New York Times Silverlight Kit version 1.0.7 Released

We have just released a new version of the New York Times Silverlight Kit, adding better documentation to the help file and new CLR objects for accessing the Campaign Finance APIs.  We’ve also updated the WPF Kit as well. 

New Campaign Finance APIs Implemented in the kit:

• CandidateDetails
• CandidateSummaries
• DonorInformation
• StateZipTotals

Just passed 1,000 on StackOverflow

I love StackOverflow!  It’s a great programmer question and answer site built on ASP.net MVC.  I have been an active member of the site for 8 month and have had a great time asking and answering questions about topics that interest me like Silverlight, Expression Blend, and IE8.  What’s great about the site is way that you can grow your reputation on the site by effectively answering questions.  I have been watching for any questions about Blend, IE8, and Silverlight and answering them to the best of my ability.  When the questioner sees that my answer is the best, I get points, but other community members can also “mod up” my answers if they think that they are good.

Over the weekend, I passed the 1,000 point mark and I’m now the second-highest all-time answerer of Silverlight Questions.  If you are a software developer, I encourage you to participate in StackOverflow, either asking or answering questions.  If you can answer, my latest question, I will be very grateful.  Thanks in advance.

Best Buy’s Keith Burtis Interviews Me

Keith Burtis from Best Buy just posted an interview that I did with him last week.  We covered everything from evangelism, to Silverlight, to career advice in about 26 minutes.  Best Buy is doing some very exciting things with their Remix APIs and we’ve already started thinking of the possibilities…

• The Interview
• Artist Explorer Silverlight App
• Best Buy Stores Silverlight App

Silverlight Kit Webinars

Today went well.  I delivered three LiveMeeting presentation on Silverlight Kits, Silverlight libraries that facilitate data access to web services, with minimal technical difficulties.  If you missed the live presentations, then you can catch the recordings.  In addition, I have just completed a whitepaper on Creating Silverlight Kits for Web 2.0 APIs.

6/10/2009 – Updated: I forgot to mention that Clay Loveless from Mashery joined me for the Building Silverlight Kits webinar and explained how their company helps with the deployment and management of public-facing APIs.  Thanks, Clay!

Also, Keith from Best Buy asked about any Silverlight Plug-ins for WordPress and I said that I’d send a link to it (created by my colleague Tim Heuer). 

And lastly, as building composite sites with Silverlight and various web technologies like PHP and ASP.net is important, here is a link to the Microsoft Web Platform.

SFO Silverlight User Group Next Meeting on 6/11/2009

On Thursday, June 11, we will be hosting at the San Francisco Microsoft Office a second meeting of the San Francisco Silverlight User Group.  We are having a Silverlight Showcase where community members can show off their Silverlight applications.  In addition, I will be giving an overview of the upcoming Silverlight 3 and we will be going over what happened at Mix (a bit late). 

Logistics:

Whitepaper on Measuring Browser Performance

If you haven’t seen it yet – download and read Christian Stockwell’s excellent whitepaper of Measuring Browser Performance.  You’ll find it relevant no matter which web browsers you use.

ARCHITECT COUNCIL | Pragmatic Patterns for Architects

“Cloud computing will supersede traditional IT”, “SOA will enable business agility”, “my way or the highway”, etc.  We’ve all heard this type of proclamations before, as many look to the “next big things” in technology to exact sweeping changes and solve many issues; truth is, technologies and tools aren’t as instrumental in influencing progress, as the design and discipline in applying them to specific issues. When used appropriately, technologies and tools can be powerful enablers that bring about change.

One of the things we hear a lot working with the community is a desire for more guidance about how to use the technology instead of just talking about features and functions.  To address this, our team has put together a series of live webcasts on June 9^th – 11^th which will focus on guidance and patterns for some of today’s hottest topics. 

DAY 1 – June 9, 2009 at Noon PST

Patterns for Moving to the Cloud

Larry Clarkin & Wade Wegner

Everything that you read these days seems to suggest that you should be moving to the cloud. But where do you start? Which applications and services should be moving to the cloud? How do you build the bridge between on-premises and the cloud? And more importantly, what should you be looking out for along the way? In this session, learn architectural patterns and factors for moving to the cloud. Based on real-world projects, the session explores building block services, patterns for exposing applications, and challenges involving identity, data federation, and management. This session provides the tools and knowledge to determine whether cloud computing is right for you, and where to start.

DAY 2 – June 10, 2009 at Noon PST

Building Silverlight & WPF Applications with Prism

David Hill

Prism provides guidance, via design patterns, to help you build robust, flexible and modular Silverlight and WPF applications. These patterns support unit testing, separation of concerns, loose coupling and the ability to share application logic between Silverlight and WPF applications. Prism includes source code for the library itself, extensive documentation, and a sample application that shows how the patterns work together in a real-world application. It also includes a Visual Studio add-in to help you easily share code between WPF and Silverlight. This session provides an overview of Prism, and shows how you can use Prism to design and build composite Silverlight applications.

DAY 3 – June 11, 2009 at Noon PST

Patterns for Parallel Computing

David Chou

With recent advances in cloud computing, service-oriented architectures, distributed computing, server virtualization, multi-core processors; we are now seeing parallel computing techniques being implemented across the spectrum.  It’s moving towards mainstream applications such as internet-scale web applications, massive data processing, graphics rendering, but the myriad of choices also present a number of questions on when and how to utilize parallel computing. This session explores the architectural patterns and trade-offs between different forms of parallel computing including:  approaches for utilizing them to improve application performance, optimizing the use of existing infrastructure, and applying concurrency towards day-to-day enterprise information processing needs.

WEBCAST AGENDA

REGISTER

To register, please click on the link below for each day:

We will email you with the LIVEMEETING information and log-in detail a few days before the actual event.  We will use the email address you provide in the registration.  Thanks!

SPEAKER BIOS

Larry Clarkin - SR ARCHITECT EVANGELIST, Microsoft

Wade Wegner - SR ARCHITECT EVANGELIST, Microsoft

Architect in the Developer & Platform Evangelism division at Microsoft, tasked to collaborate with organizations in the advanced and emergent areas of enterprise architecture, SOA, Web 2.0, and cloud computing, as well as to support decision makers on defining technology adoption strategies.  You can reach Wade at his blog http://www.architectingwith.net/ or through twitter at http://twitter.com/wadewegner.

David Hill – PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team

David Chou – ARCHITECT, Microsoft

 Architect in the Developer & Platform Evangelism organization at Microsoft, focused on collaborating with enterprises and organizations in many areas such as cloud computing, SOA, Web, RIA, distributed systems, security, etc., and supporting decision makers on defining evolutionary strategies in architecture. Drawing on experiences from his previous jobs at Sun Microsystems and Accenture, David enjoys helping customers create value from using objective and pragmatic approaches to define IT strategies, roadmaps, and solution architectures.

Virtual Event: Microsoft Silverlight Kits 6/9/2009

On June 9, 2009, I will be presenting a series of free web meetings about Silverlight Kits that I have been working on:

1. 9:00 AM PDT: The MySpace Silverlight Kit
2. 11:00 AM PDT: The New York Times Silverlight Kit
3. 1:00 PM PDT: Building a Silverlight Kit for your Web 2.0 API

All of the meetings will be roughly an hour long and they will recorded if you can’t make them at that time.  Please come with your questions and your APIs, as Silverlight works great with REST, SOAP, and JavaScript-based APIs.

Register here.

New York Times WPF Kit

If you browse the source code for the New York Times Silverlight Kit, you’ll notice that there are two project that are not for Silverlight but for WPF applications.  It turns out that most of the code that will work in Silverlight will work in WPF applications as well so it took me about 20 minutes to build the NYTimesWPFKit.  the WPF Kit links to the source files for the Silverlight kit so the two kits are actually sharing code.

Here are the differences:

• WPF doesn’t have a JSON parser so the Times Articles and TimesTags APIs will not work in WPF but since the New York Times has made most of their APIs available via XML as well as JSON APIs, all the rest of the APIs work fine in WPF.
• Some APIs are different, like HtmlPage and BitmapImage, so there are a few places that the code looks like this in the NYTimes.Newswire class Logo property:

#if SILVERLIGHT
        image.SetSource(streamResource.Stream);
#else
        image.StreamSource = streamResource.Stream;
#endif

The significant aspect here is that the WPF and Silverlight kits share 99% of the same code (I didn’t do the exact calculation but if you look a the source code you’ll see what I mean). 

Microsoft Product Roadmap

My colleague Bruce Kyle, just posted a list of product releases planned over the next year, including Silverlight 3, Windows 7, and Office 2010:

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/05/15/roadmaps-for-major-products-announced-at-teched.aspx

Very comprehensive – thanks, Bruce!

Need Help with my Chroma Key Pixel Shader Algorithm

I’ve just uploaded a simple demo application that shows the Silverlight 3 Chroma Key Effect in action.  If you don’t have the Silverlight 3 beta installed you will need to install it from here (the install link in the application will not work). 

If you watch the demo, you’ll notice ghosting along the edges of the dancers – obviously I need help with my pixel shader algorithm:

float4 PS( VS_OUTPUT input ) : SV_Target
{
     float4 color = tex2D( ImageSampler, input.UV );
   
     if (abs(InputColor.r - color.r) <= Tolerance && 
         abs(InputColor.g - color.g) <= Tolerance &&
         abs(InputColor.b - color.b) <= Tolerance)
     {
      color.rgba = 0;
     }
  
   return color;
 }

If anyone has suggestions on how to make this algorithm better – or has a better algorithm, please share it with me.

Thanks in advance.

Created HTML Help Documentation with Sandcastle

I just used Sandcastle and the HTML Help Workshop to build the documentation for the New York Times Silverlight Kit.  It took a little hacking to get it working but it turned out some pretty cool docs.  You can download the .CHM file here.

You will probably need to “unblock” the CHM file before using it:

Alpha Video with Silverlight 3 Pixel Shaders

One of the requests that I hear quite often for Silverlight is support for Alpha Video where video has transparent regions to ease compositing.  By adding GPU-Accelerated Pixel Shaders to Silverlight 3, that capability will now be possible.

One of the foundational new features in Silverlight 3 (to be released later this year) is the software-based GPU-based Pixel Shader support like WPF already has.  You can use any pixel shaders created for WPF for Silverlight applications.  The WPF Pixel Shader Library on CodePlex now has a Silverlight 3 library as part of the source code.  One of the shaders in that library is a simple color key pixel shader.  I started with that shader and adapted it by adding color and tolerance properties as well as design-time support for Expression Blend 3 and an installer that adds the shader to Expression Blend Asset panel).

You can download the shader installer and source code here.

5/15/2009 – Correction: pixel shaders in WPF are GPU accelerated, in Silverlight 3, they will be software-based.

New York Times Silverlight Kit Now Open Source

We are excited to announce that the New York Times Silverlight Kit is now an Open Source project distributed under the MS-PL license.  There are some pretty cool techniques here that you might want to look at as you build your own Silverlight kits:

• How to work with APIs that return pages of data
• How to work with APIs that have QPS (queries-per-second) limits
• How to make APIs that expose sample data
• How to write unit tests for CLR class in Silverlight
• How to use custom attached properties to add functionality to classes
• How to make your CLR classes easy to use by designers in Expression Blend
• How to define the default namespaces used in Blend with CLR objects
• How to write and use Value Converters

We hope you can use this kit to build some great applications and also use it to learn best practices for building Silverlight components.

Silverlight, Video, and SketchFlow at MGFest in Austin Next Week

Next week I will be teaching two full-day workshops at the Motion Graphics Festival in Austin, Texas.  If you want to learn about Silverlight and Video Distribution and Encoding, then register for the Motion Graphics Festival today.

• Introduction to Microsoft Silverlight (May 12)
• Video Distribution and Encoding for Silverlight (May 13)
• Dynamic Prototyping with SketchFlow in Expression Blend (May 14 – taught by Sara Summers – NDA Required)