Entries Tagged 'sample' ↓

Many of you have seen the New York Times reader application - it was featured as part of the portfolio I've been building up of Great WPF Applications. As I mentioned at the time, the New York Times reader is based on an SDK that we built to allow newspapers and content publishers to create rich, "occasionally-connected" experiences based on the flow layout capabilities in WPF. We've had a private beta program running for a while now, and over the intervening months there have been a number of other newspapers that have gone live with applications using this toolkit.

Now we're delighted to announce the public release of the reader toolkit on windowsclient.net. We've made a number of improvements to the kit to broaden its usage; the reader toolkit is now known by the rather more accurate but slightly less memorable name: the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit. This reflects its potential to go beyond a news reading scenario and handle other kinds of data synchronization and display needs. For example, you could use this as the basis of a client for financial data analysis, where the application downloaded stock prices and other financial information and presented it in a rich client experience (Lab49, are you listening?!)

The great thing about the starter kit is that the source code is available, so you can customize it to your heart's content: changing templates and styles, modifying the way it handles data, adding new features, and so on. We've also created a sample MSDN Magazine reader application built with the starter kit, which is of course also provided with full source code. Even if you're not interested in the reader toolkit itself, you'll find this a really useful application in its own right.

Have fun with this - I'm looking forward to seeing the applications people build with this toolkit...

Around the world, people are preparing to gather together to celebrate the holiday season, to give and receive gifts and to sing carols.

This year sees the start of a new tradition that our children and our grandchildren will preserve and pass on: the sending of Silverlight-enhanced Christmas cards! I've received some fun ones - thanks to those who have shared them with me. Here are a few:

• Season's Greetings from Microsoft UK
• Online Spotlight, Norway
• Happy Holidays from ObjectSharp
• FranksWorld Special Presentation

Anyone else got a cool Silverlight Christmas card to share?

Here's a cool little Silverlight 1.0 application that our team (specifically Adam) assisted with over the last week. In the run-up to Christmas, I'm sure a lot of us are told that we're "hard to buy for". Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to give our friends and family a few gentle pointers without having to spoil all the surprise by being prescriptive down to the stock keeping unit level?

Enter the Christmas CoolWall. Adopting an idea from the wonderful auto-related Top Gear television program from BBC TV, the CoolWall allows you to find images of different items and sort them into categories of "Seriously Uncool", "Uncool", "Cool" and "Sub-Zero". You can also annotate the images with comments ("the Halo soundtrack is cool, but not on cassette tape please"). Having built a cool wall, you can save it, copy it as an image, or send it via email to a friend.

All this is, of course, built in Silverlight 1.0. The application demonstrates a range of capabilities: integration with Live Search and Live ID, HTML / Silverlight integration, reuse of simple controls written in JavaScript, ASP.NET server integration. It's not the most complex application ever written, but it's a bit of fun in this holiday season. The application was originally prototyped with the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha by Dot Net Solutions, a UK-based solutions integrator firm, and as a bit of fun, Adam agreed to try back-porting it to Silverlight 1.0 to see whether everything they'd implemented in C# could be as easily accomplished in JavaScript. I've noticed a certain preconception that Silverlight 2.0 is the "one to wait for" because it's the platform that allows you to use a "proper" language like C# or Visual Basic. Of course, having .NET languages, the base class libraries and technologies like LINQ will make RIA development a ton easier, but it's impressive what you can get out of JavaScript, particularly when coupled with the client-centric Microsoft AJAX Library. We're considering recording a Channel 9 video or something like that where Adam can share some of the more interesting experiences he gained from this application - we'll keep you updated.

See the Christmas CoolWall here. You can also see my own (rather fanciful) wishlist, if you're interested. And give it a try!

You may be pleased to know that we've just updated Video.Show with a bunch of changes. The 1.0 Release Candidate build is now available for your downloading pleasure from Codeplex.

If you haven't seen Video.Show before, I'd encourage you to check it out. Vertigo (the company who we commissioned to build this) have a great web-site with further information and plenty of screenshots.

Notable changes in the RC build include:

• Role management, allowing for hosted installations in which new users do not have upload rights. Users now fall into one of three categories: untrusted users (who can create comments but aren't able to upload videos); trusted users (who also have the "upload user" right), and an administrator role (who can manage other users' roles). This is built using the ASP.NET Membership technology.
• Basic debugging information is written to the database when video processing (encode, upload to Silverlight Streaming) fails. This is an interim solution; we have longer-term plans to provide an upload status screen where video uploaders can see where their video is in the queue, cancel it and/or see any errors that have occurred during conversion.
• General code cleanup, commenting, and bug fixes. The codebase is getting significantly more polished; by the next release, we'll have some solid documentation that describes the layout of the application and the workflow needed to put it into production.

We're close to releasing this as a production-quality sample. We're currently doing a security audit on the code to make sure there aren't any nasty SQL injection-type issues. As mentioned above, we're also working on some documentation and other pieces; we're doing some componentization work to make it easier to swap various pieces out (e.g. to replace the Silverlight Streaming hosting with a local IIS / Windows Media Server-based hosting model). What else should we be doing? Any of you have plans to use this? Tell us what we're missing!