Marc: My Words : Silverlight

Hand-drawn Graphics Resources

maholmes — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:32:41 GMT

Loved these resources listed by Smashing Apps.

Thought they might work really well with Sketchflow stuff.

The Power of Farming

maholmes — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:31:13 GMT

Great quote in this month's Edge Magazine on "Moment of the Decade" from Playfish CEO, Kristian Segerstrale:

"I'll pick the launch of the Facebook platform. In little more than two years Facebook have created a game platform that has grown to more than 250 million monthly active players - faster than any game platform has grown. And most of the people playing aren't even gamers."

Back in July FastCompany asked why we were obsessed with online farming. I've no idea on that detail particularly (other than my mother* being obsessed with it) but once again the characteristics of challenge, co-operation, control and recognition (along with a dash of narcissism) combine to motivate huge volumes of people to participate in the experience. According to a number of sources, Farmville has anything between 60m and 70m+ users with Wikipedia quoting 72m active users as of December 2009.

Zynga - the developer of Farmville (amongst others) - are doing pretty well out of this (as are Playfish and several others). That's a big valuation, and a big market too. The linked report on the US 'Virtual Goods' market - on which the success of all of this 'free' social gaming is predicated may be worth a read but at $995 dollars that particular virtual good was priced a bit steeply for me...

Facebook has long been known for successful crowd efforts (just yesterday the campaign to get Rage Against The Machine to Christmas No.1 ahead of XFactor winner Joe McElderry paid off and had over a million group members) but I'm interested in the middle ground: is there space on to create something as successful as Farmville but with a more regular purpose - like exploring media or just buying groceries? There's a different level of sophistication applied to games in terms of the tools given to the end user (and therefore the motivation to keep going back) than is typically given by smaller utility/fan apps. What else can a brand do to empower the end user?

BTW, if you're developing for Facebook there is a .NET/Silverlight SDK so you can create "Farm Town" or something. What do you mean that's already been done? Oh.

*I'd previously thought that my mother was just idling her time away on the internet and had scarcely considered that she was a natural futurologist. My suspicions were aroused when it turned out she was a very early adopter of Bing (she likes the daily pictures) and whilst I bemoaned the amount of time she spent on Farmville, once again she was simply pointing to the future of technology. She also preferred Olly Murs to Joe McElderry which is perhaps the exception that proves the rule although time will tell which of those will be more famous. I typically back her on these things...

Silverlight helps to produce lump-free gravy

maholmes — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:07:42 GMT

At this time of year, my mind begins to wander towards "what to cook for Christmas lunch". (There is the small business of the birth of Holmes Baby 2.0 to contend with in the next couple of weeks too).

Last year, the village lost it's electrical power around lunch time owing to overload from all the ovens, so this year I was thinking of playing it safe by having something I can chuck on the barbecue if needed. Sausages probably.

Anyway, if you need to produce some lump-free gravy at any time of year, it's great to see Silverlight helping Tesco show us how to do that.

EyeOnEarth - Environmental Azure App

maholmes — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:24:38 GMT

Just when you think you've escaped the Unified Communications net (THEY CAN ALWAYS FIND YOU!) for five minutes to have a look at Facebook, up pops another buddy - Stu McCarthy - to tell me he's just finished work on EyeOnEarth.eu. Seems like a bunch of MCS chums are involved so well done all.

The official press announcement is here, but in a nutshell you can scan around Europe courtesy of Bing Maps, Silverlight and Azure (hey - the coherent development strategy) and take a look at air and water quality monitors. Cool.

Creating Casual Games in Silverlight 3

maholmes — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:27:19 GMT

What an awesome set of 12 tutorials!

Silverlight RIA Services Site

maholmes — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:08:30 GMT

Brad Abrams recently put together an epic set of blog posts on RIA Services with Silverlight.

Since then, it seems that he's been busy working on a microsite from the main Silverlight site focused on RIA Services. Nice work, and should be a handy hub for this material.

Silverlight Toolkit on Web Platform Installer

maholmes — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:56:14 GMT

Just noticed that the WebPI now has the Silverlight Toolkit as an install option (it's the October 2009 version). You can still get it from CodePlex too, but this is a handy option for removing that extra bit of friction.

Sky News streaming with Silverlight

maholmes — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:50:15 GMT

If you're a Sky subscriber, then you may already have been using the Sky Player service which is built using Silverlight and has been deployed for some time now.

Well, you might be pleased to learn that Sky have been building on the success of that platform and have now begun using the Sky Player to deliver Sky News so everyone can watch it on the main Sky News site.

You can get the official blurb from the Sky press office.

A bunch of Expression/Silverlight Links

maholmes — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:03:42 GMT

I've got a bunch of 'ooh, that looks interesting' links in my reader from the past couple of months. So here they are:

Expression

Big list of example triggers, actions and behaviours for Blend 3 from Peter Blois
An 'explode' behaviour (also from Peter)
Loads of great Blend and Sketchflow stuff at Silverlight Buzz
Bill Reiss commenting on the impact that behaviours have for Silverlight game programming.
Awesome, awesome, awesome physics behaviours from Andy Beaulieu
And then Andy follows up with some "how to" on behaviours.
A 40-minute video from Jose on the power of states in Blend 3.
A game "star field" implementation.
Don Burnett talking about prototyping in Sketchflow.
Katrien's 3mins on Blend 3 series - great Sketchflow examples.
A tutorial on using Sketchflow Map.

Silverlight

Silverlight 3 Multi-touch: The Basics (from Tim - who still hasn't renamed his blog "Heueristics"...)
Animating when Data Changes - parts one and two from Josh Twist.
An out-of-browser install pattern (also from Tim).

Links cleared - hope they help.

.net Magazine Expression Tutorials

maholmes — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:24:28 GMT

If you haven't dabbled in Expression then .net magazine is publishing some interesting tutorials and exploration of Expression and Silverlight capabilities. At the moment, there's a useful review of Expression Studio 3 and a tutorial on building network-aware desktop applications (or out-of-browser). Worth a look-see.

Silver Arcade – Silverlight Casual Gaming Portal

maholmes — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:07:55 GMT

Great to see a gaming portal for Silverlight. Silver Arcade has just launched (there’s not all that much content yet so it’s got a way to go to compete with the likes of the mighty Miniclip !) and it’s great to see Silverlight pushing into the gaming...(read more)

Silverlight and Commodore 64

maholmes — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:22:16 GMT

I’ve mentioned we have a Commodore 64 in the office (it’s about the only machine that we can’t get Windows 7 to run on). Well, no need to be jealous of this particular artifact as you can now run a C64 emulator in Silverlight 3 . Terrific work is by Pete...(read more)

Silverlight and MySpace

maholmes — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:16:04 GMT

Big news from Michael Scherotter that you can now build Silverlight applications for the MySpace Developer Platform . Full details here. Great news all round for Silverlight developers and also for MySpace as the legions of .NET developers can get to...(read more)

Physics Helper for Silverlight, Blend and Farseer

maholmes — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:12:47 GMT

Wow! Can’t believe I only just discovered this yesterday: a codeplex project for assisting with the creation of physics based objects . More info on Andy Beaulieu’s blog here and here . Top job!...(read more)

Quake 3 in Silverlight

maholmes — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:31:35 GMT

French developer Julien Frelat has made a port of Quake from C/ASM to Silverlight 3. You can have a go of a demo (requires the SL3 beta) here. It’s not exactly playable – there’s more work to do – but it’s an interesting start and shows the rendering...(read more)