Paul Stubbs

31 Days of Silverlight – Week 1 Recap

Jeff Blankenburg is posting daily Silverlight tutorials for the month of July. Here is a summary of the 1st week.

July 1st-5th

Day #1: Mouse Events in Silverlight

Learn how to handle mouse events such as MouseEnter, MouseLeave, MouseLeftButtonDown, MouseLeftButtonUp, MouseMove,

Day #2: Silverlight Screen Transitions

You will see how to move from one screen/page to another using storyboard animations to fade out from one screen and fade in to the next screen, much like you would see in a PowerPoint presentation.

Day #3: Custom Silverlight Loading Screen

Make your Silverlight apps look professional by creating a custom loading screen. Using JavaScript and an external XAML control you can monitor the loading progress.

Also check out the MSDN tutorial - How to: Define a Simple Silverlight Splash Screen

Day #4: Communicating Between Two Silverlight Controls

See how to get your Silverlight controls to communicate with each other. This is one of my favorite topics as I have written about it before in my blog and in my Silverlight book.  Local messaging as it is called is very useful in creating SharePoint Web Part applications with Silverlight and in many complex Enterprise applications. I speak to customers all of the time who ask specifically about this feature.

Day #5: Silverlight Drag and Drop

One of the most common tasks that users do is drag and drop stuff around an application. In this tutorial you will learn the basics of drag and drop.

Daily Silverlight Tutorials in July

Throughout the entire month of July Jeff Blankenburg will be posting a new Silverlight tutorial each day.

Be sure to check back everyday to see that day’s tutorial.

http://jeffblankenburg.com/2009/06/thirty-one-days-of-silverlight.aspx

How to access SharePoint List data with Visual Studio 2010 and WPF

Steve Fox walks you through the process of building a WPF application using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 to access SharePoint 2007 List data. Using the newest version of Visual Studio, C#, Linq, XML, and SharePoint web services to pull a List from the server and display it on the client.

Check out the post for all of the source code.

Retrieve SharePoint List Data with XLINQ using VS 2010 Beta 1 

Download XNA Game Studio 3.1 with Avatar Support

XNA Game Studio 3.1 is available now for download. Although v3.1 has a number of cool new features like XBOX Live Party support and video playback. I think for me the most exciting feature is support for Avatars. This will allow you to render 3D models of your Avatars and use them within your own games. For an example of what could be possible see the upcoming XBLA game JoyRide. Check out the XNA Creators Club Online for all of the details of the 3.1 release. Also here is a detailed breakdown at what’s new.

Be your Avatar

Here are some other games where your Avatar is the star.

See your Avatar

If you want to use your avatar’s image on your blog, in your IM or on your Facebook you can easy link to it using the following URLs.(Terms of Use apply)

avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(gamertag)/avatar-body.png

avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(gamertag)/avatarpic-l.png

avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(gamertag)/avatarpic-s.png

So for my avatar the links would render the following images. TIP: If your gamertag has spaces make sure you add those to the URL as well.

Free your Avatar

The XBOX.com site has a cool new tool called Free Your Avatar. This will allow your Avatar to strike a pose. This app is another example of the fun non-game things you can do with your avatars. Who out there is going to be the first to create a Sims clone using only avatars and XNA Game Studio 3.1?

Program your Avatar

Avatars 101 is a great blog post about getting starting with your Avatars. There are many good links to resources and information. So if you are ready to jump in here is the place to start.

Wii Researcher comes to Natal

Johnny Chung Lee who is famous for his Wii-mote hacks has been working on Project Natal. Project Natal on the XBOX 360 is going to be a game changer.

Here is an interview with Johnny on Channel 9.

 Read Ina Fried’s detailed reporting on this.

What Do Geneva, Dublin, Stirling, Velocity and Madison Have in Common?

Geneva, Dublin, Stirling, Velocity and Madison are all code names of upcoming Microsoft products and technologies talked about at TechEd 2009. (which one is not a city?)

Bruce Kyle has pulled together links to all of these and more in his recent blog post. He also lays out the projected timeline for their release.

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/05/15/roadmaps-for-major-products-announced-at-teched.aspx

This post is a great resource that I will add to my bookmarks. A quick reference to all the of the cool technology coming out of Redmond in the next year and beyond.

How to get Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4 Beta 1

Today Soma announced that VS 2010 and .Net FX 4 Beta 1 has shipped. If you are a MSDN/Technet subscriber you can download right now. The rest of us can download the bits on Wednesday.

Subscriber download page for VS 2010:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx?pv=18:370

For more details visit the  Visual Studio 2010 Product Page

How to get a copy of Office 2010 technical preview

More details have been coming out of TechEd 2009 this week. One of the cool announcements is that the Office 2010 technical preview is just around the corner. This will be closed release. If you were lucky enough to go to TechEd you are first in line. But there is still hope for the rest of us. Run, don’t walk to this site and signup to get on the list.

Signup for the Office 2010 preview:

https://microsoft.crgevents.com/Office2010TheMovie

The following applications will be part of the preview.

SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server better together

Today the SharePoint team announced that SQL Server will be a prerequisite for SharePoint 2010. It was also announced that SharePoint will only come in the 64-bit version. So that means 64-bit SQL (2005 or 2008) and 64-bit SharePoint. Also SharePoint will require Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2, which only comes in a 64-bit versions.

This announcement is well ahead of the availability of SharePoint to give you time to prepare. Most medium to large scale SharePoint deployments are already running on this 64-bit configuration today with SharePoint 2007, as it is the current best practice. You should also use the SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Checker that shipped recently as part of SharePoint SP2. The upgrade checker will help you identify potential upgrade issues and blockers.

The last part of the announcement was around the set of supported browsers. IE 6.0 will no longer be supported with SharePoint 2010. Again you have some time to prepare if you company is still using IE6.

To recap the SharePoint 2010 announcement:

1. 64-Bit Only.
2. SQL Server (2005/2008) and Windows Server 2008 (R2) Required.
3. IE7 and above (see post for other supported browsers).

Arpan’s blog has a couple of good links to running and migrating to a 64 bit SharePoint 2007 environment.

Looking to keep up with SharePoint?

SharePoint is a huge product. The SharePoint community is one of the biggest and most active. So one question I get frequently is “How do I keep up to date with what’s going on.” I have found that using Alltop has been a huge help. This site aggregates the most important SharePoint blogs into one page that makes it super easy to stay informed.

http://SharePoint.Alltop.com/

Thanks to Guy for providing a great resource.

Where to Download SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2)

Today the SharePoint team announced that Service Pack 2 is ready to go. SP2 rolls up all previous bug fixes and patches. SP2 also includes new features to improve performance, availability and stability. SP2 also prepares your SharePoint farm to make the upgrade to SharePoint 2010 when it is available.

Where do I get it?

Check out the SharePoint team blog for all of the details and links to all of the download locations.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/28/announcing-service-pack-2-for-office-sharepoint-server-2007-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0.aspx

What's in there?

Read the Overview details in this document: Service Pack 2 for SharePoint Products and Technologies Overview Document

Service Pack 2 provides fixes for known issues and improves existing functionality in the following product areas:

· Authentication — Improvements to forms-based authentication, authentication for Web applications, and the Business Data Catalog.

· Database performance and integrity — Improved database performance and integrity by automatically rebuilding database indexes with a timer job.

· Interoperability — Improved support for standards-based document formats and compatibility with a broader range of browsers level 1 and level 2 browser support.

· Read-only content databases — Improved user experience by automatically configuring site collections as read-only when the content database is configured as read-only.

· Stsadm command-line tool — In addition to operations for pre-upgrade scanning and variations analysis and repair, several operations are improved and new operations added to better support farm administration.

· Pre-upgrade scanning and reporting — An Stsadm operation that enables you to scan an existing farm and its servers to verify that they can be upgraded SharePoint Products and Technologies "14".

· Variations analysis and repair — An Stsadm operation that enables farm administrators to better manage and perform necessary operations against variations.

Ramp Up your SharePoint Developer Skills

Are you a developer looking to expand your skills and marketability with SharePoint? SharePoint has a large surface area which can be intimidating for people just starting out. Take this free online SharePoint course to get up to speed quickly.

Where do you begin?

A good place to start is with the Ramp Up free online training courses. The training is a good mix of Documents, Slides, Videos, walkthroughs and hands on labs. The site also allows you to track your progress and manage your learning.

SharePoint for Developers - Part 1

• Web Parts
• Data Lists
• Event Handlers
• Workflow
• Silverlight Web Parts

SharePoint for Developers - Part 2

• Page Navigation
• Page Branding
• Web Services
• Custom Content Types
• User Management

Get started today with your SharePoint career! SharePoint skills are white hot right now.

SharePoint SP2 adds support for IE8

Office 2007 SP2 is just around the corner. One of the many improvements is support for Internet Explorer 8. The Office team blog announced today that the Office SP2 and the documentation will ship on April 28th.

http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx

The post includes a long list of features and improvements for both the server apps such as SharePoint and the client apps like Word and Excel. It is also good to hear that they will be bringing back the spreadsheet that enumerates all of the bugs that were fixed.

It is nice to see the Office sustained engineering team hit their ship target dates. So often only the slips are reported. Good job!

Generate Online Training Courses with Silverlight and SharePoint

SharePoint is a great collaboration platform for training and online courses. Steve Fox posts an example of using SharePoint with a rich Silverlight UI to generate and consume online training courses.

Check out some of the screen shots at his blog.

Silverlight and SharePoint made Real

The LearningPoint for SharePoint system allows you to:

1. Administer courses and users
2. Design and create courseware
3. Launch courses
4. Collaborate on courses

SharePoint 14 now officially SharePoint 2010

Office 14 and SharePoint 14 have been given their official product names, Office 2010. There will be a Beta later this year with RTM coming in the first half of 2010.

See the official interview for more details:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Apr09/04-15Office2010.mspx