content on this site. You can read the full announcement from grand poohba Haack himself here. I’m loving this release because of the improvements made but also a little selfishly because the modifications I’ve made to my own fork I’ve been using have made it into this release! These modifications really make this the best platform for me when using [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 11th '08 |
Some Silverlight ecosystem updates
Tim Heuer
I’ve had a couple things sitting in my inbox for a week or so and rather than call them out individually and take up your precious aggregation space, I’ll summarize them here.
3rd Party Silverlight Controls
Got a note from Valentin about the roadmap for the Telerik Silverlight controls. As they’ve previously noted, they are planning a set of controls: Window, Menu, TreeView, TabControl, PanelBar, Cube, ComboBox, Upload, Calendar, DatePicker, NumericUpDown, MediaPlayer, Range Slider, Prog [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 8th '08 |
Play Olympic Games in Silverlight
Tim Heuer
With the Olympic ceremony only days away and being able to enjoy the Olympic experience online via Silverlight, why not get a little excited and play some casual games, Olympic style. All of these were build using Silverlight and the Popfly game creator:
Torch Lighting
Soccer
Track and Field
Archery
Long Jump
Weightlifting
Boxing
Gymnastics
Diving
Synchronized Swimming
I played them and they are pretty fun and amazing what can be done using a non-programming tool for [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 6th '08 |
Compare on Kelley Blue Book with Silverlight and DeepZoom
Tim Heuer
Have you seen those television commercials about used car markets and someone standing in a white background and as they vocalize their automobile preferences the selections fly in and around them. That’s what I was reminded of when I came upon the new feature on Kelley Blue Book’s comparison feature on their site. I had previously written about some innovative uses of DeepZoom with Jose’s samples and I like what KBB has done here as well. They’ve leveraged Silverlight with DeepZoom [read].
Posted: Tue, Aug 5th '08 |
My Garmin Nuvi
Tim Heuer
If you are a constant reader of this blog, I suspect you’re a geek as well. And with most geeks it is generally pretty hard to buy gifts. We usually buy gadgets when they come out and don’t give much room for ‘wish lists’ for our significant others to shop for us. As such my house around holidays is usually no gifts for me of substantial surprise…that’s fine by me. This father’s day was different. My family got me a portable GPS device. Specifically the Garmin Nuvi 260. [read].
Posted: Tue, Aug 5th '08 |
IronNails = Silverlight + IronRuby + Patterns
Tim Heuer
If you already pay attention to the IronRuby dev group and are on the distribution list, apologies for the dupe. I’ve just got back from a camping trip and rifling through all my emails now. I checked in on the IronRuby group and noticed a new project emerging from someone. It’s from Ivan Porto Carrero and he calls it IronNails. It was previously called something else (quite frankly I liked the other name better myself) but there was already a project named after his chosen name. So [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 4th '08 |
Silverlight tip: shortcut simple properties
Tim Heuer
I’ve seen the rumbling a few times now about property setting in Silverlight. The rumblings are along the lines of “why do I have to use SetValue for setting simple properties like the x/y positioning?” To those points, I agree from a fundamental standpoint. From a technical standpoint SetValue is there and serves a great purpose for providing a common way of setting properties on XAML elements regardless of the element. As a developer, I like it actually. I do, however, see the [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 4th '08 |
iPhone AppStore and Apps disappearing
Tim Heuer
Well, it seems that in addition to problems with MobileMe, Apple is getting into some gray area with AppStore. Applications are appearing, disappearing without explanation to the authors. The one that got more attention was NetShare, an app that purports to enable tethering of your iPhone 3G. However despite it being available (actually for me clicking on the link it wasn’t even available then) it seems to be performing one of Criss Angel’s greatest feats in appearing/disappearing at w [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 4th '08 |
Predictably Irrational
Tim Heuer
I’ve just finished reading a book recommended to me. You see, I don’t read much. I tend to stick to technical reference documentation and if I do choose to read it is usually something involving challenging thought, social economics or conspiracy theories. My favorite book is probably Freakonomics which challenged my way of thinking, provided some interesting social economic studies and really just was an interesting perspective on various things. I highly recommend you get that book [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 4th '08 |
Honoring your NDA and terms of use and the iPhone SDK
Tim Heuer
NDA. Non-disclosure. Hush documents.
Not many people like them. In the technology world they are a necessary evil. Personally I don’t think that way. I think NDA’s are generally a good thing. It’s enabling legalese to let two parties participate in information exchange when they don’t want the rest of the world to know about them. NDA is a general term, of course, and the wording in any non-disclosure agreement is subject to the two parties involved. Heck it could say “ [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 31st '08 |
Silverlight data binding and value converters
Tim Heuer
If you are working with Silverlight and data you most likely are going to leverage data binding at some point and run into some needs to format the data in the XAML. Luckily this can be done using value converters, which have been available for WPF since it’s inception as well. Let’s explore what I’m talking about using a common formatting need: dates. Consider this list box output binding: 1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
9:
10:
Assume this XAML bind [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 30th '08 |
Powerline equipping my dungeon
Tim Heuer
I’ve been working a lot more from my home office lately and it was getting increasingly challenging during this summer with both kids at home. Okay, let’s be honest, my wife was probably more the distraction :-). When we built our home 4 years ago we were both working from home and built an office specifically for the both of us. 3 dedicated power circuits to the room, hard-wired ethernet to that room x 4, wireless printing, split desks, tile floor, etc., etc. – everything I wanted i [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 30th '08 |
Silverlight at Gamefest
Tim Heuer
This week I had the privilege of attending and helping with some Silverlight in casual games presentations at the XNA Gamefest conference happening in Seattle. I say helping because the real game experts were there. Two Silverlight presentations were given. One by Bill Reiss/Joel Neubeck and the other by Mike Snow. Between the two sessions we covered concepts in Silverlight game development as well as a walk-through of starting out to create a simple game. I consider these guys to be the [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 23rd '08 |
Providing startup parameters for Silverlight
Tim Heuer
One of the things that makes Silverlight 2 great is the ability to create a very flexible framework application that others can use and can be embeddable with some dynamic properties. This is the method used in the SL2 Video Player to provide a completely dynamic player that is portable. How? Using the initParams property of the plugin. There are a few ways you can do this. I’ve just uploaded a video demonstrating three of them: Creating App Resources Passing into the root visual con [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 18th '08 |
Low-cost SSL Providers
Tim Heuer
In IIS7 you can do very simple testing for SSL related site hosting. It literally is like a 2 click process: Enter a name for the cert and done, you now have SSL on your box. Of course this is a self-issued/signed certificate so it will do you know good in the real world, but for most of the developer world it will work fine. There may be those times, however, where things may not be quite working right and you want to eliminate the self-signed cert form the equation to make sure it isn [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 17th '08 |
Making SL2 Video Player an Encoder Template
Tim Heuer
Now that the Silverlight 2 Video Player is available from Codeplex, I wanted to make it a template for Expression Encoder. I’ll attempt to articulate the steps below. It’s actually pretty trivial. In fact in the current incarnation, you have to throw some extra stuff in there you may not need :-). Step 1 – Creating the template folder While I’ve covered this in previous posts and this is also well documented in the Encoder SDK documentation. First you’ll navigate to C:\Program Fi [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 16th '08 |
Updates to Amazon S3 and Silverlight
Tim Heuer
After posting my sample implementation of accessing Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) via Silverlight, I reflected quickly and also chatted with some AWS engineers. Cross-domain Policy One thing that you should never do is just deploy a global clientaccesspolicy.xml file blindly. Often times in samples, we (I) do this. I need to be better about this guidance to be honest, so I’ll start here. As an example, for the S3 cross domain policy file, we really should add some additional attrib [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 16th '08 |
Gary Krakow is off his rocker, blames MSFT for iPhone battery woes
Tim Heuer
Gary Krakow has gone insane. I was going to say he’s an idiot, but I’ll leave that up to Cali. In his latest article on TheStreet.com, he writes (regarding the iPhone and battery life): In our tests, iPhone batteries really can't handle the extra drain of Microsoft Exchange mail. Blame it mostly on Microsoft. Microsoft's mobile email software is a pig. It always has been a battery hog. Everyone who has ever lived with a Microsoft Mobile phone knows that battery life stinks if you constan [read].
Posted: Tue, Jul 15th '08 |
iPhone 3G breaks some compatibility with accessories
Tim Heuer
I’m a little pissed right now. Today I had a long drive downtown and on the way home I was planning on charging my iPhone (since battery life sucks bad) as well as listen to some of the tunes. I upgraded my car system last year to support iPod connectors and put a dock in my car attached to my OEM stereo. It was a project I was pretty proud I was able to do myself :-). You can read and see about it here and here. At the time I did this I was asked why I didn’t use a Zune…after al [read].
Posted: Tue, Jul 15th '08 |
iPhone not quite ready for ‘Enterprise’
Tim Heuer
Well now that the iPhone 3G (and actually more specifically the 2.0 software) are out, I promised myself I’d take another look, especially given that the claims of “for the Enterprise” were there (which really meant ‘we added ActiveSync’). I had been holding on to some gift cards to subsidize this gadget investigation and so alas, I am testing the iPhone 3G for my use. Now because the device itself isn’t really much different (physically the changes are subtle) I’m not really com [read].
Posted: Sun, Jul 13th '08 |
Embedding Fonts and File Upload in Silverlight 2
Tim Heuer
Two new videos were just posted on the Silverlight learning section. Embedding Custom Fonts in Silverlight 2 This video demonstrates the supported method for embedding your custom font files into your Silverlight applications and how you might use them in your application as well as how to provide fallback fonts for your application. OpenFileDialog and File Upload in Silverlight 2 Two for one. Check out the OpenFileDialog control and how you might even use it with UI-less Silverlight applicati [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 11th '08 |
How about some LIVE Silverlight service debugging?
Tim Heuer
I’ve got a thought lately and curious if I’m thinking crazy. You see, probably the most asked questions I get are around working with services within Silverlight. Although I’ve got some helpful (at least I think they’re helpful) posts on the subject: Silverlight, 404 and some tool help Updates for Beta 2 Working with Syndicated Data Calling WCF/ASMX Services Calling REST Services Cross-domain policy files it still seems there are people not quite able to get over some stumbling b [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 10th '08 |
Get you some Dizzy Pig
Tim Heuer
Among my other passions besides technology is food. Truth be told I only have cable television so I can get the Food network. Seriously…my TiVo proves it. My wife has always said that if I had my druthers I’d have my own restaurant and attempt to be a chef…and she’s probably right. In fact I’m going to add that to my rolling 5 year plan: own a dive shop in Cancun and have a BBQ cafe as a part of it. I recently was turned on to this site Get Your Grill On which is a blog of sor [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 10th '08 |
iPhone 3G: Exchange for the rest of us…because AT&T sucks?
Tim Heuer
I had been a customer of T-Mobile for 10 years (through a few company changes) and only recently changed to AT&T about a year ago. As a general assertion, I’ve been happy. I like the 3G speeds and the coverage in my house is far better than T-Mobile, which was the ultimate driver as someone who works primarily from a home office. That being said, I think I’m agreeing with what a friend said when the first iPhone launched. He said (paraphrasing of course) If the iPhone has any short [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 9th '08 |
Accessing Amazon S3 with Silverlight
Tim Heuer
I ran into an interesting situation last week…the desire to access some of my Amazon S3 services from within a Silverlight application. Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) is a pay service provided Amazon for object storage ‘in the cloud.’ Although there is no UI tool provided by Amazon to navigate your account in S3, a SOAP and REST API are available for developers to integrate S3 information into their applications or other uses. You can view more information about Amazon S3 on thei [read].
Posted: Sat, Jul 5th '08 |
Updating Silverlight.js
Tim Heuer
I’m hoping this post will help explain a few things with regard to Silverlight detection scripts that some sites may be using. This is related to the silverlight.js Javascript file that was deployed with a lot of Silverlight 1.0 applications/sites and is also available as a part of the Silverlight 2 SDK tools.
What the heck is this Silverlight.js you speak of?
Simply put, Silverlight.js is a helper file which enables Web sites to create advanced Silverlight installation and instantiation exp [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 3rd '08 |
Pogue’s Hypocrisy
Tim Heuer
I’m a fan of David Pogue. I like his podcast as he covers some cool gadgets and service in a bit of a no-nonsense way. I saw his site today and saw his ‘pledge’ followed by my eye glancing at what I consider ads. Evidently David doesn’t consider self promotion of goods and sale words like ‘half-price’ or product placement words advertising. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license. [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 2nd '08 |
Line Rider rides on Silverlight 2
Tim Heuer
One of probably the coolest casual ‘games’ I’ve ever seen is Line Rider. It’s a fun game, but really gets exciting when you have an artist behind it. Basically it’s a blank canvas for you to draw a route for the main character to hop on his sled and ride. Sound lame? Not when you see what some have come up with. For example, here’s a very popular ‘ride’ on YouTube.
Well, the Line Rider team has recently modified their beta version and implemented in Silverlight 2! The [read].
Posted: Tue, Jul 1st '08 |
Silverlight community controls contest
Tim Heuer
I suspect we’ll be seeing more of these efforts for Silverlight and I love it. In fact, INETA will be sponsoring the 2008 INETA Silverlight Challenge soon, so you should sign up for more information about that as well. But until then… But until then, check out what some of the community MVPs and leaders are doing on their own! They’ve started the Silverlight Control Builder Contest ‘08. Two main organizers (Page Brooks and Dave Campbell) have put some time and thought into how t [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 30th '08 |
Learning ASP.NET MVC?
Tim Heuer
Are you poking around with the latest ASP.NET MVC (Model-View-Controller) bits? If so, hopefully you are already aware of the resources available to you and the fact that Phil Haack is one of the program manager’s leading those efforts, and Scott Hanselman has been providing the community with some resources to jump start your learning. Well, another member has just joined the ranks on the team I work for. Stephen Walther, pictured here in his best book-cover pose ;-), has joined the team. [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 29th '08 |
I <3 Zappos!
Tim Heuer
Zappos – a company that seemingly ‘gets it’ with regard to customer service, doing the right thing, and providing the best products at the best prices. They have not paid/asked me for this comment. When I find a company willing to provide the best service and put the customer first, I’m so impressed. I just ordered a new pair of shoes this afternoon (about 11:00 GMT –7). I just received this email (emphasis mine) in my inbox (13:50 GMT –7): Although you originally ordered Stan [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 29th '08 |
Android, iPhone and Windows oh my!
Tim Heuer
I suspect Apple will have a good day on 11 July. I’m pretty sue Apple could release the iGumWrapper and people will camp out 2 days before to be the first to purchase a gum wrapper made out of napkin and far less superior in functionality than what exists today. It’s the lure of Apple, the marketing engine behind them and the fact that despite that napkin material, it would likely be so beautiful and make you forget some things that you’ve depended on for so long. But I digress :-). [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 29th '08 |
FeedReader web part 3.0.0.2
Tim Heuer
For those of you who use my RSS FeedReader Web Part for SharePoint, it has been updated into an ‘official’ release for the project. Version 3.0.0.2 is now the latest release. It incorporates all the changes from our team’s contributor, Ryan – thanks Ryan!!! You can read the checkin on the Codeplex site or review this previous post for Ryan’s checkin notes. As always, the source code is included on the site, licensed under the Ms-Pl. There has been some emails/work items/debate ov [read].
Posted: Sat, Jun 28th '08 |
Appreciate your blessings…
Tim Heuer
Yes, this is one of those posts where you reflect on ‘life’ and how precious it is. Today was a weird day for me because of two things that caused me pause. Allow me a little history… Just over 5 years ago now I received a call that my father was in the hospital as a result of a massive heart attack and was unconscious. Those are things you never want to hear…ever. Needless to say it was going to get worse. In fact my father was in immediate need of a heart transplant to live. [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 27th '08 |
Some new Silverlight videos
Tim Heuer
Some new videos just got posted to the Silverlight community site. Topics included: IsolatedStorage usage HTML DOM Integration Dynamic Assembly/XAP loading Working with Syndicated Data As always, feedback and ideas are welcome. Ben’s been leaving some great comments here on suggested topics and I’d love to see more. I’ll be starting a new ‘series’ soon…more to come on that in a week’s time. As a reminder, these videos are meant to help jump start some learning. We try t [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 27th '08 |
svn commit my_contribution_to_OSS
Tim Heuer
As I patiently awaited, here’s what was presented to my browser: I’ve made my first official “commit” to an open source project that I didn’t start. I feel good. I feel like cracking open a Mt. Dew and going crazy. Honestly though it does feel good (and fun). My blog engine I use is SubText. It’s the blog engine I’ve used almost exclusively (I actually started with .Text before scottw sold out went to Telligent to make Community Server. I kid of course, Scott is a gre [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 26th '08 |
Silverlight Streaming upgraded to Beta 2
Tim Heuer
The Silverlight Streaming service has been upgraded to support Silverlight 2 beta 2 applications. As a note to customers who were previously hosting Beta 1 applications for test purposes, as beta 1 is no longer a supported test platform for SLS. Authors should update/upload their applications using the latest Silverlight 2 bits. These are available (with the tools) from the Silverlight community site. Silverlight 1 applications hosted on SLS are not affected by this upgrade and still suppor [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 24th '08 |
Silverlight 2 Media Player project now open source
Tim Heuer
Over the past few months Joel and I have been back-and-forthing modifications to his original great idea and goal “build a re-sizable video player using no custom user controls, but instead leveraging controls styles and templates.” Joel started in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and implemented using the style method (aka ‘the MIX model’) available at that time. I took it and added some functionality of scaling and startup parameters. After the VisualStateManager model for styling was relea [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 24th '08 |
ATMs, design and XAML
Tim Heuer
I’ve been a Wells Fargo customer for a long time. As a financial institution it has served me well. I’ve never really put much thought into the services I use and the interactions I have with their systems. Actually I take that back – I make heavy use of the online banking system and have noticed some likes/dislikes, but overall pleased. Over the past year, the automated teller machines (ATM) have undergone some design changes that, while subtle, have been impressive and welcome addi [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 19th '08 |
Microspotting
Tim Heuer
I’ve been watching Ariel’s blog for a while and really like the insight. What is it? Microspotting, where she describes “Like the paparazzi, but for geeks.” I would say similar to the core tenet of Channel 9, Microspotting has the intent of turning the looking glass inward to get some profiles of key individuals you might recognize within Microsoft. What is great is that the story is augmented by another of Ariel’s talents: photography. She’s pretty good and I’ve enjoyed the [read].
Posted: Wed, Jun 18th '08 |
Firefox 3 and Silverlight
Tim Heuer
Well today (17 JUN 2008) will be the release of Firefox 3, a seemingly much anticipated browser update. I checked out an earlier build (I think beta 2) and it was a nice browser. I’m not a browser zealot, I use what works for me and IE works for me, has some tools that I like, etc. Firefox is a fine browser as well and I do use some plugins from time to time in my Firefox install. Today, I assume a lot of people will be downloading FF3 whether by explicit choice or by a prompt from their [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 17th '08 |
Free Silverlight 2 training CD
Tim Heuer
The team att AppDev is providing a free learning CD-ROM for Silverlight 2. They are providing it as a CD-ROM or download and said it represents a $115 value for their training…but are providing it now for free! If you are familiar with MSDN Magazine, ASPNETPro, and other online/offline publications, the name Dino Esposito might sound familiar. Dino is the one providing the training walkthroughs for you in this offering. It includes roughly 3 hours of training on Silverlight 2 content. [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 13th '08 |
Airlines raising fares in plain view…
Tim Heuer
I just received an email from US Airways (my preferred airline) in my inbox…here’s an excerpt: It's no secret that the airline business is facing difficulties of unprecedented proportions; and 'unfortunately US Airways is no exception. Surviving high oil prices is going to require some substantial changes to the way the industry is run. Today, we announced a series of changes designed to prepare our airline for these new ways of doing business. Specifically, we announced changes to domest [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 13th '08 |
Updated Silverlight media player using VisualStateManager
Tim Heuer
I’ve just finished updating my modification of Joel’s original concept. Joel had a really great base for me to build off of and used styling and templates to create simple controls for a standard Silverlight media player that could be embedded. I took his sample and made some minor adjustments to accommodate automatic sizing as well as make it a bit more parameter-driven. The end result was (what I think at least) a fairly nice player that could be flexible if needed: Joel made great [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 10th '08 |
Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies
Tim Heuer
One of the things I love about the Microsoft developer ecosystem is the partner channels that are enabled to create great add-ons to our platforms and frameworks. Our partners in this space usually get to the better implementations before we do, taking on the task of filling some gaps in unique implementations while our teams can focus on providing the best framework for enabling that construction. In December of last year, Telerik showed their intentions of making a control suite for Silverli [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 10th '08 |
Silverlight cross domain services and a helpful tool
Tim Heuer
I’ve been getting a few notes on issues relating to people trying Silverlight beta 2 and WCF or other services. The most common issue I’m seeing reported is “my exception is showing a 404-not found error message, but the service is there and works!” Okay, there could be several things happening here, but let’s tackle the “make sure it is plugged in” type situations. I don’t mean to make light of the error, because at first I, too, was banging my head against a wall. Sometim [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 10th '08 |
Getting started with Silverlight 2
Tim Heuer
Now that beta 2 is out and some of the features or more solid, and a majority of the breaking changes have been announced, there is no excuse to hold back anymore. Oh yeah, and there is a commercial go-live license available now, so no more excuses :-).
So where to get started? Well you should first head over to the Silverlight community site and visit the Get Started section. There you will find a rather simple formula to get started:
Download/install the tools
Watch a quick video ( [read].
Posted: Sat, Jun 7th '08 |
Important change to Sockets in Silverlight 2
Tim Heuer
An important note for those using Sockets in Silverlight 2. In beta 1, Sockets were limited to site-of-origin (meaning you could only connect back to the same host that served up the Silverlight application). This has changed in beta 2 to allow your Silverlight application to connect to any server exposing some Socket connections. One important note, however, is that a policy implementation has been added. This policy implementation affects not only cross-domain Socket calls, but site-of- [read].
Posted: Sat, Jun 7th '08 |
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 updates for web services
Tim Heuer
We were all jumping for joy when Silverlight 2 beta 1 was released and the ability to connect to services was more readily/easily available to us. For discoverable services that provided a WSDL we were quickly able to implement them using the Add Service Reference capability in Visual Studio 2008. Beta 2 brings a few changes to the world of services that you should know about. I’ll do my best to recap some of them here. Generating a WCF Service In beta 1 when we created a WCF service fo [read].
Posted: Sat, Jun 7th '08 |
Silverlight Streaming adds video upload fix
Tim Heuer
I previously wrote about a known issue with Silverlight Streaming services and videos encoded with Encoder 2. The quick recap is that a video already encoded to VC-1 using Encoder 2 will not process when using the Manage Videos feature of Silverlight Streaming services. I provided 3 work around options (#3 being the easiest of those 3) to get you past the issue and get the video uploaded. The SLS team recently just added another option into the actual process and enables you to use the Manag [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 6th '08 |
MIX Essentials Mexico and unique cuisine
Tim Heuer
Well, I have about 3 hours until I leave this little city called Mexico City. Sarcasm of course, did you know there are roughly 25 million people in Mexico City. I didn’t. It is amazing. Traffic, however, is something to be desired. I’m told that a 3 mile trip at times could take 1hr, 30 minutes. Maybe I should stop complaining about my commute when I do it? No, it still sucks. Anyway, on to business. Yesterday I attended and spoke at the MIX Essentials Mexico conference. T [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 6th '08 |
Free Silverlight DataGrid with source code!
Tim Heuer
Um. Whoa.
Okay, DevExpress rocks. I think this will be very well received by the community and you’ll have to watch their page for when it is available and to get your license.
From their site:
As the release of Silverlight draws near, DevExpress has invested the engineering resources needed to deliver a feature-rich grid control for Silverlight. Not just a "preview" of what is possible with Silverlight, the AgDataGrid Suite was developed to fully exploit the power and flexibility of the [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 5th '08 |
A new Silverlight control - TabControl
Tim Heuer
Silverlight 2 brings a suite of controls for designers and developers to leverage within their applications. With the Expression tools helping us to be able to skin these controls, also comes some new controls you may not have used yet as well as a new one introduced with the latest release of Silverlight 2.
Introducing TabControl.
The TabControl is implemented in the System.Windows.Controls.Extended class library and not in the Silverlight core. To use it make a reference to the Extended as [read].
Posted: Wed, Jun 4th '08 |
Silverlight and the VisualStateManager
Tim Heuer
If you’ve heard the news about Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and Expression Blend 2.5 (June 2008 preview), you will notice something else in addition to being able to skin your controls easier. Remember how you may have had to create different states for your element using “MouseOver State" and then create storyboards to transition to states? There’s now a better way. Enter VisualStateManager. Let’s take a look and see if we can simplify this down a bit a basic understanding. Let’s use so [read].
Posted: Wed, Jun 4th '08 |
Skinning Silverlight controls just got easier
Tim Heuer
This has been one of the features that I’ve been excited about for a while since I heard we were changing it. With the release of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and the updated preview of Expression Blend 2.5 (June 2008), skinning and styling controls within Silverlight gets a bunch easier. When Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was released there was the possibility of styling/skinning controls. It wasn’t impossible, but perhaps a bit obfuscated to the eye for people with short attention spans like myself. [read].
Posted: Wed, Jun 4th '08 |
Reading data and RSS with Silverlight and no cross-domain policy
Tim Heuer
So you want to read an RSS/Atom feed on the interwebs and saw the SyndicationFeed class you could use in Silverlight to give a nice RIA display of the syndicated data. Great, no problem right, just wire up an WebClient, point it to the RSS feed on something like http://silverlight.net or something and boom, done. Wait, what’s this 404 Not Found error? In most cases this is going to be a result of a cross-domain issue. If you haven’t started working with services yet, Silverlight requ [read].
Posted: Wed, Jun 4th '08 |
Silverlight Streaming won’t upload my video!
Tim Heuer
I’ve seen this issue a few times with people using the Manage Videos portion of Silverlight Streaming to directly upload a video file to be hosted. Now with direct endpoints to the WMV files I’m seeing it a bit more. Let me see if I can shed some light on this situation. First, there is a distinction between uploading an application to Silverlight Streaming versus just a video. What I’m going to discuss here is working with video only uploads. If you didn’t know, you can directly [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 3rd '08 |
Download Windows Live Writer June 2008 Preview
Tim Heuer
Hot off the press, a new drop of Windows Live Writer was just released. Get it here. This is one of my favorite tools from Microsoft and the update brings a few new changes. First, I’m happy to report that Flickr4Writer and S3Browser still work fine and require no adjustments. The other thing announced today from the Writer team is an updated SDK. This new SDK includes a new type of plugin which enable plug-in activity for pre- and post-publish events. Some of you following me on Twi [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 2nd '08 |
MIX Essentials Mexico!
Tim Heuer
This week I’ll be traveling to Mexico City to meet developers and designers at the local MIX Essentials (English translation here – funny that RIA gets translated to LAUGHS) event. I’ll be presenting two sessions there this week. I was fortunate enough to be asked to kick-off the conference talking about building RIAs with Silverlight 2. I’m particularly excited about this as I have some things to show that haven’t really been shown broadly yet. I will also be speaking on worki [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 2nd '08 |
SnagIt and PNGOut
Tim Heuer
I searched and didn’t immediately find anything, so I’m partly doing this for my own mental archive but also for others who might want this feature. First, I use two tools for snapshot capturing. When I want a quick snapshot with no annotation, I use WinSnap, which rocks the hizzouse. For when I need annotation (arrows, highlighting, etc.) I use SnagIt from the makers of Camtasia (Betsy Weber rocks). Both of these tools are incredible and I’ve purchases full licenses for both and hav [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 1st '08 |
SnagIt and PNGOut
Tim Heuer
I searched and didn’t immediately find anything, so I’m partly doing this for my own mental archive but also for others who might want this feature. First, I use two tools for snapshot capturing. When I want a quick snapshot with no annotation, I use WinSnap, which rocks the hizzouse. For when I need annotation (arrows, highlighting, etc.) I use SnagIt from the makers of Camtasia (Betsy Weber rocks). Both of these tools are incredible and I’ve purchases full licenses for both and hav [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 1st '08 |
RIApalooza wrap-up
Tim Heuer
I just finished up a day attending the Chicago RIApalooza event in, well, Chicago. First, I must say that I love cities with great mass transit systems. I’ve said this before and I keep threatening myself to move to one. For this event I paired up with a super designer Corrina Barber. Corrina works as a user experience designer at Microsoft, is wicked smart and was a perfect compliment to this event. Most of the attendees at RIApalooza I believed to be interactive developers, so most h [read].
Posted: Sat, May 31st '08 |
Innovative use of Silverlight and DeepZoom
Tim Heuer
Take a few minutes and look at this video of Jose Fajardo re-demonstrating one of his ReMIX features shown using Silverlight and DeepZoom. Are you kidding me?! Seriously, Jose has a great imagination and an incredible sense for effectively demonstrating things. In this video he answers questions posed to himself like “what if all web images were DeepZoom-able?” and “what if all the documents on the web were DeepZoom-able?” Then he gets crazy and suggests that people could collabora [read].
Posted: Thu, May 29th '08 |
Silverlight Flickr Badge
Tim Heuer
Taking another cue from some great stuff Joel is doing, I liked his implementation of the ‘Leopard Screen Saver’ but wanted to make it more ‘real’ for me. So I wired it up to my Flickr account. Result here (using Silverlight Streaming):
I only had to change a few things.
First, in the Page_Loaded event, I removed the timer start function. This was because with interacting with Flickr it was going to be async. I didn’t want the timer to start until I knew the image collection w [read].
Posted: Mon, May 19th '08 |
NY Times Reader on Mac with Silverlight
Tim Heuer
A while back the team at the New York Times newspaper produced a digital reader for their content, dubbed ‘Times Reader.’ The technology powering that reader experience (“the digital newspaper that reads like the real thing”) is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), part of the .NET Framework. It is a remarkable experience for viewing digital news in a traditional format. It provided online and offline reading capabilities mixed with some new and innovative ways of viewing related [read].
Posted: Mon, May 19th '08 |
RIApalooza – I’ll be there!
Tim Heuer
I’m very excited to have the opportunity to attend the RIApalooza event in Chicago in a few weeks (31 MAY). What is RIApalooza? RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and "PowerPoint-Free" zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built. source: riapalooza.com I love the PPT-free zone aspect of it. I loving having the maxim [read].
Posted: Fri, May 16th '08 |
SharePoint guide for Visual Studio Extensions released
Tim Heuer
In February, the SharePoint team released a Visual Studio extensions kit for SharePoint development. Just recently they released a user guide complete with samples and walkthroughs. The sections include:
Starting out in SharePoint Development
Walkthrough of the VS extensions
Team Site project
Blank Site project
List Definition project
Web Part project
Workflow projects
Project Item Templates
Best practices for the VS extensions
They also note that a VS2008 extensions [read].
Posted: Fri, May 16th '08 |
Write Silverlight, win XBOX
Tim Heuer
Want a Silverlight-branded XBOX console? Yeah, me too, that would be cool. Well, there isn’t one of those, but there is a chance for you to show your Silverlight prowess and win some cool stuff. The RIA development portal at DevX is currently running a contest (which ends next week, yikes, hurry!) for creating games in Silverlight 2. The contest seems relatively simple: Step 1: Create wicked cool game in Silverlight 2 Step 2: Host it on Silverlight Streaming How simple is that…oh yea [read].
Posted: Thu, May 8th '08 |
New and great Silverlight examples
Tim Heuer
There are some really great application concepts emerging using Silverlight. I cam across two that I feel are really demonstrating great use of the technology, both in the code as well as attention to detail in the user interface. Both of these examples make great use of layouts, controls, etc. within Silverlight 2 to show what is possible with some imagination and the platform. The first is the “My Travel Management” site which leverages real travel information to represent the scenario [read].
Posted: Thu, May 8th '08 |
Foxit PDF Previewer Security Update
Tim Heuer
Hello readers! If you are a Foxit user, please update your reader software to the latest version ASAP. A recent exploit was found by a security research firm and Foxit turned around an update to their reader within 24 hours. Bravo to the Foxit team for being very agile and getting this rectified. After some further research and discussion with the development team it was found that the ActiveX component used in the PDF Preview Handlers might also be vulnerable. To reconcile this, Foxit h [read].
Posted: Tue, May 6th '08 |
Streaming media in Windows Server for Silverlight
Tim Heuer
When using media with Silverlight there are a few things that you should be aware of. First, ensure that the media you are planning on using conforms to the VC-1 specification. Your media files just need to then be accessible via streaming or http-based access for progressive downloads. The media files for progressive downloads can be anywhere: any web server, Amazon S3 storage, some HttpHandler, whatever – as long as they can be served. Streaming media is supported via Windows Media Servi [read].
Posted: Tue, May 6th '08 |
Making use of your JSON data in Silverlight
Tim Heuer
Wait! Don’t throw out your JSON services!
The Situation
You’ve made an investment in exposing some services for client script consumption. Most likely if you did it in the past 2 years, that involved exposing your data as JSON formatted objects.
What is JSON?
It is a text-based, human-readable format for representing simple data structures and associative arrays (called objects)
Perhaps a search service returns a list of people formatted using your custom “Person” object and you’ [read].
Posted: Tue, May 6th '08 |
Skinning an embeddable Silverlight 2 media player
Tim Heuer
While Silverlight 2 brings us great capabilities as .NET developers and opens many opportunities for creating rich clients in the browser, it still supports strong media features that have been available since the initial release of Silverlight. The ability to deliver efficient, high quality media in the browser is an increasing need in a lot of sites producing content for their members. Traditional ‘podcasts’ which were historically audio-only, are moving increasingly faster to richer m [read].
Posted: Fri, May 2nd '08 |
Silverlight and Media Encoding
Tim Heuer
While you may not personally work with a lot of media solutions in your Silverlight application, it is nice to know the quality is there when you need it. Silverlight supports the VC-1 codec for media which provides a standards implementation for high quality media. I would imagine that most developers probably don’t know/care what all that means. But if you are deploying a high-touch media solution (i.e., online TV, etc.) you want that high quality.
Our resident media expert, Ben Waggon [read].
Posted: Wed, Apr 30th '08 |
Rich Text Editor for Silverlight 2
Tim Heuer
For Silverlight 2, we finally have some native controls to leverage. Most of them are to aid in input scenarios. The text input, however, is currently scoped to be plain text input. Some have desired a richer input control. You knew it wouldn’t be long before someone in the community stepped up to the challenge. Christopher Husse has done just that.
Enter: Silverlight rich text editor.
He posts a detailed description of all the capabilities on Michael Syncs blog. The effort is al [read].
Posted: Tue, Apr 29th '08 |
Some minor Subtext enhancements
Tim Heuer
This blog runs on SubText. I heart SubText. I know there are others out there but for me SubText has met most of my needs. And when it hasn’t I modify it. Which brings me to this post. There was a thread on an email list I belong to about Windows Live Writer (I heart Live Writer too :-)) and categories (adding new categories on the fly). This got me to crack open the source and hunt. Alas, there was no support for this. I’ve been ranting about WordPress API support for SubTex [read].
Posted: Mon, Apr 28th '08 |
Silverlight gets Familiar
Tim Heuer
Another geek musician, Bob Familiar, has decided to start working with Silverlight to revamp how he displays some of his compositions on his web site. Bob just posted a multi-part series where he sets out to demonstrate some features of:
resolution (size) independent UI
layout
controls
custom controls
invoking WCF services
data binding, templates and styles
dynamic xaml
HTML integration
DeepZoom
He is including source to his efforts if you want to tag along. I’d lik [read].
Posted: Sun, Apr 27th '08 |
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