MVVM (Model/View/ViewModel) is an architectural pattern that is well-suited for Silverlight and WPF development. It is a variation of the MVC pattern that originated from the development of Expression Blend. At its heart, MVVM imposes three kinds of classes that separate out ideas of presentation (Views...

Seema Ramchandani works on performance as a Program Manager on the Silverlight team. She gave a fast-paced talk at MIX09 covering the graphics and media that contained some helpful tips for performance profiling, debugging and optimization. Silverlight Rendering Architecture When building a graphics...

Brandon Bray gave an interesting presentation at MIX09 on how the CLR (the execution engine that underlies the .NET Framework) was refactored to support for Silverlight; I thought I’d share my distilled notes from the session. Bringing .NET to the Silverlight world was an obvious choice. Not only does...

Bill Buxton talked about why user-centered design is so important; now we’re going to talk about the “ how ”. We’re going to be talking about three key categories today: web , media and RIA . One of the things we’re trying to do is to provide a single platform – the .NET Framework – that can be used...

Not a huge release this one, but we've just shipped an update for Silverlight 2 that fixes a number of minor bugs that have been reported over the last couple of months. Get it while it's hot, here: Silverlight 2 GDR1 end-user runtime Silverlight 2 GDR1 developer runtime Note that the...

Any good politician, regardless of leaning, knows that the language you use to frame a topic is key to how it is perceived. By repeatedly using pejorative terms to describe your own position and that of your opponents, you start to move a debate onto your own terms. Of course, those with a little more...

A lot, it turns out. Some long-time readers may remember my post of a year or two back where I set a fun little challenge to test what could be accomplished with just a single element of XAML . In the preparation for MIX09 , the team created a competition that offered slightly more room for creativity...

A gloomy, rainy Monday morning is rarely a pleasure to be savored, but today is a great day! We’ve signed-off on the final release of Silverlight 2 – every control has been added, the last few bug fixes have made it into the release, and it’s finally ready to relinquish the “beta” mantle. Download links...

My favorite conference is almost upon us. If I’ve been quiet for a little while on my blog, it’s because this has been a crazy busy season for me and my team, as we put all the pieces in place for PDC2008. PDC is Microsoft’s flagship conference, both because of the scale and depth of content, but also...

Get it from http://silverlight.net/GetStarted , along with the developer tools, documentation and the June update to Blend 2.5. Lots of new goodies – as ever, Scott Guthrie’s blog has a comprehensive guide. I’m not going to try and compete with him today: my family tell me it’s time for the weekend to...

I've posted a few times about issues relating to enterprise distribution of Silverlight , and I thought I'd mention one additional topic that came up during a customer tour that I've been on for the last ten days. If you're a systems administrator, one of the aspects of Silverlight that concerns you...

We released a minor maintenance update to Silverlight 1.0 over the weekend (internally known as GDR3 , where GDR stands for "General Distribution Release"). I'm sure most readers of this blog already have Silverlight 2 Beta 1 installed on their own machines, but if you're building a site for...

Just loved the team's latest Silverlight video. Props to Adam, Laura, Nic, Monica, Dan, Scott and Tina.

Following on very nicely from my last post on deploying Silverlight content to your own production server , I'm pleased to announce that Silverlight Streaming has added full support for Silverlight 2 applications. As well as adding the basic support, the team have put a lot of work into simplifying the...

Deploying Silverlight content to a production web server is a pretty easy process. Despite occasional misconception, Silverlight doesn't require a Microsoft-based web server: Apache can host up Silverlight content just as happily as IIS. But there's one little gotcha: web servers are typically configured...

I'm going to be "live blogging" the Steve Ballmer keynote this afternoon at this URL. Keep this blog post bookmarked and start hitting "refresh" shortly after the keynote starts at 1pm Pacific / 9pm GMT. Or simply tune in to the webcast ( 750kbps , 300kbps , 100kbps ) and watch it...

I mentioned yesterday that the Hard Rock memorabilia application was live already at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com . The AOL Silverlight-based mail client is not live yet, but they've just opened up their pre-registration site for testers who want to be the first to try out the new application, in...

We're already starting to see some cool samples that use Silverlight 2 really effectively. Prior to MIX, we had a small private beta running to get some early feedback on the builds that we were producing, and a few folk made really good use of this time to build some interesting ideas out. This one...

OK, so you've got all the bits downloaded and installed on your machine. What's the best way to start to get familiar with everything we've added to Silverlight 2? Well, you could do worse than start with the thirty page hands-on lab that I spent part of last week frantically working on! This lab takes...

Here's a consolidated list of all the key downloads you'll need to update your developer workstation to the latest and greatest technologies announced this morning: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 (x86) Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 (x64) Windows XP (x86) Windows...

At last, the mad rush is over. The run-up to a conference like MIX is always frantic: for me, the first three weeks in February involved a constant juggle of competing priorities. With the exception of one last-minute firedrill, the worst was over by late Friday afternoon. Now it's the calm before the...

After three public preview releases, I'm proud to announce the final version of Video.Show , a ready-to-run solution for hosting video content on the web! You might be interested in Video.Show if: Your company or school wants to distribute e-learning or educational content over the web for internal or...

If you're really astute, you may notice that we released a very minor update to the Silverlight 1.0 plug-in this week. There's no changes to the core itself, apart from a fix to improve logging of Windows Media audio-only streams; as a result, machines won't auto-update unless the site they visit explicitly...

Around the world, people are preparing to gather together to celebrate the holiday season, to give and receive gifts and to sing carols. This year sees the start of a new tradition that our children and our grandchildren will preserve and pass on: the sending of Silverlight-enhanced Christmas cards!...

Although we're all too proud to admit it, I doubt there's anyone reading this who doesn't love to while away the odd bit of free time perusing sites like YouTube and break.com for funny videos of stupid people doing dangerous things. However, there are few individuals who have been more successful at...