Entries from November 2008 ↓

Scott Gu tipped us off to a recently released ASP.NET server control by Microsoft (Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5) that can be used to create beautiful browser based charts. As usual Scott has put together a nice writeup with instructions, links and screen shots.

I just stumbled upon Justin Angel’s blog. He has some of the most thorough and easy to understand WPF/Silverlight/Expression tutorials I’ve seen. Nice work.

Jonas Follesø has put together a well thought out piece on Silverlight 2 and it’s place in Business applications titled “Is Silverlight 2 Ready for Business Applications?“. The article covers Offline Storage of Data, Access to Local Files, Multi Threading, Real-Time Networking, Portability, SEO and much more.

Brian Goldfarb, Lead Product Manager of the Web Platform and Tools team at Microsoft, asks you to give your input on Silverlight 2 via the Silverlight Feedback Survey.

We’ve put together a short survey to help us improve our Silverlight features and API. Spend 15 minutes and tell us what is good and bad about Silverlight so far.

Matt tipped us off to his newly released Silverlight Validator & Input Toolkit. Looks nice, and light weight.

The toolkit provides:

• Required Field Validator
• Field Length Validator
• Phone Validator (and optional formatting)
• SSN Validator
• Regex Validator
• Numeric Range Validator
• Text input filter service is included that can be used to filter user input to only numerics, alphas, etc.

There’s a working demo available for you to test drive it.

According to BetaNews the public beta of Moonlight, a Silverlight runtime for Linux that is part of the Mono project, will be released within the next several days.

In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight — a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight — is expected within days.

Microsoft Research teamed up with Disney/Pixar to create a virtual tour of the universe hosted by none other than WALL•E.

According to this Microsoft press release the tour which uses WorldWide Telescope sounds like a lot of fun. Unfortunately I’m getting an error when I click the “Download Tour” button on the WorleWide Telescope project page.

Anyone have better luck?

Ever need to have a color pallet available while working on a project in multiple applications? Microsoft Live Labs has released a color picker sidebar gadget that will hold 8 colors io a beautify designed art board.

To add to the color fun, they’ve added the ability to search the ColourLovers database of pallets for inspiration. Sweet.

Sam (snoutholder) has put together a thoughtful piece on using ViewportOrigin and ViewportWidth in Deep Zoom. There are some errors in the documentation that his post clarifies.

ScottIsAFool @ LiveSide.net shows us how to assemble a “Quick And Dirty” Live Mesh Silverlight Application. It only applies to those who have access to the LiveFX and Mesh SDK, but it gives us a look at what development for Live Mesh Silverlight will look like.