Misc

We talk to the First Runner-up in SilverlightShow Eco Contest Levente Mihaly on his impressions from the Eco contest, the application he submitted in the contest, and his expectations towards MIX10. Though unexpected circumstances prevented him from attending MIX, he is looking forward to watching the MIX sessions online.

Meet the First runner-up Levente Mihaly!

Q. Levente - please introduce yourself for those of SilverlightShow community who haven't had the chance to meet you.

A. I'm from Hungary, studied Computer Engineering/Science at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, finished Msc.

Next in our series of interviews with SilverlightShow Eco Contest winners is the Community Vote winner Cigdem Patlak. We talk about her expectations for MIX, sessions she would be most willing to attend, people she would like to meet there, and of course - how it feels to be a community winner in such a competitive and challenging contest!

Meet Cigdem Patlak!

Q. Cigdem - please introduce yourself for those members of SilverlightShow community who haven't had the chance to meet you.

A.

The 3 winners in SilverlightShow Eco Contest are already getting packed for MIX10 in Vegas! Before they fly away, we catch them to talk about their expectations for MIX, sessions they would be most willing to attend, people they would like to meet there, and of course - how it feels to be a winner in such a competitive and challenging contest!

Meet the Grand Prize winner Daniel James!

Q. Daniel - please introduce yourself for those members of SilverlightShow community who haven't had the chance to meet you.

1. Introduction

Silverlight 3 is already a fact and along with it a new version of Expression Blend has been released. One of the changes in the Expression Blend that makes me a deep impression is that the new Blend has been made more approachable for designers. Beside the behaviors, Photoshop and Illustrator importers, the new Blend 3 makes a huge step in the direction of making better user experience. This step is the SketchFlow. The SketchFlow is a new set of tools for Expression Blend to create sketches and prototypes of interactive content and applications.

The official release of Silverlight 3 is already a fact and at Silverlight.net you can find the latest files for download. For more information on how to get started with the new Silverlight 3, pay a visit to our Get Started page.

With the official release there are a lot of changes that will affect in some way the Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 Beta applications. As the list of changes is pretty long, I will overview only the most interesting of them, but to be fully intact with the new release and to convert your application as fast and easy as possible, be sure to read this breaking changes document, provided by the Silverlight SDK team.

1. Introduction

The use of Deep Zoom Composer for creating deep zoom source files is often inconvenient.

For example, one guy has his online shop with thousands of high quality product images and after the release of Silverlight Deep Zoom technology he decided to use it. Surely he can’t decompose his images using Deep Zoom Composer, because due to the amount of existing site images it would take too much time.

And this is not the only case when you want to dynamically generate multi scale image tile source for high quality images without any other preparations.

1. Introduction

Currently Silverlight supports two ways of duplex communication: sockets and WCF polling duplex services. I was really impressed by the simplicity of using WCF polling duplex in Silverlight 3, but its responsiveness and scalability leaves much to be desired. On the opposite site we have sockets, which are rather tricky to use, but their responsiveness and scalability satisfy real world application requirements.

In this article I’m going to introduce my SocketsLight framework, which should simplify the working with sockets by providing high level API over .NET sockets library.

Introduction

Silverlight 2 has introduced many interesting features and controls but it misses something that Silverlight 3 makes possible –easily creating and manipulating rich data forms. These series of posts will help you when creating rich data forms in Silverlight 3 in your projects. Silverlight 3 introduces a new control, called DataForm. It enables various methods for display, edit, update and navigation through data.

The DataForm control is like the DataGrid control in Silverlight 2. But while the DataGrid control is used to manipulate a list of items, the DataForm control focuses on the item itself.

1. Introduction

This is the first article of my series about deep dive into  ADO.NET Data Services. In this article I'm going to show you how to implement your own ADO.NET Data Services proxy with T4 templates.

Source code and database backup

2. Content

2.1 Problem

ADO.NET Data  Services is a very powerful toy, but as many other cool Microsoft technologies it needs some workarounds to become usable in the real world applications.

Most of the problems are connected with the auto generated proxy which is created after the addition of a service reference.

1. Introduction

In this article I will present you a game which I created on Silverlight. It is a very small and simple but extremely popular game – the n-puzzle game. The n-puzzle is known in various versions, including the 8 puzzle, the 15 puzzle, and with various names. It is a sliding puzzle that consists of a frame of numbered square tiles in random order with one tile missing. If the size is 3x3, the puzzle is called the 8-puzzle or 9-puzzle, and if 4x4, the puzzle is called 15-puzzle or 16-puzzle. The object of the puzzle is to place the tiles in order (shown on the next figure) by making sliding moves that use the empty space.

If you are interested in more details about the history of the puzzle game, you can use the next link. But now let’s roll up our sleeves and dive into the world of Silverlight. The demo can also be found on a separate page.