Posts tagged Silverlight
Introduction to Silverlight
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On 29th of March I had the pleasure of hosting a presentation, a quick “Introduction to Silverlight”. It was held at Avid branch in Kaiserslautern, in which I am proud to be Senior Software Engineer. The company’s culture promotes in-house training and I took the challenge in my hands.
Given that the allotted time was only two hours, the topics presented were just a few. Maybe in the future there will be again 8 hours workshops like I did while part of the Microsoft Student Partners Team! Since almost no one had experience with Silverlight, I have presented the history, stepping through each version of Silverlight and discover its novelties and added features. We had also some examples, already built applications, to showcase what one can do with this framework – from line of business to games, interior design scenes, deepzoom showcase.
Silverlight and Windows Phone Workshop
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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
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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
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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
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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?
- 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
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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.
Microsoft Student Partners
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Today I had the pleasure to make the first step in Microsoft Student Partners organization (West Germany branch).
It all started when I went to a very interesting workshop on Windows 7 VHD, presented by Daniel Neumann.
So I applied by sending to Microsoft Student Partners enrollment e-mail address a cover letter, my cv and a short description. After a while, I got a call from Anton Schweizer, Senior Student Partner, and I was invited to an interview.
I also had to prepare a presentation. It supposed to be a 10 minutes long presentation on a technical theme. Because I like very much Silverlight, I started preparing it as main subject.
The interview was very relaxed and I got the usual questions: why do I want to join Microsoft Student Partners, why Microsoft, how much time can I invest in this, where and when can I prepare workshops, discussions on Microsoft products.
Basically, I understood that the duties of a Student partners are very similar to ones of Microsoft Evangelist:
- create presentations for its colleagues in University
- prepare workshops and assist students while working on a certain theme
- involve itself in the students life and present Microsoft technologies to them
Very interesting .. I just wait to start! They said that I will get soon a response regarding my application.
Later edit:
I WAS ACCEPTED!
Forecast on websphere: Flex or Silverlight or AJAX or JavaFX ?
1Lately I had some interesting conversations with few of my developer friends regarding their opinions on which technology will rule the Rich Application Interfaces websites in the future. My strong believe is that there’s room for all four of these as per my experience and actual trends. More over, all these will have a separate slice of the market but overlap at only few areas. Let’s take AJAX as example – it is widely popular for creating rich user experience community building apps, portals, mash-ups and so on. On the other hand, Flex is used more for multimedia rich requirements, interactive maps for example, photo albums, portfolios, games etc. Another technology, Silverlight, is a direct competition to Flex, but its presence is more dominant in the Enterprise applications market.
Adobe’s Flex has a big advantage of running on the Flash platform, inheriting a very wide reach on the internet and having also an integrated support from other Adobe products, like Photoshop, After Effects, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator. Also some near future upcoming products – Catalyst, Thermo, Cocomo, and more will be closely integrated with the legacy platform. All these are reliable, proven technology in web industry, being leading tools for creating visually rich media, no matter that is composed from images, animations or videos. Besides all, the new AIR version brings even more value by having a desktop version of an app that is integrated with the online one. (more…)
Usability
0Is Microsoft learning basic principles of Usability?
Corrina Black, lead designer for the Silverlight platform, presents usability principles implementation in the newest Silverlight 3. She is focused very much on design, so no coding best practices will be heard here. Only good advices on how to create an appealing, easy to understand interface.
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