Devigner Goodness

Avast Ye XAML Heads

Frank La Vigne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:16:00 GMT

<PIRATE>Arrr, Cameron Albert is cookin' up a cool Sil'erlight Game Gar, Where can I find a bottle o'rum?</PIRATE>

Sorry, I couldn’t resist using the Pirate Translator.

Cameron shares a screencast of the pirate themed game he’s developing in Silverlight.

Technorati Tags: Games,Silverlight,Casual Games,Silverlight Game Dev

Silverlight 4 Book Discount Codes

Frank La Vigne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:05:00 GMT

If you plan on picking up Silverlight 4 Business Application Development – Beginner's Guide, you might as well save money. Use the following codes when purchasing directly from Packt Publishing.

MsSilver15 – Save 15% off hard copy of the book

MsSilver30 – Save 30% off the eBook

If you are a .NET developer looking to expand your skills into Silverlight this is a great introductory book.

The book gets you involved in the code right away and we try and keep the working code philosophy throughout. If you like to learn by doing, then this is the book for you.

So, what are you waiting for? Pre-order now. ;)

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Silverlight 4,Book,Packt

Slides from Bing Maps & Silverlight Talk at N3UG

Frank La Vigne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:39:00 GMT

To go along with the links from my talk, here is the slide deck:

Bing & Silverlight: Perfect Together

View more presentations from Frank La Vigne.

I’ll be giving a similar talks in the near future in the Mid-Atlantic area, so keep an eye on my blog and Community Megaphone for more details.

Technorati Tags: North Jersey,N3UG,Bing Maps,Silverlight,GeoLocation

CapArea.NET Silverlight SIG News

Frank La Vigne — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:29:00 GMT

In case you're wonder WTH happened to the Silverlight SIG in January and February: you may have heard the good news: I'm a dad now!

You may not have heard the bad news: I seriously injured my shoulder in January.

Meetings will resume March 31.

In fact, I’ll be doing a Deep Dive talk on Silverlight 4. [add to calendar]

If you can't wait until March 31 to get your Silverlight fix, keep a close eye on the goings on next week at MIX10. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I won’t be able to make it this year. :(

Congratulations to Leonard Van Lowe!

Congratulations are in order to the Leonard Van Lowe (@lvanlowe), the new vice-president of the SIG.

He's a local Silverlight expert and all around great guy. He'll be there to help run the group and make sure I am no longer a single point of failure.

Sponsors!

We're looking for sponsors to help support the group. Seriously, we need sponsors. Our pizza fund is in jeopardy.

see more dog and puppy pictures

I'll bring cake to a meeting in the near future to celebrate the publication of my Silverlight 4 book, but unless more sponsors step up, that'll be all the food we'll get for a while. Contact us for details. (frank@franksworld.com or scott@caparea.net)

There are a lot of great things coming down the pipe this year: Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 4, etc..

Here's to a great 2010, even if we have to start it in March. ;)

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,SilverlightDC,Pizza

Bing Maps Developer Sheet

Frank La Vigne — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:51:00 GMT

I just put the final touches on chapter 9 of my Silverlight 4 book, which deals with the Bing Maps Silverlight control.

While searching for something mapping related, I came across this: a cheat sheet for Bing Maps developers.

I could’ve used this a few weeks ago. :)

Bing Maps Developer Data Sheet

View more documents from Gazi ERDOGAN.

Technorati Tags: Mapping,Silverlight,Silverlight 4,Book,Bing,Bing Maps,Reference

Joel Cochran on Community Megaphone Podcast Show #2

Frank La Vigne — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:34:00 GMT

Local WPF/Silverlight guru is on the latest episode of the Community Megaphone Podcast.

Way to go Joel!

Show #2 with guest Joel Cochran posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Originally an AS/400 RPG Programmer, Joel is a former Contributing Editor for ITJungle.com (originally MidrangeServer.com) and has taught various programming languages and Internet technologies at Blue Ridge Community College. He has been developing in C# full time since 2003 and currently devotes most of his efforts to Blend and WPF. A frequent speaker at User Groups and Code Camps, he enjoys teaching and writing about .NET and other technologies, which he happily shares on his blog at http://www.developingfor.net. Joel has served as the Director of Operations for Stonewall Technologies, Inc., in Staunton, VA, since 2000.
Show Notes

Pro WPF in C# 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation with .NET 3.5, Second Edition By Matthew MacDonald

Silverlight 3 Programmer's Reference by J. Ambrose Little, Jason Beres, Grant Hinkson, Devin Rader, Joe Croney

Technorati Tags: WPF,Sivlerlight,Community Megaphone,Developer Community

More Silverlight Performance Goodness

Frank La Vigne — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:15:00 GMT

Mike Snow has some tips on squeezing the last drops of performance out of your Silverlight applications.

In short, here are four parameters on the plug-in to set in order to tweak your application.

On top of that you can also use XPerf to analyze performance of your Silverlight application.

With XPerf, you can track CPU and disk usage over time and get a better handle on what’s going on. It’s a free install from MSDN. URL= http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc305187.aspx.

For more details and instructions please see read Seema’s post on using XPerf.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Performance Tuning,GPU

Silverlight Advanced Performance and Profiling Techniques

Frank La Vigne — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:48:00 GMT

Straight from PDC09, here’s an interesting session by Reema Samchandani that’s relevant to what I’m working on today:

The mad lib was an interesting intro.

Technorati Tags: PDC09,Silverlight,Performance Tuning

Six Traffic/Weather Cams Feeds in One XBAP

Frank La Vigne — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:34:00 GMT

Like many metropolitan areas, the Washington DC area has a lot of traffic and congestion.

A little while ago, I noticed that the local news station WJLA has a bunch of live video feeds of both traffic and weather. I’ll look at them to see what I am in for.

On the WJLA home page, you click on any of the thumbnail images to bring up an HTML popup window:

On the pop up page, I noticed that they were using Windows Media Player:

My curiosity piqued, I right mouse clicked on the media player to take a closer look at how they were delivering the video feed.

On the properties page, I saw that the video feed was being served via a Windows media stream.

This got me thinking that I can build a better experience, such as show all the video streams on one screen.

This way, I can see the entire weather/traffic story in the area before I go anywhere and no annoying pop-ups.

Here’s what I built [Live Demo]:

I do realize that I have a lot more to do in terms of making it a really stand-apart experience

But in the meantime, notice how little procedural code I actually had to write.

The XBAP itself is only 10k!

If you’re wondering why it’s a WPF XBAP and not a Silverlight app, I had some issues with consuming the video feed in Silverlight.

It’s on my TODO list. :)

Technorati Tags: WPF,XBAP,DC,Traffic

Crayola’s Law

Frank La Vigne — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:18:00 GMT

Here’s something interesting I saw via Twitter: Crayola's Law: The number of colors Crayola offers doubles every 28 years.

Technorati Tags: Crayola,Colors,Design