Psst… if you looking to learn more about LINQ, ASP.NET 3.5, Silverlight 2 or SQL Server 2008, check out this website where you can download the books for free. 
Free downloadable e-book offer- Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2
Check this out, it looks like SimCity. There is a classic HTML view but also a Silverlight view whereby you can zoom in and out. The link is here.
I just build my town named Georgietown
This week project Mono released a Firefox plugin called Moonlight which enables Mozilla Firefox to display Silverlight contents.
I spent one whole night getting Ubuntu 8.04 install in a spare partition and setup Mono Moonlight. Below is the screenshot of a Silverlight website inside Firefox.
Note: Siverlight.net does not render yet but this website seem to comes with all basic Silverlight control and runs well on Moonlight, even it’s animated menus
Ubuntu 8.04 comes with Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 and as mentioned in Moonlight’s download page, changes to the way Firefox 3.0 handles <object> tag breaks Moonlight. I found a walkaround here using a script for Greasemonkey addin. You got to install Greasemonkey then only click on this LINK. Which then you will get a prompt as below.
It’s not perfect yet (note the v0.6 version number) as media like sound and movie cannot play on Moonlight yet but its a good start showing another Microsoft interoperability initiative.
Every time when I apply leave just to relax, I would either go out of town or go learn something new. Most of the time I will end up learning a technology I wanted to check out for sometime. It could be a competing technology like Ruby on Rails, or something developed by Microsoft but not on my scorecard. That is exactly what I strike out to learn today, Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Expression Blend 2.
Just in case your don’t know Blend is part of Expression Studio and it is a tool for designers to create rich interactive user interface applications based on WPF or Silverlight technology.
So what I am keen to find out (because I did some talks on Smart Client recently)in Blend is how to create Smart Client application using WPF which has a lot of funky user experience. To get myself a jumpstart I refer to a new book, Foundation Expression Blend 2. The book is using September preview of Blend and some content might be outdated. Let me warn you first, the author of this book is a designer and not really a developer, and sometimes the comparison he made in the book is confusing for developers but they are OK for designers. For example, his non stop referencing of C# as the code behind language of XAML but never mention about Visual Basic. Commenting that CLR is just like Adobe’s Flash Player (CLR can do so much more!)
Just finished Chapter 5 (total 15 chapters) of the book and I found some of the stuff I like a lot about WPF or Blend:
Screenshots
Brush Transform
Local Brush Resources
Layout controls
Split view (Design view on top with XAML on the bottom)
I just started reading the SharePoint Products and Technologies Protocol Documentation today, quite interesting and profound to found out the level of details released under this document. All the specification of protocols (sometimes I would like to call it APIs) used by SharePoint from system behaviors, WSDL, XML Schemas, managed (and/or unmanaged) APIs as well as Stored Procedures used by SharePoint. Technologies from CAML, SharePoint list, view, search, workflow, administration all the way to the user interface is pretty well covered in this set of documents.
For Microsoft partners it opens up a whole new opportunities for them to build applications on top of SharePoint. (Almost) gone are the time when we try to figure out why SharePoint behave a certain way and there are no official documents to look at. Most of the time we resort to word by word advices from fellows developers in the forum. Imagine now it is possible for developers to write application (esp. those with different client platform) to works seamlessly with Microsoft SharePoint platform.
Besides SharePoint technologies, Microsoft also release Protocol documentations for Windows(incl. .NET Framework), Office and Exchange and also XAML (the markup language for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight); all of these fall under the so called High Volume Products from Microsoft.
They include IE8 Beta1, Expression Suite 2 and Silverlight 2. I just downloaded them… see this weekend got time to try or not.
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By the way, dev.live.com got a facelift with new APIs announced.
Do check out Mix’s website.
Today at SharePoint Conference, Microsoft announces Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint. It consists of source code and guidance for developers describing how to use Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft SharePoint together in business applications and Internet Web sites. SharePoint applications that use Web Parts can now be built using Silverlight user interface elements. This capability enables a fresh look at data exposed through SharePoint Products and Technologies using the modern graphics capability in Silverlight.
Here are 2 sample videos on the sample app. It’s cool to see the installer is created using SharePoint Installer.
Navigation Control
[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sbAyWofcy8]
YouTube - Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint - Navigation Control
Social Network
[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc-TkW60ZKw]
YouTube - Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint - Social Network
You can download them here:
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