Rants Tagged with “Silverlight”
Sign up for my MSDN GeekSpeak and ask me questions about
WPF/E (and even see a soup-to-nuts demo). I'll see you there!
Dan Wahlin has posted the code (though not a live example) of using Amazon, WPF/E and ASP.NET AJAX to do an Album Lookup Example. He has the code, a video of it working and a talk about how he created it up on his blog. Check it out.
I am doing a MSDN
geekSpeak event hosted by
Glen Gordon and
Susan Wisowaty on January 17th at 3pm EST (noon PST). Come listen to me wax poetically on the merits of using
WPF/E in web development.
Not sure how I missed this, but they updated the SDK on 12/22/2006. If you're playing with the bits, go get the new version.
I just saw this on Mike Harsh's blog. Its a nice Winter Card with a cool mix of photo's, drawing and animations. Check it out!
I have been polishing up my use of WPF/E on my website to have a better way to host my samples. I now have a landing page for my WPF/E samples:
http://wildermuth.com/wpfesamples
This landing page is actually a really simple WPF/E page I created for a class I taught in Redmond earlier this month so its not much to look at. In creating this page I wanted to host WPF/E inside a master-page driven form and I wanted an excuse to try out the new ASP.NET WPF/E Control that Mike Harsh was advocating.
Mostly I like the new control as it makes some of the bit-fiddling necessary to host your XAML pretty clean. I really like the ability to use the Channel9 hosted aghost.js file. I've changed all my examples to use that aghost file for clarity. If you want to manually link to that version of the hosting script, it is located at:
http://channel9.msdn.com/playground/wpfe/pageturn/js/aghost.js
My only pet peeve with the control is that I had to hack together the name of the host element when I used it in my JScript file. Because the name that I specified for the host was in a masterpage-driven web form, it changed the name to be unique so "theHost" became "ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_theHost". No biggie, but I think we need a better way to do this since we don't want to force the JScript to be created by server-side scripts that can be driven by the server information. My guess is that no one has used this embedded in other containers before so its a bug that needs to be worked out.
Overall, it did simplify the entire process. Check out both my sample page and Mike Harsh's blog about the new control if you're playing with any of the new WPF/E stuff.
I want to plead with Microsoft to eat their own dogfood and prove that WPF/E is a viable technology by using it on their own sites. Perhaps its too early, but with the WPF/E focus on Video it seems to me that SoapBox should evolve to use "WPF/E" instead of Flash IMHO.
I will say one thing, I like the UI of SoapBox better than some of their competitors. Its a nice clean interface. Here is the new Halo 3 spot via SoapBox:
Here is a nice
"WPF/E" Egg Timer Sample that was mentioned on
Mike Harsh's blog. Its a great first example by
Simon Allerdice.
Here is a sample video player I crufted up with
WPF/E. You can grab the code, the
Expression Designer file and the
XAML from the page. Check it out.
For me, one of the compelling "WPF/E" stories is the toolset. Like WPF, the Expression toolset is meant to fully support "WPF/E". Currently the new Expression Design (was Expression Designer) support export to "WPF/E" XAML. Expression Blend at this time doesn't support "WPF/E" natively but with a little coaxing I have demos that show it working that i'll be showing off soon.
The interesting bit is Expression Media which will enable Video producers to create video pre-built with "WPF/E" XAML wrappers ala SoapBox and YouTube.
For those who haven't read it on other blogs, here's my take on the Expression Studio tools:
- Expression Design: An Adobe Illustrator-like designer.
- Expresion Blend: A XAML editor that integrates with Visual Studio project files to provide seemless XAML editing without having to 'throw the design over the wall' to developers.
- Expression Web: FrontPage v.Next. Better and more powerful, but I think it is really aimed at that level of user.
- Expression Media: A full featured media editor for support with post-production work (e.g. intros, outros, watermarking, etc.).
