Barak's Silverlight News and Analysis : UX

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.

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...