To all you New York/New Jersey area Silverlight'ers, I will be in New York twice in the next few weeks:
If you are into Silverlight, this is an opportunity for some good information on Silverlight 2 in your area!
Microsoft launched Project Rosetta today. To quote the site:
Project Rosetta is a site dedicated to helping designers and developers build applications in Silverlight while taking advantage of skills they already know.
It seems like a laudable effort to try and find a place to help people (though the site seems to really be focused on Designers) create great Silverlight 2 applications. Of note, I particularly liked the From Flash to Silverlight article that is up on the site. Let me know what you think!
I've uploaded a new version of my code from my Silverlight 2/Data Services MSDN Article. I took the new Silverlight 2 Data Services client that was released and updated the code example. If you want to get the code, you can download it from my site here:
http://wildermuth.com/downloads/sl2_ds_example.zip
I've also changed and updated the examples (more elaborate versions of the article code) using it on the Silverlight Data site, including both the Entity Framework and the NHibernate examples. Let me know if find any bugs.
I'd like to introduce you to the Silverlight Tour's newest instructor. Erik Mork (of The Sparkling Client Podcast fame) has agreed to become an instructor for the Silverlight Tour. We are ecstatic about having him on board to help teach our U.S. classes. He brings his substantial Silverlight experience to our three-day workshop.
Erik joined the tech community in 2000 and starting working on C++ 6, sockets and MFC applications. With the release of the .NET Framework, he transitioned to the world of Windows Forms and ASP.NET-based .NET Applications. He has 8 years of development experience.
As a recognized expert on Silverlight 2, Erik regularly trains and consults with companies around the world. He has worked with Silverlight since the 1.0 public release and on such projects as the Heroes happen {here} site, Microsoft internal training materials and other Silverlight 2 projects. Erik and his wife created the popular Silverlight podcast (The Sparkling Client Podcast).
When he's not consulting or writing applications, Erik is active in the Silverlight 2 community including speaking at User Groups, talking at Conferences and reviewing new Silverlight 2 books.
As the end of the year is creeping up on us, we are proud to announce our Winter/Spring schedule for the Silverlight Tour. If you are working on next year's training budgets, don't forget to include us now that we have next our Winter/Spring schedule set. Here are the new dates and cities:
- January 5-7th, 2009: Atlanta, GA
- January 19-21st, 2009: San Francisco, CA
- February 16-18th, 2009: Chicago, IL
- March 2-4th, 2009: Seattle, WA
- March 23-25th, 2009: Washington, DC
- April 6-8th, 2009; Denver, CO
- April 27-29th, 2009: Boston, MA
As always our partners also teach the class outside the United States including Latin America, Canada (in English & en French) and in Australia. We are also announcing a new partner soon to teach the class in the United Kingdom! We also offer the workshop as a private class to individual companies.
If you are interested in attending the class and your city is not listed, please feel free to contact us to recommend cities where we might find enough interest to hold the class.
Mike Flasko to the rescue! The ADO.NET Data Services Team has released an interim build of the ADO.NET Data Services Library to address .NET 3.5 SP1 incompatibilities. While this is just a stop-gap measure, its of great relief that I announce this news as my new MSDN Magazine article was broken because of the incompatibility.
Follow the link for all the information, warnings and download links. As Mike says, this is an interim build to address the incompatibility but that you shouldn't rely on it for production machines. The real build will come with Silverlight 2's release whenever that actually happens.
I usually am not one of those tinfoil hat guys, but the Google Chrome Privacy Policy says that anything I do with the browser is sent to Google with a browser unique id attached to it. From their privacy policy (emphasis added by me):
When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for. If you choose to share usage statistics with Google and you accept a suggested query or URL, Google Chrome will send that information to Google as well. You can disable this feature as explained here.
If you navigate to a URL that does not exist, Google Chrome may send the URL to Google so we can help you find the URL you were looking for. You can disable this feature as explained here.
Google Chrome's SafeBrowsing feature periodically contacts Google's servers to download the most recent list of known phishing and malware sites. In addition, when you visit a site that we think could be a phishing or malware site, your browser will send Google a hashed, partial copy of the site's URL so that we can send more information about the risky URL. Google cannot determine the real URL you are visiting from this information. More information about how this works is here.
Your copy of Google Chrome includes one or more unique application numbers. These numbers and information about your installation of the browser (e.g., version number, language) will be sent to Google when you first install and use it and when Google Chrome automatically checks for updates. If you choose to send usage statistics and crash reports to Google, the browser will send us this information along with a unique application number as well. Crash reports can contain information from files, applications and services that were running at the time of a malfunction. We use crash reports to diagnose and try to fix any problems with the browser.
You supposed to be able to disable it, but this is where you can disable the address bar suggestion on my machine:
Can be disabled for me. Hopefully its a bug. Even if you can disable it all, but its not obvious to me in the browser how to do it, only by reading the privacy policy. Back to IE for me.
LOTS OF UPDATES: Read down to see more info.
I just installed the Google Chrome browser and to no one's surprise, it doesn't support Silverlight 2. Not sure why it doesn't work since it supports WebKit. What I find most interesting is that it thinks its rendering it. It may be Google's Plug-in/Process model that is breaking it.
To see what I mean, visit my http://www.silverlight-tour.com site. On that site, I test to see if the plugin can load and show a non-Silverlight version of the map when Silverlight isn't supported. When it is supported, I show the Silverlight app. When you follow the link you'll see that the Silverlight 2 app is taking space, just not loading. So the Silverlight.js script thinks its supported and tries to load it. Hopefully we'll hear more about this soon. Keep tuned and i'll let you know what I find out.
UPDATE: Google's Task Manager definitely shows that Silverlight 2 is loaded in a separate process, but interestingly the page with Silverlight is getting odd info in the Task Manager (e.g. no memory):
Another UPDATE:
Flash doesn't seem to work either:
After re-running the Flash installer it now works. Must have had a heads up to a fix that was required.
UPDATE: Instead of not working, Silverlight 2 its just sorta working. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
In case you hadn't heard, the Silverlight Tour is making a stop in Denver Colorado on September 15th-17th. If you're in the market for a 3-day workshop on Silverlight 2, don't forget to sign up now while seats are still available.
As some of you may have seen, my new article in MSDN Magazine (and online) was recently published. Because we're in a bit of a no-mans-land with builds, the current article only works with .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta and Silverlight 2 Beta 2. This means if you're like most of the world and updated to the full release of .NET 3.5 SP1, some of the code in that article is not going to work for you. I hope to have a new drop of the code (and maybe the article too) once Silverlight 2 ships and is fully compatible with ADO.NET Data Services/Entity Framework that are in the full version of .NET 3.5 SP1. See my other article talking about the incompatibilities here:
My apologies to anyone who spent too much time trying to get the code in the article working. Such is the problem with beta software and hopefully we'll have a solution sooner rather than later.
