Entries from March 2008 ↓

Holy crap. This dude built a a Lego Mindstorms robot that can solve a Rubik’s cube.
Totally off topic but i had to post it.

One of the most exciting new features of Silverlight 2.0 is Deep Zoom.

Deep Zoom allows designers and developers to compose super high resolution image collections from a few megapixels to gigapixels in size where the user is never left waiting for huge image downloads.

The result is hard to explain. Check out this example at the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia Collection

Does all this sound familiar? That’s because Deep Zoom is related to SeaDragon which is used in PhotoSynth. It’s all one big happy family.

Deep Zoom Composer can be downloaded here.

The Silverlight Fire Starter series is little older, focusing on v1.0. But it does cover a good amount of Expression blend and mat be worth a look if you’re new to WPF and Silverlight.

The Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter is a one-day event providing developers and designers information on the concept behind Silverlight as a technology, what tools are useful in development and the knowledge in order to start building their own applications. The eight sessions listed, are available to watch here and to be downloaded in video and audio formats.

Tim Sneath has a nice post about Web Server configuration for Silverlight. The bottom line, you only need to add 2 MIME types:

Tim also offers up some handy alternatives for those who are using shared hosting and don’t have access to the server for configuration.

Alan Le has posted a nice brief example of a filter as you type function.

Let’s take a look at the RIA job market trends over the last 6 months.

These graphs represent the average percentage of jobs that match the keywords Adobe Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX, Openlazlo and WPF. The first graph runs through June 2007 where the second runs through Jan 2008.

I highlighted the area in the second graph that represents the full area of the first graph. As you can see, the WPF and Silverlight job market has really heated up over the last 6 months, where Flex appears to be leveling off for the time being. No surprises here for the faithful.

Now let’s compare average salaries over the last 6 months. Here you can see that WPF has been healthy all along where Silverlight has made a huge gain of $18k over the period. Not too shabby when you consider that all of the other technologies have remained rather flat.

If you’re doing Silverlight development feel free to print this post and present it to your boss.

Source: indeed.com

An anonymous reader tipped us off to ViewOn TV v0.3. ViewOn is a WPF Media Library and Player similar to iTunes or Zune desktop. It’s got some nice features like:

• Music Player
• Video Player
• Preloaded with Online radio
• iPod Support
• CD/DVD Ripping

The UI is not ground breaking, but it’s nice and clean. The app supports browsing by genre or cover art, visualizations, scrollbar location preview, and a nice little color chooser. It also supports compact mode which is handy.

Ok, this has to be the coolest Silverlight Video implementation I’ve seen to date. Beautiful and consistent theme, fluid transitions and a hip full motion video background. Check it. Rai Click presenta SANREMO ANCHE NOI

A couple of months ago we posted that Josh Smith had released a WPF podcast player called Podder. Now he’s released Podder v2 with some nice enhancements and a slick new interface care of Grant Hinkson. I really like the interaction on the cover flow area (for lack of a better term). Nice and snappy with fluid easing. Nice work guys.

Infragistics had published a Silverlight 2.0 Interactive demo called “FaceOut”. It’s a mash-up of Sales data using their chart, gauge, scroll panel, and data from Windows Live Maps and Live Contacts.

Infragistics Silverlight Showcase Sample, a sales dashboard, called faceOut, is an enterprise mashup that combines enterprise sales records with data from the Windows Live Services, Live Maps and the Live Contacts. faceOut exemplifies how developers can use Silverlight to integrate corporate data with services provided on the internet to create a business-driven mashup experience, while simultaneously providing LOB application users with an engaging and visually appealing user interface.”

I love the work that Infragistics does, but I have to say… the animations and interactions in this example feel a bit kludgy and don’t flow as smoothly as what you find in some high-end Flash applications. But it’s a nice piece and I’m sure they’ll be rockin a new rev soon.