Silverlight Futures: Line of Business app made easy!
15 novembre 08 06:16 | Laurent Duveau

Interested in building Line of Business app with Silverlight ?

Check out this presentation from Jamie Cool at PDC2008:

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC11/

You may want to go straight to 30min on the talk to get the good stuff…
Jamie shows what’s coming in a next version of Silverlight: a new framework to help you build business focused applications:

  • Data access with client side ObjectDataSource!
  • Silverlight Business Logic Class (used inside Silverlight without adding a service reference!!)
  • Validator controls, validation rules enforced by server–side business class
  • Navigation workflow, browser history integration
  • Login control, roles

This is coming… and this is huge! This reminds me of what was ASP.NET 2.0 compared to ASP.NET 1.1!

You shape it – a new Microsoft tech portal
14 novembre 08 12:23 | Laurent Duveau

You shape it

Microsoft has a new web site to start the excitement on his new dev technologies: IE8, WPF, Silverlight and Windows Mobile. It is called {You shape} it and focus on Design, Development and IT Management in a nice claymotion Silverlight UI.

http://www.microsoft.com/youshapeit/

MSDN is part of this portal (www.microsoft.com/youshapeit/msdn) and I am a contributor as I wrote the article on IE8 development “IE8: Improve the Browsing Experience” that shows how to build Accelerators and Web Slice, check it out!

Silverlight FAQ from TechDays Canada 2008
13 novembre 08 11:56 | Laurent Duveau

My Silverlight sessions at TechDays Montreal were a great success and generated so many questions like “Is ASP.NET dead ?”, “What about Silverlight vs WPF XBAP ?” or “Would you recommend Silverlight for line of business application ?” that we decided to create a FAQ and it was published on the Canadian Developer Connection blog thanks to Qixing:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cdndevs/archive/2008/11/13/silverlight-faq-from-techdays.aspx

 

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Silverlight Contrib
09 novembre 08 10:46 | Laurent Duveau

Silverlight Contrib is a collection of Silverlight Controls and API enhancements built for and by the Silverlight developer community and hosted on CodePlex.

Current version has the following features:

Controls:

  • Color Picker
  • Gauge Control
  • Star Selector
  • Enhanced Metafile (EMF)
  • Cool Menu


Library:

  • Zip Compression
  • Byte Utilities
  • String Utilities
  • Simple Text Parser
  • Animation Tweening
  • Wheel Mouse Listener
  • Clipboard Helper (Internet Explorer Only)
  • Data Context Extension Method Wrapper

I am not sure about the controls has we now have the Silverlight Toolkit (futur merge?), but the APIs are great!

CodePlex project:
http://www.codeplex.com/silverlightcontrib

You can see live demos there:
http://silverlightcontrib.org/demo/

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ASP.NET Dynamic Data Web projects templates
09 novembre 08 09:05 | Laurent Duveau

Since Visual Studio 2008 SP1 you may have noticed 2 projects template for dynamic data:

Dynamic Data Web Site - Dynamic Data Entities Web Site

So what is the difference ?

  • Dynamic Data Web Site / Dynamic Data Web Application:
    Uses a LINQ to SQL model and LinqDataSource controls.
  • Dynamic Data Entities Web Site / Dynamic Data Entities Web Application:
    Uses a ADO.NET Entity Data Model and EntityDataSource controls.

Since LINQ to SQL is dead I would not recommend using Dynamic Data Web templates. LINQ to Entities is now the recommended data access solution and will remain in .NET 4.0, so for your RAD Scaffolding needs you should use Dynamic Data Entities Web Site/Web Application!

My Silverlight presentations at TechDays 2008 Canada
09 novembre 08 08:33 | Laurent Duveau

Here is the Silverlight 2 project I build for my “Mastering your Silverlight Samurai Skills” 2 parts talk I did at TechDays Canada 2008.

Also you can download the Powerpoint material (content created by Mark Rideout for TechEd US):

English

Part 1:

Part 2:

French

Partie 1:

Partie 2:

 

Usefull links

Silverlight controls:

Deep Zoom demos:

 

My company RunAtServer Consulting is doing Silverlight development, we already have some clients and realizations, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Silverlight Montreal

We also have a 3 days Silverlight 2 training in french!
>> More information (fr)

 

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Silverlight sessions at DevTeach Montreal 2008
08 novembre 08 08:41 | Laurent Duveau

[via Guy Barrette]
DevTeach
Looks like there will be plenty of Silverlight content at DevTeach Montreal this year:

 

Building Silverlight Controls
David J Kelley - SLV467
Designed primarily for Developers. This technical presentation walks through a number of senerios for building Silverlight Controls including user controls and custom panels. The usage of properties, dependency properties, events, reusability, and encapsulated control architecture is reviewed in detail. In the presentation we will build a custom chart control based on a user control and built custom panels and review dispatch timer and multi threading in the context of controls.

Comparing Silverlight to ASP.NET
D'Arcy Lussier - SLV301
With Silverlight, web developers now have a new option for delivering browser-based applications. But does Silverlight negate HTML-based web development? Should we put aside traditional web development for this new paradigm? In this session we’ll compare Siilverlight and ASP.NET, not to prove one as better than the other but to show why you might consider one over the other for your next web application.

Data Visualization with WPF and Silverlight 2
Tim Huckaby - SLV202
Building Data Visualization Applications with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) & Silverlight 2.0
This session will be heavily demo focused to accentuate how the power of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight 2.0 can be used to visualize data. WPF is the next-generation presentation sub-system for Windows. It provides developers and designers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media, and documents. WPF uses vector based graphics rendering, which results in better graphics and presentation for an application. WPF also has other features such as layout, styling, and data binding, which, when you mix with interactivity, enables scenarios such as interactive data visualization. When you put all this together, you have a unified API for various presentation components, such as 2D and 3D documents and declarative programming through XAML, which is a powerful platform for data visualization that can be used to really “light-up” you enterprise applications.

Designing Interfaces with Expression Blend
Markus Egger - SLV333
Silverlight and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) are powerful UI technologies, and XAML represents a fascinating new way of programming WPF and Silverlight. However, without tools, XAML gets tedious quickly, and a good designer is needed. Microsoft offers a whole set of such tools. This session focuses mostly on MS Expression Blend (used in combination with Visual Studio). This session provides an overview of the goals, features, and characteristics of this tool and shows how to create a small next-generation application using it. This session also shows developers how good looking interfaces can be created using a few simple and repeatable tricks.

Hacking Silverlight 2
David J Kelley - SLV469
Hacking Silverlight 2.0 for designers and developers
Designed for Designers and Developers. This engaging presentation gets the audience involved in bridging the gap between design teams and software development using Silverlight and the Silverlight toolablity story. The presentation is full of audience participation and skits that get audience members up out of their seats and excited about Silverlight. The basics of team work using Microsoft tools for design and development are used and the audience is shown some of the coolest Silverlight hacks that can make Silverlight applications really shine. With the “Coming out of the closet” skit the audience is shown sexy UI using Silverlight, learning about speed of development and why we care about Sexy engaging Web 2.0 experiences.

Silverlight 2 Controls: Data on Board
Dave Campbell - SLV355
Learn how to populate your Silverlight controls with data, and how WebServices are your friend. This will be done using LINQ and WCF webservices, in addition to more traditional code-behind and asmx.

Silverlight 2 Controls: Your Controls, Your Way
Dave Campbell - SLV389
Learn how to use the Parts and States model and VisualStateManager to your benefit in your environment. Starting with existing controls through modification using VS2008 and Blend to produce a Custom Control that is then consumed.

Silverlight 2.0 Achitectural Best Practices
David J Kelley - SLV421
Designed Developers and Architects or people wanting to understand Silverlight archtecture. This presentation startings with a detailed technical review of Silverlight control, application architecture and design patterns. Design patterns as applied to Silverlight application development and general best practices are reviewed in detail. The presentation includes learning from the trenchs of building Silverlight apps on a large scale including horror stories and ‘Anti-Patterns’ or things ‘not to do’ are reviewed.

Silverlight Development: Lessons from the Trenches
D'Arcy Lussier - SLV349
So what’s it like creating a line of business application using Silverlight? What are the differences in developing a Silverlight application compared to a Winform or ASP.NET based application? In this session I’ll share with you my experiences in creating a real-world Silverlight based application and what you should expect /look out for when developing with this exciting new technology.

Silverlight 2: Business Oriented App. (In French)
Laurent Duveau - SLV321
You've already heard a bit about Silverlight? You have some knowledge of this technology which is now available?
Come discover how to create a business oriented application: that means manipulate data and build a rich UI with Silverlight!
During this session I'll use Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend to build an application that retrieves SQL server data through an Entity Framework model and exposes it to Silverlight client via a WCF service. I’ll use a grid to display the data and asynchronously update the model as users edit the grid. Finally I will show you how to place the data in local cache on the client to optimize network traffic.

Turning on the Silverlight – A Silverlight Intro
Markus Egger - SLV201
Microsoft Silverlight is the latest generation of Microsoft UI technologies for web browser applications. It is based on (and a sub-set of) WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). It enabled developers to create next-generation user interfaces in web browser applications that work not just on Windows systems, but other environments such as the Apple Mac or mobile devices. This is a radical departure from previous .NET development, which was limited to Windows systems. Silverlight applications enable developers to run .NET code on non-Windows Systems. This session also compares Silverlight to other technologies such as Flash. Attendees of this session will get a good feel for what it is like to develop real life applications in Silverlight.

User Controls, Customization, and Styling
Dave Campbell - SLV312
Silverlight 2 Controls: User Controls, Customization, and Styling
Get your Silverlight application Stylin’ with out-of-the box techniques for making your UI to not only look like it was all written by the same company, but also matching your corporate identity. This will be showing VS2008-only concepts, so no design knowledge or interest is necessary.

 

As you can see I will be presenting a session and it should be interesting as I will build a full Silverlight application live with very few powerpoint... can’t wait to be there!
Are you registered ? Hurry up, it is coming in Montreal on December 2-4!

I’M A PC at Apple Store…
08 novembre 08 08:26 | Laurent Duveau

What a couple of MVPs do when they get a free “I’M A PC” toque ?

They run to the first Apple store and ask an employee to take a picture!

I'M A PC at Apple Store

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Add a translator bot to your Live Messenger
08 novembre 08 08:21 | Laurent Duveau

TBot

TBot is a translator bot for Windows Live Messenger!

Add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and ask him for translation!

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My IE8 Zune Social Accelerators and Search Provider
02 novembre 08 11:07 | Laurent Duveau

 IE8 Zune

I made 3 Accelerators to interact with Zune Social right into IE8:

Also a Search Provider to search for Songs, Artists and Albums on Zune Social:


Check out my other IE8 Accelerators:

And Search Provider:

 

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Zune feedback
01 novembre 08 11:16 | Laurent Duveau

Zune

As you may have heard Zune v3 is out, I spent a long time playing with it to provide my feedback one¦more time.

First thought: Zune software is still a piece of sh*t!

But I have to say this is no more the worst software ever written by Microsoft, it is a bit better now, but still full of crappy features and the UI s*x badly. First, I always wonder myself: “why the hell did they create a NEW media player ???”.
Windows Media Player v11 - Zune v3 - Hello?
Marketplace?? Why not simply add a new “Social” tab on WMP ??

So that is the point, I start this feedback exactly like my previous one: “both Zune software and firmware can do a lot better”.

Having said that I will start with what I like on this new version:

  • The “Add to now playing list” feature on device. Best.Thing.Ever! they finally get rid of the “Quick list” stupid feature (it was soooo useless!)
  • Games are officially supported!
  • Time displayed on device main screen
  • Zune is now able to go back to current song after viewing some pictures.
  • Find Zune buddy by Live ID: Now, on your "my social" page you can see if any of your Windows Live contacts have a Zune Card and add them as friend.
  • Picks are great and allow you to get personalized recommendations.
  • I can’t talk about Channels as I don’t have a Zune Pass but this seems very nice.

Now here is my list of suggestions :

* Device:

  • Add some auto playlists please
    • Last sync (a bit like the “date added” view in software). When I have a lot of music in my Zune it become hard to find the last synced music.
    • Favorites songs, the one tagged as “heart”.
  • Snooze mode. Not a big deal but this would be a nice addition.
  • Screensaver: why not? my Zune at home is always docked and can’t stop itself, so it would be nice to have a screensaver coming – or to be able to enter sleep mode while docked.

* Software:

  • Add a Folders view (like Windows Media Player) tags are nice but a great part of my collection is not tagged so I have difficulties to browse my music. This is also a big problem with compilations which generate me thousands of artists entries with only one album/song. I would love to have a setting “Do not display artists with less than X songs in artists view”. See also next bullet.
  • Add a live search box (like in WMP library).
  • I would like to get some stats of my library (number of albums, songs, artists, most played song, album, artist, ….)
  • Now playing screen is interesting (and really beautiful with artists shots and stats) but… I would need a party mode, where I can see the current playlist, sort, move and add new music. It would be like a “Now playing” + collection view.

Also it seems to me there is a bug: while playing just one song (not an album), then browse to another song and "add to now playing list": it turns out that the song is queue after the whole album of the current playing song. I would need to add songs one by one to the current playing list, what do you think ?

 

Don’t get me wrong my goal is not to flame Zune but to bring ideas and feedback to make it better. I like my Zune, but to me the Zune Software is a total mistake.

If a Microsoft guy or better someone from the Zune Team read this, I would love to be a beta tester and bring my feedback, do you have a beta program ?

As an MVP + Windows Live Butterfly let me say I am strong on feedback.

 

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Expression Encoder 2 SP1 available!
31 octobre 08 05:34 | Laurent Duveau

Expression Encoder 2 SP1 The main info is in the title…

Download the SP1 of Expression Encoder 2 here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A29BE9F9-29E1-4E70-BF67-02D87D3E556E&displaylang=en

Why is it so nice?

Because you can now export your encoded videos to a Silverlight 2 player with a new set of templates!

Then easily open the output in Visual Studio 2008 and add your C# or VB code! How cool is that?

Expression Encoder Silverlight 2 templates

The blue “I” gives you information about the template applied to your video/settings like: “The gallery bar in this template supports thumbnails, but not all your media files have them.” nice!

2 days ago we (RunAtServer Consulting) were invited by Microsoft Montreal to demo Silverlight during a presentation to their major media customers, we needed that SL2 templates to show VS2008 integration after export from Encoder 2, and had the chance to get a pre-version of the SP1 thanks to Joel!

 

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Presenting at Microsoft TechDays Canada 2008
30 octobre 08 10:35 | Laurent Duveau

techdays-2008

TechDays is the Microsoft largest technical education conference series for IT Professionals and Developers in Canada. I will be presenting 2 sessions in the Web Development track at Montreal (November 6-7):

Mastering Your Silverlight Samurai Skills (Part 1 of 2)

“Silverlight provides a powerful platform for building the next generation of rich interactive applications on the Internet. In this first of two sessions, we take a deep look at the programming model and tools that developers and designers can leverage to build these true next-generation experiences for consumers and business, and demonstrate building a rich interactive application (RIA) using Silverlight and Microsoft .NET. We cover how to use Microsoft Visual Studio to create applications, how to create UI using XAML markup and code, how to build a custom control, how to retrieve data from a Web service, and how to manipulate data with XML and LINQ. We also discuss roadmap and positioning of Silverlight.”

Mastering Your Silverlight Samurai Skills (Part 2 of 2)

“Silverlight provides a powerful platform for building the next generation of rich interactive applications on the Internet. In this second of two sessions, we demonstrate building a rich interactive application (RIA) using Silverlight and Microsoft .NET and topics like Control Template, Custom controls, layout, DeepZoom and Local Storage.”


See you there!

Youtube Search Provider for IE8
25 octobre 08 06:00 | Laurent Duveau

Youtube Search Provider for IE8I made a Search Provider for IE8 to search videos on Youtube:

What are Search Providers ?

In IE8 you can use search providers like Live Search, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Amazon, and more to deliver direct results and images that provide you with immediate answers. Learn more.


I also wrote an MSDN article on IE8 development experience which will soon be live.

Check out my IE8 Accelerators:

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Formation Silverlight 2 à Montreal en Novembre!
21 octobre 08 02:59 | Laurent Duveau

La technologie Microsoft Silverlight 2 est maintenant disponible en version finale… venez vous former dès maintenant à Montréal… ne manquez pas cette étape du Silverlight Tour au Québec!!!

Quand: 19-21 Novembre 2008
Où: Montréal, Qc

“Le Silverlight Tour est un cours de trois jours sur Silverlight 2. Il divise son contenu en trois domaines différents : Design, Développement et Langage serveur. En suivant cet atelier, les étudiants seront capable de développer des applications Silverlight 2 avec Visual Studio 2008 et les logiciels Expression. La formation est un mélange de leçons didactiques, de démonstrations et d'ateliers. Chaque étudiant créera différentes petites applications Silverlight 2. Cette variété d’apprentissages nous assure que tous les étudiants deviendront compétents dans cette technologie, et ce, de façon rapide et amusante.”

>> En savoir plus

 

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