CTO, Software engineer and Team leader
Posts tagged Silverlight 4
Silverlight and Windows Phone Workshop
Jul 23rd
On 13th I will have the pleasure to present a workshop at the University of Bonn. This workshop will introduce Microsoft Phone to students. The focus will be on mobile development, web services, Silverlight and introductory design in Blend. The participants will acquire the basic knowledge of these technologies, allowing them to have a good chance to further pursue on Microsoft career path.
Subject: Silverlight and Microsoft Phone
Start: 9:00 with 1 hour lunch break around 12-12:30
End: approx. 15:00 – 16:00
Location: Windows-CIP-Pool N222
Language: The talk will be given in English.
Add Silverlight to WordPress
Jun 4th
As I presented earlier, you can easily create a Silverlight video player and you can see it working pretty nice. Not to mention that it can play a lot of formats and it is only 344 kb in size! Now let’s see how this is possible and how can one do it on his website.
From the start, Silverlight was meant to be as easiest as possible to develop and deploy. Also, the cross browser (running on all major browsers) and cross platform (running on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows) was a requirement. But more than this, not to depend on the server side on .Net framework was also important. So you can deploy and run (only for running you’ll need the Silverlight Runtime installed) your app no matter the OS (Operating System).
This is why we discuss today on adding Silverlight to WordPress and not on How to deploy Silverlight on Linux. From the server’s OS point of view, Silverlight is just another file so you don’t need any plugin nor installs on the server side. It is on the client side where it is downloaded, setup with parameters and processed and here you need to install the Silverlight runtime – a mere of 4 Mb. If you’ve developed prior Adobe Flash application, you’ll feel very natural on the process. So let’s begin our ride to add your Silverlight application to WordPress.
Step 1.
Develop your Silverlight application. You should have a .xap file built in order to go further.
Silverlight VideoPlayer for RailsCasts
Jun 1st
I am and will be a Microsoft Developer. While working for convenience with other tools, I love strong type languages. I don’t want to ship products because I saved once and hit “s” one more time, so my product will be shipped with that small, human and yet unpardonable error in code.
How many times did you loose your time and effort with PHP in order to find a small mistake like this?
In my pursue on Microsoft tools path I started enjoying the Silverlight technology. Who might not know, Silverlight is a competitor to Flash. By now, on its 4th version, is way above Adobe Flash in almost all areas (I actually worked with Flex and Flash recently, so I really know what I’m talking about):
- Easy to develop : the C# language is a world class, easy to write in, with good compiler, a lot of resources and a VERY good IDE (try to write code and animations in same time in that Flash IDE and you’ll see what I mean)
- Supports Full HD (there are examples on the net with 2 or 3 full HD movies playing), while Flash just tries to get HD with lots of CPU used.
- The model of development is the same for in Browser and Out of Browser – you don’t need to change the tool from Flash to Flex in order to have same product for Desktop and Web.
Railscasts Silverlight video player
May 31st
This is my second shot to create a better player for Railcasts. As you can see, it goes better and better. Who knows what might be next?
If you want to know more about the process through which this player was designed you can read also:
- How and why I choose the Silverlight platform
- How to integrate your Silverlight content with your WordPress blog (and presumable all blog systems who allow you to add JavaScript)
SpringBoard 2010 – RIA Business Applications
Apr 7th
Today I had the pleasure to present the “RIA Business Applications”. This was a conference of Microsoft Student Partners, of which I am a proud member. My talk covered the Visual Studio 2010 RIA business template, Silverlight 4 in general, RIA WCF and more than this, the Business perspective on software development.
Silverlight, Entities and RIA WCF service combined brings in business world a new approach, outclassing previous implementations of processes by taking what is good in both worlds, of web and desktop applications. It combines the power of a client side application with the web availability, offering a quick way to improve the experience of the business users.
First, we had a quick walkthrough through different options that a user can have when building a Silverlight application, for business or not:
- the Silverlight template, who offers only the basics required to create a Silverlight application
- Navigation template, who adds navigation and deep linking in the picture
- Business template, who, besides navigation, inserts also a RIA WCF service into the solution and links it to the corresponding Silverlight project.
Then we jumped into the code, the rest of the presentation focusing on features required by professionals :
- different templates for editing and viewing,
- Domain Data Source who encapsulates and exposes strong types,
- the CollectionViewSource object and its use,
- Drag&Drop databinding, Charting,
- cross field validation including the new INotifyDataError,
- Camera usage in a real application,
- Printing features in Silverlight 4 with custom templates,
- Clipboard interaction – copy / paste into Excel,
- Theming of application – usage and switching,
- Contextual menus at right click and their scopes and availability,
- the new Commanding feature from Silverlight 4
I had a lot to present, jumping from code to PowerPoint presentation, in a very fast pace.
