Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'moonlight'

Catching up with Silverlight 2

Adam Kinney — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:24:00 GMT

Starting last week on March 5th after Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was announced, a lot has been said about Silverlight 2. Presentations have been given, demos have been shown, bits have been released, tutorials have been posted and many conversations have been had. As an attempt to catalog some of the more interesting and useful content, I'm posting my list of highlights since SL2B1 day.

Overview

In the unlikely event you haven't found where yet, you can grab the runtime and tools for Silverlight 2 Beta 1 on Silverlight.net.

Other links to help you get started include:

Building Rich Internet Applications using Silverlight 2 - MIX session presented by Joe Stegmen and Mike Harsh, Part 1, Part 2
A Whirlwind Tour - Jesse Liberty's introduction to Silverlight 2
Fundamentals Lab - This lab explores the fundamental tools and features that underpin any Silverlight application.
Breaking Changes in Silverlight 2 - This topic discusses the changes made to the Silverlight runtime and Silverlight tools between the Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha September Refresh and the MIX 2008 release.
Packaging and Application Startup - Pete Brown explores the new application model, read Part 1 and Part 2
Dynamic Animation Lab - This is a simple lawn mowing simulation that exposes different techniques of leveraging the managed Animation API in Silverlight 2.

Demos

Hard Rock Memorabilia - One of the most talked about demos at MIX08, welcome Deep Zoom!
Pulse at SXSW - mashes up twitter, del.icio.us, Technorati and flickr in a very visual and useful way
AOL email client - a full email client written in Silverlight 2
NBC Olympics - can be seen in the first keynote at MIX08 around 1:17:00, an interview with Perkins Miller is also available
TextGlow - read Word 2007 documents online with Silverlight 2
Silverlight.net Community Gallery - controls demo, RSS reader, SOAP Weather Widget and more
Tunnel Trouble - a new Silverlight-based game from Terralever
WeatherBug - designed for Silverlight Mobile, you can test the app running on the web.

Controls

Control Demo Page - see the controls in action
Source code and Unit Tests for controls - download the code
Creating Rich Dynamic User interfaces with Silverlight 2 - MIX session presented by Karen Corby
Controls Tutorial - Another Jesse Liberty tutorial
ListBox and ScrollViewer FAQs - all you ever wanted to know about them and more
File Upload Component - Wilco Bauwer builds a File upload and control and shares the source
User Controls Lab - Building Reusable Controls in Silverlight 2
Using the Silverlight 2 Canvas - a screencast by Jesse Liberty
Using Silverlight 2 Grids and Stack Panels - another great screencast by Jesse Liberty
Styling Controls - another tutorial by Jesse Liberty (he's been very busy)

Deep Zoom

Applications = Designers + Developers - MIX session presented by Celso Gomes and Kirupa Chinnathambi , Deep Zoom heatured in the second part
Hard Rock: Behind the Music with Deep Zoom - MIX Session presented by Scott Stanfield
First Attempt with MultiScaleImage - Mike Taulty shows how to implement control over Deep Zoom, followed by an update
Deep Zoom Demo - Mike Ormond shares Deep Zoom code and then adds mouse wheel support in part 2
Deep Zoom Composer Preview
Deep Zoom Composer Preview - User Guide

Mobile

Mobile Devices and Microsoft Silverlight - MIX session presented by Amit Chopra and David Kline
Using Microsoft Silverlight for Creating Rich Mobile User Experiences - MIX session presented by Giorgio Sardo
Brad Becker interview - about the recent announcement about Silverlight Mobile.
WeatherBug demo
MIXr demo
Silverlight for Mobile primer session at MIX08 - my notes from the first mobile session at MIX

Dynamic Language Runtime

Microsoft Silverlight and Dynamic Languages - MIX session presented by John Lam and Jimmy Schementi
Hello World! demo - demo from MIX session
Managed JScript and flickr -demo from MIX session
Integrating Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC - demo from MIX session
Iron Python - Jimmy Schementi's MSDN article
Iron Python and the DLR - Bill Chiles's MSDN Article
John Lam on Ruby, Ruby, Ruby - Open Space session at MIX08

Moonlight

Exploring Moonlight : Novell's Implementation of Silverlight on Linux - MIX session presented by Miguel de Icaza
Pre-Mix 08: Moonlight Updates
Channel9 works with Moonlight!

Physics

Farseer Physics Engine - an open source physics engine for Silverlight 2
Polygon Demo - Andy Beaulieu's recent demo using Farseer
Heads Will Roll demo - Chris Cavanagh updates his sample, click "move platforms" to make the wheels/heads go flying

Networking and Data

Networking and Data Lab - In this hands-on lab, you will look at using a variety of remote data sources and communication techniques to retrieve data for a Silverlight application.
Working with Data and Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight 2 - MIX Session presented by Eugene Osovetsky
Sockets Sample
Data Binding Tutorial - A Jesse Liberty tutorial

Browser Integration

Browser Integration Lab - In this hands-on lab, you will look at the places where DHTML and Silverlight meet.
Calling JavaScript functions - Tim Heuer tutorial

Tools

Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint - This is the answer to "how do you use Silverlight in Sharepoint?", Micheal Lehman has an interview live on Ch9
PhotoZoom - Want a Deep Zoom Album of your own? try this site. Look for the "processing" notification when attempting to view your albums, the site is rather busy right now
BlogEngine.NET Silverlight Extension - I would expect to see more of these start cropping up
Programmer Utilities - Jesse Liberty's suggested "other" tools
Telerik Controls - There are lot of cool examples under the Online demos section. Very cool to see the Animations framework in there.
ImageGear for Silverlight

Fountains of Information

Scott Guthrie - great tutorials and source of breaking news
Tim Sneath - next best place for breaking news and clarity of information
Jesse Liberty - The Silverlight Developers best friend
John Lam - Dynamic Language Runtime
Jose Fajardo - User Experience and Design
Andy Beaulieu - games and physics
Sparkling Client - a podcast about Silverlight and other RIA technologies.
Code Trip - driving around the west coast, check to see if they're coming to your neighborhood

SilverlightDevCamp SF Recap

Adam Kinney — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 07:51:00 GMT

I had a great time this weekend at the SilverlightDevCamp in San Francisco. I had never before been to a DevCamp, BarCamp or any other type of camp that happens indoors. The casual yet academic atmosphere was well set and provided for by our hosts Kurt Brockett, Kevin Marshall and Anand Iyer. Nicely done guys, as well as thanks to the sponsors.

The camp started Friday night with a greeting, logistics and a bit of beer and pizza. During the greeting we had come up with a few session ideas and some common questions. Once I was introduced I took the opportunity to jump into Silverlight and answer a few of the burning questions with easy answers. What I quickly learned is that I should have polled the crowd about on their knowledge of Silverlight. I spend most of my days deep in Silverlight and most of the attendees had just started their journey. In my excitement to share my knowledge, I had jumped to step 200 but should have started from the beginning. I was able to answer questions for those who could not come on Saturday, so I think that was a plus. Definitely something to remember for future DevCamps.

We continued to plan sessions and happily socialize the night away.

Saturday morning came and the full day of sessions began. It was interesting to see the session schedule organized and driven by the attendees. Some held forums to lead a discussion around a topic they themselves wanted to learn more about. Others had prepared their sessions ahead of time and it showed.

I was happy to participate and contribute in almost every session. Silverlight is such a new technology and we've launched many products around the technology and WPF, that it is still very fresh. We have some misinformation out there we need to correct as well as our continued improvement on the ability to explain Silverlight.

I also received some great feedback on how we can improve upon the initial step in learning Silverlight . Currently I recommend using the Get Started page on Silverlight.net and the QuickStarts, but it sounds like a scenario-based getting started doc would be useful (e.g. if you are an SVG developer...).

Here are my highlights from the sessions I attended (full sessions page):

Silverlight 101
Brian Ellis from Vertigo did a respectable job of starting the day with an introduction to Silverlight. Not too deep but a good amount to get started with the code and the tools.

Expression Blend 101
Unfortunately Cal Schrotenboer's talk was cut short by technical difficulties, but I did get the chance to talk with him and learn about the classes he is teaching. He has a list here, but I don't believe I've seen that many WPF classes at a college before. I would expect to see a Silverlight class soon.

iPhone and Top Banana
Beau Amber of Metalliq and Top Banana fame, walked us though the iPhone simulation he had created for MIX:UK 07. He did a great job replicating the iPhone in XAML using Blend as his main tool, actually I think it was the only tool he used. He also demoed Top Banana and as usual the crowd loved it. Its such a cool app and hearing the story about how it came together was inspiring. And good news, the source is almost available, apparently there is just a little more clean-up to do. I did record the whole session and am working on publishing the video.

Silverlight and Flash (and JavaFX)
After lunch (more pizza) it was finally time for the most anticipated session comparing Silverlight and Flash. Randy Fong had started gathering questions since the night before and the session had awakened Ryan Stewart and drawn in John Dowdell. (Ryan had actually attended almost the whole thing and John had asked some good questions during Beau's talk)

We had an interesting start with Abdel Remani adding JavaFX into the comparison as well. I say interesting because nobody had mentioned JavaFX before and it didn't seem as though it was completely comparable in all aspects. Either way I learned about JavaFX and Flex in this session and Ryan, John and Anand did an admirable job trying to keep the comparison clear and accurate, while not turning it into a grudge match.

Regarding comparing technologies, I found the whole DevCamp very useful in learning more about technologies in the RIA space. Special thanks to Rob Rusher who spent some time going through Flex with me.

Moonlight
The Moonlight session was interesting because none of us had actually gotten Moonlight to run yet, but we were all interested. Anand and Tyler Ballance had the most to share and we made a bit of pact to continue to work together to futrther our Moonlight knowledge. Next step, host a VPC or VMWare with it running.

Extending Silverlight 1.0
Jeff Atwood of Vertigo and Coding Horror walked us through the construction of the Chess Viewer Sample. This seemed to resonate well with the attendees and acted as real practical application of the code we had been talking about. Nice job Jeff and thanks for the lesson in chess notation.

IronPython
Tyler Ballance of Slide.com introduced us to IronPython and all of its Python goodness. He was actually a contributor to the Mac port so he had a fair bit of experience to draw upon. The session morphed into a "dynamic languages are fun? check yes or no" session. Which was fine because looking at Python code it looks fun and carefree. I should spend some time trying to build with it and see how I feel afterwards.

Media Services
We had a short Media session where we covered codecs and playback but most of the time was covering features we are planning for the future including server-side playlists and DRM.

After the last session, I interviewed Tyler about his DevCamp experience and the sample he had built while there. I think the video came out pretty well and I should be publishing it shortly.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the DevCamp and look forward to attending future Camps. If you take a look at the SilverlightDevCamp page, you'll see that there are currently two more planned. One in Washington DC in November and the other at the end of this month in Chicago the weekend before Adobe MAX.

I few last notes: there are more photos available on Flickr, it was very nice to finally meet John Dowdell in person and I was told that my voice sounds like Seth Rogen.

Silverlight 1.0, now with Support for Linux

Adam Kinney — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:48:00 GMT

Silverlight 1.0 has been released and along with that a nice surprise announcement that Microsoft will officially be working with Novell on Moonlight.

A lot have posts have already been written heralding the news:

Official Press Release
Sean Alexander
Scott Hanselman
Scott Guthrie - a meaty post as expected

But once I found Scott Barnes' post which pointed to Kurt Brockett's Silverlight with Tux image I was convinced I should share the love as well.

Thinking its time to setup a Linux box now...