Laurent Duveau

Start the Year with a Great Silverlight Training!

The Silverlight Tour has a new class in Montreal, and already provide Silverlight 4 content!!!

>> This course will be taught in English <<

Yesterday I did a Silverlight presentation at the PHP Quebec User Group in Montreal.

I did a small intro to Silverlight with powerpoint, then instead of listing the features in slides, I showed lots of cool demos online, here are the links I used:

• Interesting Plugin stats - www.riastats.com
• DeepZoom - http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/
• Sophisticated UI - http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/
• Games with Physics - http://www.spritehand.com/
• Animations Easing and Pixel Shaders - http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/[...]
• Multi-Touch Puzzle demo - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/[...]

The excellent “Bouncing Plane” demo:

The amazing “Multi-Touch Puzzle” demo, to show Silverlight 4 latest features:

Then back to the slides I explained the architecture, and what you need to install.

Links:

• Web Platform Installer - http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx
• Visual Web Developer Express - www.microsoft.com/express

At the end of the presentation I did a code demo where I built a Silverlight app in a PHP website, that displays a nice Cover Flow control (from Telerik) filled with Flickr images called from a PHP file.

Some interesting links for PHP developers:

• Tutorial: Silverlight & PHP - http://php.miniprojects.org/phpsilverlight/
• Silverlight for PHP Developers article - http://tinyurl.com/SL4PHP
• PHP on Windows webcasts - http://www.msdev.com/Directory/[...]

Powerpoint (french)

Start the Year with a Great Silverlight Training!

The Silverlight Tour has a new class in Montreal, and already provide Silverlight 4 content!!!

With all the new additions for Silverlight 4, the course has so much content that we decided to move it to a 4-day format.

More than this, we also have an excellent news: we now offer a free license of Telerik's RadControls for Silverlight to every attendee ($999 value)!! For more information on RadControls, you can visit http://www.telerik.com/products/silverlight.aspx.

If you are looking for 4 days of intensive Silverlight training in French this is your chance to learn it from soup to nuts!
While the labs will continue to be in Silverlight 3, the instructor will be using Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4 to explain how the new features work and how they may impact how you architect your Silverlight solution. So the content cover all Silverlight 3 features as well as Silverlight 4!

I recently finished reading “Essential Silverlight 3” book from Ashraf Michail (Addison-Wesley). This book provides an incredible level of details on the UI part (graphics, animation, effects, text, media) of Silverlight. “Under the Hood” sections present very (too?) deep information of the Silverlight UI architecture that you won’t find in other books.

So it is a good reading for advanced Silverlight developers focusing on graphics and layout optimization. I would NOT recommend it for beginners, intermediate or business app developers. If your goal is to quickly understand Silverlight 3 and all its features you will easily find more appropriate books for that purpose. Data driven application developers will only be interested by the data binding chapter, so don’t bother opening this book.

Also note that the book does not cover many important topics like WCF Services, Silverlight Toolkit, interaction with DOM/Javascript, custom controls, isolated storage, deep zoom, … To conclude, this is a well organized and well written book but highly specialized on the graphics and layout system, it is good to know that it presents only this specific portion of Silverlight and is very far from covering all the richness of this technology, not even an overview of the new features for business oriented application, beware!

The very first email of the year in my inbox is still a sweet one, announcing that I’ve got re-awarded Silverlight MVP by Microsoft. This is the 4th year in a row and I am still very honored and excited! In 2009 I had the pleasure to be involved in many community events around Silverlight, as well as taking part in worldwide conference like TechEd America, MIX Las Vegas and the MVP Summit in Redmond.

Silverlight is definitely my main focus since 2008, over the years content on my blog slowly migrated from ASP.NET to Silverlight… which is now the main topic. My plan for 2010 is to just continue this way, so expect to read a lot about Silverlight here. Also I already know that I will be at the MVP Summit in February and at MIX10 in March, a chance to go beyond online presence and meet people for real. I will also continue teaching the Silverlight Tour in Canada and Europe more than ever, and I have some great surprise coming on that side soon...

Happy New Year!

We just deployed our corporate Silverlight Greeting Card to Windows Azure, the cloud computing service from Microsoft.

http://silverlightgreetingcard2010.cloudapp.net/

Happy Holidays!! See you in 2010…

Telerik has announced yesterday their “RadControls for Silverlight 4 CTP, the first UI component suite to natively support Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta”.

http://www.telerik.com/products/silverlight.aspx

Microsoft is moving very fast with Silverlight, we should get 1 version per year, so it is nice to see third parties jumping so early on the latest wagon. Only Telerik for now but I am sure others will follow soon.

So this Silverlight 4 CTP release is for using their controls in VS2010/SL4 projects, and the suite is very impressive:

Telerik adapted their existing controls to take advantage of SL4 new features, for example the ContextMenu control now use the built-in right-click and no more trick.

I am also excited to see that they already support WCF RIA Services.

If you want to have a quick overview of the controls you may want to watch this short (4:28) video:
http://tv.telerik.com/silverlight/video/radcontrols-silverlight-product-video-q3-2009

My goal now is to try these controls and I will post my feedback here.

This is your last chance to get a Silverlight training in Montreal this year…

The Silverlight Tour will hit Montreal just before Christmas, and already provide Silverlight 4 content!!!

Unfortunately we had Jesse Liberty down by H1N1, so I took care of the Silverlight 4 session with co-worker Dominic Sévigny at the Montreal .NET Community meeting.

Having less than 24h of preparation, I came to the meeting with just 1 slide, a huge number of demos and no idea how it will goes.

Finally in the first part of the evening we had lots of interesting discussions around the new features listed in my slide. Then after the break it was a deluge of demos (13 I think..).

I believe it was the first presentation done with VS2010 (and the new zoom feature!).

First thing first I couldn’t resist to show the awesome SL3 LocalConnection demo (which is not new in Silverlight 4 but not a well known feature… and the demo is totally fun!):

You can try a live sample (requires popups), and download the source code from here: BouncingBalls.zip

Then I showed all these Silverlight 4 demos, grouped by features here, with screenshots and links to download:

WebCam

http://wildermuth.com/2009/11/23/Taking_a_WebCam_Photo_with_Silverlight

http://www.silverlight.net/learn/videos/silverlight-4-beta-videos/access-web-camera-microphone/

Print

http://wildermuth.com/2009/11/27/Silverlight_4_s_Printing_Support

Right click / Context menu

http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2009/12/08/silverlight-4-right-click-mouse-support.aspx

MouseWheel

http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2009/11/20/silverlight-4-mouse-wheel-support.aspx

Clipboard

http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2009/11/21/silverlight-4-clipboard-access.aspx

RichTextArea

http://channel9.msdn.com//learn/courses/Silverlight4/RichTextEditor/RichTextEditor/

Notification

http://www.silverlight.net/learn/videos/silverlight-4-beta-videos/notification-api/

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/22/silverlight-4-notification-window-queue-sample.aspx

WebCam (+ Print)

http://scorbs.com/2009/11/19/pdc-session-silverlight-4-beta-overview/

File Drop (+ Print)

http://scorbs.com/2009/11/19/pdc-session-silverlight-4-beta-overview/

WebBrowser

http://blogs.msdn.com/jstegman/archive/2009/11/19/browserflow-sample-from-pdc-2009.aspx

Text Trimming

http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2009/11/25/silverlight-4-text-trimming.aspx

Download the slides

After all it was fun with lots of interaction with attendance!
We will try to invite again Jesse after MIX10!

Silverlight 4 (currently in beta) adds support for right-click mouse events on all UIElements:

• MouseRightButtonDown
• MouseRightButtonUp

In Silverlight 3 those events were not exposed and used internally by the plug-in to show the Silverlight context menu. With Silverlight 4 the default behaviour is still like in Silverlight 3 (Silverlight context menu) but now if you want you can override this and provide your own context menu.

In fact you just need to handle the events above and build you custom UI (no, there is no template for context menu in the beta), AND you need to mark the MouseRightButtonDown event as handled (e.Handled = true), if you forget you will get the default context menu.

In my sample I use a ColorPicker control in a xaml popup to change the Rectangle’s Fill property with the selected color via right click:

The XAML has just a Rectangle and a Popup with a ColorPicker:

<TextBlock Text="Customize this shape with right-click" FontWeight="Bold" Margin="12,0,0,0"/>

<Rectangle Height="254" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="12,24,0,0"
 Name="frame" Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="4" VerticalAlignment="Top"
 Width="320" RadiusX="15" RadiusY="15" Fill="Red"
 MouseRightButtonDown="frame_MouseRightButtonDown"
 MouseRightButtonUp="frame_MouseRightButtonUp" />

<Popup x:Name="pop">
    <Border Background="LightBlue" Margin="10" BorderBrush="Blue" CornerRadius="5" BorderThickness="3">
        <StackPanel Width="220" Height="240">
            <TextBlock Text="Pick a new color:" FontWeight="Bold" HorizontalAlignment="Center"/>
            <my:ColorPicker HorizontalAlignment="Left" x:Name="colorPicker1" Margin="10" />
        </StackPanel>
    </Border>
</Popup>

In CodeBehind:

- I mark the MouseRightButtonDown as handled
- I open the popup on MouseRightButtonUp and position its HorizontalOffset and VerticalOffset close to the mouse location with GetPosition method.
- When a color is selected I close the popup and fill the Rectangle with it.

public MainPage()
{
    InitializeComponent();

    colorPicker1.ColorSelected +=
           new SilverlightColorPicker.ColorPicker.ColorSelectedHandler(colorPicker1_ColorSelected);
}

void colorPicker1_ColorSelected(Color c)
{
    frame.Fill = new SolidColorBrush(c);
    pop.IsOpen = false;
}

private void frame_MouseRightButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    e.Handled = true;
}

private void frame_MouseRightButtonUp(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    pop.HorizontalOffset = e.GetPosition(null).X + 2;
    pop.VerticalOffset = e.GetPosition(null).Y + 2; 
    pop.IsOpen = true;
}

Download source code

(requires Silverlight 4 beta)