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Monthly Archives:

  • WPF Falling Snow Animation

    Kirupa has created a nice WPF sample that shows how to create falling snow animation in WPF in code. Check out his post here. I haven't seriously looked at the source yet, but I may translate this to Silverlight just for grins.

    Published Saturday, December 29, 2007 | Tagged: , , | 2 comments

  • Great Toy Rocket

    When I was little, I had something similar to the 3' Saturn V sold by Toys R Us here, a space shuttle (based on the prototype), and a bunch of rocket posters, maps and solar system posters, on my walls along with the usual Star Wars stuff. For Christmas this year, Santa brought our son this great iPlay Rocket Ship. I would have killed for this when I was little. It's just too much ...

    Published Saturday, December 29, 2007 | Tagged: , | 2 comments

  • Looking Forward to 2008

    I hope you all have (or had) a Merry Christmas! I just finished up helping Santa put some presents under the tree for our boy (he'll be two in February). Now I'm down here removing all the old alphas and betas and installing the latest VS and Expression tools, as well as the latest Silverlight bits. A full uninstall of VS2008 Beta 2 followed by a full install of VS20...

    Published Monday, December 24, 2007 | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight 1.0 Tutorial and Lessons Learned from Frank La Vigne

    Fellow AISer Frank La Vigne has put together a great set of posts covering how he built the Christmas is Going to the Dogs Silverlight Christmas Card. If you are doing anything in Silverlight, check them out.Tutorials:Part 1Part 2Part 3The Christmas Card:Christmas is Going to the Dogs

    Published Monday, December 24, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Want to Learn from the Silverlight Templates in Expression Encoder - or Create Your Own?

    Microsoft Expression Encoder includes a number of attractive templates for creating quick media players for video and audio run through Encoder. A side effect of that is that you get access to unmanaged Silverlight source for some slick media players. However, that source could be hard to follow until now, and there was no guidance for creating your own templates.The debug version of the base p...

    Published Tuesday, December 18, 2007 | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Christmas is Going to the Dogs - A Silverlight Christmas Card by Frank La Vigne

    Inspired by the Christmas Special intro I blogged about in Christmas 2.0 and his love of all things canine, fellow AISer Frank La Vigne has put together this great Christmas card using Silverlight. He combines music, vector graphics, animation, and a bunch of fun pictures to put together a little something Christmassy for you to enjoy.Enjoy, and have a great Christmas!

    Published Tuesday, December 18, 2007 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Malvern Silverlight Firestarter a Great Success

    Despite attempts by weathermen to scare off attendees with talk of snow and ice, the Malvern Firestarter event was a great success. Illustrating the interest in Silverlight, the event filled two rooms even though an equally interesting XNA and Robotics studio event was going on just down the hallI had the honor of delivering the keynote and the Expression Encoder / Design / Blend session for th...

    Published Sunday, December 16, 2007 | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight and the Carbon Calculator Podcast Interview with Brian Eastwood

    Back in October, Brian Eastwood from SearchWinDevelopment.com attended my session at ReMIX07 in Boston, and later wrote up an article based on that. A week or so back, Brian also interviewed me for a podcast regarding our Silverlight work at AIS, specifically around the Conservation International Carbon Calculator Steve Suing and I wrote this spring/summer. We discussed some things th...

    Published Monday, December 10, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight Firestarter Coming Up!

     The Philly Silverlight Firestarter is coming up soon.Here's some recent traffic on it from Tim Heuer and Dani Diaz.I encourage you to register if you haven't already. It's going to be a fun day, and I feel honored and excited to be able to kick it off with Peter, Dani and friends.December 15, 2007 8:30am at the Microsoft office in Malvern, PA.

    Published Wednesday, December 5, 2007 | Tagged: , , , , | Leave comment

  • Snope-It!

    Man, I have to install this.My father forwards me all sorts of junk in email, like how to boycott gas companies , the origin of golf, and the color of coke. Even better are the pages of Worth1000 photochops (w1k watermark clipped off, of course) passed off as real photos. He knows most of it is false, but he just can't help press that "send" key on the off chance that maybe there&...

    Published Wednesday, November 28, 2007 | Tagged: | Leave comment

  • Silverlight Firestarter in Malvern, PA

     I'll be doing the keynote and one of the follow-up sessions at the Silverlight Fire Starter event in Malvern PA (near Philadelphia) on Saturday December 15. It looks to be an exciting day and a great way to avoid Christmas shopping for your family ;-)For schedule and details, including sign-up information, check out Dani Diaz's blog.

    Published Tuesday, November 27, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • More Silverlight 1.1 Hints

    As is often the case with Silverlight 1.1 news, it's the little things said in other contexts that clue us in to what to expect with upcoming releases. I hate to pull out the tea leaves, but I can't help it this time :)In this post by Mke Harsh, he mentions that the team has put out the first Silverlight 1.0 service release. However, he also mentions this about 1.1:In the midst of ...

    Published Thursday, November 22, 2007 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • More on How Assemblies are Downloaded in Silverlight 1.1

    Assem in this thread on Silverlight.net pointed out that the downloader object isn't required to get assemblies down to the local machine in Silveright 1.1 (September alpha).I didn't believe that, so I did a test. Guess what? He's absolutely right. Calling Assembly.Load(name) is sufficient to cause the assembly to be downloaded to your workstation. Thinking about it in retrospect, t...

    Published Sunday, November 18, 2007 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • Links from today's NoVA Code Camp Advanced Silverlight Talk

    In a break from some of my previous Silverlight talks, today at the NoVA Code Camp, I did a mostly slideless open-topic dicussion on Silverlight. The topics covered were the instantiation of the Silverlight plugin, some general Silverlight background information, the basics of how to build controls, what you can do in Silverlight today and what to expect in the future.Here are some of the links...

    Published Saturday, November 17, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight Talk at the NoVA Code Camp Tomorrow

    I'll be doing a mostly-demo Silverlight talk at tomorrow's NoVA code camp at 10:30 am.I'm finalizing the content, but the fact that there is going to be an excellent 9:00 "Silverlight for beginners" session frees me up to do some slight more in-depth stuff. Expect to see the instantiation model briefly covered and then an under-the-hood walkthrough of what is goi...

    Published Friday, November 16, 2007 | Tagged: , , , | Leave comment

  • Christmas Specials 2.0

    Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I have fond memories of the "TV Special". You know, the holiday specials that were preceeded by the funky drum and horns intro with the swirled-in "special" text (note: you can find just about anything on the internet. heh. here's a longer version for Rudolph.), then followed by a spot for Mounds and Almond Joy. They were an ...

    Published Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Tagged: | Leave comment

  • Rant : Adobe Acrobat Reader - what a mess

    Why can't Adobe Acrobat Reader, arguably one of the most essential pieces of software out there, just play nice with the rest of my systems?Through several browser versions on three different systems, over several system rebuilds, running three different operating systems (XP Pro, XP Media Center, and Vista), one thing has remained consistent: Acrobat reader has been and continues to be a s...

    Published Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Tagged: , , | 8 comments

  • Updates to the Panel and Treeview Controls

    I made some updates to the panel and treeview controls described in this post.Changed the name from AnimatedWrapPanel to AnimatedFlowPanel to be more consistent with established panel namesAdded Vertical layout to the AnimatedFlowPanelTweaked the icon for the Treeview Added a "using" around the stream in ControlBase.LoadXamlChanged the demo app so when you click a treeview n...

    Published Wednesday, November 14, 2007 | Tagged: , | 20 comments

  • Silverlight Assembly Preloader in Managed Code

    The Silverlight preloader example on the silverlight.net quickstarts site shows how to use unmanaged code to swap in a new page over an old one once the content is loaded. In the carbon calculator, that was the approach I took, as it was the only one out there. I never liked it as it was pretty hokey, seemed brittle, and required more javascript than I wanted in what was otherwise an all-c# app...

    Published Friday, November 9, 2007 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • Thank you! Say goodbye to "Click to Activate"

    One of the most annoying developments over recent years has been the "Click here to active this control" message you get whenever visiting sites that use Flash or other browser plugin technology. The worst is when it is used in a menu or some other critical navigation scheme, and you have to do this for each postback.You can get around that by using script to create the object tag. Th...

    Published Thursday, November 8, 2007 | Tagged: , | 4 comments

  • How Silverlight is Loaded and Instantiated

    At the end of the day on Saturday's Silverlight Dev Camp, I gave an ad-hoc talk on controls and silverlight. The conversation quickly turned to a lot of Q&A on how the Silverlight control and content is loaded. I covered that there, but for those who didn't attend, this is useful information.When file requests are made to the server, they currently follow normal browser caching and ...

    Published Wednesday, November 7, 2007 | Tagged: , , | 10 comments

  • Links from tonight's CMAP Talk on Extension Methods in VB9 and C# 3.0

    I spoke about extension methods in C# 3.0 and VB9 tonight at CMAP. Here are the links I promised:This VB9-oriented article does a great job covering the basics (sorry <g>) of extension methods.Here is my brief article on the same topic.

    Published Tuesday, November 6, 2007 | Tagged: , | Leave comment