Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Released!

And no one can explain it better than Scott Guthrie, and I must say, the list of improvements are pretty lengthy, but definitely worth a read!

Also download the June preview of Expression Blend here, and get Silverlight 2 Beta 2 here!

Coming soon: Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2

It was just announced in the Keynote by Bill Gates at the Tech.Ed 2008 in Orlando that Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 would be scheduled for release by the end of this week.

And it will be this version of Silverlight, not Silverlight 2.0 RTW, will be used to power the live video broadcasts of the soon to come 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Some of the features, according to Mary-Jo Foley are:

• Improvements to the already awesome DeepZoom technology
• Networking and databinding improvements
• WPF Compatibility
• Improvements to error handling and reporting

I for one will definitely be keeping my eyes wide open awaiting for this release, and of course, along with another release of Expression Blend 2.5.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Silverlight

XamlParseException with WPF, due to IE8

Have a bug with WPF applications? Especially for applications that previously ran okay? Did the exception come from using .EndInit()?

Well I did, and I had a bug with my WPF application, which resulted in it throwing a XamlParseException. At first, I tried skimming through my XAML code, but eventually gave up because it was pretty lengthy.

Thus I did a search on what could cause a bug to come out of no where, when I stumbled around and finally found the solution.

It was all because I have installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

According to Jeremiah Morril, internally WPF uses some of the same APIs as IE, thus some of the APIs might have been overwritten due to the IE 8 Beta 1 installtion, resulting in the thrown exception, which would occur when the .EndInit() function is called upon, used mostly when you are writing code to display BitmapImage elements in your application.

Once I uninstalled IE 8, everything ran fine.

(To remove IE8, go to Control Panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features -> View Installed Update, where it is placed under the Microsoft Windows grouping, then Uninstall it.)

Hope this helps anyone who faces the same issue.

Event: Remix Essential 2008

Just got news from my MSP manager that Remix Essentials 08 will be held at:

Date	:	27th May 2008
Time	:	9.00am – 1.00pm
Venue	:	Lim Kok Wing University, Cyberjaya

I’ve been hearing “rumours” that Remix 08 will be held at  soon, and I was really looking forward to it.

There will be sessions on stuff like Expression Studio, Windows Live, Silverlight, WPF, and UX. The speakers of these sessions are awesome guys like Leon Brown, Arturo Toledo, Angus Logan, and our resident Silverlight guy, Rohan Thomas.

Unlike the Remix or Mix events of other countries, Remix Essentials 08 is totally free!

On top of that, attendees stand a chance to win a full copy of Expression Studio 2! The seats are limited to a first come first served basis, you’ll definitely not want to miss out, so register right now!

Silverlight for Linux released

As reported by Mary Jo Foley, Silverlight for Linux, developed by Novell in collaboration with Microsoft under the Moonlight project, has just been released.

It currently only has support for Silverlight 1.0, and support for Silverlight 2.0 is still under development.

If you’re running on Linux, head over here to download installer.

For more information, check out the blog post by the Novell Vice President for Developer Technologies, Miguel de Icaza here.

Its been quite some time since Microsoft promised the delivery of Silverlight via their partnership with Novell, and its great that it is finally delivered as promised.

Xceed Upload for Silverlight

Today, I received the online newsletter from the Xceed team, who are pretty well known for their awesome Xceed DataGrid for WPF, where they announced the release of the Xceed Upload for Silverlight.

It is a full featured Upload control (like the ASP.NET FileUpload Control), built on Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1, which has cool features like a loading indicator, imagine previewing, multiple file uploading support, and many more.

As far as I know, I don’t think other control vendors have any file upload control, which is very useful in developing enterprise solutions. This is definitely richer and much more interactive alternate to the ASP.NET FileUpload control, as long as your company can afford it

New version of WPF Released

Today, Microsoft has released a beta preview for of SP1 for various editions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework 3.5. And Tim Sneath has also blogged about the availability of the new major version of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), that will ship with the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1, which full version will be available later this summer.

The downloads for these Service Pack beta releases are available here. For more information also check out Scott Guthrie’s blog post here.

There are a few major improvements, and the most notable one is the introduction of the Client Profile, which is a scaled down version of the .NET Framework 3.5, that is around 25 MB, where assemblies that aren’t used are removed. Its pretty amazing that the solution to the deployment issue for enterprise WPF applications is pretty similar to the approach adopted by the Silverlight runtime. Ease of deployment will definitely help in increasing the adoption rate of WPF in the industry.

There is also improvement to the WPF graphics engine, with enhanced support for shaders and deeper DirectX support, enabling a Direct3D surface to be brushed on top of any surface of WPF elements. Another notable improvement is the “fixes” on the BitmapEffects we most commonly use, Drop Shadow and Blur, which are now hardware-accelerated, and was previously a definite “no-no” in developing WPF applications as it takes up too much processing power.

Other than that, there are many other improvements like the loading screen of XBAPs now running in HTML instead which is definitely a great improvement, the introduction of Splash screen support in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

There will also be new controls to add on to the arsenal of controls available in WPF, which are the DataGrid, Office Ribbon, and most notably, the WebBrowser control, which could potentially enable seamless integration of WPF and Silverlight applications.

Its great to see that many improvements on WPF, and if Silverlight is to continue evolving to provide the capabilities of what WPF has today, I must say, the future looks very promising indeed.

faceOut

Today, I dropped by Silverlight.net and saw faceOut being featured on the right column of the front page.

faceOut is a demonstration application by Infragistics, that is created using the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 controls included in their NetAdvantage for Silverlight control set, to build a rich interactive, enterprise quality mashup utilizing Windows Live Services.

For more information on faceOut, check it out here. Infragistics have also shared the source code to the mashup, packaged along with the NetAdvantage by Silverlight.

You could also experience faceOut here.

Popfly Game Creator

A few days back, Techcrunch reported on a new feature on the social-mashup-gadget-builder Web site, Popfly, which allows users to create their own mini games.

It’s a pretty neat addition on to Popfly, as in the first place, games were never really this easy to create, and this would really be a great addition onto the list of stuff (mashups, gadgets (or widgets), and Web pages) that non-technical people can build, just with a few clicks.

I tried some of the templates out, and I must say its really simple to create these games, and you could straight away play any of the templates to get a feel of how the games are, and then customize the background, characters etc to your liking, and of course, share it with your friends.

It is built using Silverlight 1.0, but even so, I believe it only exhibits a fraction of what Silverlight 2.0 could be capable of, as there is a big difference between the capabilities of managed code and scripting languages.

The game creator function is currently still in Alpha, and I’m speculating that it would only be officially RTM’ed only when it is built on Silverlight 2.0, not the Beta 1 version, but the RTW version of Silverlight 2.0.

As for the targeted audience for this feature…I dunno, maybe young children or girls that like mini-games?

Live Mesh, the future of synchronization

I believe most of you have heard of Live Mesh, which could very well be the key and best service offered by Windows Live so far. In a nutshell, it allows you to synchronize your files and applications across all your devices.

To find out more about it, read the articles by Techcrunch, Mary Jo Foley (All About Microsoft), and Ryan Stewart (The Universal Desktop).

And of course, sign up now at mesh.com.