Laurent Duveau

This document contains information on each public release of Silverlight: enhancements, new features, also from there you can download previous releases:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1b7a3205-b5f8-4e20-bf42-792de5923454&displaylang=en&tm

…but with a white shirt!

Joke aside, Channel9 has a nice video where Scott talks about what will be presented at MIX this year (Silverlight 3 GPU Acceleration, Expression source control, …):

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Scott-Guthrie-On-Silverlight-MIX09-Keynotes-Developers-and-Designers/

Microsoft is organizing a Silverlight contest: create a cool game with Silverlight 2 for the Server Quest Contest 2009 and you could win $5000 cash.

>> www.serverquestcontest.com

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:182f88a2-d194-4938-a6c2-86d2a41f490f&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Server Quest Trailer">Video: Server Quest Trailer</a>

Each time I teach the Silverlight Tour Workshop I use some links to show interesting stuffs related to each topic I present, so I think it will be interesting to list them here, grouped by interest:

* Demos samples

I always start by showing some live samples to demonstrate the different kind of apps you can build with Silverlight. The point here is everything you can do with Flash, you can do it with Silverlight (animation, games, business app, data access, web service, …)

MS Health Patient Journey Demonstrator: Most impressive demo ever!
http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/

Silverlight Airlines (LOB sample)
http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/silverlightairlines/run/default.html

Games (with physics engine!)
http://www.spritehand.com/RECENTPROJECTS/tabid/161/Default.aspx

Performance benchmark (Animation)
http://www.bubblemark.com/

Yosemite DeepZoom
http://www.xrez.com/yose_proj/Yose_result.html

* Free Silverlight controls

The point here is the Silverlight controls ecosystem is already large like ASP.NET. When you need a control, start by looking at existing available controls (there are several free projects).

Silverlight Extensions
http://www.codeplex.com/SLExtensions

Silverlight Contrib
http://silverlightcontrib.org/

BlackLight
http://mightymeaty.members.winisp.net/blacklight.silverlight/

You can find a much more detailed list here:
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/01/28/comprehensive-list-of-silverlight-controls.aspx

Of course you should already know:

Silverlight Toolkit:
http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight

Silverlight 2 controls demo page
http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/silverlightcontrols/run/default.html
(also interesting to learn which assembly are needed for extended controls)

* Design with XAML

Silverlight resources for designers post
http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2008/11/25/silverlight-resources-for-designers.aspx

* Data Access

Silverlight Data-Driven Examples (Data Access with NHibernate or Entity Framework)
http://www.silverlightdata.com/SilverlightDataApp/

Data Binding (french)
http://broux.developpez.com/articles/csharp/databinding-silverlight/

* Real world apps

See the Silverlight Showcase
http://silverlight.net/Showcase/

I made a little tool to fix the TechEd 2008 North America DVD player because it was built for Silverlight 2 beta 2, no more working now.

The tool generates a fixed htm page that will play the content on your DVD. No need to burn new DVDs.

> Download link:

Instructions:

1. Download and unzip in a folder.
2. Run TechEd2008DVDfix.exe, select your DVD drive and click OK.
3. This will generates 2 htm files (Developers.htm and ITPro.htm) and launch the first one in your browser.
4. Insert the requested TechEd DVD in your drive.
5. Enjoy!

Please read notes bellow.

Note 1:
The htm page try to access a local Silverlight app so you’ll probably need to “Allow Blocked Content…” in IE yellow security bar at the top.

Note 2:
You just need to run the app once. Then you can use your local htm files to see DVDs content, no need to burn a new set of DVDs!

Note 3:
I added a menu at the top right of the page so you can navigate from Developers DVDs (1 to 5) to ITPro DVDs (6 to 9).

Note 4:
Do not use the Default.htm in your DVD anymore! Use the local htm files only.

Windows 7 beta comes with this default wallpaper: a fish, but not any kind of fish… it’s a betta fish…

I used to have a tank with several of them, but the point here is MS is making a subtle joke with it.

Did you noticed the 7 bubbles ?

Since I installed Windows 7 beta on my Dell D830 laptop I was not able to get Aero glass as my current driver only support 16-bit color. Moreover the nVidia beta drivers for Windows 7 available on Windows Update refuse to install for me.
So I was stuck for a few days until I found this on a TechNet forum:

Right click on desktop
Select NVIDIA control panel
Select Display / Manage custom resolutions
Click "Create...", enter 32 for "bits per pixel"
Click test and save it.
The test reports a failure but... it works!

Now I can play with Aero Shake and Aero Snap!

Windows 7 introduces some mouse gestures features: Aero Shake and Aero Snap.

Aero Shake

Drag a window and shake your mouse: all background windows instantly become minimized.
Shake again: minimized windows are restored.
(Also available with shortcut: Win + Home)

Aero Snap

Aero Snaps allows you to position and resize windows by dragging windows to the edge of the screen.

Note: if you are more a “hotkeys” person here are some shortcuts:

Win + left/right arrow: dock left/right
Win + shift + left/right arrow: same but across multi-screens!
Win + up/down arrow: maximizes and restores / minimizes
Win + shift + up/down arrow: maximizes and restores vertical size

Also I noticed that window borders keeps transparency even when maximized (unlike Windows Vista).

And to conclude: no, there is no 3d cube desktop manager in Windows 7, which is something people are very much interested; if I believe my stats this 2 years old page gets more 1000 visitors per month on my blog:

http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2007/03/23/vista-desktop-manager-with-3d-cube-effect.aspx