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.

Douglas Olson and Peter Blois give a nice presentation on the WPF/Silverlight workflow with Expression Blend.

I was reading the article ‘Common Misconceptions that New Designers have with Expression Blend‘ by Don Burnett this morning. The article has a lot of great info, but one very interesting nugget that I didn’t know is that you can now add intellisense to Expression Blend.

The download is available here:
IntelliSense For Expression Blend
These are Don’s install instructions:

1. Extract the contents of installation archive in your Blend 2.0 sp1 installation folder (typically %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 2.0)
2. Run Blend from the Blend.bat file that was extracted into Blend’s installation folder. (The only way to run an add-in in Blend is to use a command line argument: -addin:path_to_the_addin - in this case -addin:Addins\Expression.Blend.IntelliSense.dll.

Jason Beres gives a walkthrough of the new Timeline, Map and Zoombar Silverlight controls offered by Infragistics.

Source: Channel9

The good folks at MIX Online have relaunched with a new beautifully designed site and mission. The new site is intended to be a community for web designers and developers. Behind the scenes they’re using a custom blogging engine built by the people behind Channel9 using ASP.NET MVC.

This site was painfully designed using a combination of Photoshop, Illustrator and Expression Web. It was brought to life using a custom blogging engine built by the code monkeys behind Channel9 on the recently released ASP.NET MVC. Imagery and icons, unless mentioned otherwise, were, and continue to be created by our team of versatile ninja designers. A shout out to You The Designer, and IconArchive for giving away some cool images that we repurposed for our needs.

Thanks to Long Zheng over at ISatrtedSomething for the tip.

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.

U Rank is a social search engine prototype developed by Microsoft Research.

U Rank is a research project to help us learn more about how people organize search results as they go about larger information tasks, how people collaboratively search, and generally, how people edit and share searches

According to the U Rank project page you can organize, edit and annotate search results, as well as share information with others.

• Collaboration: Share URLs with friends (”related projects”, “our reading list”)
• Recommendations: Tell your friends what you like (”best books,” “favorite restaurants”)
• Multimedia results: Mix video and images with web results for added context
• Ego-boosting: Make sure your home page is #1 (at least for you and your friends)
• Easy to explore what your friends are sharing
• Short-cuts: Move your favorite sites up; then put an ! in front of the query and go straight to the top result

Check out the latest release of Silverlight Contrib (Alpha 2 - Silverlight 2 Compatible).

Silverlight Contrib is a collection of open source Silverlight Controls and API enhancements built for and by the Silverlight developer community. The goal of this project is to complement Silverlight and make the lives of Silverlight developers easier.

The set features 5 Controls;

• Color Picker
• Gauge Control
• Star Selector
• Enhanced Metafile (EMF)
• OSX Dock like Menu

And 8 Library items;

• Zip Compression
• Byte Utilities
• String Utilities
• Simple Text Parser
• Animation Tweening
• Wheel Mouse Listener
• Clipboard Helper - (IE Only)
• Data Context Extension Method Wrapper

The coolest features, for me at least, is the Tweening framework and Zip compression which is a port of the ShareZip library. Check out the full functioning demos here.

Kirupa Chinnathambi had put together a nice concise tutorial on Preloading and Displaying an Image in Silverlight. It’s very well written and a great primer for novice Silverlight designers or developers.