SilverlightShow: Silverlight Tools

Changes in the new DeepZoom Composer

0 comments / posted by Martin Mihaylov on Jun 17, 2008 (1 month ago)

What’s new?

Along with the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 a new version of the DeepZoom Composer was also released. After taking a look at it, I thought that it might be useful to make a list with the changes and the new features I found in it.

Output format changed to XML file
Image tags can now be added in the Compose section
Alignment to Grid and guidelines added to the Compose section
Export section enhancements (image formats, Silverlight project output)

Tip: Force firing MouseLeftButtonDown event on any place in a StackPanel

0 comments / posted by Ivan Dragoev on Jun 11, 2008 (1 month ago)

While digging into templating and styling of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 controls, I came into a situation where the event for MouseLeftButtonDown was not triggered when I click on the control. I created a sample project and in the Page.xaml I added the following:

<StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" 
MouseLeftButtonDown="StackPanel_MouseLeftButtonDown">
     <TextBlock Text="Antonio Moreno" Height="22" FontSize="16" />
          <Grid>
               <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                    <ColumnDefinition />
                    <ColumnDefinition />
               </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                    
               <TextBlock Text="AMoreno@hotmail.com" Grid.Column="0"/>
               <TextBlock Text="(5) 555-3932" Grid.Column="1"/>
          </Grid>
</StackPanel>

As you can see from the xaml, I have a StackPanel and an event handler for MouseLeftButtonDown event.

Open Source Silverlight Chart Control

0 comments / posted by Chirag N R1 on May 30, 2008 (1 month ago)

Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components - powered by Microsoft^® Silverlight^™. With Visifire you can create and embed visually stunning animated Silverlight Charts within minutes. Visifire is easy to use and independent of the server side technology. It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML.

Take a tour of beautiful charts in Gallery

Design your own chart in minutes using Chart Designer.

Expression 2 ships!

0 comments / aggregated from Snowball - The Blog on May 02, 2008 (2 months ago) / original article

Exactly 1 year after the release at Mix 07, Microsoft releases Expression Studio 2. The suite of tools for professional designers includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder.
It also works seamlessly with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, solving the age-old designer and developer workflow challenge.

Here are the most important changes that made it into this release of the Expression Suite:

• Expression Web 2 adds support for PHP and Adobe Photoshop import based on customer feedback.

Expression Studio 2 RTMs today!

0 comments / aggregated from Somasegar's WebLog on May 02, 2008 (2 months ago) / original article

Last year the Microsoft Expression team shipped a new suite of tools for creative professionals. This first release of Expression Studio marked a significant milestone in the history of development tools at Microsoft, delivering superior designer-developer workflow and providing designers a set of interaction design, graphic design, Web design, digital asset management and video production tools to deliver better user experiences on Windows and the Web.

I am pleased to announce, just one year later, the team has done it again with today’s release of Microsoft Expression Studio 2.

Using the DeepZoom Composer

2 comments / posted by Martin Mihaylov on Apr 22, 2008 (3 months ago)

Update: You can read about the latest changes in the DeepZoom Composer here.

Introduction

First let’s see what stands behind the name SeaDragon. This is a project of SeaDragon Software, which are a part of the Microsoft Live Labs. Its main purpose is to make the browsing of a large amount of visual information, regardless of the device, smoother and independent from the bandwidth of the network. You can read more about it here. So what’s the DeepZoom Composer? It allows us to use some of the SeaDragon technology in Silverlight. To get started first download the DeepZoom Composer.

First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2

4 comments / aggregated from ScottGu's Blog on Feb 29, 2008 (4 months ago) / original article

Last week I did a First Look at Silverlight 2 post that talked about the upcoming Silverlight 2 Beta1 release. In the post I linked to some end-to-end tutorials I've written that walk through some of the fundamental programming concepts behind Silverlight and WPF, and demonstrate how to use them to build a "Digg Search Client" application using Silverlight:

In this first set of Silverlight tutorials I didn't use a visual design tool to build the UI, and instead focused on showing the underlying XAML UI markup (which I think helps to explain the core programming concepts better).

inkscape at socal linux expo - svg to xaml

0 comments / aggregated from Method ~ of ~ failed on Jan 09, 2008 (6 months ago) / original article

Inkscape.org i had previously done a screencast where i talked about the tools i use to convert vector graphics in SVG format to XAML assets to be consumed in either WPF or Silverlight applicaitons. one of the tools mentioned in the screencast is Inkscape. inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilitis siilar to illustrator, freehand, etc and uses the SVG file format (mostly). ... (read more)

KaXaml 1.0: final release, includes support for Silverlight!

0 comments / aggregated from Snowball - The Blog on Jan 07, 2008 (6 months ago) / original article

KaXaml has finally hit the 1.0 milestone! Indeed, finally!

In case you don't know this great little (free) XAML tool, here's what the official website has to say on it:
Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content (kind of like XamlPad but without the gigabyte of SDK).

There are a lot of new features included in the 1.0 release, including Intellisense support, a new UI and tabsupport. To see an overview of all the new features, go here. One other interesting thing it that it now has basic support for Silverlight too!

Convinced that this can and will make your XAML life easier? Go here for the free download or visit www.kaxaml.com .

Snowball.be - The blog of Gill Cleeren

Silverlight P2P Library

0 comments / aggregated from First Floor Feed on Jan 05, 2008 (6 months ago) / original article

CodePlex really is a fun place. Super easy source control with Visual Studio Team Explorer and lot's of project management functionality. Because I like it so much, I have moved another Silverlight project to CodePlex as well. This time it's the Silverlight P2P Library that is available at http://www.codeplex.com/SilverlightP2P.

The First Floor Silverlight P2P library integrates Silverlight 1.1 (Alpha) with Live Messenger Activities, introducing the concept of Silverlight Activities. The Silverlight class library exposes the P2P Activity API.