Adam Nathan's Blog : Silverlight

Silverlight 2 Unleashed Available for Pre-Order

Adam Nathan — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:00:02 GMT

I told someone awhile back, "Don’t worry, there will be a Silverlight 2 Unleashed. The only real question is whether I'll be the one writing it."

Until a few weeks ago, I just couldn’t make up my mind. (I know, it was a bit late to decide!) But finally I did, concluding that life has been too hectic to write another book. Fortunately, Laurent Bugnion had already been writing a "Teach Yourself" book on Silverlight 2 over the past year, so it was natural to convert it into Silverlight 2 Unleashed.

I met with Laurent last year when he was getting started with the book, and I’m sure it’s going to turn out great! So check it out!

Popfly Games: Now With High Score Tracking!

Adam Nathan — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:03:28 GMT

Yesterday afternoon we updated Popfly with arguably the most fun feature yet for both viewers and game authors. Popfly games automatically track scores, wins, and losses for the people who play the games. If you browse to http://www.popfly.com/Profile/Achievements.aspx, you can see your stats and find out about popular games you haven’t played yet:

On each game’s page, you’ll find a little scoreboard so you can compare your performance against your Popfly friends or game author:

And these features (+ more) apply to Facebook as well, now that you can turn any Popfly game into your very own Facebook game. Any game you create automatically gets a scoreboard that compares Facebook friends, a nifty profile presence, news feed notifications, etc. For example, you can check out the Facebook version of my Crayon Cannon game.

So, as a game creator, what should you do to take maximum advantage of this:

Use the game-level Score property (if you want to keep any kind of score). Any numeric values will do, and if you want lower scores to be better, simply click the lower score is better button on the Game tab of the creator.
Use Won and Lost scenes. You can have as many of these type of scenes as you want. And you can now add more at any time via the Add a Scene dialog.
If you don’t care about scores or win/loss records, you still might as well make your game end on a Won scene. That way your game at least gets credit for having been played every time that scene is reached.

New Game Creator features are now live!

Adam Nathan — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:21:00 GMT

A few hours ago we released our 20th major update to Popfly, which includes our first update to the game creator since it was released just over a month ago. There are tons of new features for you game creators out there, so I want to highlight them for you:

1. The new "color swapper" enables easy customization of any actor’s colors

This comes in very handy for differentiating good guys vs. bad guys, or just giving your game a unique look without needing artistic skill.

2. You can now rename actors

This was long overdue!

3. You can now publish your own actors so others can use them in their games

Some of you have already created fantastic custom actors. I’m looking forward to seeing them show up in search results!

4. Guide lines & snapping in the UI designer make it easier to arrange your visuals just right

You can toggle this setting with the "Snapping" button above the scene or actor appearance designer.

5. Actor stamping makes adding multiple actors fast & easy

This might take a little getting used to, but it makes it much faster to add actors exactly where you want them to be. As soon as you add one, you can instantly move/resize/delete it before stamping more actors. And if you resize the actor, the stamp will adjust to these new dimensions. Click the arrow on the left to change to normal selection mode.

6. 4 new events make it easy to create more powerful games (Scene Enter, Viewport Enter, Viewport Leave, and State Change)

For example, you could make a bad guy in a side-scroller move toward the hero only when the bad guy is within the current viewport.

7. You can now filter any Scene Enter/Leave or Viewport Enter/Leave event by one or more directions

Useful for many games, such as this one.

8. Creating multi-level games is easier, because you can now clone an existing scene

This saves tons of time. I used this to create a multi-level Kill The Peas.

9. Searching & browsing of actors has been enhanced

10. The behaviors list is now a bit more helpful, since it shows exactly what key has been chosen for a keyboard event

11. You can now turn a Popfly game or mashup into your own first-class Facebook application

You can do this by clicking "Create Your Own Facebook Application" option from the Facebook button on Popfly’s share widget.

Through Popfly, you create & control the core app and can upload an image to be shown in the app's profile box.
Through Facebook, you can control all kinds of things – icon, logo, what should be on the about page, etc. You get all the features of Facebook dedicated to your own app – a discussion board, analytics, reviews, wall, fans, etc.

Embedding a game (even as a plain ol' IFRAME) can be a pretty powerful thing. Check out what "What Now" (a kids' TV show in New Zealand) did with their Popfly game!

12. You can now see how many views your game or mashup has received

13. We've made some cosmetic updates to help authors highlight their creations and get feedback

14. We’ve added more actors

15. We’ve also fixed lots of bugs, including ones reported in our forum. A notable one: saving large games should be much faster (and avoid pesky unresponsive script dialogs).

.NET Rocks!

Adam Nathan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:25:00 GMT

I was fighting off a cold and perhaps not always thinking straight, but here I am on episode #314 of .NET Rocks!

Popfly public beta!

Adam Nathan — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:05:00 GMT

As Steve Ballmer announced this morning, Popfly (my day job) is now open to the public! All you need is a Windows Live ID. This morning I decided to use Popfly to show a noticeable trend in my books:

Tip: Click MashOut -> Tweak this from the little overlay to experiment with customizing this little app with your own data.

Of course, this trend in page count is also easy to see in person:

To keep the trend going, I guess my next project is going to be a pamphlet on Popfly! :) Actually, I promised my wife that my writing days are over, so the next value in the sequence is 0. I'm happy to let someone else do the writing for a change. In fact, I see that a book is actually already planned for Popfly! Awesome!

By the way, I've gotten some emails from people who pre-ordered Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed asking why Amazon is giving weird information about the ship date. Don't worry... they should be starting to ship already! As you can see from the above photo, I've already gotten a copy!

View and Edit Live Silverlight Examples

Adam Nathan — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:10:00 GMT

Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed is days away from shipping. To celebrate, you can (1) pre-order your copy now and (2) check out examples from the book at http://www.adamnathan.net/silverlight/code.

You can not only view the HTML/XAML/JavaScript source and the resulting output, but you can edit all of it on-the-fly. Here's a screencast that demonstrates.

Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed is now available (sort of)

Adam Nathan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 21:27:00 GMT

I'm going through the very last revisions, but in parallel the book has now appeared on Safari as a "Rough Cut." What is a Rough Cut? The almost-final chapters in "raw" unformatted HTML. The pictures in the book should still show up, although they might appear in black & white unlike the full-color printed book. On Safari, you can purchase immediate online access, or even a bundle that includes the printed book (when it is completely finished, of course). I don't have online access myself, but I believe the chapters should start trickling in on Monday or Tuesday.

By the way, here is the final table of contents:

Part I          Fundamentals
1      Getting Started
2      XAML
Part II        Creating Static Content
3      Shapes, Lines, and Curves
4      Text
5      Brushes and Images
6      Positioning and Transforming Elements
Part III      Making Your Content Come to Life
7      Responding to Input Events
8      Downloading Content on Demand
9      Animation
10    Audio & Video

Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed!

Adam Nathan — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 17:15:00 GMT

It's now official and on Amazon! As indicated by the (temporary) cover, it will be in full color, just like WPF Unleashed! As always, take the release date with a grain of salt because I haven't even written the whole book yet, but rest assured that it won't be out until after Silverlight 1.0 is finished. Although considering that I was able to write .NET and COM 100 years before the technology was introduced, I don't really need to wait...