Barak's Silverlight News and Analysis

Why don't you try a nice Silverlight game on Facebook?

Our dear friends in Plexipixel  have created a nice Silverlight based game on Facebook. It is called Roshamboom! (http://apps.facebook.com/roshamboom).  

Roshamboom! is inspired by David C. Lovelace’s extreme rock-paper-scissors concept called RPS-101.  The RPS-101 (http://umop.com) game got a ton of web chatter when it was released back in 2007 because it took David over a year to concept the game and produce the 5000+ outcomes.  The Plexipixel folks thought it would make an ideal (and silly) turn-based game for Facebook.  Plus, it allowed them to practice some Silverlight skills.  You can read more about the game here: http://plexipixel.com/blog/2009/04/roshamboom-how-it-came-to-be.html 

  

Try it and let me (and the Plexipixel folks) know what you think.

 

Barak

Want to drive more users to use your Silverlight powered web app? This one is for you.

The Silverlight Installation Experience White Paper and Sample code is now published on Microsoft’s Download Center.

 

This paper provides an insight into the mechanism of authoring and designing a proper installation experience for Silverlight applications on Web pages.  

 

The design incorporates feedback we got from focus groups and from our experience with many Web sites that have a sub-optimal installation experience for Silverlight.

 

The paper provides templates for Silverlight Web applications and Web media applications.

 

The templates are designed to:

·         Be easy to localize

·         Work on any browser and address incompatible Web browser configurations

·         Be light weight

·         Work with different form factors

·         Being able to be customized using text only

·         Leverage and be compatible with the code provided in the shipping Silverlight.js

·         Support multiple controls

 

 

 Please use this code in your Silverlight applications and improve the chances of your users who do not have Silverlight install, to go to your Web page, install Silverlight and use your application.

 

Have a nice weekend.

 

Barak

Silverlight Advertizing Creation Kit is now available

The Silverlight Advertising Creation Kit (SACK) is now available for download. 

 

The SACK is targeting designers and ad creation agencies and discusses several aspects of creating ads using Silverlight.  Step-by-step instructions are provided throughout so no previous knowledge of Visual Studio, Blend or Silverlight is required.  Sample projects are also included for each of the sections.  The following topics are addressed:

•                    Creating Polite Ads

•                    Tracking Actions (Event Handling)

•                    Ad synchronization

•                    clickTAG Support

•                    Expanding Ads

•                    Optimization Techniques

 

This document supplements the Silverlight Ad Publishing and Serving Guide, which specifies how to serve ads to a client page.  The Silverlight Ad Publishing and Serving Guide is available for download here.

 

This is the great work of Dan Penn who is leading this space in our product team.

 

Barak

Silverlight 3 beta is here with some oomph

This week at MIX we revealed a beta version of Silverlight 3. This version addresses many asks we heard from you from your Silverlight 2 experience.

There are tons of new things (in a package simiar in size):

Media

• Smooth streamign suppot (working with IIS media services)
• More HD with H.264
• GPU acceleration for video rendering and resizing (full screen HD is enabled by that)
• Raw AV pipeline (you can write your own codec in managed code, if you are writing one, please let me know about it)
• PlayReady DRM for VC-1 media

Graphics

• Perspective 3D transform
• Bitmap caching (improving speed)
• Bitmap APIs
• Pixel Shaders(GPU based)
• Dynamic Styling and Theming
• Improved text rendering (you will see more of that in the RTW release)

Application Development

• Over 60 controls
• Search SEO support
• Data form controls
• DLL Caching
• Binary XML
• Better data binding
• Better Accessibility

Out of browser

• Run your SL app on the desktop on Mac and Windows
• Start menu and desktop icons
• Sandboxed envinronment
• Connectivity detection
• Widnows 7 integration (touch)
• No admin smooth installation and update

You can access the bits on http://silverlight.net  

This is a great release and we have more good stuff in the pipe. Stay tuned.

Barak

 

Emergence of social networks for kids with Silverlight

In my last business trip I had the pleasure to meet the leaders of a small company that is betting big on Silverlight. 

Shidonni is a collaborative that is targeting kids between the ages of 4-8 (way lower than other social networking sites) and is encouraging the concept of creation (kids can create their own interactive creatures), sharing (they can share them with their friends), interaction (playing games with their characters) and learning. Targeting kids of smaller age is interesting and possibly marks a trend. When I was 4 I was not interested in social network 9I did not know what they were), but my little kids certainly are more exposed to the digital world and this seems like an interesting approach for introducing kids to this virtual world in a safe manner.

 

Let your kid try it and let them know the reaction.

Barak

Happy New 2009

The year had just began and it is time to share some electronic greeting cards the design agencies we work with created, please share with your freinds and family.

 

   

 

View a sneak peak into the X-Files trailer with Silverlight

Here it is: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/trailers/x-files/default.htm

Silverligth 2 beta 2 is available today

As announced earlier this week in TechEd, Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is available today. Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has many new features and enhancement over beta 1. These include the following:

 

·         UI Framework: Beta 2 includes improvements in animation support, error handling and reporting, automation and accessibility support, keyboard input support, and general performance.  This release also provides more compatibility between Silverlight and WPF.

 

·         Rich Controls: Beta 2 includes a new templating model called Visual State Manager that allows for easier templating for controls. Other features include the introduction of TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort, performance increases and more.  Controls are now in the runtime instead of packaged with the application.

 

·         Networking Support: Beta 2 includes improved Cross Domain support and security enhancements, upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications (“push” from server to Silverlight client).

 

·         Rich Base Class Library: Beta 2 includes improved threading abilities, LINQ-to-JSON, ADO.NET Data Services support, better support for SOAP, and various other improvements to make networking and data handling easier.

 

·         Deep Zoom: Beta 2 introduces a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles, as well as a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom. Better notification for sub-images enter the view is another improvement in Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

 

Silverlight 2 will be availble on download center and on http://microsoft.com/silverlight

MSN Toolbar is live and kicking

A team of trail blaziers from MSN released last week the new MSN toolbar. This is the first commercial native Win32 application that uses Silverlight as its rendering engine. The chose Silverlight because of two reasons:

1. Small memory footprint: MSN toolbar is a browser plug in that needs to have a small memory footprint (mainly because new instances of it are running while the browser is open). Silverlight small footprint enabled that.
2. Rendring online content: the toolbar is used to render up-to date content and Silverlight provides the right architecture to deliver that.

Try it today on http://toolbar.msn.com/Overview.aspx?loc=en-us

 To the customer, the toolbar provides a simple way to be up to date on today's news. It is also enhances the search experience.

Download and Enjoy.

PS. the toolbar is compatible with Silverlight 1.0 and with Silverlight 2 beta 2 (and forward).

Installing Silverlight became much easier OR Piotr is a hero

If you recall, until now when you installed Silverlight using the SDK Silverlight.js file, you could refresh the IE to view the content but needed to restart Firefox and Safari.

Well, thanks to Piotr from our setup team, things have changed dramatically.

You HAVE to read his blog post on this. It is simple and will make your customers happy.

 

 

New Microsoft.com video portal available

Video is becoming more and more relevant format to convey information these days. Microsoft released today a new beta video portal that is a single repository of videos that Microsoft creates for various purposes (marketing, education, training and more). You can search and embedd videos in your blog like this one:

You can expect to see much more video content spread in Microsoft portal to help our customers.

The portal is using the MSN Video hosting service in the back-end and obviously uses Silverlight for the video presentation.

Enjoy.

Tafiti is now powered by more Windows Live services

At MIX we released an update to the Tafiti projects that integrates more Windows Live services in it (specifically, presence and P2P messenger APIs that allow one to share search favorites with buddies). You can find the new Tafiti site here: http://tafiti.mslivelabs.com/Default.aspx. This site shows how WL Messenger APIs can allow sites to encourage interaction with peers. Find the project page on Code Plex here

The Microsoft Video Portal will soon be heading your way

With some much content available in a video form, and the popularity of the video medium with both consumers and enterprise customers, we identified a need to consolidate the vast amount of video content we have in our network and make it available (and searchable, and embeddeble) to our customers. The MS.COM team stepped up and created a new portal that will be powered by Silverlight and will allow you to search, experience, embedd and email video content on http://preview.microsoft.com/video/ (which later will become http://microsoft.com/video ). An initial view of the site was available during the MIX 08 conference and you can expect to see it going live again in April (I will update you with specific date once it is available). The creation of this makes one think about the viability of creating a searchable media site for corporations. We already released a blue print for such a design with the video.show project.

Jumper movie trailer site is available in Silverlight. More to come.

We have been working with our freinds in FOX to start a serier of hosting movie mini-sites that are powered by Silverlight.

 Jumper (starting playing in US theaters today) is the first one.

The actual content is hosted on our beloved Silverligth Streaming service (it is Valentine's day today afterall)

The page is localized to several markets.

Enjoy (and expect future movie mini-sites to have more functionality with Windows Live Services). It will be an exciting year.

Share your love for Valentine's day with Silverlight

What would be a better way of sharing your love other than using a free Silverlight customizable Valentine's day card?

The Silverlight and Windows Live teams collaborated on creating such a card as can be experienced here:

Note that the card was implemented in a way that allows universal use of it. You can use any language to compose your message. This is done by overlaying HTML DIV on top of the Silverlight UI.

Enjoy and remember to send your own card on time, Valentine's day is Feb 14th