Silverlight 3 to launch July 10.

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

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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.

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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.