I just heard the news announced at PDC that the Managed Extensibility Framework, or MEF, is now slated to be included in Silverlight 4. Great news! I did a bit of proof of concept work using MEF about a year ago. MEF is all about composition of providers and consumers. MEF’s main job is to [...]
Congratulations to Miguel de Icaza and his team at Novell for the completion and release of Moonlight 1.0! Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight for the Linux platform developed in a joint effort between Novell and Microsoft. Silverlight was the primary deployment vehicle for live online video coverage of the Olympics last summer, [...]
Scott Guthrie gives us a status report on the Silverlight 2 deployment and key design wins worldwide. 100 million downloads of Silverlight 2 in the past 4 weeks. Silverlight is now on 1 in 4 PCs on the web. BlockBuster and Netflix both use Silverlight for their online movie players. Scott also sketches out some details [...]
A few folks I’ve talked to in the Live Frameworks CTP forum or in email have expressed a little bit of confusion or a lot of surprise at what you can do with the Live Mesh platform and Live Frameworks. Let’s run through a few of scenarios to give you an idea of the breadth of options you have to leverage Live [...]
Yesterday at PDC Microsoft unveiled Windows Azure, a new platform for global scale distributed computing services, often called “cloud computing”. Today Microsoft rolled out tools for creating apps that use Live Services, access the same Mesh Objects you see in Live Mesh, or execute in the Windows Azure cloud. Mesh-enabled web applications can even update themselves thanks to Feedsync-enabled Live Services [...]
The second major version of Microsoft’s Silverlight web platform, featuring new UI controls and a lot more, has been released. Read all about it in Scott Guthrie’s post.
Scott Guthrie has announced the availability of Silverlight 2 Release Candidate. Scott’s post also delves into some of the details of this release, including new controls and near-final UI skins for the entire Silverlight control set. Check it out!
In the midst of writing some Silverlight code, something struck my funny bone: .NET has an Application.Current. “Current” suggests “now”, and its existance suggests there was a need to distinguish “now” from something else. Does that mean there could be an Application.Next? Application.Future? Application.Past? Those could save me a lot of effort. How will I [...]
In getting back up to speed with Silverlight, and in particular the new Silverlight 2 beta 2, I’ve been surfing through the many quickstart topics on various web sites. While skimming “Receiving Plain XML Messages with Silverlight” these words lept out at me: note: The WebClient class does not currently support cross-domain calls. Say what? [...]
In all the excitement of getting oriented in the new digs at Microsoft, I almost missed the news that Silverlight 2 beta 2 has been released! You can get the goods from Silverlight.net. I found a nice overview of what Silverlight 2 and beta 2 have over on the GeekValley blog. Lots to dig into in [...]
Halo 3 has officially hit the streets! Besides the game itself, check out the supporting info on the web, which happens to be implemented in Silverlight: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/halo3.aspx Having been out of the loop on the whole Halo series progression, I found the backstory and character summaries for Halo 3 very informative. Originally published on my [...]
The promotional campaign for the new Halo 3 FPS has begun with a series of in-game and thematic live action videos. High-def 2mbps videos are here: http://halo3.msn.com/videosHD.aspx Lower bandwidth versions of the same are here: http://halo3.msn.com/videos.aspx These are already on the msn boards and will be referenced by additional promotional spots throughout the rollout. How is [...]
MSN just launched The Podium ’08 as part of their 2008 US Presidential election coverage. The Podium ’08 brings together data on presidential candidates for voters and election followers to explore by topic and compare candidates head to head on specific issues. What’s interesting about The Podium is that the content is not canned editorial material. When [...]
Looks like the folks at terralever are going full-bore on Silverlight: They’ve implemented a delightfully addictive puzzle game called ZeroGravity using the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha runtime. Check it out! It’ll be interesting to see how long before my #5 high score (9997) rolls out of the top ten. via Tim Heuer Originally published on my [...]
Last week Kevin Ledley, keeper of the dev.live.com content, asked me for a bit of help to get a Silverlight video player working. He wanted to “borrow” the cool scrolling video list and video player from our sister site, msdn2.microsoft.com and set it up on our dev.live.com homepage to show Windows Live related videos from [...]
Torontonian “wavesmash” has been tinkering with getting a Silverlight app up and running on his Blogger blog. Silverlight Streaming got him most of the way there, but he found the recommended pattern of placing the Silverlight control construction in a separate createSilverlight.js file became a show stopper because Blogger won’t let you serve .js files from [...]
Delay started out poking around in the XPS document format. Before he could stop himself, he had an XPS document reader implemented in Silverlight! This post was originally published on my MSDN blog while I was at Microsoft.
I’ve been tinkering with Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming and thought I’d share some of my discoveries and pointers. Silverlight is designed to dovetail into a traditional HTML+JavaScript web app. Your web page loads a Silverlight.js file and constructs a Silverlight object. What happens after that within the Silverlight objects is determined by a XAML (“zammel”) file [...]
If you set out to install the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha SDK and installed all the additional recommended (but not required) bits such as Visual Studio Orcas and ASP.NET Future, you won’t see this problem so you can stop reading now. If you’re a minimalist like me and install only the bare minimum Silverlight 1.1 Alpha runtime [...]
Silverlight implements isolated local storage on the client. Currently in the Alpha, the storage is limited to 1MB per web application and is keyed to the full URL of the XAML/HTML page. That means for this alpha release, two pages that are part of the same application served from the same domain will have separate isolated [...]