knom's developer corner : MiX 08

Silverlight 2 - Feature Overview

knom — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:31:14 GMT

Last week in Las Vegas the upcoming version Silverlight 2 was presented.

Right now the Beta 1 is available for download.

As you probably already know, Silverlight is a browser plugin, which needs to be installed once by the end users.

If users get along Silverlight content embedded in a webpage, the app is downloaded and executed locally be the plugin (but displayed in the webpage).

Let me give you an overview of the functionality of the current beta:

.NET Support:

Silverlight 2 has a built in mini-version of the .NET Common Language Runtime. You can therefore build Silverlight 2 applications using C# or VB.NET (and even more..) without having .NET installed on the client before. That's why Silverlight .NET applications also work on the Mac.

Controls:

.NET support enabled a series of controls within Silverlight. Most important, focus handling is now supported - meaning you can control the currently active controls with the TAB key and input text or send other keys to controls.

The collection of built-in controls includes Textbox, Button, ItemsControl, FileOpenDialog as well as layout controls like Grid or StackPanel. The SDK includes other controls (which are not included in the core runtime and need to be shipped with your app), they contain Checkbox, RadioButton, DataGrid, Calendar and more.

Styles & Templates:

Like with WPF you can now style your controls with a collection of property values for colors and other things. Moreover you can change the appearance of controls completely by specifying a control template for it. Data templates for visualization of custom objects are also available.

Databinding:

To bind specific properties to others you can now use databinding.

The sample shows how to bind a property (in contrary to WPF, the Path=.. syntax doesn't work right now). Set the data source with a DataContext property of the control or it's parents.

Networking:

You can either add a web reference to a HTTP or JSON web service or you can download data from any same-domain (or even cross domain) site URL. Client sockets are also supported.

LINQ:

With the help of LINQ to XML (in the SDK) you can query XML data source with the well known LINQ paradigm.

HTML Integration:

As Silverlight is always embedded within HTML it is crucial to provide a good interop story between HTML and Silverlight. You can access HTML objects out of Silverlight as well as access Silverlight methods out of JavaScript.

Local Storage:

Silverlight apps can store information in a local folder (which is somewhere in the user profile). Only the same app can read and write to and from this location. The size is limited, but increase can be requested. This is equal to Isolated Storage on the full .NET FX.

OpenFileDialog:

Local file system access is not permitted except Isolated Storage. With the help of the OpenFileDialog users can grant access to a specific file to the application (e.g. to use it for upload).

DeepZoom:

This technology, formerly known as "Seadragon" allows seamless zooming into high resolution images. Only the necessary parts of the images are transferred to the client to reduce network traffic.

If you want to play around with the current version, these links are essential:

By the way: In Q2 2008 a second Beta will be released, which will allow you to get online with your commercial projects - so start looking into Silverlight now!

MiX 08 Keynote News - Silverlight, IE 8, ...

knom — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:57:42 GMT

Wednesday March 5th, Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas. Endless crowds are trying to get into the keynote room of MiX.

The first speaker is Ray Ozzie. As chief software architect of Microsoft, he talks about the overall strategy of Microsoft, providing a platform for consumer media applications as well as business applications over a variety of devices and the web.

Then the first announcement: We will provide what is called Microsoft SQL Server Data Services. Not to be confused with ADO.NET Data Services (Project "Astoria"), the SQL Server DS is an online storage service based on REST and SOAP webservices, which can be leveraged for your own applications. If you're interested in details see the session recording at visitmix.com, available for download later this week, or see Eugenio Pace's blog on this.

After that, Scott Guthrie, VP of developer division took over and started with an outlook to the future of web development with Microsoft:

One of these is the ASP.NET MVC framework, Dynamic Data Support as well as new AJAX extensions.

The next interesting announcement: The availability of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. You can already download it here! More details about new features to come on my blog.

Expression Studio 2 - is available as Beta version, with e.g. a great new Expression Web and Expression Blend for Silverlight 1.

To use Blend with Silverlight 2 a new version Expression Blend 2.5 March CTP is available.

Two other interesting announcements regarding Silverlight:

We are currently building a mobile version of Silverlight for use with Windows Mobile 6 devices. The first CTP will be available in Q2 2008 and...

Together with Nokia, Microsoft will provide versions of Silverlight for the Symbian powered devices Nokia S40 and S60 (no timeframe mentioned there).

So get back for the detailed postings on Silverlight 2 and IE 8.

If you are interested in sessions from mix, go to http://sessions.visitmix.com/

We're going to Las Vegas

knom — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:19:36 GMT

As MiX conference currently takes place here - I travelled "over" to Las Vegas. 15h of flight! That's really hard.

We departed at 10:50am in Vienna with Austrian Airlines towards Washington. Although economy class was as narrow as always we had nevertheless a lot of fun. They had small screens, where we could watch a lot of cool movies (like Disney's Pocahontas ;-)) as well as get ourselves ready for Las Vegas by playing Roulette (unfortunately without real money).

I tried hard not to get asleep! So I spend my time with watching movies, reading Harry Potter (The order of the phoenix) and eating "delicious" food served by the stewardesses. Every now and then I had to walk around in the narrow airplane, otherwise my feet would have fallen off...

(no comments..)

Finally we arrived.. no.. not in Las Vegas, but in Washington! After getting out of the aircraft we had to wait at the immigration counters to get our temp-immigration sheet. There was a long queue in front of the counter, which didn't get any shorter (although we were already waiting half an hour).

Thank god they were playing a nice ad-movie about the beauty of America ;-)

Finally an immigration officer told the waiting crowd, that their computers had hang up (I removed all "Microsoft" labeled items on my backbag and jacket in a hurry)..

So we had to wait and wait.. and watch the beautiful ad, about people talking of equal chances mixed with beautiful scenes of canions...

After what seemed like 100 repeats of the movie the computers were fixed again and we were finally allowed to immigrate.

Time to our connection flight was rather short, so we hurried to the boarding-gate, where we got into the airplane. Big mistake: The airline (TED) had nearly no meals (only pre-built snack boxes with chips,.. for lots of money..). So we were starving for the next 5 hours until we finally arrived in LAS VEGAS!!

I have to say Las Vegas is really nice! Especially the Venetian Hotel, where the MiX conference takes place. Everything here is styled like in Venice. They even have a small canal "grande" with condolas.

But will MiX be worthwhile 15 hard hours of travel.. ?! Let's see!

MiX 2008 - I'm coming!!

knom — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:43:02 GMT

Hurrah! This year I'm allowed to attend MiX conference in Las Vegas! And I'm really excited!

I'm sure it will be a week of interesting sessions about Silverlight, Expression and other Web / UX Dev. topics!

You can also expect some interesting announcements around these topics.. :-)

So stay tuned to the news around MiX 08!

According to my weather sidebar gadget the temperature in Las Vegas will rise up until 22°C - so it's going to be a *hot week*!

Also it's my first time in Las Vegas, so I'm really curious seeing all the places I've only seen in lots of movies.