Barak's Silverlight News and Analysis : SILVERLIGHT

Happy New 2009

Barak Cohen — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:55:00 GMT

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

Barak Cohen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:51:00 GMT

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

Installing Silverlight became much easier OR Piotr is a hero

Barak Cohen — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:34:00 GMT

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

Barak Cohen — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:25:00 GMT

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

Barak Cohen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:14:00 GMT

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

Barak Cohen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Barak Cohen — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:46:00 GMT

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

Barak Cohen — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:47:00 GMT

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

We released "Tafiti" Search Visualization (w/source code)

Barak Cohen — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:35:00 GMT

In December we released the source code for "Tafiti". A search visualization app that uses Live Search in the background and Silverlight on the front end to render search results in a compelling way. Tafiti is the first example we had for a dynamic application that renders temporal service data using Silverlight. We expect this area of synamic application to evolve and offer users more compelling experiences with their online services.

Now is your chance to look at the guts of this app and think how you can use this wizdom to create your own application.

Happy New Year from the Silverlight team

Barak Cohen — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 02:01:00 GMT

During the weekend and with the help of some Wunderman/VML people and Tiffany our web lady, we managed to retrofit the holiday greeting card as a Happy New Year card. It is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/HappyNewYear2008/default.html. Please share it with your freinds.

Gizmox and bridging the gap between Windows Forms developmnent and Silverlight/Ajax style applications

Barak Cohen — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 02:23:00 GMT

During my last visit to Israel I had the pleasure of meeting an interesting company that is called Gizmox.

Gizmox had developed an application UI framework that bridges veteran practices of building enterprise applications (using WinForms) with web 2.0 style application delivery (AJAX style). The idea behind their solution is that the WinForm application style can be sub classed to have a class that separates the UI implementation (and optimizes the communication between the UI and the application logic) from the UI logic. The result is that one can develop a Windows Forms style application and the WebGui class underneath emits an ASP.NET application that maintains states and conencts a JavaScript based UI to the application UI logic that runs on the server. The result is a modern Web 2.0 style application that was developed with the Windows Forms UI paradigm. Note that the application is an ASP.NET application and can be extended in a standard way. The technology is licensed under an LGPL license and already in use by large enterprise customers (SAP is using it for their labs application).

Feel fee to explore a little more of the workflow in their web site: http://www.gizmox.com/About/GuidedTour/QuickStarts/tabid/297/Default.aspx

The next generation of this technology will be using Silverlight to achieve a more powerful UI for this new type of rich interactive applications. Once it is ready, I will cover it again.

Until next time...

Happy Holidays

Barak Cohen — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 01:26:00 GMT

I spent the last month traveling, visiting the UK and my home country, Israel. Sun was abundant and thus my spirit is high.

Beyond some vacation and very close ancounters with Alpakas and Lamas (images will follow) I had the pleasure to meet some design firms that are already doing great things with Silverlight and some startup companies that are lookign into harnessing what Silvelright can do to the innovation they want to bring (more details about these in my next blog).

But now it is time to relax and enjoy the holiday season. It is my pleasure to introduce some jems that you can share with freinds:

1. http://www.wunderfulholidays.com/ - design your own gengerbread and share it.

2. http://www.seasonal-greetings.com/ - view a pencil drawn London

3. http://www.onlinespotlight.no/en/Christmas07/ - from the MSDN norway team

4. And my favorite: http://www.mason-zimbler.com/festivegreetings/ - absolutly a contender to the next eurovision song contest

Until next time.

MSN delivers Election Central with Silverlight

Barak Cohen — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 02:34:00 GMT

The Podium ’08 -- (http://election.msn.com/podium08.aspx) is Live on the MSN US Election Portal.

This is just the first of many innovations MSN (one of the largest online sited in the world) will deliver on Silverlight.

I had the pleasure of working with the MSN team on this and although this site looks simplistic, it actually encapsulate some innovative approaches to online application delivery (that leverage the Silverlight architecture):

The site is actually template driven, MSN integrated Silverlight into its publishing system and thus it can create template driven applications; the editors are just updating meta data in Infopath xml files and the application markup is generated by the publishing system accordingly.
The architecture of the application is an example of Software plus Services approach that uses Windows Live Search behind a modern user experience.
Search visualization and rendering of service generated dynamic content is an area that Microsoft is trailblazing (please take a look at http://www.tafiti.com which is another exploration of search visualization).

Barak

On the Surface

Barak Cohen — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 03:29:00 GMT

Microsoft.com today shipped is second brand campaign that is based on Silverlight.

This time the Microsoft Surface team campaign is powered by Silverlight.

Hurry up and view this over the weekend here: http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx

Once it expires I will update the blog with an alternative link.

Enjoy.

Under the Surface

Barak Cohen — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 01:14:00 GMT

This week Microsot revealed Microsoft Surface. A new computer platform that is based on Windows Vista and WPF that enables users to grab data with their hands, interact with physical objects that are positioned on the surface using natual gestures and touch.

You may ask, what is the connection with Silverlight? well, WPF and Silvelright share the same XAML based presentation markup. And shortly after Surface was released, a Silverlight sample that shows a similar interface was posted here.

Finally it is fare to note that the Microsoft Surface site is not implemented yet on Silvelright (due to the fact that Silverlightis not released yet).