Joe Stegman has been nice enough to compile a list of samples he presented in Mix 2009 which are all pretty awesome, I especially love his sample with the bouncing balls to show the Local Messaging feature of Silverlight. Here are some preview of what samples you can find.
Chess Wars
Perspective 3D
I believe these samples here must have whet your appetite, here’s the link to his blog post with the full list of downloadable samples.
I have been looking around for a free coverflow sample control and stumbled upon this gem. The source code is even shared out so you can see how the author of this cool component made the coverflow control, taking advantage of Perspective 3D that is newly introduced in Silverlight 3.
View the live sample here and here’s the link to the download page for this cool Silverlight Coverflow control.
Just found out from the Expression Blend and Design blog that the Nibbles Tutorial website, famous for providing small tidbit tutorials on Expression Studio, Silverlight 3 and WPF, has been updated to show how the cool samples included with Expression Blend 3 are deconstructed. Check out the updated site now!
Finally, Silverlight 3 is released out to the wild! Download it right now at the official microsoft silverlight page.
As usual, make sure you drop by Silverlight.net and download everything you need to get started with Silverlight 3!
Make sure you read the extensive post by ScottGu on all the awesome goodness of Silverlight 3. To be honest the feature that excites me the most is Perspective 3D, I just can’t stop talking about it because its just so cool, think of the possibilities!
Here’s an excerpt from ScottGu’s post on Perspective 3D
Silverlight 3 also adds new perspective 3D support that can be used with graphic elements, videos and controls. Silverlight 3 also includes new bitmap and pixel APIs, as well as the ability to create and apply custom pixel shader effects (e.g. blur, dropshadow, swirl, etc) to any image, video element, or control. Easing support can also now be used to enable more textured motion within animations.
I am gonna make sure I’ll keep my eyes wide open on any cool Perspective 3D goodness out in the wild.
Do also check out Tim Heuer’s post on Silverlight 3 and the new features, greatly appreciate the fact that he dives down in detail and provide us with a great picture of everything, kudos Tim!
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 
Its hot, its on fire, its Firefox 3.0, grab it while its hot!
The good news is that its the fastest browser ever, and I for one love the new interface, especially the browser bar. To find out more about goodness of Firefox 3.0, click here.
One of the things that I have not seen people are mentioning is that when viewing any Web pages in full-screen, the top bar would automatically shrink, thus allowing the Web page to fill your whole screen, ain’t that neat!?
As for the bad news, the Silverlight 1.0 version plug-in might not work well, so if you want to view Silverlight content, make sure you upgrade to Silverlight 2.0.
Anyone with Silverlight 1.0 applications published on the Web, try using the Silverlight.js from the Silverlight 2 SDK, it might work (I haven’t tested it out).
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!
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!
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