Everything Silverlight, and more!

In this Issue: Erik Mork(2), Michael Washington, Faisal(2), Andrej Tozon(2), and Jose Fajardo.

---

I feel like I went through a time-warp or something because there is a flurry of SL out there right now. And a couple of folks are just flooding me! Hopefully I can catch up this weekend.

From SilverlightCream.com:

Downloading Prism

Prism apparently is not straightforward to get up on your machine (oops, kinda lets you know I'm not running it eh?) oh well..Erik Mork has a great tutorial links and all, no more excuses!

10 Things to Know About Silverlight Prism

When I first saw Erik Mork's 10 things post I thought ok, a list ... but nope .. each of thse is important and links out to a podcast, video, or post ... great list of resources!

Silverlight FileUploader 2.0

Michael Washington has provided a cool File uploader that gives each use the ability to create their own unique structure on your DNN portal.

Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-3

Faisal continues his cool series on duplicating the original Nike site. This time he is working on the basics of a search control.

Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-4

Faisal goes through some great Expression Blend information in this series... check it out to make sure it's not new to you!

Countdown to Silverlight 3 #4: Element binding

If you're not aware of this stuff, Andrej Tozon explains in words and example binding between UI elements in SL3B in his countdown series.

Countdown to Silverlight 3 #5: ChildWindow (Modal, Non-modal, Templated)

Andrej Tozon is ahead of me on posts, and I'll catch up eventually, but in this post he is covering the ChildWindow control... very cool and needed!

Blend 3 + Silverlight 3 = Luv (video demo)

Jose Fajardo has a great set of videos out walking you through what he thinks is the best to know about Expression Blend ... and from Jose, that's saying something... these are to watch!

Stay in the 'Light!

---

Twitter SilverlightNews | SL Web Articles | My SL2+ Tutorials | My SL2 Articles | My SL2 ToolTips | My Tutorials | My Articles | My Tooltips | SL2 Web Articles | SilverlightCream | Join me @ SilverlightCream |


Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3 Beta    SilverlightCream

We are very proud to announce that AgiliTrain and Rachel Appel are partnering to present a series of public classes on the next generation of web development. Rachel will be teaching two new courses for AgiliTrain on web development:

• The MVC Tour: A 3-day training session that features an in depth look at MVC – the Model/View/Controller pattern as implemented in ASP.NET.
• The jQuery Tour: A 3-day jQuery workshop that enables developers new to jQuery development to increase their knowledge and gain familiarity with the jQuery libraries, plug-ins and ecosystem.

For those not in the know, Rachel has been working as a mentor, instructor, software developer, architect and DBA for nearly 20 years. During her career, Rachel has worked with a variety of languages, technologies and systems and has contributed to projects of all sizes including large scale enterprise applications at some of the world’s leading companies. Rachel’s expertise lies within developing solutions that align business and technology using the Microsoft .NET family of products, particularly ASP.NET & SQL Server. She is also an ASP.NET MVP, ASPInsider and holds the Microsoft Certified Trainer, MCAD & MCSD certifications.

The workshops will be held in several cities including:

The MVC Tour (http://mvctour.com):

• Sep 14-16, 2009  in Seattle, WA 
• Nov 2-4, 2009 in Philadelphia, PA 
• Jan 11-13, 2010 in Dallas, TX

The jQuery Tour (http://jquerytour.com):

• Aug 24-26, 2009 in Philadelphia, PA
• Oct 5-7, 2009 in Dallas, TX 
• Dec 7-9, 2009 in Seattle, WA 

Get your seats while they last.  Only sixteen students per date will be accepted.

© 2009 Shawn Wildermuth. All Rights Reserved.
Add Comment | digg this

Erik Mork, Silverlight MVP, host of the SparkingClient Podcast and an instructor for The Silverlight Tour, has compiled a new set of Prism for Silverlight Resources.  He recently completed a number of podcasts and videos on how to use Prism in Silverlight. This blog post enumerates the ten things every developer should know about Prism and links over to resources that explain each point. If you're new to Silverlight and have heard a lot about Prism and/or MVVM, this list is worth reading and following.

© 2009 Shawn Wildermuth. All Rights Reserved.
Add Comment | digg this

I’m in the UK today and tomorrow (on my way back from a trip to India for two days earlier this week), and am giving two tech talks while in town. 

The first is this evening at a London .NET User Group event.  I’ll be presenting Silverlight 3.  Unfortunately the event is already over-registered – so if you haven’t registered yet you’ll need to catch it the next time I’m in town.

The second talk is tomorrow (Friday) from 1-4pm at the Microsoft facility in Reading and is on ASP.NET MVC.  When we first announced it last week it also over-registered quickly.  Thankfully my hosts were able to get a larger room this week, though, so another 120 spots became available. 

You can register to attend the talk for free until 4pm today if you want to attend.  Hurry, though, as there are only 43 seats left (down from 57 seats when I first started writing this blog post).

Hope to see some of you there,

Scott

this is a short one. A couple days ago I needed to create an adaptive streaming player. If you don't know what adaptive streaming is, its what Microsoft is marketing as smooth streaming, its a method by which a single movie is encoded into multiple bit rates, and is chunked into 2 second chunks, such that individual chunks can be pushed down the wire and reassembled. This is the technique used during the 2008 Olympics, and has only improved from there. One of the most interesting parts of this technique is how it scales, by simply using established http caching mechanisms ( see alex's blog for more great details). The thing about smooth streaming in silverlight is that it’s not "native" support, it takes some plumbing to make it work. However as much as smooth streaming has been publicized when I went looking for example code there was little direction to be had. Most references point to either the open video player initiative, which is great but lacks the adaptive source, or simply says "encode with expression encoder, and you get a silverlight player with smooth streaming built in". Yet I wanted source to make my own not a prebuilt one. Doesn’t every dev want to look at the plumbing after all. Then I remembered that Encoder comes with the source for the templates.

So long and short of it, is if you look in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 2\Templates\en\" theres your adaptive streaming source.

Also for the other folks who just go googleing/binging(doesn’t sound as good) for the source, here you go.

In this Issue: Cristian Merighi, Walt Ritscher, Al Pascual, Vijay, and Faisal(2).

Shoutouts:

The Mashooo folks have the winning entries up for their S Prize contest. I'd like to thank them for the honor of participating as a judge. I didn't look at any of the games prior to going through the 10 finalists because I didn't want to be swayed. Since I was a judge I won't comment on the winners, but I will say I'm not disappointed :) Check them out ... the other 7 are all winners also! Mashooo S Prize Silverlight Games Contest

Danijel Stulic sent me a link to this awesome school timetable software completely done in Silverlight: School timetabling just got better using Silverlight. I did a trial, and it looks and works great. I hope you get time to blog about this, and if you do, let me know!

---

From SilverlightCream.com:

Silverlight and F# happily ever after

I've blogged about Cristian Merighi's work before... but have you looked at his blog? ... I love the Silverlight on there! In this post he talks about the F# templates that are available (and links), and then tackles building a custom IValueConverter that translates a PointCollection into the area of the relevant generic Polygon.

Arranging Shapes in a Circle with Expression Blend – Part 2

Walt Ritscher has part 2 of his great Expression Blend tutorial up on creating spinning thingies to let your users know your app is busy, or at least give them something fun to look at if it locks up :)

Silverlight 2.0 Authentication Services

Al Pascual demonstrates creating a Silverlight Authentication Service in Sl2, so that Silverlight will use the authentication cookie.

Unit Testing Business Logic in .NET RIA Services

Vijay uses the .NET RIA Services walkthrough application and demonstrates using a repository to make it more Unit Testing friendly.

Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-1

Faisal took aim at the original Nike Site and decided to take a shot at doing it in Silverlight ... and it looks great to me! ... very cool Blend tutorial along the way! and by the time I saw the first one, part 2 was up: Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-2

Stay in the 'Light!

---

Twitter SilverlightNews | SL Web Articles | My SL2+ Tutorials | My SL2 Articles | My SL2 ToolTips | My Tutorials | My Articles | My Tooltips | SL2 Web Articles | SilverlightCream | Join me @ SilverlightCream |


Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3 Beta    SilverlightCream

First congratulations to everyone else that got awarded or re-awarded today!

The only one I'm aware of so far is John Stockton -- a first-time awardee in Silverlight -- very cool John!  I'm sure Twitter is alive with all the info, but I can't get to it from here.

Just after getting to work, I got my re-award email and it made the muggy gray day here in Phoenix much brighter :)

Thanks to everyone involved... I know it's a tough thankless job sifting through all the information and there are so many people to choose from. I'm proud and humbled at the same time (is that possible??).

Thanks a bunch to my lead, Suzanna Moran-- a tireless lady that is always watching out for all of us.

And thanks to all of you that are involved with either developing Silverlight or making it what it is by developing using Silverlight.

As always

Stay in the 'Light!

In this Issue: Davide Zordan, Erik Mork(2), Walt Ritscher, Peter Bromberg, and Lee.

Shoutouts:

Are you up for showing off?? Tim Heuer has announced a Silverlight Coding Competition – win USD $10,000! ... and check that list of judges... wow :)

Remember Chris Klug's FlickR ViewR? Well, check out the problems he had putting it on the blog: And then Firefox does it differently…reloading the Silverlight control when the css changes….

---

From SilverlightCream.com:

Multi Touch enabling your WPF application

Yeah I know this is WPF, but it's just cool, check out Davide Zordan's Windows 7 RC multi-touch app... and check out the link to David Kelley's Silverlight version too!

Prism’s Event Aggregator

In a continuation of the interviews with the P&P team members, Erik Mork and Shawn discuss Eventing in Prism this time.

Eventing in Prism - Loosely Coupled Talking

At the same time as the PodCast above, Erik Mork has pushed out another of his very cool tutorial videos and this one is on Eventing in Prism.

Arranging Shapes in Circle with Expression Blend – Part One

Walt Ritscher has put up an outstanding tutorial on using Blend to put your own spin (heh) on a graphic ... this is really great Walt!!

Silverlight 3 Polling Duplex Chat and Realtime Stock Updates

In a continuation on his previous post, Peter Bromberg extends into pushing data to subscribers using Silverlight 3 Duplex Polling... lots of code for us to sift through :)

Hilighting entire row in datagrid

Ever wanted to NOT highlight a row in a datagrid if it's readonly? Lee shows you how easy it is!

Stay in the 'Light!

---

Twitter SilverlightNews | SL Web Articles | My SL2+ Tutorials | My SL2 Articles | My SL2 ToolTips | My Tutorials | My Articles | My Tooltips | SL2 Web Articles | SilverlightCream | Join me @ SilverlightCream |


Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3 Beta    SilverlightCream

With nearly three weeks left, we are starting to run out of seats for the Silverlight Tour in Atlanta. This stop of the Tour will be the first using all Silverlight 3 materials. The seats are going quickly, get yours while they last. You can sign up on the AgiliTrain website here:

https://agilitrain.com/Workshop/Info/Silverlight_Tour_Workshop

If you miss out on Atlanta, the Tour next stops in Dallas on August 17-19th.

© 2009 Shawn Wildermuth. All Rights Reserved.
Add Comment | digg this

This is part four of a series of blog posts on Document Toolkit. Document Toolkit is a Silverlight library offering a range of features that enable easy document access and document display in Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 applications.

Related Links

• Part 1: Customizing the document viewer
• Part 2: Using the WebPackageReader
• Part 3: A better document service
• Document Toolkit Evaluation version

In this post I demonstrate how to use a custom book control to flip through the pages of an XPS document. An open source Silverlight Book control is available on CodePlex. We are going to adapt this control for use with XPS documents.

As I blogged in part one of this series it is very easy to customize the look and feel of the FixedDocumentViewer control by replacing the ItemsPanel displaying the document pages. Unfortunately the Silverlight Book Control is a stand-alone UserControl, so we need to take another approach here.

The UCBook control is a UserControl that queries for content using the IDataProvider interface. The IDataProvider is a custom interface and looks like this:

public interface IDataProvider
{
    int GetCount();
    object GetItem(int index);
}

We need to provide an implementation for IDataProvider where the GetCount() method should return the number of pages of an XpsDocument and where GetItem(int index) should return the page having the given index.

Loading document pages in Document Toolkit is achieved by using the XpsClient class and is a two-step process. All page information is available when a document is loaded. To display a page, the actual page contents needs to be loaded, which requires a seperate (asynchronous) load operation.
 
Once the contents of a page are loaded, it is visualized using the FixedPageViewer control. Normally, the FixedDocumentViewer takes care of page loading, visualizing and unloading. For we cannot use the FixedDocumentViewer in the BookControl, I have stuffed this behavior in a class BookData which implements the aforementioned IDataProvider interface.

When an XPS document has been loaded succesfully, an array of FixedPageViewer control is created. One FixedPageViewer wrapped in a Border for each document page.

// create page viewers
FixedDocument document;
this.pages = new Border[document.Pages.Count()];
for (int i = 0; i < this.pages.Length; i++) {
    this.pages[i] = new Border() {
    Child = new FixedPageViewer() { Scale = null }
}

Implementing the IDataProvider is relative easy, for we now have all page information stored in an array. The only thing left to do is load the actual page contents the moment a page is requested.

public int GetCount()
{
    return this.pages.Length;
}

public object GetItem(int index)
{
    var page = this.pages[index];
    var viewer = (FixedPageViewer)page.Child;
    if (viewer.FixedPage == null) {
        var pageContent = this.document.Pages.GetPage(index + 1);
        var settings = new LoadFixedPageSettings();
        this.client.LoadFixedPageAsync(pageContent, settings, null);
    }
}

When the page contents have been loaded, we assign it to the associated viewer.

private void client_LoadFixedPageCompleted(..)
{
    // asign loaded page to its viewer
    var page = this.pages[e.PageContent.PageNumber - 1];
    var viewer = (FixedPageViewer)page.Child;
    viewer.FixedPage = e.LoadFixedPage(null);
}

Run the sample.
Download the sample source code (requires Document Toolkit 1.0).

Sample XPS document courtesy of Laurence Moroney.