Last week I mentioned that Silverlight is designed to work for all languages, platforms, browsers, etc right? Right.

But you are a smart cookie. You know that deep down, the boys at Redmond really want you to develop with ASP.NET right? Right.

So how do they lure you? Simple…better tools. While you can call Silverlight objects from any language, if you want to use the sweet tools they are making, then you have to be in ASP.NET.

The next question is: what are these tools and when do they come out (guess that is really 2 questions)? Glad you asked.

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Although TechEd is officially over, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t keep on giving. Here are some links from the conference concerning Silverlight.

I will also be putting these on my WPF/Silverlight resources article as well.
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So, one of the coolest things here at the conference is Silverlight. That’s the good news…the bad news is there aren’t a whole lotta sessions on it because it is not quite ready for primetime. The main one was given by Scott Guthrie, and it was really amazing (it helps that Scott is a great speaker).

This article details a few things:

1. The different versions of the platform
2. When it is coming out
3. Where it fits in the overall scheme of things
4. Highlights from the TechEd session
5. Finally, why I think it is going to make such a big splash

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So here I am soakin’ up the WPF goodness here at TechEd. I have been to so many talks now, my mind needs to take a nap. Good thing I took notes.

So my more “in depth” coverage will have to come later after I process this stuff, but here are some highlights about WPF that I have picked up.

• WPF is deployable on both the desktop and the browser (called an XBAP…another winning name)
• It uses the full .NET framework (unlike Silverlight which I will talk about later).
• You can use Click Once to deploy it (while it is outside of the scope of this blog, if you are developing desktop apps, you owe it to yourself to look into that tech).
• WPF is made for 2D - Using scalable, vector-based graphics, the WPF animation, images, and graphics are really efficient.
• WPF is made for 3D - Since Direct3D is the foundation for WPF’s graphical capabilities, it can do just about anything (including games, albeit on a somewhat restricted basis).
• What really struck me when watching the demos and such is how easy doing the animation stuff is. I have done my fair share of Flash, and I always thought that even the relatively easy stuff was overly tedious. This just isn’t the case when working with Blend.
• Controls get an upgrade
  • Textboxes can have a spell checker embedded - Not 100% sure how this works, but its a pretty sweet idea.
  • All controls natively support Ink for use in tablets, or just with a mouse. For the most part, this is just fluff, but I can definitely think of some scenarios where this would be genuinely cool
  • Textblock is like a normal textbox, but on steriods. It is incredibly customizable and supports wrapping, trimming, and formatting.
  • InkCanvas is a control that uses Ink as its primary input. Think Surface, and you will see the potential
• Flow Documents. These things are pretty sweet. Basically they are completely scalable panels that can support a newspaper-like layout (I will have some cool links to post when I get back showing this in action).
• WPF is fully skinnable. While you can’t use CSS (this is a desktop technology afterall), the framework does support skinning and theming so if your client suddenly changes your color scheme, you don’t have to redo everything
• Panels have the ability to size to content which basically is like the autosize on a label, but the content inside can be just about any control
• To use all this graphic goodness, the devs recommend that the client computer has a DirectX 9 capable graphics card. All other requirements are pretty vanilla.

Silverlight…WPF…you have heard the names, you have read a little about them, and now you are ready to take the plunge and build your first “next generation” app.

Getting started in a new technology is always a bit rough. So to help all of you who are itchin’ to get buildin’, here is a list of tutorials, videos, and other resources for both WPF and Silverlight.

This list will grow and change as more resources are uncovered. If you know of a site or article that I missed, please let me know!

*UPDATE - 5/24/07* - Gettin’ close to 40 now…keep ‘em coming.
*Update - 6/12/07 - Added some links to the Silverlight demos shown at TechEd.

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So, as I mentioned this morning, Microsoft is slowly and steadily releasing more information about their new Silverlight technology platform. Some interesting stuff has been released so far, and I thought I would share it with y’all (some of my Texas roots there).

The big announcement is about the new “Silverlight Streaming” which essentially is a place where developers can stream out their silverlight apps for free. While the product is in Alpha/Beta stages, they are giving any developers up to 4 GB of free storage space that can be used to stream video and applications up to 700 Kbps.

Once they release developers get free streaming up to “one million minutes”. After that you will have ads or have to pay a “nominal fee”…who knows what that means.

I, for one, think this is pretty sweet. One of the bad things about playing around with new web technologies is you typically had to get hosting just to play around. With this service, you can play around all you want and not have to pay a dime. If you are using more than a million minutes of streaming time, then I would think that you are getting some nice traffic which should be able to pay for any “nominal fee”.

You can find more about it here. Also, here is a link to a Microsoft blog post to help you get started.

Another big announcement is the simple fact that you can program Silverlight apps using C#. Why is this a big deal? Well, simply put, it allows non-windows developers to create Silverlight apps. I think in the coming months/years Silverlight is going to be a big deal and reaching out to the non-MS crowd will be an important part of that.

One final note for the day…if you want to see a really cool “Mix” app, you should check out mixme by thirteen23. The pictures part is a bit seizure inducing, but it gives you a great feel for what is possible with WPF and Silverlight.

What if a button didn’t have to look like a button? What if it could look like anything you wanted it to? Lets say a book that was sitting on a shelf. That isn’t too fancy…you can do that right now with images and CSS.

Ok…but what if, when the user clicked on the book, it slid forward and got larger, flipped a few pages and then showed you the content inside. That can be done in Flash right? Well…kinda. Just like you can make a 2D image look 3D, you can make Flash behave 3D-ish, but it doesn’t have a very solid 3D engine.

Yesterday I took the long view and talked a little about building UIs for a keyboard-less world. That world is coming…

However, even the comfortable world we live in right now is about to change in a big way. I have talked about it before but WPF is on the next horizon and it promises to bring a whole new slew of goodies that has the potential to impact UI developers in a big way.
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So, as of yesterday Microsoft announced at the National Association of Broadcasters conference and through its various blogs that it is now calling WPF/e…wait for it…Silverlight.

Why is this important? The name isn’t, but the technology behind it is. The name simply gives us something much shnazzier to call the WPF/e (that didn’t really roll off the tongue). WPF/e as I mentioned before is the next wave of web technologies courtesy of the guys in Redmond. Releasing the new name is simply the first of many announcements regarding this tech that will be coming over the next few months.
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So most of the time all you hear about nowadays is how awesome the web is, but truth be told, there are a whole lotta developers who never write any code for the web…sad but true.

When people think of business or desktop apps, they think of boring grey boxes that have boring grey buttons on them. If a designer gets really fancy, there might be an icon somewhere. Not the stuff of legend to be sure (but it pays the bills right?).

Enter WPF and Xaml and say goodbye to the boring old grey forms and buttons (rejoice!).
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