Thanks everyone who attended my talk at the Silverlight User Group last night.  I really enjoyed myself and was glad to see a hearty discussion around RIA services – which is surely the point of these sorts of events; to get everyone thinking and get the dialog going. You can download my presentations from here: http://bit.ly/SlugSep09IB  Ria Services   If you want to find out more about Ria Services then Brad Adams is the person to go to – if you haven’t seen his blog series that followed on from his Mix09 series then check that...

I am chuffed to be talking at the user group meeting tonight, along with Ian Smith. Details here I will be talking about two things : Silverlightpulse.net This was the micro app I created before the Mix 09 conference in anticipation for the Silverlight 3 announcements and why I was originally invited to talk at the user group meeting (it’s a bit of a long story as to why it has taken so long for that to actually materialize – filled with stories of product launches and twisted ankles!).  I still think this is...

bbits have produced 2 new Silverlight 3 courses; one targeted at designers, the other at developers building line of business applications. Both are bang up to date, including Sketchflow and Blend 3 for designers and RIA Services, PRISM and M-V-VM for developers. Take a look: Silverlight for Designers with Blend 3 Silverlight for Developers (inc Ria Services, M-V-VM and PRISM) bbits courses can be customised at no extra cost, so if you can’t take the 5 days for the full developers course, you can cherry pick the...

Bart Czernicki had good post recently titled Silverlight 3 - Where is Silverlight Mobile? I thought a lot of the comments he made were spot on.  We have been lead up the garden path by the mobile team and in particular Amrit Chopra who has been announcing Silverlight for Mobile for 3 years now.  In fact I was expecting that he would announce it again at Mix year and then deliver nothing again!  Turns out he took a back seat in the 6.5 overview instead and no significant news on Silverlight Mobile was forthcoming. In my opinion though,...

Just a quick note to point you towards a little app I have been playing with to keep track of Silverlight news on Twitter.  Thought it might be interesting to keep an eye on this week with all the Silverlight announcements. This is a very early attempt at some ideas I have for a richer Silverlight Twitter app – [read more]  Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Twitter

Robert Hess has a interesting chat with Brad Adams about silverlight 3 – this is a sneak peak of Brad’s session for Mix09, without, as he calls “the super secret stuff”. [read full article] Technorati Tags: Silverlight,LOB,Validation

The Model-View-ViewModel pattern has been gaining a lot of popularity for WPF, and there have been a growing number of posts and resources about adapting it for Silverlight. This is a short summary post of some of those resources.  I will follow this up later with a detailed post on M-V-VM where I will also explore the business case for adopting such a design .. [read more] Cheers   Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight,M-V-VM

In Silverlight 3 we have seen that the Alexandria Framework will have a rich validation and business logic framework that is really very powerful and productive.  Silverlight 3 is due to be announced at Mix 09, and I would expect a CTP or Beta to be available then. But what can you do now?  Even if we get a go-live license on a SL 3 Beta it will be too early for many corporate teams to adopt.  This post will look at using Silverlight 2 and: ... Read full article ...

[cross posted from: http://blackburnian.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FB8B852EF1AB0B35!1917.entry] In the UK the DDA (The Disability Discrimination Act, 1995) makes it a legal requirement for service providers to ensure access for disabled customers and if necessary make reasonable adjustments to the way they deliver their services; this includes web sites (see Part III, 2.2, 4.7, 2.13-2.17, 5.23 and 5.26).  This almost certainly isn’t news to most of you, but I think there is a large degree of confusion about what creating a DDA Compliant site actually means, if not among the legal profession, it certainly appears to be among the development teams...

[Cross Posted from http://silverlightforbusiness.net ] A common requirement for a rich UI in a business application is to support dragging and dropping of UI elements.  For this to be successful you will need to be able to detect what elements you are dragging over, and you will need to support dragging over any type of layout (such as a complex grid layout), which is a contrast to many examples out there that only show dragging and dropping in relation to absolute layout with a Canvas. In addition many blogs appear to mention that the UIElement.HitTest method, available in...

[Cross posted from: SilverlightForBusiness.net ] Silverlight 2 does not have a BinaryFormatter like the full framework does so you have to take a different approach to serializing data to Isolated Storage. However there is a simple solution by using the DataContractSerializer.  You will need to add a reference to System.Runtime.Serialization.  This will serialize the object to an Xml format and is what Silverlight uses when you add a service reference. So if we have an object called Person, we can use the DataContract and DataMember attributes to mark it up as follows: [DataContract] public...

Kings Hill Conference & Training Centre (location) Friday November 28th, 2008 (10am-1pm) I am presenting this seminar in Kings Hill on November 28th – should be a good overview and I will be drilling into some depth with the demo’s later on. Hope you can make it. Marketing info and content below ;-)   Don't miss this opportunity for your company to get a great insight into this exciting technology and how it can affect your business Special Offer ...

Shameless plug for my new blog:  silverlightforbusiness.net And the latest article:  Silverlight 2 vs. Asp.Net Ajax Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight,asp.Net Ajax

Most developers and managers are impressed with Silverlight when they first see it, and most are keen see what it can do.  Most see the immediate benefits for rich web based UI, and often there is a comparison drawn with Flash (“Is Silverlight a Flash Killer?”).  However the business case is not always clear to them. I believe Silverlight offers a tremendous platform for Business Applications It’s not just the richness of the UI and the wide reach and lower maintenance of the web deployment, but the fact that it is built in managed .net code, with a...

I answered a post on the Silverlight forums recently about creating reusable animations for an Image, and thought that it was worth a blog entry to expand on it a little. I am looking here at two common approaches to creating reusable animations within a single project: Create the animation in xaml (using Blend) on one element and then change the target in code.  This is easier to do but means you can only play one animation at a time (because only one animation actually exists) ...

If you have wondered about how Silverlight 2 will fit into your enterprise application, then Rockford Lhotka has just strengthened the (in my opinion) inevitable case for Silverlight 2 becoming the de-facto standard for web based enterprise apps over the next few years. He has just ported his popular Windows CLSA.Net framework to Silverlight, and has maintained a coherence between Windows and Silverlight.  As he says: The commonality between the two framework implementations allows sharing of business object code between .NET and Silverlight, while the differences allow you to exploit the power of the two...

The current Beta 2 release of Silverlight 2 is not very informative when there is an error from a Wcf service that you have referenced. Currently all errors materialize in a http 404 no matter what their origin and you will end up seeing something like this: To get the real exceptions you will need to wait for the final version of Silverlight 2, but for now you can use WCF diagnostics to help you out. In your web app that is hosting the service, right click on web.config and select Edit Wcf Configuration (I don't see this...

Isolated storage offers a great opportunity to improve performance for locally cached data.  Instead of reading data from the server you can store it locally in the protected storage available to Silverlight.  Images seem like a good use for this, but it is not as easy as you may expect in the current build.  Here is a simple image browser example that walks through some of the ideas. In this example we will: See how to use the FileOpenDialog to allow the users to select image files from their hard drive Save those files into Isolated Storage...

Chrome makes a case in their "launch comic" that JavaScript performance can be vastly improved over current browsers, and go into some detail about how they achieve that.  I decided to test it using the bubblemark site which provides a simple metric for various RIA technologies. Using the DHTML test I ran the page on IE7, FF3, Safari for Windows, and Chrome.  Here are the results: Browser DHTML Score for 16 balls (Lenovo T61p Vista x64 4Gb Ram) IE7 62 fps Safari 55fps Firefox 3 74 fps Chrome 136 fps That's a significant...

The always informative Mike Taulty gave an excellent talk at the UK Silverlight User Group in London on Thursday, called "No Silverlight Application is an Island". I often looks at Mike's video synopsis and think that I have that all covered, but then he nearly always throws in something that is surprising and useful. The video is available here: http://blogs.conchango.com/michelleflynn/archive/2008/08/18/silverlight-user-group-2.aspx  Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight

If you have used the Deep Zoom Composer to generate a Silverlight project, then one thing you may notice is that your users can zoom out so far that they can't see anything!  It is actually quite easy to lose the image completely and not be able to get back to seeing anything.  Alternatively you may want to restrict how far they can zoom in too, so they don't start to see "blocky" images. A simple fix for this is to modify the Zoom method in Page.Xaml.cs with the following:   public void Zoom(double zoom, Point pointToZoom) ...

I have been doing a lot of work with this wrapper (called VIEWS, and available here: http://codeplex.com/views) - it really makes life a lot easier for working with VE in Silverlight, and will no doubt point the way towards how the final Silverlight VE control will work. I recommend checking it out, and watching this intro video from Jared Bienz is a good start Virtual Earth Mapping in Silverlight with VIEWS   Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Virtual Earth

EDIT:  See http://www.bbits.co.uk/blog/archive/2008/09/12/debugging-wcf-services-in-silverlight-2.aspx for further help on this.  Keep getting this error on a Silverlight 2 B2 project that is referencing a WCF service in a Web Site (not web project). There doesn't seem to be any reason for it, and it happens intermittently, however the workaround I have for it currently is to simple open up the cs class for the service and make any edit (e.g. just add a comment line) and then build.  This seems to fix it for a while. Hope there is a better solution long term, or a fix for this somewhere... Ian   Technorati Tags: Wcf,Silverlight

http://theamazingalbumcoveratlas.org/ The excellent Word Magazine recently created an album cover atlas which shows locations of famous album covers.  Cool idea, but I didn't like the basic google maps interface.  So as an exercise and to also help spike out some work we are doing on www.lovecleanstreets.org I created a quick Virtual Earth and Silverlight version that make use of the VIEWS VE managed wrapper for Silverlight. Luckily the original developer, Ian Reeves used a REST service to get the data, so I was able to work with the same live data for my project.  There was no...

If you want to have your Silverlight control to have a transparent background, then it is simply a question of setting the properties that Mike Snows describes in his tip post. What had caught me out previously and the reason for this post is that I had used the Background property of the Silverlight control, rather then the correct PluginBackground property.  Confusingly this works for the Html control but not the Aspx one.  I had in fact filed it as a bug, and perhaps it is because I am not sure we need both of those properties? Cheers Ian Technorati...

For security reasons, the Silverlight version 2 runtime restricts access to certain classes of URLs from the WebClient and HTTP classes in the System.Net namespace.  The main requirement is that the services you want to use should implement either crossdomain.xml (which is the Flash policy file) or clientaccesspolicy.xml (which is the Silverlight one).  If the service you want to use does not implement one of these then you can't use Silverlight to access it. However such restrictions are not present when using WebClient on the server, so you can easily create a bridge service that your Silverlight client can use....

This error had me baffled today, and I could find little reference to it from Google or Live Search. It was the result of creating a simple WCF Service with two methods as follows and then trying to add a reference to it from Silverlight 2: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfService { [OperationContract] string HelloWorld(string name); [OperationContract] List<Person> GetPeople(); }   public class WcfService : IWcfService { public string HelloWorld(string name) { return "Hello World " + name; } ...

Todd helpfully re-published the Windows Mobile Silverlight roadmap recently.  It does not make exciting reading.  In amongst news of Impressive Google Android Apps, (and here) a T-Mobile Android phone this year (from HTC) and endless twitter about iPhone and 3G, the road map is hardly going to light any fires.  Here's my take on the Windows Mobile roadmap in general, followed by my hope of a glimmer of light for all us WM developers and users... Windows Mobile 6.1 was just released - really nothing to write home about - threaded SMS is nice but there is not much...

I have a ListBox in a Silverlight 2.0 app that is bound to some data coming from a WCF service that is returned from Linq to Sql.  The service is simplicity itself:   public List<CourseSection> GetCourseSections() { CoursesDataContext db = new CoursesDataContext(); return db.CourseSections.ToList(); }   Note: you have to mark your DataContext Serialization Mode as Unidirectional for the above to work (as shown)   I added a Service Reference to this from Silverlight and bound the data to a ListBox: private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CoursesService.CourseServiceClient client = new CourseBuilder.CoursesService.CourseServiceClient(); client.GetCourseSectionsCompleted +=          ...

Since FriendFeed has produced an api I thought it would be fun to produce a little Silverlight app or control that could consume it. I thought this would be as simple as the digg example given in the Silverlight Quickstart - and it should be! Unfortunately the guys at FriendFeed have not added a crossdomain.xml or  clientaccesspolicy.xml which stops Silverlight (and Flash for that matter) from making cross boundary calls to their api. Took me a while to figure it out, so hope this helps someone. Moreover I hope FriendFeed fix this one quick snap! Cheers Ian Technorati Tags: Silverlight,FriendFeed,crossdomain

Silverlight 2.0 might be all the fashion but 1.0 is released and out there, so there is value in using it purely for the wider reach and acceptance of users who are happier to  install the released plugin. So here is a easy little app you can write your self to give you an image rotator with click through and whatever logic you want for the weighting of the images. It fits together as follows: A Silverlight Xaml page with some JavaScript to control it An Asp.Net web page with the Script manager from the...

Gary Pretty has a detailed post on some of the new features in Expression Web 2  - I hadn't realised there was so much goodness in it!   Gary lists the following:  PHP Support - PHP Intellisense and syntax highlighting, and previewing of PHP sites locally, without the need for a separately installed web server ASP.Net & AJAX Controls  - full support for the standard ASP.Net Ajax controls to simply drag and drop them into your page Silverlight 1.0, Windows Media & Flash -  drop your Silverlight 1.0 applications straight...

Technorati Tags: silverlight,silverlight 2.0 Silverlight has great full-screen support, and it is a simple matter to switch to full screen by setting the IsFullScreen property of the content object as follows.  Note for security reasons this can only be done in response to user input; note also that this code has changed from version 1.1 alpha   //get the plugin content object System.Windows.Interop.Content content = Application.Current.Host.Content; public Page() { InitializeComponent(); // wire up key down and full screen changed events this.KeyDown += new KeyEventHandler(Page_KeyDown); content.FullScreenChanged += new EventHandler(Content_FullScreenChanged); } void Page_KeyDown(object...

Technorati Tags: .net,silverlight,visual studio I was recently asked to detail the various .net and Silverlight versions in a simple table - here's my attempt (this is all available at www.asp.net/downloads but I must admit I found it useful to try and summarise the essentials here) Version Released Tools Summary Comments ...

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Mindmap Wow - there has been a great response to my humble Silverlight Mindmap post. The most interesting being a fantastic tool from Michael S. Scherotter that converts MindManager maps to silverlight! Michael converted my map to silverlight and has hosted it on the new free silverlight streaming service. You can see the silverlight version on the map here. Cheers Michael! Ian * UPDATE * I have updated the map a little and also hosted it myself here as a silverlight app .