Barak's Silverlight News and Analysis

Happy Halloween from the Silverlight team (and Archetype)

2009-10-30T16:43:00Z

One of our favorite Vendors, Archetype (http://www.archetype-inc.com ) created this great Silverlight based Haloween greeting card.

You can carve your own pumpkin and send to your friends.

Try it, it is great (and is hosted on Azure): http://halloween.cloudapp.net/pumpkin/02a97183-d2c3-4b5f-a692-75c23da13703

It is fun on the Surface

2009-07-23T21:11:00Z

just wanted to update you that the redesign of http://surface.com is now complete, offering a better experience for customers and partners. What you’ll find:

Improved layout and navigation with lots of Silverlight based content
Showcase of top deployments and partner activity
Easier steps to purchasing a Surface unit (I want one too)
Fast path to QuickStart and becoming a partner

The surface team is not done yet and you can expect to see more content coming along.

An important thing to know is that this whole site was built in two weeks. Great job by the Surface team.

Read more about Surface in their blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/surface/

Barak

Our friends at contentmaster launched a new Silverlight sample site at http://www.silverlighttoys.com.

2009-07-23T20:55:00Z

Andy Yeckel and Umesh Patel own this. Try it out.

It has samples (http://www.silverlighttoys.com/Samples.aspx) and Tutorials (http://www.silverlighttoys.com/Tutorials.aspx)

Sample code never hurts.

Barak

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

2009-04-24T01:04:00Z

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.

2009-04-11T02:54:00Z

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

2009-04-02T05:02:00Z

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

2009-03-21T00:36:00Z

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

2009-01-21T22:12:00Z

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

2009-01-06T15:55:00Z

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

2008-06-07T02:51:00Z

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

Silverligth 2 beta 2 is available today

2008-06-07T00:59:00Z

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

2008-06-07T00:40:00Z

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:

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.
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

2008-05-03T01:34:00Z

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

2008-04-01T21:25:00Z

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

2008-03-21T00:14:00Z

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