Silverlight

Silverlight comes to Symbian first

July 6, 2010 | By Surur

Microsoft has delivered their Silverlight runtime for select Nokia handsets running Symbian. Unlike Windows Phone 7 the runtime will enable Silverlight applications such as the Bing app above both inside and outside the browser.

Supported handsets include the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97 and Nokia N97 Mini and other Series 60 5th edition devices.

While is seems unfortunately that Microsoft could deliver Silverlight for Symbian and not Windows Mobile 6.5, there does seem some synergy emerging for Windows Phone 7, with developers likely able to easily move Silverlight applications from the platform to the other.

The download is available in Nokia’s Ovi store here.

Read more about the runtime at Microsoft’s Silverlight site here.

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Zoomery.com MIXes up Deepzoom

July 4, 2010 | By Surur

Microsoft makes quite a bit of fuss over their DeepZoom Silverlight technology, but I don’t think I have ever seen a better use of it than at Mix.Zoomery.com, where the website presents 1.2 Gigapixels of information in a beautiful and easily digestible format.

The web application also translated very easily to a Windows Phone 7 application, as can be seen above, with over 90% of code re-use.

Read more about the technology here, and see the application in action at Zoomery.com here.

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DroppyPop : a nice Windows Phone 7 game you can play right now

June 26, 2010 | By Surur

It seems guaranteed that Windows Phone 7 will launch with quite a few games, but that is still a few months off.

Fortunately with much of the software on Windows Phone 7 running in Silverlight, the resulting emulator app can run as easily on the web.

DroppyPop is a Windows Phone 7 game by Spritehand where you control a rag doll which is falling through an endless sky of balloons. The purpose of the game is to pop as many balloons as you can for points while avoiding the bombs and baddies along the way.

We will have to wait for the Windows Phone 7 version, but the Silverlight version can be played right now, right here. (See if you can beat my high score!)

Final release of Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 now available

May 18, 2010 | By Surur

The final version of Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is now available to download. Silverlight is one of the two run times available on Windows Phone 7, and will form the basis of most non-game applications on the platform.

Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 includes many essential features to help developers work with your Silverlight 4 applications including:

New interactive design surface
Working with Styles and Resources
Go To Value Definition lets you directly locate nested styles
Using the new "Data Can" to pinpoint data hookups
Moving stuff around in complex Grid panels using the new right click "goodies"

Check out this 20 minute Silverlight.tv video above which shows most of the new Designer features in action.

The latest build can be downloaded by following the instructions at www.silverlight.net/getstarted .

Via Mobileblab.com

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Windows Phones 7 Series Silverlight 3D Web App

April 21, 2010 | By WenWP

Windows Phones 7 Series is getting new development every day before being released, and this new web browsing 3D tab seems to be my favorite. The concept behind this is simple, you flick around a cub of your opened tabs then click on one of them, and you are multi-browsing –that should be a word. The show was held in India at TechEd 2010 and shows the potential of Silverlight and WP7S.

This is quite impressive, with all this, I am a little excited to see what else WP7S can do. The only thing I see about this that is a little weird is the close similarity to SPB Mobile Shell 3.5’s cub page selector.

Watch the video:

Source: BeingManan.com, via:Pocketnow

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For Developers: Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4.0 launches, brings improved Windows Phone 7 developer tools

April 12, 2010 | By Surur

Over the weekend Microsoft has launched the latest iteration of their Visual Studio product, Visual Studio 2010. Silverlight 4.0 will also be released later this week to the web for download.

The combination brings further improved tools to developers, such as multi-monitor support and better debugging tools.

Windows Phone 7 developers specifically can however expect the ability to more easily create good-looking applications with the built-in integrated phone design surfaces.

Silverlight 4, of which elements exists in the current Windows Phone 7 build, delivers media and business application capabilities that enable developers to deliver application experiences on or off the Web. New features in Silverlight 4 include extended out-of-browser capabilities, enhancements for enterprise application developers, and more than 60 customizable pre-written controls to quickly build rich, interactive applications.

“We’re excited to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2010 with developers around the world today,” said Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, in a statement. “Customer and partner feedback was instrumental in shaping this release. The functionality of Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 creates a powerful and unique combination, opening up new opportunities for developers to build applications that take advantage of new and existing devices, as well as emerging platforms like cloud services.”

Eddie Amos, general manager of developer platform and tools marketing at Microsoft told eWEEK a key theme for VS2010 was simplicity. "We wanted to be able to allow developers to keep it simple, but dream big," he said, noting that the Microsoft tools story has been consistent for many years. That consistency enables the company to deliver tools and development platforms for developers that allow developers to use what they are familiar with to create applications that can run across a variety of environments — from the cloud to mobile devices.

"A lot of the same components are in place, so developers can leverage the skills they have to build web applications and other types of applications from within Visual Studio," Amos said. "We can enable them to optimize their code for the different platforms."

Microsoft is kicking off a global launch of its flagship application development environment, with more than 150 developer-focused events around the world today.

New York Times Silverlight app ported to Windows Phone 7

April 3, 2010 | By Surur

Michael S. Scherotter, Media Experience Evangelist for Microsoft is doing his bit to spread the Silverlight Windows Phone 7 word.

Noting that all .NET and Silverlight developers are also Windows Phone developers, he managed to quickly and easily port the New York Times Silverlight Kit into a Windows Phone 7 app. He notes it was simply a question of adding “a few #if statements to the code”, which he has made available at CodePlex site.

Read more about the project at MSDN here.

Will the Silverlight base of Windows Phone 7 see an avalanche of apps coming to the OS and is it worth sacrificing native apps? Let us know below.

Via FuzeMobility.com

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WP7 + Silverlight + Twitter = Silver Tweet

April 3, 2010 | By l3v5y

As those that follow me on Twitter may have noticed, I’ve started work on a Silverlight Twitter client.

At current, it’s feature set is limited. It currently supports posting a new tweet, and viewing your latest tweet/location/profile image.

It’s under active development, and if anyone has any requests, let me know and I’ll see what I can build in!

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Windows Phone 7 series will also support DeepZoom

April 2, 2010 | By Surur

Windows Mobile users were pretty miffed when Microsoft released there Seadragon DeepZoom client on the iPhone last year.

They will be however relieved to hear that Windows Phone 7, with its Silverlight base, will in fact support the technology and make it available to developers directly.

According to Alex Yakhnin’s MSDN blog its simply a matter of dragging and dropping a control on your Visual Studio page, and that the MultiScaleImage contol works exactly the same as on the desktop.

Read more about this feature to spice up your apps at his blog here.

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Windows Phone 7 Silverlight isn’t “Silverlight lite”

March 28, 2010 | By Surur

In an interview with Techradar Microsoft corporate vice president Scott Guthrie insisted the Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 was not watered down in any way.

"This isn’t Silverlight ‘lite’, it isn’t Silverlight ‘different’, it is Silverlight," corporate vice president Scott Guthrie told TechRadar. It includes "all the APIs of the current Silverlight version 3 and quite a bit of Silverlight 4; it’s a superset plus some extras".

The difference is less about what the phone can run and more about thinking about what you need on a phone. "Pretty much all the features that we think are mobile-specific, that you’d want in the phone, are there," says Guthrie.

"There are features like printing and more business features that don’t necessarily make sense in the phone, but all the graphics, the access to the webcam and microphone, those we already have."

Microsoft has also done a lot of optimisation of the way Silverlight is rendered on Windows Phone, mainly, says Guthrie, "because on the phone you have ARM processors typically and instead of one giant one you have about four cores the more work you’re doing on a processor – one quarter of an Arm processor – the slower your app is going to be. So we did a lot of work to partition the graphics operators out across multiple CPUs, and the animation system. We have to do that because otherwise you can’t get above 12 frames per second."

Interestingly, he promises that those improvements will make their way back to desktop Silverlight; "probably in an update to Silverlight 4 and certainly by [the next version]".

While having a full implementation of Silverlight on Windows Phone is encouraging, we know at present Silverlight will not actually function in the browser yet, dashing hopes of being able to access Silverlight-based websites such as Netflix streaming straight out of the box. This is however a feature expected to arrive eventually.

WP7: Software distribution and development

March 14, 2010 | By l3v5y

I was reading up on what’s happening at MIX2010, and discovered this interesting snippet:

With Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft offers a fresh approach to phone software, distinguished by smart design and truly integrated experiences that bring to the surface the content people care about from the web and applications. Windows Phone 7 gave us the opportunity to start from scratch and create an application platform that draws on the best tools and technologies available today, to give developers and designers an opportunity to reach an evolving mobile customer. The Windows Phone 7 application platform is based on Silverlight and XNA, two robust and mature frameworks used by hundreds of thousands of developers today to build compelling applications and games for the Web, the PC, and Xbox. Applications and games are built with Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Expression Blend. Developers and designers publish their completed applications and games using the Windows Phone Marketplace. Marketplace provides developers and designers an open and structured ecosystem with the structure, transparency, and support they need in order to deliver on high quality, trustworthy experiences for end users.

This implies both that software development is entirely Silverlight/XNA based, and that software may be published exclusively through the Windows Phone Marketplace.

This may mean that software development is entirely managed code (as in .Net) as on the desktop platform Silverlight is exclusively .Net, however, on the Windows Embedded Blog, we find some potentially very good news:

The Silverlight for Windows Embedded feature is a UI framework for out of browser applications (or shells) and is based on the Win32/native API, not managed code. This feature gives you the ability to have designers create UI in Expression Blend, export their XAML and then have you hook up events in Win32/C/C++ at the back end. This means that designers get to “design”, and developers get to “develop”.

Since WP7 is based on CE7 this may not apply, but let us hope it does.

The distribution through Windows Phone Marketplace could well help Microsoft overcome one of the major issues with the current Marketplace – the lack of apps on it – because developers would have to use it. It could however be less beneficial, as the diversity of software for WM6.5 is due in part to the fact that nothing needs to get certified for you to install it.

Would you prefer an entirely controlled ecosystem (as the iPhone has) or a much more free one (as we have now) or somewhere in between?

MIX2010 and Windows Embedded Blog.

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Windows Phone 7 styled Silverlight Sudoku games gives a taste of the OS

March 14, 2010 | By Surur

Rishi from Orktane.com has published this Silverlight based Sudoku game which is a port of his iPhone app ported using nRoute Toolkit.

The software gives a taste of the UI we can see in these puzzle-type games and I must say, the cut-off text started grating pretty quickly.

What the game does however demonstrate is the ease with which good-looking user interfaces can be created in Silverlight relatively quickly, and will hopefully mean we can look forward to a large number of good looking applications soon after the release of Windows phone 7.

Read more about the project at Orktane.com here.

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Windows Phone 7 development docs leaked

February 18, 2010 | By Surur

Click for larger versions.

We can always count on XDA-Developers to bring us the news early. In this case it is some snippets of the developer documentation for Windows Phone 7. The above bit confirms the OS is multi-tasking capable, but then we knew this already.

More after the break.

Continue reading →

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