March, 2008

As you probably heard Vista SP1 was released to Windows Update on Tuesday.   Full list of updates can be found here.  I decided to take the plunge last night and offer up my most sacred and highly used machine - an Alienware Area 51 9750 laptop.  To say I am in love with this beautiful piece of technology would be an understatement.  From the way it looks to the way it performs it is pure geek joy.  SP1 was either going to make it or break it on this machine.

I loaded up Windows Update - Selected SP1 - clicked Next and then hoped for the best.  Forty minutes later everything was installed and my machine had finished booting back up.  It was worth mentioning too that windows update detected some out of date drivers (that had been tested to be non-sp1 compliant) prior to installing SP1 and upgraded them for me.  In fact it wouldn't let me install SP1 until I did - saving me from creating a bad situation for myself. 

First thing I noticed was Windows actually reporting the full 4 gigs of ram:

Time for the next test. Besides all the IIS7 improvements in SP1 (features straight from Windows Server 2008), new APIs and bug fixes there was one thing I just had to check out.  The DirectX 10.1 update of course.  After all it can't be all work and no play right?  I was pleased to find that both my graphics scores had gone all the way up to 5.9 previously being 5.8 and 5.7 respectively.  I re-ran the test three times just to make sure it wasn't a fluke but the scores remained. 

Feeling pretty confident I decided to put the new file copy speed to the test as well.  My test subject was the Visual Studio 2008 directory.  Coming in around half a gig and almost 7,000 files it would be a great test.  To my surprise the estimate started out around 1 minute and 45 seconds and never went over 2 minutes and 30 seconds.  I was also getting some amazing throughput - 3.26MB sec. Check it out...

Overall I am pleased with the upgrade.  The file copy speeds alone makes it worth the price of admission but when you add on things like DirectX 10.1, developer and IIS7 improvements I would definitely recommend checking it out.  The machine seems to be running a bit peppier and I ran through a couple Visual Studio 2008 WPF and Silverlight projects, did some encoding in Expression, and loaded up a bunch of docs in Office 2007 all with with no appcompat hiccups.  Oh, and World of Warcraft runs fine too. =)

It's out, go grab it!

As previously mentioned here I will be posting all my material from the Financial Developers Conference session online. 

You can now grab the Powerpoint here.

Grab the Source Code here.

Here is a breakdown of what you will find in the zip file.

AjaxUpdateStatus

• This is the project where I showed how easy it was to add Ajax too an existing ASP.NET Website using VS2008.
• Two pieces of code to to watch for here.  First is the UpdateProgress control, this is what enabled us to throw up a message when we simulated server traffic.  To simulate server traffic just put the thread to sleep for a few seconds.  I did this in the Button click event but you can do it anywhere really.

      <asp:UpdateProgress ID="UpdateProgress1" runat="server">
          <ProgressTemplate>
              Loading, Please Wait...
          </ProgressTemplate>
      </asp:UpdateProgress>

       protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
       {
           Thread.Sleep(5000);
       }

SLDevCon

• This project showed a sample of creating a new Silverlight 2.0 application using the templates in VS2008.  We covered how to create a mirror shadow on an image (to make it look like glass) a simple storyboard animation and then how to add video as a brush to an element.  This is something that is very easy to do in XAML and has some great effects.  You'll see in the code we create a MediaElement for the video and then just apply it as a Video Brush on the text foreground.  You could do this for any element really, even your buttons or listboxes. =)

    <MediaElement Height="152" HorizontalAlignment="Right" Margin="0,0,25,28"     VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Width="178" x:Name="myVid" Source="Bear.wmv" Visibility="Visible" Opacity="0"/>
    <TextBlock Height="59" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="45,0,0,52" x:Name="myText" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Width="203" 
     Text="USING VIDEO" TextWrapping="Wrap" FontSize="24" >
    <TextBlock.Foreground>
    <VideoBrush SourceName="myVid"/>
    </TextBlock.Foreground>
    </TextBlock>

SLTimers

• This project showed how we can easily use timers now in our code behind in Silvelright 2.0.  The old days of using a Storyboard to keep track of time and fire off events are slowing fading.  Thanks to Tim Sneath for the idea from his excellent hands on lab.  Basically we create a new Dispatch Timer and every time it fires off its Tick event we change the color of the button text.

            timer= new DispatcherTimer();
            timer.Interval = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 2);
            rng = new Random();
            timer.Tick += new EventHandler(timer_Tick);
            timer.Start();
        }

        void timer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Byte[] colors=new byte[3];
            rng.NextBytes(colors);

            btnClick.Foreground=new SolidColorBrush(Color.FromArgb(255,colors[0],colors[1],colors[2]));
        }

TestDepth

• This project is the DeepZoom project.  I did not include the image output from DeepZoom Composer due to size constraints as well as the Heores mp3 file due to copyright.  I will be posting a screencast very shortly that will take you step by step how to build your own.  The Deep Zoom image itself is just a MultiScaleImage element declared in the XAML.  The mp3 I played was a declared as a MediaElement and then I just added an event handler to capture keyboard input off the control itself.  I used W for play, S for pause and X for stop.  The actual handling of the mouse to Zoom and Pan was done via the "Nerd Silverlight" code snippets the amazing guys at IdentityMine posted here.  Other than that I just formatted the control itself to be a little bit smaller than 1024x768 so when I went into full screen IE mode the illusion all played out nicely so it looked like a Powerpoint.

       <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
        <MultiScaleImage x:Name="myZoom" Width="1014" Height="766" 
Source="http://localhost:49862/TestDepth_Web/ClientBin/FinServHeroes/info.bin" Cursor="Hand" 
MouseLeftButtonDown="myZoom_MouseLeftButtonDown" MouseLeftButtonUp="myZoom_MouseLeftButtonUp" MouseMove="myZoom_MouseMove" /> 
        <MediaElement x:Name="mp3Heroes" Source="http://localhost:49862/TestDepth_Web/ClientBin/Heroes.mp3"  AutoPlay="False" />
       </Grid>

        public Page()
        {
            this.InitializeComponent();
            this.KeyDown += new KeyEventHandler(Page_KeyDown);
            myZoom.KeyDown += new KeyEventHandler(myZoom_KeyDown);
        }

  
        void Page_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
        {
            CheckMusic(e);
        }

        void CheckMusic(KeyEventArgs e)
        {
            switch (e.Key)
            {
                case Key.W:
                    mp3Heroes.Play();
                    break;

                case Key.S:
                    mp3Heroes.Pause();
                    break;

                case Key.X:
                    mp3Heroes.Stop();
                    break;

                default:
                    return;
            }
        }

Web-AJAX

• This was the sample AJAX project we did where we applied a Shadow Extender to the button and some CSS. 

Web-SLMediaPlayer

• This is the project where I showed how to add video to an existing ASP.NET Web Application using the new Silverlight AJAX controls.  We also went in and modified the XAML for the player skin and added a DevCon logo animation that fired off when the Canvas was loaded.  This showed how easy it is to fire off events in XAML directly using Triggers and the ability to create rich animation using Expression Blend.  Thanks to Brad Abrams for the original idea and inspiration behind this.  Brad also did a really awesome session at Boston Remix on using Video in your Web Applications.  Check it out here.

<Storyboard x:Name="myLogoSpin"/>
  </Canvas.Resources>
    <Canvas.Triggers>
        <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Canvas.Loaded">
            <BeginStoryboard>
                <Storyboard x:Name="spinMyImg">
                    <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="image" 
Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Opacity)">
                        <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:02" Value="1"/>
                        <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:04" Value="1"/>
                        <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:05" Value="0"/>
                    </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>
                    <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00" Storyboard.TargetName="image" 
Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(TransformGroup.Children)[2].(RotateTransform.Angle)">
                        <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:02" Value="0"/>
                        <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:04" Value="361.077"/>
                    </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>
                </Storyboard>
            </BeginStoryboard>
        </EventTrigger>
    </Canvas.Triggers>

WPFButton

• This project was originally part of Kevin Moore's WPF Bag-O-Tricks.  What I did for the session was just create a new Blend Project and import most of the XAML.  The great thing about this demo is it shows a really slick animation based on mouse movement without any code behind.  It is done entirely in XAML using triggers.  Check it out!

Feel free to email me with any questions.  I plan to have the Deep Zoom and Video Editing screencasts done shortly and will post the links up here so stay tuned.

Thanks to everyone who attended the Financial Developers Conference this week we had an amazing turnout.  It was great meeting a lot of you face to face and I really enjoyed the discussions.

I've gotten a lot of requests around the session I gave - especially the DeepZoom and Silverlight 2 pieces.  I'd like to apologize to those that were not able to see it, we ran out of space in the room the first day and a logistics snag prevented us from doing a repeat session on day two. 

So with that in mind I am going to do two things... 

First I will be posting the slides and code from the session to my blog.  Update - grab all the content here as well as an overview of what is in the zip.

Second I will be doing a Screencast of the DeepZoom pieces that will walk through both how I demoed it as well as how I created it.  I'll go step by step from downloading the software to making the image matrix and coding it.  I'll also do a second Screencast that covers the Expression pieces we did with the video player and devcon logo insertions.  I'll touch on some things we ran out of time to show too like how you can easily publish all of this to Silverlight Streaming.  I'll post them up to Channel9 when done.

Also, here are the links I mentioned you may find useful:

Devs4Devs "Silverlight - What, Where and How" Video

• This one will take you through the “What, Where and How?” of Silverlight showing you step by step how to get started.

Devs4Devs "SharePoint - Making Sense of it All" Video

• Takes you step by step through the history of SharePoint, what it is today, how to development for it and what tools to use.  Also shows how to use other technologies like Silverlight inside a webpart.

Silverlight Links and Resources

Wicked Code - Silverlight Tips, Tools and Tricks

Financial Services OBA Component Library Info

Direct Download Link to Silverlight 2 Retail Financial Services Demonstrator

Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint

ASP.NET MVC

User Experience in the Enterprise

• Video of the session from Boston Remix
• Article that covers most of the topics