If you’re interested in Silverlight 3 and building business applications you’re not going to want to miss this excellent free Silverlight training opportunity!

Join us at Advanced Home Care on Tuesday, 7th July, 2009 at 6:30 p.m. (Dinner & Meet & Greet: 6-6:45 p.m.)

Directions link: (4001 Piedmont Parkway, High Point, NC 27265).
Overview:

Silverlight 3 is expected to hit the web sometime soon this summer and in this presentation you will learn about some of the new features applicable to developing business applications with Silverlight 3. We will look at building solutions with the new navigation framework, accessing, validating, and updating data with .NET RIA Services, working with the new capabilities to make your Silverlight applications SEO friendly, and a few more things as well. Agenda: 6:00 – 6:30          Dinner & Meet & Greet 6:45 – Presentation · General Announcements · Building Business Applications in Silverlight 3.0 Presented by: · Jim Duffy is founder and president of TakeNote Technologies, an award-winning training, consulting, and software development company specializing in .NET software developer training and helping clients create business solutions with Microsoft technologies. Jim is a Microsoft Regional Director, a Microsoft MVP, an INETA speaker, and is an entertaining and popular speaker at regional user groups and international developer conferences. He is also a co-host of Computers 2K9, a call-in radio show on WRBZ (AM 850), 850 The Buzz, in Raleigh, NC. You can find additional information about Jim, TakeNote Technologies, links to his blog, as well as a public training class schedule, on-site training information, consulting information, and software development services at at   http://www.takenote.com Please see the www.triaddev.org site, or click the Directions link. So be sure to RSVP today! Note: You may RSVP in reply to this e-mail, or to www.triaddev.org

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Tonight the gang at the TRINUG Web Apps SIG (Special Interest Group) decided to take a break from their monthly MVC and JQuery fun to take a look at some of the new features of Silverlight 3. The screenshot above and link below is the completed code sample that I was walking through to show some Silverlight basics and look at a few of the new features.

The sample includes Perspective 3d capabilities, element to element bindings, and Pixel Shader Effects.

Download SigDemo SL3 Code

The Silverlight 3 Out Of Browser Slide application demo that we took a look at as well is available here on Mike Harsh’s Blog.

Posted in Silverlight | TRINUG  | Comments [3] 

Thanks to everybody that attended my presentation at the Carrboro RIA meetup last night.

Here are a few links to items discussed:

Getting started with Silverlight:

http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

Microsoft Expression Blend website:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/

Some of the demo sites we looked at:

http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/

http://www.smoothhd.com/

http://www.robzelt.com/silverlight/planets/

 

Silverlight Control Toolkit

http://silverlight.codeplex.com

Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

Mix09 Content

http://www.vistimix.com

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With the recent public announcement that the Release Candidate (RC) of Win7 was just days away, we’re starting to hear a lot more buzz around some details that had been kept secret.

Have ever wondered why Microsoft makes certain decisions for the Windows OS and what’s behind those decisions? For a behind the scenes explanation from some of the key engineers behind Windows 7 and IT Pro’s about their own experiences, check out the introduction to “Talking about Windows” by Stephen Rose.

But wait! There’s more! This isn’t just a video site, it’s a community hub that allows discussions around the content, as well as links to the Springboard Series of technical guidance.

“Communication is key...We look forward to continuing the conversation.”

Well worth checking out.

Posted in Software  | Comments [0] 

I had initially planned to go through and polish up a few posts I had been working on regarding some new Silverlight 3 features. Unfortunately I decided to do read a few of my favorite blogs and saw some great posts covering some of the same topics. While I go write some code… check these out:

My MIX09 Silverlight 3 ShowOff Video – Commodore 64 Emulator [This was absolutely one of the coolest things I saw at Mix09. Aside from the C64 coolness, it showed some amazing potential for the new SL3 features]

Shawn Burke's Blog - Silverlight Toolkit March 2009 Release

Silverlight 3 – Perspective 3d Transforms – PlaneProjection

Jeff Prosise's Blog - Silverlight 3's New Perspective Transform

WriteableBitmap

Silverlight 3 Out-of-browser Update

Silverlight 3 – BasedOn Styles

Silverlight 3 – Taking Silverlight Out of the Browser

Silverlight 3 – UI Element to Element Binding

Silverlight 3 – Creating Video from Raw Bits using a MediaStreamSource

Silverlight 3 – Drop Shadows and Glows with Pixel Shaders

Incremental Blogger » SketchFlow introduces ink to

MIX09 - The Gratuitous Graphics Demo

What is .NET RIA Services-

Displaying background activity in a Silverlight RIA application

Data Validation in Silverlight DataGrid

Grouping in Silverlight DataGrid

What’s New in Expression Blend 3 for Silverlight Preview

Nikhil Kothari's Weblog - .NET RIA Services- From Vision to

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Today at Microsoft’s MIX09 conference a number of extremely exciting announcements were made about the companies efforts in the RIA space. Most notable was the release of a Silverlight 3 beta which includes a huge list of exciting new features including Out Of Browser support, enhanced media capabilities and a line of RIA Services targeted towards building line of business applications. The new release includes support for things like Deep Linking, Navigation, SEO Optimization, Hardware GPU support, 3-D and Animation enhancements, and the list goes on.

The Out Of Browser capabilities are a key items that targets an area a lot of people having been asking for and creates some truly exciting innovation opportunities to create cross platform applications that can be run from the desktop. (Translation: You can write a CLR application that runs on a Mac) 

For more information, here’s the link to get started as well as some of the key blogs posts of the day to get you started. I’ll be posting more on some of my recent work with the new bits over the next few days.

Silverlight 3 Getting Started

Blog Posts of Note:

A Guide to Silverlight 3 New Features

Silverlight 3 Beta is Live! – Out of Browser, Perspective 3D, Effects, ElementName Binding and m

Silverlight 3 Beta Sample - Slidentity - Presentation Creation App

Introducing Offline and Out of Browser support in Silverlight

SketchFlow – Sketching and Prototyping in Expression Blend

Posted in Silverlight  | Comments [1] 

If you missed the MIX09 keynote, check it out!

Posted in Silverlight  | Comments [0] 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on how different types of layout controls can be used make the tools and the framework do the heavy lifting for us in our Silverlight Development. Karl Shifflett recently posted an example creating a custom WPF control to make it easier to layout a data input screen and I decided to build out a Silverlight version.

The control extends an ItemsControl to use a custom container that provides a text label and layout for input controls.

The result is a custom control that allows me to add input controls such as TextBoxes and CheckBoxes and get labels and much of the styling for free. Silverlight’s DataBinding capabilities allow me to set a DataContext for the FormControl, and then simply specify an individual binding for each field.

<TextBox Zelt:FormItem.LabelContent="First Name" Text="{Binding FirstName}" Width="250"/>
<TextBox Zelt:FormItem.LabelContent="Last Name" Text="{Binding LastName}" Width="250"/>

Utilizing this type of markup allows for a lot of potential in tool support. I’m sure that Karl plans to support this type of content in his XAML Power Toys add-in.

I’ve got a few additions before I share out the code, but I’d welcome any feedback on this approach.

Posted in Silverlight  | Comments [2] 

In early December Montreal is hosting an exciting developer conference covering a wide range of topics from some of our industry's leading presenters. The 3 day conference is packed with information in 136 sessions. Pre and Post conference sessions are also available to increase your learning potential at the event. Attendees will also receive over $1000 in free software!

The fun starts Tuesday December 2nd with a key by Ted Neward. See you there!!!

http://www.devteach.com

Posted in Rant | Silverlight | Software  | Comments [0] 

Did you miss PDC? Want to see some of the latest content relating to Cloud Computing, Silverlight 2, and the future directions of ASP.NET 4? Links are below for your FREE invite!

Introducing the MSDN Southern Fried Roadshow:

The MSDN Southern Fried Roadshow is a  ¾ day, free developer event with a southern flair where you will learn about some of the latest developments in Microsoft technologies. For this edition we will cover a broad range of the latest Microsoft Technologies:

· Take a tour of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform and the services that make it easy to give your applications the most compelling experiences and features.  Explore the journey a developer takes, from writing a service to launching that service in the cloud. Learn about the cloud services that enable developers to easily create or extend their applications and services.

· Microsoft Silverlight provides a powerful platform for building the next generation of rich interactive applications on the Internet. In this session, we take a look at the programming model and tools that developers and designers can leverage to build these true next-generation experiences for consumers and business, and demonstrate building a rich interactive application (RIA) using Silverlight and Microsoft .NET.

· ASP.NET is evolving a very rapid pace, come explore all the latest features of ASP.Net such as Dynamic Data, MVC, and even take a sneak peak at the upcoming features in ASP.NET 4.0!  We’ll look at some new features such as taking control of your Control IDs, using the DynamicImage control, and ViewState management options.   We’ll spend plenty of time talking about MVC and creating applications based on this framework, so if you’re wondering how to leverage MVC in your web applications, this talk is for you!

12/2/2008 -- Charleston

12/3/2008 – Wilmington

12/4/2008 - Raleigh

12/5/2008 - Charlotte

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