MIX07 - Silverlight and the Compact Framework
For my small blog audience out there, I apologize that my blog has been lacking in activity over the last several months. In spite of the communication black hole, I’ve actually been quite occupied and there’s been quite a bit going on in the last several of months since XNA v1 shipped in November of 2006.
The .NET Compact Framework team has been busy. In the early quarter of 2007, we shipped Service Pack 2 for .NET Compact Framework v2.0. My favorite feature is the new version of RPM that contains the ability to snapshot and analyze objects in the managed heap; a great boon for detecting and squashing memory leaks or poorly engineered sections of code. Service Pack 2 was quite a big accomplishment considering we’re also headlong into our product development milestones for the next version of Visual Studio 2005, code named Orcas. Beat 1 shipped shortly after the service pack and our next beta is coming soon.
Fortunately, being on a great team has given me the opportunity to work on some pretty cool projects. In previous years, getting the .NET Compact Framework up and running on the Xbox 360 for the XNA v1.0 and v1.0 Refresh releases was a remarkable and rewarding experience that fell into this genre. But one of my current projects has me just as excited – very reminiscent of the early XNA work. Over the last month+, I have spent countless hours toiling over this cool new thing – Silverlight.
“Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.” Check out this cool demo…
Fox Movies
So what does this web experience have to do with the Compact Framework team? For me, it meant a countless number of long work days and longer evenings that resulted in this “labor of love.” A picture says a thousand words, so go ahead and check out the MLB demo done by Justin from MLB and Michael from Microsoft. Justin does a great job going over the Silverlight based Major League Baseball game viewer and player tracker. It looks really slick with great video, alpha blending, and nicely done graphics. At the very end he’ll whip out his fancy new Windows Mobiles 6 device and show Silverlight running a forward looking prototype of a MLB Mobile application.
MLB Mix 07 Demo
I’ve been itching to blog about this undertaking, but since this just debuted yesterday, I was not able to. Now that the cat’s out of the bag…
The demo shows a very early port of pretty much the entire Silverlight rendering engine running on Windows Mobile 6 integrated with the .NET Compact Framework. The entire application is written in C#. All of the visual elements, with the exception of the small blue hatched portion of the banner and the video thumbnails, are entirely 2D vector elements rendered from XAML. Even the MLB logo is in XAML. This allows the elements to scale nicely between the QVGA display shown in the demo and a VGA display on larger form factor Pocket PCs. The content actually works just fine in your web browser on a Mac or Windows machine running the full Silverlight framework. Kudos to the Forg Design team that put together great looking content for me to work with.
The demo video really doesn't do the content justice, so here are some screen shots..
(edited 5/7/2008 - removed pictures as links are now stale. Sorry.)
For any of you code jockeys out there who have ever been tasked with assimilating and componentizing design assets into a functioning interactive application, I now have a much better understanding of the process and challenges you face. While it was a bit of work and learning for me, I actually I actually used Microsoft Expression Design to process and create all of the XAML assets I obtained from the Frog Design team. Working on the Release Candidate of Design, it was definitely a lifesaver.
In retrospect, it seems crazy that I’ve focused an entire month of my life for a demo that appears on stage for less than a minute. It was a hard, grueling work. I am oh so thankful for a supportive team and for an even more supportive family.
Crazy – yes I would qualify it as borderline crazy. Foolish? Absolutely not. My guess is that all of my developer brethren out there who have fought with integrating a rich set of design assets into an application will immediately grasp the significance of our accomplishment.
So let’s get on with it and officially recognize the elephant in the room. When are we shipping? On what platforms will this be available? Xbox 360? Windows Mobile?
Well… as you probably guessed I can’t quite blog on that yet J It’s killing me, but when the time is right, we will make the appropriate announcements and I’ll be sure to whip up another blog entry.
Stay tuned…
