Unwrapping Silverlight 2

Ahead of the first public Beta of Silverlight 2, Scott posts this overview and follows up with a series of tutorials that will get you up to speed with the breadth of features being introduced:

Part 1: Creating "Hello World" with Silverlight 2 and VS 2008
Part 2: Using Layout Management
Part 3: Using Networking to Retrieve Data and Populate a DataGrid
Part 4: Using Style Elements to Better Encapsulate Look and Feel
Part 5: Using the ListBox and DataBinding to Display List Data
Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Details Scenarios
Part 7: Using Templates to Customize Control Look and Feel
Part 8: Creating a Digg Desktop Version of our Application using WPF

This is just an hors d'oeuvre before the Beta is available for public download. Soon! Hope you love what we've cooked.

Update: Adam does a CliffsNotes take on Scott's posts.

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Free Microsoft Software for Students

Microsoft is making professional development software available at no charge to post-secondary school and university students worldwide. The initiative called DreamSpark was announced yesterday starting with 11 countries, and will soon grow to more countries over the year.

Among the products available currently are Windows Server, the Expression Suite of products, XNA Game Studio, SQL Server and the new Visual Studio.

Students attending accredited university, college, junior college, community college, or a tertiary/higher education institution can go to the DreamSpark site on MSDN now to sign up.

PS: Kudos to Academic DPE.

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Life at Microsoft

Booyakasha. If you've ever pondered the question, then check this look at life at Microsoft, courtesy of the folks at On10.

Update: inline now...

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Olympics online coverage to be powered by Silverlight

This one is big for my team. My colleagues and I on the Silverlight product development team are enthused about NBC Universal's choice of our platform to power the user experience on their site for the upcoming Beijing 2008 Olympics. I think providing a compelling experience around the thousands of hours of live feeds and on-demand content is just the kind of challenge that Silverlight was built for.

Here's to Silverlight 2.0, of which you'll hear more in the days and months to come.

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Joel Spolsky's brush with Vista's SuperFetch

In a scathing post on the new Safari 3 for Windows, Joel remarks how slow the browser is while starting up. He likens Apple's performance claims as reality distortion, but later makes an update saying:

The more I run Safari on Vista, the faster it launches. Am I hallucinating? Is there a cosmic force that means just when I complain about Safari taking 57 seconds to launch, as soon as that complaint is made public, it launches much more quickly? Am I going insane? Or is someone playing a clever prank on me?

Well Joel, you're not going insane. Ironically this is Microsoft's Windows Vista coming to Safari's rescue. You see, Windows Vista has a little known feature called SuperFetch, which

enables programs and files to load much faster than they would on Windows XP–based PCs.

When you're not actively using your computer, background tasks—including automatic backup programs and antivirus scans—run when they will least disturb you. These background tasks can take up system memory space that your programs had been using. On Windows XP–based PCs, this can slow progress to a crawl when you attempt to resume work.

SuperFetch monitors which applications you use the most and preloads these into your system memory so they'll be ready when you need them. Windows Vista also runs background programs, like disk defragmenting and Windows Defender, at low priority so that they can do their job but your work always comes first.

The Windows team has figured out that the more you use something, the more you must like it and the easier and faster it should be to load. But you won't see that in a Microsoft ad.

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Microsoft Surface: What WPF Can Do For You

Today Microsoft announced the Surface, a new line of consumer products that turn "an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, dynamic surface that provides effortless interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. Beginning at the end of this year, consumers will be able to interact with Surface in hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues." If the videos on the Surface website seem impressive, you haven't even scratched the surface yet. Using the real product is way cooler!

The Surface team has thus far been operating under the radar. I'm proud to say that the device runs a variant of Windows Vista and uses Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for its user experience. It shows how WPF can be a game changer when you exploit its power. It is understandable that the first generation of the product - shipping in the second half of 2007 - is out of reach of the average consumer, and is focused on businesses. I expect that in a couple iterations, component prices, usage scenarios and its economic network will work their way to the mainstream. We've seen that story before. These are good tidings for designers and developers; as Rob points out, this is a "nice device to leverage some of your WPF programming skills on!". This is a great time to pick up and hone those WPF, Silverlight and Expression tools skills.

Congratulations to our friends in the Surface team on the public unveiling of a fantastic product.

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We Popfly High, No Lie, You Know It

With what it states as "another piece in [Microsoft's] company-wide outreach in helping non-professional developers build everything from Xbox games to Robotics to custom Web applications using Windows Home Server", Microsoft today announced a new service called Popfly.It comprises a set of online visual tools so non-programmers can create web experiences, and a social aspect involving a community watering hole where people and view, share, remix and rate content. And did I mention Popfly was built using Silverlight? Popfly is currently accepting limited participants for its private alpha.

Personally speaking, Soma's and John Montgomery's talk about extending tools like Visual Studio to the Live world, is starting to make sense. Of course, this is just a step in that direction. John was kind enough to give us on the Silverlight team a sneak peek at Popfly at a Friday Beer Bash some weeks ago. As a fan of UNIX Pipes programming paradigm, I was immediately fascinated by some aspects of the Popfly Creator. We'd have loved to have shown this off circa Mix 07, but John and team rightly were looking at Maker Faire as the correct avenue to showcase this.

See one such Popfly creation in action here.

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New To Programming?

Microsoft's Beginner Developer learning center has great resources for beginner programmers intending to learn web and desktop programming basics. There's also a Kids Corner.

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Windows Vista in a browser using WPF/E

From the Microsoft Slovenia team with assistance from local agency Renderspace, here's a Windows Vista demo using WPF/E. Very cool! Requires Feb 2007 CTP of WPF/E which went live yesterday.

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Great apps powered by ClickOnce

I've posted previously about XBAPs, but here are a couple links to standalone Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications that use the ClickOnce deployment model.

ITN has a cool new news -video application called ITN Hub Player, accompanied by a Windows Vista sidebar gadget. See http://www.itn.co.uk/vista/

OTTO, the 2nd largest online retailer in the world, just went live with a very impressive ClickOnce-deployed WPF application which completely changes the online store as you know it. See http://www.otto.de/vista

This app also uses Windows CardSpace and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), both .NET Framework 3.0 components and part of Windows Vista.

I love seeing ClickOnce being used in mainstream consumer oriented applications, and will be posting about these more often. And that's not just 'cause my team owns WPF Deployment and works closely with the ClickOnce team. Having had my share of munging around with MSIs, I think ClickOnce is by far the most superior application deployment technology out there for rich client apps on Windows. It provides a sophistocated update mechanism for your apps, taking the pain out of that process. If you haven't heard of it before, or aren't using it in your .NET apps, I think the apps above will make you reconsider.

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Windows Vista: Now In A Store Near You

After "the biggest product launch in Microsoft's history", Windows Vista is now available in a store near you and via fine merchants online. This is a culmination of years of work done by my teams and countless others in Microsoft, hardware & software partners and OEMs. In the WPF team, as elsewhere, we've fervently believed: "if you build it, they will come". So although I don't claim to speak for Microsoft on this blog, above all, a big shout out to all of the developers and creative professionals who patiently evaluated our CTPs, Betas and the like and gave us great feedback; and to the people who continue to bet their businesses on our platforms, frameworks and APIs. Thank you for your support. Please keep telling us what we're doing wrong, and what we're getting right. Here's to building applications we've dreamed of!

Tags: Windows Vista, WPF, WinFX, NetFX3, Microsoft

Windows Presentation Foundation, is the next generation presentation sub-system and managed code framework for Windows. It is a .NET Framework 3.0 component, present on Windows Vista and a free download for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003.

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Dominoken

KF sent us a link to this beautiful XAML Browser Application (XBAP) created by Bascule for the Windows Vista launch in Japan:

DOMINOKEN

Requires .NET Framework 3.0 or Windows Vista. I've seen it several times, changing the camera angle and zoom settings. Never gets old!

Tags: WinFX, NetFX3, WPF, XBAP, 3D, Windows Vista

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