Silverlight

For Developers: Free Silverlight for Windows Phone ebook now available

November 22, 2011 | By Surur

Silverlight-for-Windows-Phone-Toolkit-indepth-ebook

With the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace booming, here is something to help the new developer get up to stream.

Boryana Miloshevska, software developer with more than 6 years of professional experience with .NET technologies, has released a free e-book called Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit In Depth.

The book covers:

246 Pages
Published Date: 11 Oct 2011
Includes all controls from the Windows Phone Toolkit Aug 2011!
22 Chapters!
Full Source Code
Based on Windows Phone 7.1 (aka 7.5) Mango!

She is a co-founder of www.windowsphonegeek.com – one of the biggest windows phone development communities. She is also working as a consultant in the areas of Silverlight and Windows Phone application development.

The book can be here: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit In Depth.

Via Esphoneblog.com

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Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit In Depth FREE e-book

October 17, 2011 | By bmiloshevska

“Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit In Depth” is the first FREE book that covers all about Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit in depth with detailed examples and full source code:

246 Pages
Includes all controls from the Windows Phone Toolkit Aug 2011!
22 Chapters!
Full Source Code
Based on Windows Phone 7.1 (aka 7.5) Mango!

Here is the link to the book:
www.windowsphonegeek.com/WPToolkitBook

About the Author
Boryana Miloshevska is a software developer with more than 6 years of professional experience with .NET technologies. She is a co-founder of www.windowsphonegeek.com – one of the biggest windows phone development communities. She is also working as a consultant in the areas of Silverlight and Windows Phone application development.
What else?
• Active blogger and tech enthusiast trying to contribute to the windows phone development community in various ways. Author of more than 300 development articles, tutorials and guides related to Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 technology most of which published on www.windowsphonegeek.com .
• MCTS, MCPD Web and Desktop development
• Winner of the Microsoft “Engineering Excellence Achievement” Award
• MSc Computer Science
• MSc Technology Entrepreneurship (UCL , London UK)

About WindowsPhoneGeek.com
WindowsPhoneGeek.com is one of the best resources for Windows Phone Development offering high quality development articles, tutorials, source code, examples, tips, resources, demo videos, latest development news and more.

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Silverlight MVP’s Take On “Silverlight Is Dead” Stories

September 19, 2011 | By Pradeep

As BUILD conference was going on past week, some developers started expressing their feelings on Silverlight as “Silverlight Is Dead”. Its not new to Silverlight as similar situation happened after PDC last year and Microsoft arranged a separate event headed by Scott Guthrie to show some features of next version of Silverlight to put these foul stories to rest. Tired of these stories, Vikram Pendse, Silverlight MVP and also an IBM employee have posted his own views on Silverlight. Here are some of them,

Few points I would like to take up for discussion -

Why people want every time a commitment from Microsoft Senior representatives like Scott Gu or Steve Ballmer to come on stage and explicitly say that “Silverlight is not dead !!” ? – Same for WPF and other technologies.

Unless one technology is not dead, New and enhanced things never comes up..I mean do you still want Visual Basic 6 if I show you strength of VB.NET or WPF for that matter. Why people are not shouting when Classical ASP,VB6 etc gone dead ? Because there was a need of .NET/WPF somewhere and that’s why they are present today. Same is the case for HTML5,Metrofy Apps and WinRT

Its a long post discussing many stuff on current state of Silverlight in Microsoft’s developer stack, etc, with the conclusion as follows,

I wrote all this to just trigger positive thought process instead of just shouting and spreading death news of Silverlight. Some things I know you have in mind and which are not clear,but frankly for some of the things even I also don’t have answers and clear vision since this is all a preview platform.

Picture will be more clear when entire platform will go to Beta and then RTM mode.So till the time instead of wasting time in nonsense discussion..lets focus and new Metro UI App using XAML, New HTML5 + JS platform,New Visual Studio 2011 and .NET 4.5 and lets get some good hold on that before making final judgment on Silverlight’s future.

In some of the section above I may sound arrogant and away from subject, but intention of this post is to keep positive focus about platform and build healthy and non biased thought process.

So..Silverlight is dead ? Look back..Think again..Do analysis,spend some time on new platform and then jump to conclusion.

Remember ! Blogs,Forum comments or News blogs people does not deal with your actual client, They are not real decision maker. Its only you and you and you who will take a call on your App Development platform and for Silverlight..lets Microsoft decide on that..It will be better !

His post is worth a read. Read it here.

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Windows 8 apps will be easily portable to Windows Phone 7

September 13, 2011 | By Surur

In a demo at the BUILD keynote Steve Sinofsky demonstrated a Silverlight application being ported by changing only one line of code from Windows 8 to Windows Phone 7.

This would increase the addressable market for bot Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 developers immensely, and removes the concern developers had that Windows Phone 7 will become a Silverlight island in a sea of HTML5.

See more of our coverage of the BUILD conference at Microsoft-News.com here.

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For Developers: Microsoft releases Mango Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit update

August 17, 2011 | By Surur

Microsoft has announced the immediate availability of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit (August 2011) add-on which will make it even easier for developers to create applications which match the look and feel of native Windows Phone 7 apps.

The toolkit includes components like toggle switches, page transitions, picker controls and more and has been localized into all of the Windows Phone ‘Mango’ languages.

New controls include:

LongListSelector has been rebuilt and redesigned to take advantage of the new smooth scrolling and off-thread touch input support in ‘Mango’. This is a buttery-smooth control for showing lists, including grouping and jump list support.

MultiselectList control enables multiple selection for easily working with lists of data, similar to the Mail app’s capability.

LockablePivot adds a special mode to the Pivot control where only the current item is shown (often used with multiple selection).

ExpanderView is a primitive items control that can be used for expanding and collapsing items (like the threaded views in the Mail app).

HubTile lets you add beautiful, informative, animated tiles to your application, similar to the new People groups in ‘Mango’.

ContextMenu control has been reworked: performance improvements and visual consistency fixes.

ListPicker now supports multiple selection.

RecurringDaysPicker lets your users select a day of the week.

Date & Time Converters localized to 22 languages. The converters let developers easily display date and time in the user interface in one of the many styles found throughout the phone’s UI, from a short date like ‘7/19’ to relative times like ‘about a month ago’.

Page Transitions have improved performance for a more responsive feel.

PhoneTextBox is an early look at an enhanced text box with action icon support, watermarking, etc.

All error messages and interface elements have been localized to all of the supported languages, making for a great experience for users around the world.

The collection is free and open source and can be downloaded from Codeplex here.

Read more at the Windows Team Blog here.

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What Does Microsoft Have Up Its Sleeve For MIX’11?

April 4, 2011 | By Pradeep

Microsoft has updated its MIX’11 conference schedule with 11 mystery Windows Phone sessions. All these Windows Phone sessions are still marked as “TBA” (to be announced). Based on the tags associated with the sessions and the speakers, most of the sessions are related to Silverlight and Windows Phone. Microsoft may be revealing some features related to Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone 7 development, Application performance evaluation tools along with some Windows Live My Phone features. Apart from Windows Phone sessions, Microsoft has various sessions based on Windows Azure, Internet Explorer 9, Silverlight,etc, Lets us see what Microsoft has in its sleeve this MIX.

Source: All About Microsoft

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IE9 coming to Windows Phone 7 much sooner than expected, support Silverlight?

March 1, 2011 | By Surur

We already know that the browser on Windows Phone 7 is modular, and can be updated separately from the rest of the OS.

Now we have a hot tip from the same person who accurately foretold the pre-NoDo update, that IE9 may come to Windows Phone 7 well before the Mango update towards the end of the year, and will in fact support Silverlight in addition to HTML5.

Given the reputation of our tipster I am inclined to believe we will be seeing a IE9 update pushed out well before fall 2011, making Windows phone 7 not just the smoothest platform, but soon also the one with the fastest browser.

Thanks Sylar for the tip.

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Face recognition for WP7

January 4, 2011 | By l3v5y

WP7 developer Vangos Pterneas has released a face recognition system for Windows Phone 7, based on porting Rene Schulte’s open source Facelight libraries.

Using Facelight is a piece of cake. You only need two XAML image controls placed in the same position. The upper one (named ImgResult) will contain a red ellipse specifying the recognized face and the other one (named ImgOverlay) will contain the original bitmap source.

The software is actually a skin recogniser, and can only detect one face per image; its utility is currently limited. It is, however, an excellent example of how Silverlight is helping to bring “write once, run everywhere”, long the holy grail of software developers, closer to reality.

You can read all about Facelight, and download the source code, at Vangos Pterneas’ blog here.

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Silverlight coming to Xbox 360–the circle is complete

November 22, 2010 | By Surur

slxbox Microsoft has put out a job advert asking for a software development engineer to bring Silverlight to the Xbox 360.

Silverlight is already the development basis of Windows phone 7, and of course already runs on the desktop. Bringing Silverlight to the Xbox 360 will effectively bring the platform to the TV, and completing Microsoft’s “3 screen and a cloud” vision. It will also effectively make the Xbox 360 and Windows phone 7 code-equivalent devices, with both supporting XNA and Silverlight.

There is a significant possibility this move precedes Microsoft opening up the Xbox 360 as a more open 3rd party development platform, to compete against platforms like Apple TV or Google TV, and may bring Windows phone 7 apps to the console.

Read the job ad after the break.

Continue reading →

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The Future of Silverlight

November 1, 2010 | By Pradeep

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There is lots of debate going on in Internet regarding future of Silverlight.

What is true is that Microsoft’s Silverlight strategy has definitely shifted. Their initial strategy was promoting Silverlight as a cross platform, cross browser runtime competing against Flash. Now after 3 years, this goal no longer seems as important.

Why is it so ? Even Flash has become less important nowadays since their platform is not supported in all the devices such as successful iOS devices. Even Microsoft cant develop a run time that’s truly cross platform, so has decided to support HTML 5 as the truly cross platform/cross browser platform.

Does this mean HTML5 replaces Silverlight on a feature by feature basis? Absolutely Not. Above is a slide from WPF Today and Tomorrow session at PDC’10 commented by a LaurentDuveau which answers many of the questions raised regarding the future of the technology.

Apart from being development platform for Windows Phone applications it also have some sweet spots as mentioned by Bob Muglia such as media and business applications.

Much more significant however is that Silverlight still has a cross-platform future out of browser which may make it even more important eventually.

Microsoft is bringing all the features of Silverlight to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and it will be supported natively. What does it mean ? The vNext of WPF will be part of Windows 8. If Silverlight is within WPF it will be able to run all the Silverlight apps without any change in code. This should allow Windows Phone 7 applications to run natively on Windows 8 tablets, which makes great sense.

While it often takes deep reading between the lines to get to Microsoft’s deeper strategy we know they are currently on an integration kick, which should bring all their products much closer together in the near future, and Silverlight, on the desktop and mobile devices, will be like HTML5 on the web, the glue which ties all the parts together.

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Flash Coming to WP7 Devices Confirmed by Adobe

October 25, 2010 | By Pradeep

At Adobe MAX, Adobe’s worldwide developer conference, they announced Adobe® AIR® 2.5 software for televisions, tablets, smartphones and desktop operating systems. There is no word on Adobe Air availability on Windows Phone 7 platform. But Adobe have confirmed that Flash is coming to future versions of Windows Phone. Here is the exact words from their press release.

With Flash Player 10.1 available on Android and Google TV today, BlackBerry platform, webOS, future versions of Windows® Phone, LiMo, MeeGo,and Symbian OS are also expected to support Flash Player 10.1.

I think its now time for Microsoft to announce the availability of Silverlight for Windows Phone web browser at PDC’10 conference to be held at Oct-28,29. What do you think?

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My Little Farm–a new twist on Tower Defence, now with online playable demo

September 26, 2010 | By Surur

My Little Farm for Windows Phone 7 CK7 Studios have let us know they have now released the final demo of their new Windows Phone 7 game, My Little Farm, which combines Tower Defence with a dash of Space Invaders and whack-a-mole, all set in an idyllic pastoral setting.

You play the role of the farmer defending your sleep from the Pixie invading force, and like most Tower Defence games you have to set up artillery to defend your position. Unlike those games however these guns do not fire themselves, adding an extra layer of excitement to the usual boring but tense part of the typical tower defence game.

All this of course before the sheep come along and mess everything up…

Give the Silverlight game a try right now at www.ck7studios.com and don’t forget to Facebook Like the demo on the same page.

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For Developers: Windows Phone 7 development now possible using Visual Basic

September 23, 2010 | By Surur

Silverlight and visual basic come together for the first time.

Apparently one of the most requested developer features, Microsoft has made available a Community Technology Preview which allows Silverlight development for Windows phone 7 using the Visual Basic Language.

The tool requires Windows 7 or Vista and one need the final version of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools and also to have Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Premium or Ultimate already installed.

The software does not unfortunately support XNA game development at this time, and also does not integrate with Expression Blend for Windows Phone, but it is likely Visual Basic developers are not too concerned with these features.

What it would allow however is the rapid porting of many enterprise applications developed in this language to Microsoft’s new platform.

Read more about the tool and download it at Microsoft here.

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