Man, It’s been a while since I’ve done an update here. I’ve been completely slammed working on a Kiosk project.

Anyway… I came across this today and thought I’d post up a quick update. It’s a great video from Channel9 where Jaime Rodriguez and Anson Tsao discuss the new Multi-touch capabilities that will be available in WPF 4 Beta 1.

Michael Scherotter posts that MySpace and Microsoft will jointly release an SDK on Thursday, April 2.

The SDK will be available on CodePlex and consist of two Silverlight class library assemblies, OpenSocial.dll and MyOpenSpace.dll. Michael gives an example on his blog and there is a little more info on the MySpace Dveloper Wiki.

Wow, it seems like the web is a buzz about Blend 3 ever since I got back from MIX09. It’s great to see that the Silverlight community has a good head of steam leading up to the release of Silverlight 3.

Here’s a quick roundup of news, tips and tricks that I’ve happened upon this week.

Tutorials

• Introducing sample data support in Blend 3
• Communication between Silverlight applications on the client side
• Using Silverlight 3’s Writable Bitmap
• Using Behaviors : A Quick Walkthrough
• Silverlight Smooth Streaming: UX Simulator
• Controlling an object using the Keydown function in Silverlight
• Using Blur to make Dialogs Pop in Silverlight 3

Tips & Tricks

• Styling a slider control
• Using Integers for Layout Calculations
• Silverlight 3 Out-of-browser Update Model
• Having trouble connecting to localhost when running your application from Visual Studio?
• Team Foundation Server support in Blend 3

News

• What’s new on the DataGrid control in Silverlight 3 Beta
• SketchFlow – Sketching and Prototyping in Expression Blend

For those not fortunate enough to attend MIX09 I thought you’d like to see what came in the Schwag Bag.

It’s some nice stuff including Sketching User Experiences by keynote speaker Bill Buxton. But the crown jewel, in my humble opinion, is this sweet notebook complete with MIX schedule.

I really wish I had the energy to write a thoughtful piece about MIX09. But to be honest, it’s been more of a whirlwind than I had anticipated. After a 5 hour flight from Boston put us in Las Vegas at 1:30am, there was a mixup with my room. As it turned out, the first two rooms that I was assigned were already occupied. Of course I didn’t find this out until I walked into each one. It did teach me that people don’t appreciate strangers walking into their hotel rooms at 2:00 am though. Oops.

On the upside, after 2 return trips to the front desk I was upgraded to a pimp suite on the 32nd floor. As I’m writing this I’m sitting in the living room of a 4 room suite with 3 HD TV’s, 3 sinks, 2 bathrooms a Jacuzzi and full bar. Life is good.

One thing I can say is that the most impressive part of day was the keynote piece about SketchFlow in Expression Blend 3. I really can’t wait to get back to the office and start working with it.

Here are some random photos from the day, and a gratuitous shot of the suite. More later.

Wow. I can’t wait to start prototyping with SketchFlow and SketchFlow Player in Expression Blend 3.

Is it me, or is the timing of the iPhone 3.0 announcement a little dubious? I’m not usually one to put on the tinfoil hat. But deciding on Thursday to make a major announcement the day of the MIX09 kickoff smells like someone is starved for attention.

Remember the early days of WPF/E when the promise was of a truly open development system? Eclipse4SL from Soyatec gets us one step closer to that promise land.

The Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight Project will integrate advanced Silverlight development capabilities into the Eclipse IDE and Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).

Found this today while looking at Virtual Earth integration. Sounds perfect.

InfoStrat.VE allows WPF and Microsoft Surface developers to take full advantage of Virtual Earth 3D with minimal overhead. Simply reference the dll, add a single VEMap control to your XAML, and you have a map! The control eliminates the Win32 Interop restrictions, so you can do everything with this VE control that you could do with any native WPF control, including:

• Overlay items (no more transparent windows!)
• Rotate and transform the map within the interface (no more boring rectangles, bring on the 360 degree interfaces!)
• Use the map within a Visual Brush (you know you want faded reflections!)

Kirpa has a great article on Dependency Properties here and a nice little Silverlight Dependency Property generator here.