These are some of the sites that you definitely should subscribe to to stay up to date with the latest Silverlight news, tips, and other resources.
The geekiest of all Silverlight Geek, his blogs is loaded with many many great posts on Silverlight, he has also prepared a many great tutorials that are available in the Silverlight.net Learning section.
Silverlight 2 has been released at last! You can download it in the official Microsoft Silverlight site now!
I could remember it was only a few years ago when Silverlight was still WPF/E, and was later rebranded during Mix’07. For those of you that thought Silverlight 1.0 was neat, compared to Silverlight 2, it was just the tip of an ice-berg, and greatest thing about Silverlight is that it brings the .NET framework to the cloud.
There are many bloggers that covered the release of Silverlight 2, and for these few days (or weeks) we will be seeing loads of broken Silverlight sites cause the new release has broken all of the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 sites, other than those that have previously downloaded the RC0 release and updated their Silverlight application accordingly.
To find out more about the list of changes, check out these links:
As for those developing Silverlight applications, make sure you install Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Microsoft Expression Blend 2 Service Pack 1 and Deep Zoom Composer, which are all available in the Get Started section of the Silverlight.net portal.
In the meantime, Scott Barnes has came up with a Website to celebrate the release of Silverlight 2, check it out.
A few months back, Mike Harsh, Program Manager of the Silverlight Team at Microsoft, recorded a series of training for Silverlight 1.0 at Lynda.com, which is available for free on Lynda.com. I love Lynda training videos and a free one definitely deserves more love.
I find these tutorials much more suited for those starting from scratch in learning Silverlight, compared to the “How do I?” videos in silverlight.net, as the chapters are structured to teach you the A-Zs of Silverlight (the basics at least), and hopefully, Zero to Hero!
If you’re new to Silverlight and curious of its capabilities and how to get started, check out the videos, their well worth it 
I’m a big fan of Personalized Pages, which I use to subscribe to feeds from all around the Web, and view them in one single Web page, which is a pretty convenient way to allow me to keep myself updated with recent news.
But when using Firefox 3.0, the Personalized Page service I was currently using, Windows Live Personalized Experience, wouldn’t work nicely. Some of the feeds couldn’t be loaded and I am no longer able to navigate to the various tabs I have.
Thus, I went and tested out the various Personalized Page services like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes and Pageflakes, to decide which service to migrate to, and these are my thoughts.
Pros:
Cons:
Which I believe easily one of the most impressive and innovative enhancement to Expression Blend!
Why do I say so? Read on.
One of the key element that makes Expression Blend such a powerful tool, is its capability to allow designers to customize and have complete control over the visual look and feel of every element in WPF and Silverlight applications, which would turn out exactly the same as it looks in Blend, thanks to XAML.
So, when customizing the look, feel, transition animations, etc of a control, the steps are pretty different for both WPF and Silverlight, briefly shown below:
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Thus, in order to “style” each control, the designer would have to define the transition animations that are stored in a Storyboard, and the look and feel of various states, and for Silverlight applications, they also need to write code to trigger the transition animations.
With the introduction of the Visual State Manager (VSM), that will be included in the June preview of Expression Blend, these steps could be further simplified, but not replaced. As VSM is introduced to simplify the customization of visual states of controls.
Visual States are essentially the various states of a control that could be seen visually. For example, a checkbox could have a few visual states:
| Unchecked | –> |  |
| Checked | –> |  |
| MouseOver | –> |  |
| MouseLeftButtonDown (or MouseDown) |
–> |  |
With VSM, you could easily customize the various visual state of a control, along with the animations that will be in effect upon each state transition, and the very duration of each transition animation.
The Interaction Panel of Expression Blend will now include a State Explorer, allowing designers to now dive down, view, and customize the various visual states of any control. The duration of transitions can be defined for each visual state group, or for a specific visual state, or even for transitions to other visual states.
VSM is not only supported for template-based controls, but also User Controls, where states could be defined, instead of customized based on the available states.
Do take note that the VSM will be available for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Application Projects for the June preview of Expression Blend, but the preview version for WPF will be available as a separate download.
To find out more about the VSM, check out the awesome posts by Christian Schormann of the Expression Team:
- Creating Control Skins with Visual State Manager – An Introduction (Make sure you see the video!)
- Visual State Manager: Goals
- Visual State Manager for User Controls: A Simple Chord Finder Example
The introduction of VSM greatly simplifies the process of “styling” both WPF and Silverlight applications, by providing a consistent solution of managing “styles” of controls.
I for one love the idea of not needing to write any code in order to “style” the applications I craft, and most definitely reduce the learning curve of designers going from WPF to Silverlight and vice versa.
Kudos to the Expression Team in bringing such a huge improvement to Expression Blend!
A pretty severe vulnerability of the Adobe Flash Player has been spotted by Symantec and could be exploited by hackers to perform remote code execution through .swf files, that could potentially be used to take control of your whole machine.
Based on the information on this exploit by Security Focus, the vulnerable versions of the Flash Player plug-in are:
I checked out the Adobe Flash Player Web site and the current version available for download is 9.0.124.0, which is also vulnerable to this malicious exploit.
This could be a huge problem, due to the wide distribution of the Flash Player plug-in. Hope the guys at Adobe fix this ASAP, but in the mean time, beware.
Sources:
Imagine, just drag-n-drop from your toolbox onto a Web form, set a few properties, without requiring a single line of JavaScript, and you have yourself Virtual Earth on your ASP.NET Web application, with full support of stuff like zooming, panning, AJAX and everything to fulfill…your “mapping” needs.
Introducing the Virtual Earth Map Control for Visual Studio 2008, which was unveiled at Remix Australia by Angus Logan in his Windows Live session.
For more information, check out LiveSide.net’s report on it, and the Virtual Earth site. Definitely looking forward to the release!
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!
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.
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
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