Scott Shows off Expression Blend 2.5 and Silverlight 2.0

by Don Burnett

Scott is at it again, man this guy is amazing (he creates such cool tutorials) I think the word is "prolific" that I keep hearing when people describe him. He's got the scoop on Blend 2.5 and not only that he's got a great HOW-TO article on using it to create your own personalized Instant Messaging client.. It includes codes and classes in visual studio for the messaging and how to setup data binding with them in Blend itself.. Go read it for yourself... Note this is the Blend "2.5" preview not the Blend 2.0 release which apparently will only support Silverlight 1.0 release and currently released products..

 

Some pictures from his article:

Blend with the IM Client UI

Silverlight 2.0 controls for drag and drop

 

I can't wait to play with the release of this. I know I am going to love it..

Technorati tags: Silverlight 2.0, Expression Blend 2.5, new content controls, multimedia

Vertigo Rocks with Slide.Show for Silverlight

by Don Burnett

Vertigo is a great development firm they keep coming out with great application reference samples and code for the WPF and Silverlight Community.. In the past they have done such very work as Family.show for WPF (a genealogy program) and Video.show (a "mini" YouTube  style site for Silverlight that takes advantage of Expression Media Encoder on the server-side).. The Slide.Show control would be great for professional photographers looking to show of their high quality pictures on a Silverlight based website.

 

They have recently release version 1.1 of their Slide.Show Silverlight "control" for doing great commercial quality slide shows with Silverlight. They have also made this release open source and available for download on Codeplex.

 

Technorati tags: Family.Show, Vertigo, Silverlight, Silverlight Controls, Video.show, Slide.show

Silverlight on the Apple Mac- The Story Continues

by Don Burnett

Since the 1.0 version of Silverlight has shipped on the Apple Mac platform, it has become a very popular plug-in, not just with users but with third party developers. It's hard not to see the potential for the plug-in's great cross platform video solution Silverlight presents. Sure it's new, and there are a few things they are still working out on it, but for most people it's a trooper.  The Mac community has been clamoring for a way to natively on OS X encode Silverlight Video and output it directly on the Mac, especially in broadcast arenas. The Apple platform is famous for it's digital video solutions in QuickTime and  Final Cut Pro is one of the most used professional editing tools out there.. Having said that, to create Silverlight video, until now you could only go part of the way, producing a WMV output file. To create Silverlight video then you'd have to import video into Expression Media Encoder (either .MOV (QuickTime) or .WMVs). That still left no native way of producing Silverlight video natively in OS X until now..

 

Enter Flip4Mac's Silverlight Support..

 

 

 

 Flip4Mac makes a set of well known Components for Quicktime that allow it to play and manipulate Windows Media Video and Audio formats.  The latest beta supports encoding to Silverlight directly and will add the well known media player and media skins that are available with Expression Media Encoder. This is exciting news for those looking to create Silverlight Video and not having access to a Windows box to do it.

Check out the new support today at Flip4Mac.com right now..

 

Technorati tags: Flip4Mac, Native Silverlight Encoding, WMV components for the Mac, OSX, Silverlight Video

Winforms Control Set for Silverlight and FLASH

by Don Burnett

Over at Tim Sneath's Blog, Tim blogs about company called Netikatech.com who has created a bunch of cool new custom controls for both Silverlight and Flash. These controls are very cool because they have implemented the Winforms control library. This is a big step ahead for Silverlight, because you can now do in Silverlight most of the controls you see in regular Windows application in either Flash or Silverlight.

This means you can port a whole Windows Application UI over to the web and it makes porting real .NET applications to the web and a universally viewable platform possible.

Here's some examples (clicking on the graphics will bring up the Silverlight demo):

A typical tab control with buttons and radio buttons

Office-style toolbars

A datagrid

Outlook style calendaring UI

A visual studio style designer for the web

Check em out they are worth your time if you are doing Silverlight or Flash..

The GOA System.Windows.Forms core library includes 40+ standard controls and components:

• Control, ContainerControl, ScrollableControl, Panel
• Button, CheckBox, RadioButton, GroupBox, Label
• TextBox, NumericUpDown
• ImageBox, ImageList
• ScrollBar, HScrollBar, VScrollBar
• Form, MessageBox, Cursor
• ListBox, CheckedListBox
• ComboBox
• TreeView
• MonthCalendar
• TabControl, Splitter
• ToolTip, ProgressBar, Timer
• ToolStrip, StatusStrip, MenuStrip, ToolStripButton, ToolStripComboBox, ToolStripDropDown, ToolStripLabel, ToolStripProgressBar, ToolStripSeparator, ToolStripSplitButton, ToolStripTextBox
• XamlCanvas (Silverlight specific)

GOA WinForms Professional is the perfect solution for GOA developers who want to integrate high-end controls in their existing RIA applications. In addition to the System.Windows.Forms core library, GOA WinForms Professional includes a set of advanced controls for quickly creating rich user interfaces:

• The standard WinForms controls of the free edition
• A sophisticated Data Grid
• More than 30 extended controls and components

Technorati tags: Silverlight Controls, Missing Functionality, Winfoms functionality for Silverlight