Joe Stegman's WebBlog

TrustedApp Sample from PDC 2009

Here is the source to the TrustedApp media player sample I showed at PDC 2009.  This sample requires the Silverlight 4 Beta which you can find here. This "trusted app" sample uses the new file system APIs, notification window APIs, windowing APIs, WebBrowser control, HTML Brush and Native integration.  For Native Integration, this sample will take the current playlist and import/export to/from Excel (assuming Excel is on the system). 

Note that this sample will look for MP3 files in your MyMusic directory and you will need at least a few MP3 files in there to see it running.  Also note that if you have thousands of MP3 files, it may take a while on first load (post first load, the application will cache the list of files and it's much quicker).

Click on the image above to install and run this sample application. 

Credits: this sample uses the TagLib Sharp library to extract meta-data from the media files.

BrowserFlow sample from PDC 2009

Here's the source to the BrowserFlow sample I showed at PDC 2009.  This sample requires the Silverlight 4 Beta which you can find here.   The sample uses the combination of the WebBrowser Control and HTMLBrush to display an interactive Ad that also plays well with the Silverlight animation system.  Click the image below to run the sample (note that it needs to be installed to run).

The demo shows the following new Silverlight 4 features:

·         WebBrowser Control

·         HTMLBrush

PDC 2009 Out Of Browser Session

I just got back from PDC 2009 where I had a great time presenting a session on the new Silverlight 4 Out Of Browser Features.  The talk is available on-demand here and you can find the slide deck here.  The session covered the following new Silverlight 4 features:

• Web Browser hosting and HTML brush
• Window settings APIs
• Toast notifications (notification window)
• Trusted Applications
• Trusted Application features including Native integration (COM automation on Windows)

I'll follow-up with a couple of posts on the samples I showed in the presentation.

Silverlight ICO/ICON Decoder (Parser)

It turns out the Windows BMP file format is similar to the Windows ICO file format.  Given that, it wasn't too hard for me to produce a Windows ICO/ICON decoder (parser) based on the work I did around a Silverlight BMP decoder.  I didn't spend a lot of time making the source efficient, so if you make improvements, let me know and I'll incorporate them into my version.  Click on the image below to run a live version of the Silverlight 3 based sample.

Silverlight 4 Feature Requests

Tim Heuer and Scott Barnes have established a more community focused way of tracking Silverlight 4 feature requests.  You can find their feature tracker here: Silverlight Feedback Forum.   Other than a few items that our outside our control (iPhone, bundling), you're likely to see at least a few of the top items in the next version of Silverlight.

Silverlight 3 Sample Updates

I finally got a chance to update both my Mix 2009 and bitmap samples to Silverlight 3.  See the table below for links to the running samples as well as Silverlight 3 sample source code.  Note the GIF decoder has been updated to support interlaced GIFs (thanks to Paul Tallett for the source).

Silverlight 3 Out Of Browser Chess Application

The final sample from my Mix 09 talk is an Out Of Browser version of the Silverlight 2 Chess Application.  You can find the source for this sample here.

Local Messaging Samples

I posted the Local Messaging samples I showed at Mix 2009 including the Bouncing Balls sample and the Chess Wars application.  Click here to run the Bouncing Balls application (you’ll need to temporarily allow pop-ups).  To start a ball, click on anyone of the 4 HTML pages that pop-up.  You can find source for the bouncing balls application here.

To run Chess Wars, Click on the image below.  To have browsers compete JavaScript engine to JavaScript engine, start two versions in two different browsers and have one be “Local” and one be “Remote” (both with JavaScript for the other player).  You can find the Chess Wars source here.

Chroma Key Pixel Shader Sample

Here’s the source to the WriteableBitmap and Pixel Shader sample I showed at Mix 2009.   Click on the image below to run the sample (and have the Silverlight 3 Beta installed – you can get that here).  Drag one of the images (or video) from the left and drop into the center area to see where WriteableBitmap is used.  Drag the video on the right into the center to see the Pixel Shader in action.  This sample will use a “shader” to mask out a chroma key (in this sample, the chroma key is black but the shader supports any color as a chroma key).

The demo shows the following new Silverlight 3 features:

• WriteableBitmap
• Pixel Shaders (chroma key shader)
• Drop Shadow Effect

WriteableBitmap Sample

Here's the source to the WriteableBitmap sample I showed at Mix.  The sample uses WriteableBitmap to take a "snapshot" of the running video to make a thumbnail.  Click on the image below to run the sample.  When running the sample, click on the running video to create a thumbnail.  You can find the video for this sample here.

The demo shows the following new Silverlight 3 features:

·         WriteableBitmap

·         WrapPanel (new SDK control)

Perspective 3D Sample

Finally getting around to posting the Mix demos, and the first I’ve posted is the Perspective3D demo.  I've posted the source here and you can click on the image below to run the sample.

The demo shows the following new Silverlight 3 features:

·         Perspective 3D

·         ElementName binding

·         FileSaveDialog (to CSV which is consumable by Excel)

·         Animation Easing

Mix09 Presentation and Deck

I did a packed “What’s new in Silverlight 3” session at Mix 2009 and had a blast.  I’m working on posting the samples but for now, you can find a video of the session here and my deck here.  Samples and walkthroughs should all be posted by Monday…

Source Code for Silverlight 2 Runtime and SDK Controls Published

Seema’s blog post has more details, but the source code for the Silverlight 2 controls, both runtime and SDK, was just released.  This source code includes control source, source for support types (e.g. EventsArgs), Visual Studio project files and unit tests (unit test are only for the SDK controls).

Source is provided for the following controls:

Silverlight Runtime Controls

• ButtonBase
• Button
• HyperlinkButton
• CheckBox
• RadioButton
• ToggleButton
• RangeBase
• ProgressBar
• Slider
• ScrollBar
• Thumb

Silverlight SDK Controls

• Calendar
• DatePicker
• DataGrid
• TabControl
• GridSplitter

Update on Feature Requests

Silverlight Feature Requests