Silverlight 3 to launch July 10.

Mary Jo at zdnet write in her blogpost that Microsoft will launch Silverlight 3 the 10. of July:

--

Earlier this year, Microsoft officials said they planned to deliver the final version of Silverlight 3 before the end of 2009. Looks like they meant months before…

Microsoft is planning to launch Silverlight 3 and its Expression Studio 3 family of designer tools on July 10 in San Francisco, company officials said on May 28.

Silverlight 3 adds 3D support, GPU acceleration, H.264 video support and out-of-the-browser capabilities to Silverlight, Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash. The out-of-browser support will add to Silverlight capabilities that are available currently in Adobe AIR.

--

Read the entire blogpost at : http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2912

Nice CowerFlow experience

Jose Fajardo at Cynergy has build a nice Cower Flow experience with Silverlight 3’s Projection feature. Have a look at his great blogpost.

http://www.cynergysystems.com/blogs/page/josefajardo?entry=coverflow_built_using_silverlight_3

Channel 9: Multi-touch .NET Library for Windows 7

Multi-touch is one of the exiting capabilities in Windows 7. Developers and Software venders will now be able build applications and solutions that benefit from these new capabilities and build user experiences that far exceeds that we are used to on Windows plattform. Just look at what HP has done with their HP TouchSmart computers.

Channel 9 has published a series of videos that shows how Developers can start building for Multi-touch.

Windows 7 Mutli Touch Overview

Programming Windows 7 Multi Touch – Part 1

Programming Windows 7 Multi Touch Part-2

Multitouch Library Win7

See Microsoft SecondLight in action.

If you are think Microsoft Surface is amazing. Have a look at the video below. On this video the Microsoft Research Cambridge Lab presents the what they are working on now. The SecondLight. Enjoy!

Smashing Mag: Optimizing Conversion Rates: It’s All About Usability

I just found this very interesting article about how to optimize your conversion rate, at Smashing Mag. The author claims that eCommerce usability improvements usually have a huge impact on conversion rates.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/15/optimizing-conversion-rates-its-all-about-usability/

Silverlight now available within Windows Media Center

The Silverlight team just announced that Silverlight now is supported within Windows Vista Media Center aswell. The first Media Center application made available by Silverlight is the NetFlix Movie rental service.

Tim Harader writes this in his blogpost:

From a consumer’s standpoint the best thing about this implementation is that you get the same great Silverlight-based adaptive streaming experience transparently protected by PlayReady DRM that Netflix offers from their website, but it’s integrated into the Windows Media Center experience. That means you can easily navigate to a variety of content from different providers without having to jump around to various websites. In Windows 7, it gets even better with the addition of a new EPG that integrates both TV programming and Internet content. This furthers Windows Media Center’s goal of being the best place to watch TV on the PC.

You can read the entire announcement on the Silverlight Team Blog.

An exiting day!

Yesterday, Microsoft released the first public Beta of Visual Studio 2010.  VS2010 itself is exiting news, but especially Silverlight developers should have high expectations to this new Visual Studio. If the expectations be meet, is to early to tell. But hopefully this release will make us more independent from Blend and become a adequate IDE for us as well.

Tim Heuer presents som tricks and tips on his blogpost from yesterday. 

A Developers Silverlight Toolbox

When developing business application in Silverlight 2.0, you will soon discover that you toolbox is sadly empty. You have of course the basic tools you need with Visual Studio and Blend, but in addition you will have to invest heavily in building frameworks and custom controls, to actually build someting flashy enough to win out there. Microsoft is off course painfully aware of this and are releasing their Silverlight Toolkit and .NET RIA Services. But that isn’t enough.

My intention is to evaluate som of the tools and framework that’s out there and give a summary of what to use and what to avoid.

Silverlight Toolkit

To boost development of Silverlight applications, Microsoft found it necessary to supply developers and designers a larger toolbox with controls and utilities. Silverlight Toolkit can be downloaded from CodePlex.

http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight Unit Test Framework

Writing unit tests is a natural way to ensure that your code does what its is intended to do. Unit testing in Silverlight is not as easy as we are used to from ordinary .NET and Java development, but this toolkit is a important step in the right direction.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightut

Blacklight (Codeplex)

Blacklight is User Experience focused code sharing project hosted at Codeplex, and is a pleasant acquaintance. The toolkit itself is a collection of controls, samples and visual assets and ideas that I found very handy. Especially their DragDockPanel becomes useful when building a flashy User Experience. But there are also a collection of useful controls like the Clipping Boder, Drop Shadow Border and Drop Shadow Text Control to mention some. You can download both the source and the complied assemblies from CodePlex and view their online showcase her.

http://blacklight.codeplex.com/
http://blogs.msdn.com/mgrayson/archive/2009/03/06/blacklight-v3-0-mar09-released.aspx

Silverlight FX

Silverlight.FX is an application framework for building Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight 2. It focuses on providing building blocks and controls that allows applications to be naturally well-architected

http://projects.nikhilk.net/SilverlightFX/

Microsoft .NET RIA Services

The May 2009 Preview can now be downloaded. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=76bb3a07-3846-4564-b0c3-27972bcaabce&displaylang=en

Microsoft has also published som usefull samples at msdn. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices

This was some usefull linkes. I will update this article with more useful stuff later.

My new blog

New technology that enables modern User Experience gets a lot of attention these days. I myself, find the way these technologies enables Rich Internet Applications especially interesting and think this trend will mean a considerably change in the way we build both Web and Client application in the future. As a former developer, software architect and now as a Business Manager for IT Consultants, I am both interested in the technology itself and in how this will change the way we do business.

I will try to use this blog to dig deep into some topics and to give a brief introduction to others. Since Microsoft technologies is what I know, Silverlight Watch became an exciting title for my blog, but might quickly become misleading. But the future will tell. I hope this will become as interesting for you, as i hope it will be for me.

Thank you!