Andy Weston's Blog

Silverlight 3 is now available for download  from MSDN.  It seems pretty crazy that MS was able to add so many features so quickly, the last release was less than a year ago.  I haven’t explored all the new features yet but the first thing I plan on looking at is the new Expression Blend 3 which has a tool called  SketchFlow that lets you protoype and share mockups of programs easily.  The bonus with this approach is that you can iterate designs quickly with higher level stakeholders without spending tons of time engineering code.

Here’s a nice open source charting solution that I’ve been looking at for Silverlight … http://www.visifire.com .  It also works for WPF.  I like the Microsoft Chart Controls too but VisiFire gives you animated Silverlight graphs in a clean way.

Corel Painter is becoming my favorite drawing program for animation.  Not only does it have all of the realistic brushes that you’d ever need, it includes a movie editing mode that lets you paint animation frame by frame.  It doesn’t include any features for keyframing like you would find in animation software but it does give you everything that you would need if you wanted to sit down with a stack of paper and a pencil and create a flip-book style of animation.  There is an onion-skinning mode that let’s you see through the paper to the previous couple of frames so that you can judge  the timing.  Here’s a sample that I created in about 20 minutes …

A team at Infragistics has put together a great collection of visual design patterns for piecing together user interfaces called Quince.  The sample explorer itself has a really nice look to it and it shows off some of the fancy things you can do with Silverlight.

If you have ever wished that you could compare the schemas on two databases to see what the differences are, look no further than xSQL Object … http://www.xsqlsoftware.com  I tried the free version and it worked great, the full versions look even better.

I discovered a nice tool recently that helps you target, market and analyze the keywords and effectiveness of your websites … it is called Web CEO.  It has tools for helping you find good keywords to focus on, for example, it calculates an index called the KEI which represents a ratio of the popularity of a keyword or phrase to the number of competing websites that use it.  This helps you pick specific phrases that have a high enough popularity yet have a low enough competition to be worth going after.  It has other tools for scanning your site and submitting it to search engines too.  Check it out.

There is a new starter kit available out on CodePlex called BlogEngine.NET that has some very nice features to it.  Its a lightweight blog application written in ASP.NET that has most of the usual features you would expect from a blog.  The source code is a nice reference implementation of an ASP.NET app that uses themes, etc., for rendering.  There are some good examples of http handlers and http modules in the code (such as a compressor) that are worth taking a look at.

I’ve been using WordPress to write this blog and I’ve been happy with it.  It is also open source, written in php, and has the advantage of being a much more mature project.

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. — MC Escher

Absurd and impossible … why are all my ideas seeming that way lately?  ;)  –Andy

I’ve been playing around with formatting XAML for Silverlight on the server side and I decided to mash-up some XML from an Amazon web service and get it to display a list of books. Here’s a sample page …

I ran into a few limitations but overall it went pretty well. The plugin doesn’t display .gif’s yet (only .jpgs and .pngs) which is a big disappointment because at least half of the book images coming from Amazon are .gifs. Surely that will be addressed in the final release, whatever the issue is … licensing possibly? I also found that formatting the TextBlocks had to be done very manually, no style sheets or anything so the font changes had to be repeated for each row. If you would like to see the source code, use FireFox, FireBug, hit the Net tab and find the sp1.xaml file.

This is some cool stuff, I need to do some animation with it in my next sample.

ComponentOne is now showing off demos of it’s upcoming Sapphire Silverlight controls.  After installing the plugin, click on the Show Me Sapphire button on the carrousel.  The control gallery includes Flashy versions of buttons and listboxes and docking panels.  These are still alpha versions of the controls (a few things don’t work yet, like the Tab key) but you can really start to see where we are headed with it now.  I’m tempted to write some of my own similar controls here but it looks like in 6 months or so all of the basics should be available.  Lots of people seem to be working on libraries.