last week Microsoft launched the Silverlight PivotViewer control that makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative and fun. The PivotViewer is a sibling of the Microsoft Pivot WPF application that enables users to explore structured data sets on the desktop. WIth the Viewer you can enable this amazing data visualization experience on your Web site and allow it to feed from dynamic data sets (as the example blow shows) . Implementing using a static data set uses a CXML file (XML file that has all the metadata) while implementign using a dynamic data set requires to implement a simple middle layer that creates this XML data dynamically from a data source.
Free download of Silverlight PivotViewer can be found here: www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer and you can discuss it with our team on: http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/68.aspx.
Ball Watch USA and Microsoft are teaming up to give you a reason to try the new Expression Studio 4 to build one of the Ball watches in Silverlight 4 like this. You can win one of the watches! Ball Watch Company has a line of beautiful railroad-inspired watches aimed at the adventurers that many of us aspire to be – their motto is “Since 1891, accuracy under adverse conditions.”
Read more here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/synergist/archive/2010/06/07/enter-to-win-a-ball-watch-by-creating-one-in-silverlight.aspx
Earlier this week, the Bing team showed a complete revamp of Bing’s Webmaster tools at SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle. The Bing Webmaster team chose to focus on three key areas of interest to webmasters: Crawl, Index, and Traffic. Each area will offer detailed data going back as far as six months with dynamic charting capabilities, enabling webmasters to focus on the timeline trends that are most meaningful to them. The Tools are web-based, and basic functionality is available through most web browsers. However, to achieve the full potential of the Tools, a Silverlight 4 powered version is available. Silverlight enabled the Bing development team to provide a smooth, visual experience, enabling webmasters to better analyze important trends through connected visual data about their websites. Read more here: http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2010/06/09/an-smx-sneak-peek-at-the-new-bing-webmaster-tools.aspx
As of yesterday, developers can download the Bing Map App SDK and start building, testing and submitting applications to Bing Maps to be featured in the gallery.
To access the Bing Map App SDK, login to Microsoft Connect at http://connect.microsoft.com/bingmapapps (you’ll need a Live ID, so make sure you have one). Download the SDK which comes with a Bing Map App template and start cranking away on your project in Visual Studio (note: the Bing Maps site was upgraded to Silverlight 4 - read more about the changes to Bing Maps). Once you’ve created your application, you can test it on the site itself. That’s right! The developer sandbox is the actual site. You simply need to go to http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/?developer=1&preview=1, click the map apps button and you’ll unlock our secret map app test tool.
Along with the SDK the Bing team also published new map apps from external developers – Weather by Weatherbug and EveryScape by Everscape.
And you can also win prizes by writing your map applications (by participating in the King of Bing Maps Challenge).
Check our more details in the Bing Maps blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=NewPost&WeblogID=5193
Yesterday, at Internet Week New York we launched Expression Studio 4. This new version is shipping just 10 months after Expression Studio 3 and includes support for Silverlight 4, the .NET Framework 4, and interoperability with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010.
In this version we movined to a new SKU structure that aligns with the the new Visual Studio and MSDN SKUs. There are now three levels of Expression Studio: Expression Studio Web Pro, Expression Studio Premium, and Expression Studio Ultimate.
Expression Studio 4 Ultimate is available to download here: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/
Important Note: If you are developing in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7, please do not install the released version of Expression Studio 4. You must continue to use the Blend 4 Beta and Add-in Preview for Windows Phone. This Beta will be refreshed with each Phone SDK pre-release and will be unified with released Blend 4 in a service pack which will release when the Windows Phone SDK releases.
Enjoy.