Alex Golesh
Andy Beaulieu
Corey Schuman
Dan Wahlin (speaking) - Syncing Audio, Video and Animations in Microsoft Silverlight Applications
Daron Yöndem
Dave Cambell
David J Kelley
Emil Stoychev
Eric Ambrosi
Erik Mork
Jeff Paries (speaking) - Principles of Microsoft Silverlight Graphics and Animations
Joel Neubeck
John Stockton
Jordan Knight
Koen Zwikstra
Laurent Bugnion (speaking) - Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel Pattern
Laurent Duveau
Page Brooks
Richard Costall
Rick Barraza
Rob Eisenberg (speaking) - Build Your Own MVVM Framework
Robby Ingebretsen (speaking) -Design Fundamentals for Developers (and Other Non-Designers) & 10 WAYS TO ATTACK A DESIGN PROBLEM AND COME OUT WINNING
Thierry Bouquain

Also, there will be a Silverlight MVP Breakfast on Tuesday morning at 8am. Come join us.

Only days away and MIX 2010 will be upon us. Here is my compellation of links and resources to get ready for MIX.

Links

The Devil’s Field Guide to MIX10 - http://thespiderking.com/wordpress/the-devils-field-guide-to-mix10/

SKETCHFLOW AND BLEND AT MIX 2010 - http://electricbeach.org/?p=421

Silverlight Sesion - http://team.silverlight.net/events/silverlight-mix10-ndash-the-next-web-now/

Schedule

The MIX team has put together a very nicely done Silverlight Session Planner (http://live.visitmix.com/SyncClient).

Here is what my initial schedule looks like. Each session is Silverlight focused. Unfortunately there’s no way I’ll be able to be four places at once, but I intend to come back and watch each session online once they’re available.

Social events

In addition to the sessions, MIX is about networking and spending time with new and old friends. There are many events taking place, like the attendee party at LAX, however that’s not the only one. Check out the site MIX 10 Events for a list of some of the free events taking place.

I’m planning on being at the Tweetup, Silverlight MVP breakfast, and the UserGroup Leader Dinner.

Initially I was going to order from Moo cards, however they require a four day processing. In true procrastinating fashion, I waited until the last minute to order. Thankfully Zazzle pulled through for me.

As for the creative, I completely bummed the idea from the Lifehacker article. Instead of using Google, I decided to use Bing. After all MIX is a Microsoft conference. Creating this card was one of the first times I’ve used Bing. Searching on Google, the first result is my site. Alternatively, on Bing the first result was my About page.

The past few months I’ve been flying under the radar, taking much needed rest and time with the family. Spending four months in another country was amazing but exhausting.

Since being home I was fortunate enough to go to the MVP Summit in Redmond in late February. Met many of the very talented people involved in the MVP program, as well as met many of the Silverlight product team and MVP. Also had the chance to spend time with a couple guys in the Cider team: Karl Shifflet (of Xaml Power Toys fame) and Nokola (you MUST check out his Silverlight work, truly amazing).

Now that I’m settled back in, I’m coming out of hibernation and have a few things planned that I’m ultra excited to blog about.

Have you ever been in a scenario where you just want to pass an object through an event the EventArgs without having to create custom EventArgs for each type of event?  SimpleEventArgs solves this by using generics, and asks only for the class.  This one class has saved me countless amounts of time by not having to code up custom EventArgs.

Almost forgot…SimpleEventArgs are Scriptable by default, making this class available from JavaScript.

Thanks guys SMF team.

FULL DISCLOSURE: This code comes directly from the Silverlight Media Framework (http://smf.codeplex.com) project.  Visit the project to get the complete source.

Once you get beyond the basic requirements, the “basic video player” becomes very involved.  A few questions that will need attention are:

• “How do you handler markers?”
• “How is streaming video handled?”
• “What do you do an an error?”
• “What’s the strategy for buffering?”
• “Can the video player support Smooth Streaming content?” (this is a whole different conversation)
• “How does the video player handle Closed captioning?”

And on and on the list goes.  At some point (hopefully in the analysis phase) you should ask is it better to build or buy.  If you decide to build, give me a call ;), but before you do I would encourage you to take a look at the following open-source (free) Silverlight video player options.  If nothing else, these players are great place to start.

I’ll start off with the three best options, then highlight other projects I am less familiar with.

Silverlight Media Framework (SMF)

http://smf.codeplex.com/

This is so much more than a video player, it’s an entire framework.  Developed by Vertigo in coordination with Microsoft, SMF has been used on the largest, most watched, Silverlight video players to date.  Wimbledon, NFL’s Sunday Night Football, PDC live keynote, and the NBC’s Vancouver Olympics video players, to name a few, all use SMF.  To say it’s robust would be an understatement.

Other than the standard video player controls, here are additional highlights of SMF:

• Smooth Streaming support – includes the Microsoft.Web.Media.SmoothStreaming.dll
• Great base classes like MergeableCollection, SimpleEventArgs and ObservableObject
• A light weight data project
• Logging
• Blendability – the player is easily skinned
• InStream markers
• Bitrate – the ability to show bitrate

For a more detailed list of features, and the code, check out SMF’s site.

Silverlight Video Player

http://slvideoplayer.codeplex.com/

If you have ever watched a video on Channel 9 (if you haven’t check out Silverlight TV) the player being used is this video player.  It was developed by Tim Heuer (Microsoft) and Joel Nuebeck (Silverlight MVP).  Although SVP does not the feature set the SMF player has, this is still a solid and proven video player.  It’s is probably the best option for a standard, light weight, feature rich video player.

Silverlight HyperVideo player (HVP)

http://slhvp.com/

A new video player to the scene is the Silverlight Hyper-Video Player (HVP).  This offering is from Jesse Liberty (Microsoft) and the Community.  Targeting Silverlight 4, HVP takes advantage of the MEF framework and is rooted in best development practices.  Although the project is young, there is a lot of traction and Jesse is doing an amazing job of documenting each step.  Keep on eye on HVP as this maybe the most scalable offering.

Others

The above three video players I have personally used, dug through the code, and/or evaluated.  The following projects I am not as familiar with, but could be possible options for your scenario:

Sharepoint video player - http://svp.codeplex.com/

Silverlight Media Player http://silverlight30.codeplex.com/

xLite player - http://xliteplayer.codeplex.com/

Two night and two user groups.  Last night we had the Atlanta Silverlight User Group featuring Jeremy Likeness , senior consultant with Wintellect, presenting on Silverlight Line of Business applications.  Jeremy’s session highlighted on Silverlight frameworks, MEF, Unit testing, services, and briefly on Blend.  We did do a screen capture of the session; as those details become available I’ll post more.

The turn out for the group was amazing.  All in all we had almost 50 people.  Thank you all for coming out.  Next month Roger Peters will be presenting on Building a Compelling UX with Silverlight.

If you have a topic that you would like to present on, visit the Meetup page and drop me an e-mail.

See you next month.

Last night, Jan 19th, I attended the Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG), http://www.drupalatlanta.com/,  with Glen Gordon.  The talk, presented by Steve Jaffe of IBM, was about “Integrating Flash with your Drupal Project”.  Steve did a great job of how Drupal can be used as the backend for Flash.  Never having used Drupal, the same techniques presented can be use for connect to Silverlight.  In fact, after some digging around, it looks like someone has already been playing around with Drupal and Silverlight…Matt Serbinski.  Here are a couple of his articles:

• Connecting Drupal and Silverlight by Matt Serbinski
• Silverlight and Drupal: Syndication

First create a simple UI (a Rectangle and a Button).

Add an event to the button click event.  The logic looks like this:

• Get a handle on your video capture device using CaptureDeviceConfiguration.
• Request access to the device with CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess().
• If the user clicks Yes, then create a CaptureSource object and set the VideoCaptureDevice to the selected webcam.
• Create a VideoBrush
• Set the Source of the VideoBrush
• Start the webcam
• Paint the Rectangle (this could be anything that takes a Brush)

Next step, F5 (run your app).  You’ll be looking at a blank screen with a button.  After clicking the button, a box appears prompting the user to allow access to the webcam and microphone.  Click Yes, since after all that is our goal ;).

Voilà!! You are now looking at yourself. Now you can do all sorts of fun web cam stuff.  Enjoy.

Tip

After running the above app, I noticed it was backwards.  Meaning when I moved left my face on the screen moved to my right.  Maybe it’s just me, but my brain was not happy about this.  Instead, I wanted the app to respond like a mirror.  To do this was a quick fix; simply Flip the Rectangle on the X axis.  Here is the menu in Blend to do this:

More info

For more information, Tim Heuer has a great video covering Web cam and microphone support in detail: http://silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/access-web-camera-microphone/

This example shows how to instantiate a NotificationWindow, with the resulting application like the below screenshot.

Code

And now for the code. The items to note:

• In the Tick event check to see if the application is running in OOB.
• If yes, then instantiate a NotificationWindow object.
• Set the Content (this could be as simple as a TextBlock or a custom UserControl)
• To show the Notification, call the Show method specifying, in milliseconds, the duration of the Notification.

Q: Can I show multiple notifications?
A: No, there isn’t a queue.

Q: Can the user interact with the NotificationWindow?
A: Yes, but only mouse support.

Q: What is the size of the NotificationWindow?
A: 400×100 (btw, I love Pixus)

Q: Can the NotificationWindow be customized?

A: Yes, below is a screenshot of the notification window using a custom UserControl instead of a TextBlock like the above example.

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/

 
http://blogs.silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx

 
http://geekswithblogs.net/WynApseTechnicalMusings/archive/2009/11/18/136394.aspx

http://wildermuth.com/2009/11/18/Silverlight_4_Beta_Announced!

This was a quick one.

Lately I have been a big advocate about using behaviors for UI interactions when developing a Silverlight app.  Behaviors enable me to quickly develop a rich UI without much code and focus on functionality.

This is a quick thought, and more to come about it, but wanted to throw it out there.  In the meantime check out

http://www.85turns.com/2009/10/14/top-5-silverlight-behaviors/

5. TextboxEditMask

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/CMEditMaskBehavior

For data input, there is nothing like a TextBox that handles all the formatting for you.  Jim Fisher has created a behavior that enables you to easily add a mask to a TextBox, ensuring your users aren’t entering garbage.  For more information, check out Jim’s post.

4. Resize Behavior

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/ResizeBehavior

Blend has a built in behavior for dragging.  As a user, one of the first things I want to do after dragging an object is to resize it.  Alessio Galdy has created a behavior that does exactly this.  Take a look at the sample on the Gallery to see his feature rich resize behavior.

3. Swivel Behavior

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/SwivelBehavior

Silverlight 3 introduced a number of features that many consider “eye candy” (pixel shaders, perspective 3d, animations easing).   John Papa uses the perspective 3d feature to create a swivel behavior.  This can be helpful if you, or your clients, need to conserve space.  Think about a menu with an overview and details section.  Simply create two views, attach this behavior, and one side you have the overview and the other are your details.

2. Mouse Wheel Scroll Behavior

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/MouseWheelScroll

I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone to a Silverlight app and started using my mouse wheel to scroll through the ListBox, ScrollViewer, or ComboBox.  Along with not putting the Hand cursor on Buttons, this is my biggest pet peeve in Silverlight apps.  With Kelps’ behavior, you can easily add mouse wheel scrolling to scrollable areas.

1. Behaviors from MIX’09

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/MIXBehaviorPack

These are the first set of behaviors you should download.  Posted by Peter Blois, of the Blend team, these behaviors include:

• Media behaviors (Play, Pause, Rewind, and Stop)
• Triggers, including an awesome MouseGestureTrigger and a StateChangedTrigger
• Data behaviors – if using MVVM, these behaviors can save you a lot of time

Needless to say, this package is the real deal.

Honorable Mention - Multi-Touch Drag and Zoom Behaviors

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/MultiTouch

This is a relatively new behavior to the Gallery (by a new Silverlight MVP, Davide Zordan) and unfortunately I haven’t taken a look at it because it requires a multitouch screen, which I am lacking.  If you do, check it out.  Additionally, read Davide’s post on this behaviors implementation.

Best Behaviors not on the Expression Community Gallery – Physics Helper

These set of behaviors enable you to quickly add physics to objects without having to dive into the world of a physics engine.  I highly recommend you check out “The Basics” video to get learn how to use the behaviors. 

On October 1st I was awarded the Microsoft MVP for Silverlight.  I am very honored and excited about this.  The MVP program, taken from Tim Heuer’s post, “ is a recognition program that is in place to recognize and reward those individuals who have been identified by individuals (peers, Microsoft staff, etc.) as experts in their technology field and global contributors to the technology”

The other talented group of guys in this round of Silverlight MVP’s are (for the complete list of Silverlight MVP’s follow this link):

• Jeff Paries
• Ambrose Little
• Robby Ingebretsen
• Rick Barraza
• Bryant Likes 
• Davide Zordan
• Huijun Li

Talking about and working with Silverlight has been a dream come true.  It enables me to pursue my passion of creating experiences and not applications (more to come on that). 

There have been many people who have helped me in the MVP process; namely Glen Gordon, Jesse Liberty, Tim Heuer, John Papa, and Justin Angel.  Thank you, and I look forward to the upcoming year.

Problem: Silverlight 2 & Silverlight 3 do not support HTML, how can I remove the tags?

Solution: Although there are many solutions to this problem, the quickest and most frequently solution I use is a regular expression to remove HTML tags.  The most straightforward example I’ve found is from John Papa’s book Data Driven Services with Silverlight 2

// Remove HTML tags and empty newlines and spaces and leading spaces
string formattedValue = REgex.Replace(value as string, "<.*?>", "");
formattedValue = Regex.Replace(formattedValue, @"\n+\s+", "\n\n");
formattedValue = formattedValue.TrimStart(’ ‘);
fromattedValue = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(formattedValue);
if(length > 0 && formattedValue.Length >= length)
  formattedvalue = formattedValue.Substring(0, length - 1);
return formattedValue;

Problem: You need text to dynamically add elipses, "…",  to the end of a sentence.  The difficulty is how do you detect the actual length of the string.  All characters are not created the same.  Ten i’s != ten m’s.

Solution: Robby Ingebretsen at NerdPlusArt.com (and of Kaxaml fame) has a dynamic control that does just this.  http://blog.nerdplusart.com/archives/texttrimming-textblock-for-silverlight.

The solution is very Elegant.  Robby wraps a TextBlock in a Content control then manipulates the Text inside based on the size.  Best of all…he as post code and an example.  Thanks Robby.

Certainly I want to stay current and come out with latest and greatest but in doing so I’ve lost site point of my blog keep it simple and keep track of what I’ve learned.  So, the next few posts will be focused on keeping it simple.

Thanks for reading and helping make this blog great.

Over the past six months I’ve had the amazing opportunity to work with a highly talented team (Mason Brown, Casey Britt, SmartyP, and many more) at IQ Interactive.  We’ve been working on an amazing, ground breaking, Silverlight application.  There wasn’t a stone unturned while developing.  Items such as Pixel Shaders, custom Panels, animations for purpose (as they should be), LINQ, dynamic loading of xap, Prism, and much more illustrate the breadth of the technology. I want to share the experience/application with you so badly but it will have to wait until the end of this month.

The biggest win over the past months is not the use of technology, but the team.  When I joined there was a large Silverlight project without any Silverlight knowledge.  Everyone rallied, designers were brought up to speed on Blend and Flash devs were put to work.  IQ now has a competent and competitive team of Silverlight developers/designers, and I am so happy to have been, and continue to be part of that. 

Over the next few month, and into the beginning of next year, I will be taking on a consultant role with IQ to ensure the project sails smoothly into launch and advice  with the direction of IQ’s Silverlight practice.  Doing this enables me to work on a number of key Silverlight projects in the media space in Turin, Italy.  Hopefully the jet lag wears off soon, because I’m ready to dig in, build awesome Silverlight projects, and most importantly build another team of kick ass Silverlight developers.

From Turin – ciao ciao