Entries Tagged 'WPF' ↓

For me, one of the most difficult aspects of making the jump from Flash to Silverlight/WPF was finding simple, to the point, tutorials to work from.

There are a few great resources out there now but at the time there was little information available, and what was out there assumed you already know a good deal about C# and .NET.

This made it very frustrating to get going because although I was proficient in AS2, I never really made the transition to AS3 before I dove into WPF and C#. Things that I could code up in AS2 in a matter of minutes became stumbling blocks along the way.

Recently a coworker let me borrow the book Foundation Expression Blend 2 by Victor Gaudioso.

If you’re new to WPF, or a Flash Developer making the difficult transition from ActionScript to XAML/C# this book will give you a great head start. Unlike some other books on the subject this one assumes little about your knowledge of WPF and C# and has a lot of simple tutorials that walk you through projects from end to end.

It seems like a lot books in this space are either written for developers or designers. This one hits that sweet spot in the middle and appeals to the technical designer, which is where a lot of Flash developers fall.

If I had found this when I was getting started it would have saved me a lot of time getting up to speed.

Martin Grayson has posted the latest release of Blacklight. You can read about the release on his blog or visit the showcase here. The showcase also has some basic information on how to use the controls.

What is Blacklight?
Blacklight is a UX focused code sharing project. Microsoft has released a bunch of technologies that allow designers and developers to work closely together to make beautiful software. This project is a collection of controls, samples, visual assets and ideas that has been put together by User Experience designers and developers to both show you what the technology is capable of (from a UX point of view), and give you code and samples that you can use in your own projects, completely free of charge (see the License tab above). Check out the showcase to see what is currently available…

ComponentOne had an interesting WPF dashboard like application to browse all of the controls in their Studio® for WPF product.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The MIX09 website has a great collection of banners and wallpapers for you to spice up your blog or desktop. Visit the MIX09 website and grab some pixels.

Michael Cohen, Principal Researcher at the Interactive Visual Media Group for Microsoft Research, has posted some examples of annotated gigapixel images.

These examples are large Quicktime videos, and the site is thin on detail, but they’re worth a look. I checked out A “tour” of Boston (62Mb), it was really interesting stuff.