Sunday, March 30, 2008

Silverlight 2 beta1 Controls Sample

I found a nice little sample of all of the new controls that are in Silverlight 2 beta1. This should you the controls as well as the code to add to you page to put the controls into your own Silverlight app. It's a pretty nice little sample to help get you started with Silverlight 2.

http://silverlight.net/Samples/2b1/SilverlightControls/run/default.html

.NET 3.5 Refresh

SDTimes is reporting that Scott Guthrie has talked about .NET 3.5 getting a refresh this summer. This is going to have a streamlined install and optimizations to graphical things like hardware enhanced DropShadow and Blur bitmap effects and other performance enhancements.

http://sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=31792

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Free Linq E-Book

I go to alot of Microsoft events and they give out alot of books. Well Microsoft Press is giving out an e-book of Introducing Microsoft Linq. Here is a link to the free e-book. Enjoy.

Free Linq E-Book

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Silverlight 2: Test 1

I made a small test app using Silverlight 2 beta 1. This is a short and sweet app that will take the test entered in the textbox and put it in the label when a button is pressed. This is just to play with the a couple of the new controls. This was a stupid little test that actually helped out pretty well. The sample ran really well locally so I went to put it up on my web server. This is where things started to get strange.

First when you look at the ClientBin folder there was my testpage.html file as well as a bunch of .dll files and one that I did not recongnize, a .xap file. Since I use Total Commander I used thefile viewing features to see that this new file was just a zip file of the .dll files and the .xaml manifest. I then looked at the test page and it refers to the .xap file when it creates the silverlight object. So I copied over just the test page and the .xap file to my server.

The test app that ran so well for me did not work at all. Nothing loaded, nothing worked. The source showed that the object and everything looked like it should work. To see what I saw you can see it here:

http://ystail.com/silverlight/test1/

I remembered that for Silverlight 1.0 to get it to work you had to set the MIME code on your server. You had to setup xaml to be an application so that it ran correctly. Of course I tried this and it still did not work. But from there I thought that since Silverlight 2 beta 1 automatically zips into a .xap file, that you might need to set .xap as an application.

Extension ".xap"
MIME type "application/xap"

After getting this setup for one of my servers, the app came up and worked just fine.

http://ysgard.com/silverlight/test1/

This seems to work pretty well and will be a good start for future tests with Silverlight 2. There are alot of things that I want to do with this including games, but that is all for another post.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Silverlight 2.0 beta1 is out

Microsoft has now release Silverlight 2.0 beta1. This new version has controls that can be used like CheckBox, Calendar, Grid, ListBox, TextBox and WatermarkedTextBox to name just a few. They have a new SDK for VS2008 and a new version of Expression Blend 2.5 to support it. It is a beta version and has a go-live license. As we start using this we will post more information and findings about it.

http://silverlight.net/