News

Less than 30 days ago, we showed you Silverlight and made some promises about the possibilities it would unleash.  Two weeks later, we showed you Popfly (built on Silverlight), and today even more pieces fall into place.

At Facebook's "F8" platform launch in San Francisco, we announced a partnership with Facebook to enable Facebook's social networking "graph" to be leverages with all the web-centric technologies we offer.  Mike Arrington and Fortune Magazine both explain why the Facebook platform is such a big deal. 

Facebook is showing off more than 70 companies already building on the social graph, and with the stuff we announced tonight the number of people who can leverage Facebook's platform grows by an order of magnitude:

People using Popfly can now drag-drop to create in-browser mashups that use Facebook friends, photos, and events.  Since it's using Popfly, the Facebook mashups can also include existing Popfly blocks, for example mashing up your Facebook friends list with XBox 360 gamer tags.

And for developers, we've created a Facebook developer's toolkit to enable you to code against Facebook with any of our programming languages.  The toolkit includes components, controls, and samples for both web development and client development.  Especially check out the fully-functional sample using WPF and LINQ to make a 3D rolodex. 

You can download the toolkit and Visual Studio Express both for free starting now.

The event is just now wrapping up.  We will be running videos and demos from the event soon.  In the meantime, you can look at photos from the event.  And don't forget to download the toolkit and make some cool mashups.  I can't wait to see what sorts of things people build!

We’re making a few breaking changes between our Mix release and our RTM release due in Summer.  You can author content today that works on both Mix and RTM release if you do the following:

 

·         Remove “javascript:” in your event handlers.  This is generally not needed and won’t be supported in our V1.0 final release.  Note that this is used in the Mix version of the silverlight.js file.  I’ve provided an updated version of silverlight.js that works correctly with both Mix and RTM bits here (you should replace your existing silverlight.js with this one).

·         The plug-in has been renamed from “WPFe Plug-In” to “Silverlight Plug-In”.  This is normally only used in silverlight.js to detect Silverlight on the system.  The silverlight.js update I’ve provided above correctly checks for either name.

·         We’ve tightened up our rules for animations and animations now require a TargetName and a TargetProperty.  This means the timer trick I posted below must be updated to specify a hidden Rectangle (the post has been updated).

 

I’ve updated my Mix samples per the above changes.  You can get the updated VideoSearch here and the CreateFromXAML sample here.

The big news today is about Popfly, our new mashup-creation tool.  Nik at TechCrunch thinks it's cool, and says "Seeing applications like Popfly coming out of Microsoft is something that I couldn’t have imagined all too long ago".  It is pretty awesome, check out the interview Rory did with the Popfly team, and also watch the demos.

I saw the first builds of Popfly a month or so before MIX07, and we really wanted to show it at the event.  Popfly is the canonical example of what we were showing at MIX: built in Silverlight and runs in the browser, and enables people to "mix" together inclusive web experiences from all of the big web sites.  However, the Visual Studio team isn't known for rushing things out prematurely, and we were sworn to secrecy.

I've seen some initial commentary about Popfly that compares it to Yahoo! Pipes.  This is probably because the UI does have some boxes that you can connect with lines to do some programming "visually".  But if you take the time to watch all the demos, you'll see that Popfly is really taking a different focus.  Popfly focuses more on producing the user interface, while Pipes is focused on the data.  I would not be surprised to see people using Popfly to consume data from Pipes in the near future.

Electric Rain recently announced a new product they're working on called Harmony.  This app will take .swf files and convert them to XAML.  This tool has the potential to help users with Flash assets ramp-up on Silverlight very quickly.  Electric Rain is promising a beta version "soon".

From the product site:

"Electric Rain Harmony provides designers and developers with a fast and easy way to convert existing Flash SWF files (graphics and simple animations*) into Microsoft-based XAML mark-up for immediate use in the Microsoft WFP and Silverlight (formally WPF/E) platforms."

         

The announcements around Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform yesterday were important to anyone who is thinking about where the web will evolve. For those of us watching the demos at the Mix conference the immediate importance of it ...

(MIX 2007, Las Vegas) It was a busy day yesterday (Apr 30). With the exciting keyote by Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie (see the video here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/video.aspx) and with 5 new external web sites that needed to go online (http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight , www.silverlight.net , http://msdn.microsoft.com/silverlight, the Silverlight documentation on MSDN at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188743.aspx and the hosted Silverlight SDK documentation ar http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188266.aspx and 1 internal one for Microsoft's intranet.

The momentum around Silverlight is great and I could hear the buzz for every person I interacted with here in Vegas.

It took a lot of coordination and effort of many good people in our web operations, designs agencies (Both Ascentium and Avenue A Razorfish and other Microsoft groups to get this going and I was still perplexed that the second Scott mentioned our web presence in his keynote, the servers went live.

I am thankful to all the people that helped with this.

Now we can get back to the day to day process of updating the content to help the world build better web experiences with Silverlight.

 

That’s right, we're very pleased to announce that version 1 of our team's suite of end-to-end tools for creative designers is done! The process is now underway to manufacture and distribute the product. For more details on the suite and how you will be able to purchase it, see the Expression Web Site [1].

The Expression Studio suite consists of four products – Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design and Expression Media.

There’s yet more exciting news today regarding Silverlight [2], Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight was announced recently at the at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007). Today, at the MIX07 [3] conference, Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie placed Silverlight in its longer-term context as part of the .NET platform and tools story. And Blend fits into the Silverlight tools story, too – today we have made available the Expression Blend 2 May Preview [4] which allows you to create Silverlight-based applications (either JavaScript or .NET).

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/expression

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

[3] http://visitmix.com/

[4] http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=blend2maypreview

 

We're pleased to present the second Beta version of Expression Blend. Here are some of the changes since the Beta 1:

• You can now instantiate resources from the Resources panel. For example, you can drag and drop a button style onto the artboard and create a button out of it instead of creating a button and applying it as a separate task.
• You can see inner exceptions when an exception happens on the design surface, allowing you to see more details about the cause of an exception.
• You now get font previews in the Text category of the Properties panel which makes it easier to choose your font. 
  After adding an event handler, the XAML file is now automatically saved for you.
• Configuring value editors has been improved. For example, you'll find editing BitmapEffects or adding items to an ItemsControl such as ContextMenu are now much easier to do.

Download Microsoft Expression Blend beta

An updated version of the Expression Design December CTP is now available that no longer expires at the beginning of 2007.   This should let you start testing again with hopefully a minimal interruption. The team appreciates all the great feedback we've been hearing and many of us have taken to reading the news groups daily in order to catch up on the latest issues.

You can download the updated CTP here:
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/expression-design/free-trial.mspx