KludgeHack

WinForms for Silverlight/Flash
27 June 2007 in Microsoft & WebDev | Comments (0)

A company called Netika released a free edition of their Windows Forms implementation, both for Silverlight and Flash.

If you go to this demo page, you’ll see that they’ve somehow taken a pretty broad set of Windows Forms controls and implemented them for Silverlight (and Flash). From the basic controls to toolstrips and calendar, they really done a good job.

Being alpha code running on alpha code, some stuff is a little slow. Even the less, you can see the designer demo, that is a great example of RIA experiences. Almost a web-based Silverlight IDE…

Nibbles: snack tutorials for hungry designers
22 June 2007 in Microsoft & WebDev | Comments (0)

Tim Sneath blogged about a new website Nibbles with Silverlight, Expression Blend and WPF content.

Currently, it only have 7 small tutorials on Blend & Silverlight.

The website runs on Silverlight, and is beautiful. An experience very similar to Flash with “faded animations and transitions and accordion bars”.

Unit Test Web Code Without A Web Server
22 June 2007 in WebDev | Comments (0)

I was looking for some help on unit testing my web apps and found Phill Haack HTTPSimulator - a class to help with running tests against a simulated Http Context, to help simulate requests and more without resorting to needing a web server running for the tests.

Testing code written for the web is challenging. Especially code that makes use of the ASP.NET intrinsic objects such as the HttpRequest object.

My goal is to make testing such code easier.

You can download the HttpSimulator package here. You can also find a lot more info on this in Phill’s post.

Even more Silverlight content…
19 June 2007 in Microsoft & Programming & WebDev | Comments (1)

Following on my previous poster about Silverlight Streaming, I was looking for some related content, and found two great posts by Microsoft employers.

First, by Mark Johnston, a Microsoft developer evangelist in the UK, you can find in his blog a bunch of great Silverlight-related content covering fundamentals concepts, 1.1 debugging, 1 line of code video player, Silverlight Streaming, etc.

The second post, can be found on Scott Guthrie blog, the General Manager of the .NET Developer Platform group, that covers virtually every aspect of Silverlight 1.1 in a good deal of depth and includes usable samples. Scott goes into a great deal of detail about the basics of XAML, animation, isolated storage for Silverlight apps, custom controls, and tons of other stuff.

There are samples on both posts, which require Silverlight 1.1 (Alpha).

How to get started with Silverlight Streaming
19 June 2007 in Microsoft & Programming & WebDev | Comments (3)

Okay, some have heard of it, other not. Silverlight Streaming is live and you can start uploading applications and media.

What is Silverlight Streaming? Basically is a new Microsoft service for developers and designers deliver and scale rich media for their Silverlight applications. They currently offer 4gb of space to host and stream cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences.

You can start by visiting the service website on silverlight.live.com and create a Silverlight Streaming account (requires a Windows Live account). You then can host 4gb of media content, with videos of up to ten minutes in length (this limitation is similar to YouTube).

Tim Sneath posted a simple walkthrough of how you can use it:

• Grab yourself the trial edition of Expression Media Encoder;
• Take a video and encode it - make sure you go to the Output tab and choose a player template;
• At the end of the encode process, you should have a directory that contains the media file, some XAML and JavaScript files and any thumbnails that you’ve specified through the Markers tool-window.
• You’ll need to remove any .html, .aspx, .media, .csproj or .config files from the output directory. You won’t need these for the Silverlight Streaming service.
• Then you’ll want to add a manifest that describes the Silverlight application; for a default player from Expression Media Encoder (I used the Glassy theme), you can use the following manifest:

<SilverlightApp>
   <loadFunction>StartWithParent</loadFunction>
   <jsOrder>
      <js>MicrosoftAjax.js</js>
      <js>PreviewMedia.js</js>
      <js>EmePlayer.js</js>
      <js>player.js</js>
      <js>startPlayer.js</js>
   </jsOrder>
</SilverlightApp>

• Save the manifest as manifest.xml and add it to the directory.
• Now simply zip all the files up (make sure they’re in the root of the zip file).
• From silverlight.live.com, go to the Manage Applications tab and upload the application.
• From here, Silverlight Streaming will guide you through the remaining steps, providing you with the JavaScript and HTML code you’ll need to add to your page to access the streamed content.

Ian Moulster’s posted a short video tutorial on this walkthrough. The process is very simple, at least, after the first time.

There’s plans for a paid version of Silverlight Streaming, but I can’t find any details.

With this chance to instantly host and share RIA applications, I hope we will see new stuff soon.