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Monthly Archives: September 2008

  • 3d Rendering with Texture Mapping in Silverlight - Quake

    I’d love to dig into the code and see what he’s doing to get that kind of FPS. The key part of the pipeline to understand would be the creation of the per-frame bitmaps and the subsequent blitting on the screen. I’ve seen dynamic PNG creation, but that seemed like it would be a little too slow for something like this, even at the relatively low resolution demonstrated. Maybe not! Quake in S...

  • Book Review: Manning’s Silverlight 2 in Action – Chad Campbell and John Stockton

    This has been a crazy summer, but since our daughter has decided not to show up on her due date (which was September 24). I finally got some time to sit down and read a pre-release of Manning’s Silverlight 2 in Action. I know the two authors who wrote this, and while John and I have had beer and burgers up in Bellevue, Chad and I have yet to meet up offline. So if I have to pick on someone, it ...

  • MSDN geekSpeak : Building Facebook Applications with Silverlight 2

    The registration link for the MSDN geekSpeak I’ll be doing with Glen Gordon and Andrew Duthie is now up. Register for the event here. The event is 12:00 Pacific (3:00pm eastern) time on Wednesday October 22, 2008. I’ll be covering how to build Facebook applications using Silverlight and ASP.NET. Expect some great discussion from your hosts and attendees and demos from my bag o tricks. See...

  • Silverlight 2 Per-Frame Rendering Callback – CompositionTarget.Rendering Event

    While promised early on, this one seemingly snuck in under the radar :) Silverlight 2 now has the CompositionTarget.Rendering event. So now, if you want to do something each frame, this is one place where you can do it. You’ll want to do some testing to see just how much you can pack in there before causing problems for your app. Where would you use this? On possibility would be when you nee...

  • Silverlight RC0 Debugging Tip – Check your VSM Styles

     This tip is somewhat buried at the end of my RC0 introductory post. However, I can’t emphasis enough that the main reason you get initialization errors or the WSOD (White Screen of Death) in Silverlight 2 is problems in your visual states.There are a few approaches and steps to debugging this.Open your project in Blend and look at the xaml files (start with app.xaml if that’s ...

  • More on the Final Silverlight 2 Release Date

    Read from this what you will. This is Scott Guthrie replying to a post on his blog. Emphasis below is mine. # re: Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available Friday, September 26, 2008 10:09 AM by ScottGu Hi Ian, >>>>>>>> Great to finally have a release candidate although I read a comment on Tim Heuers blog that you are 'still committing to shipping Silve...

  • Silverlight 2 RC0 – Developer-Only RTW Prep Release

    By now, you probably heard that Silverlight 2 RC0 is out and available for download. While you’ll find that the breaking changes are fewer (or less significant) than those from Beta 1 to Beta 2, there are still some details to pay attention to. The developer release contains a breaking changes document which will help you through the issues.First and foremost: This is a developer-only bui...

  • Microsoft Going Old School with ASCII Art Progress Bars

    What's up with the new spinning ASCII art in Microsoft installers? (from http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ all of Star Wars as animated ASCII art) Ok, well, not quite as bad as that <g>, but you've seen it: | / - \ | / - \ | When it cycles like that, it looks like a rotating line, straight out of DOS or our old VT100/220 terminal days. I think the problem they're trying to solve is...

  • Web 2.0 Tenet : Never Follow Good Development Practices

    One one of many pre-sales visits to different clients over the years, I found myself at a local dotcom in DC. It was filled with early-20’s VPs and fresh out of college developers who had a head a little too big for their skills. I love passion, but non-academic experience counts too, especially when you’re leading the work. I asked them how they did development. The first response I got was “...

  • Silverlight Facebook Application – MSDN East Coast News (what I’ve been working on lately)

    My primary Silverlight project for the past couple months has been the Facebook application I’ve been writing for the Microsoft East Coast Developer, Partner and Architect Evangelists: MSDN East Coast News. For those of you curious about building Facebook applications with Silverlight, I have at least two sessions coming up: MSDN geekSpeak on building facebook applications wit...

  • Upcoming Silverlight Webcasts and Live Events

    Here are some of the talks I’ll be doing in the next month and a half or so. Wednesday October 22 MSDN geekSpeak webcast : Building Facebook applications with Silverlight 2 . We’ll cover some of the challenges and some tips and tidbits for building applications for Facebook platform. Join me, Glen Gordon and Andrew Duthie for this event.   Saturday October 25 CMAP CodeCamp Fall Edition ...

  • Just Seven Days Until v2 Release

    [Please Read the Entire Post!] I’ve spent a good bit of time watching this grow, so I’m pretty excited to say that we’re expecting a huge v2 release in just seven days (September 24, 2008). I don’t know about you all, but I’m really excited about it even though I’m sure it will be a lot of effort to get it out. I’ve been pretty quiet about it becau...

  • Silverlight TechFest Recorded Sessions

    Other events got in the way, so I never did get a chance to blog this last month. Dr Z. from Microsoft posted the recordings from the joint Silverlight TechFest session we did right after the release of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 back in June. The Silverlight TechFest was a full-day event at the Microsoft Reston MTC focusing entirely on Silverlight 2. Ashish and Z did the first part, Mike Wolf fro...

  • How not to Encourage People to Comment on your Blog : Communications FAIL

    One of the greatest things about blogs is the ability to have a dialog with your readers. While the comments mechanism is far from perfect in that respect, it works well enough to at least be useful. My own blog requires a CAPTCHA, something I'm looking forward to removing when I move to a new platform. Anything that comes between your reader and the ability to post feedback is going ...

  • Silverlight Install Experience for MSDN East Coast News

    I’m putting the finishing touches on our first beta of MSDN East Coast News and decided to provide a customized install experience. The out of the box installation experience looks like this: That works, but really isn’t acceptable for this application. It doesn’t show the user why they would want to install this application. FWIW, I have the same beef with adding applications within face...