Silverlight Tour

For those interested in a little training check out the Silverlight Tour:

http://silverlight-tour.com/

Sparkling Client

I went to a MSDN presentation on Silverlight yesterday and found that this guy Erik Mork was doing the presentation. I found I like his presentation style and found it entertaining probably as it is similiar to my style with lots of hand jestures :) What suprised me is at the end he was talking about local resources and put up the Sd2ig url for our local Seattle User Group (Seattle Developer / Designer Interactive Group) so I was suprised and after wards went up and introduced my self. I found out he is friends with Brian a local Silverlight Developer that is part of the group starting Sd2ig. I thought this was all cool so I went and checked out Eriks site which I found was pretty cool. He does pod casts and is part of the Silverlight Tour. I hope to see him around :)

his site is:

http://www.sparklingclient.com/

Dr. WPF Sighted at PDC

My focus in Silverlight but having been sucked into the secret world of Dr. WPF now and then I like to keep up on the latest sightings. Dr. WPF has shown up at PDC this year. check out Walt Ritscher post on the super secret dinner with Dr. WPF:

http://wpfwonderland.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/dinner-with-dr-wpf/

Search Engine Optimization for Silverlight

I while back I did a couple of posts on this topic and this morning Karim sent this to me. Since I'm working on the DevTeach presentation 'Architectural Best Practicies for Silverlight 2' in toronto right now it is of interest.

http://silverlight.net/learn/whitepapers/seo.aspx

Silverlight 2 URL Redirection

So in Silverlight 2 for some time we could do this:


System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri("foobar.com"), "_blank");

well this is all good and works but in some cases in IE when redirecting to a url that is not a page but a binary of some kind there seems to be an issue with opening the file and the browser window closes. ???

since I don't have time to work out if this is a bug or not or some 'feature'... Here is my cheater method that seems to work fine...

so I added this to the App:


public static void InsertECMAScript(string JavaScript)
{
HtmlElement Script = HtmlPage.Document.CreateElement("script");
Script.SetAttribute("type", "text/javascript");
Script.SetProperty("text", JavaScript);
HtmlPage.Document.DocumentElement.AppendChild(Script);
}

and then from my user control I added this:


App.InsertECMAScript("ProcessWindowOpen(\"" + URL + "\");");

and poof it goes away....??? not sure what is up with that but works.

Breaking Changes Between Silverlight 1 and Silverlight 2

I am working on a SL 1 system to make it work with SL 2 and I found that there were a few issues... I found this great post by Laurence on his blog on the topic.

http://blogs.msdn.com/webnext/archive/2008/10/21/ensuring-that-your-javascript-silverlight-applications-work-with-silverlight-2.aspx

if your board there is also this article on msdn:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645049(VS.95).aspx

and also this one:

http://blogs.msdn.com/silverlight_sdk/pages/silverlight-bugs-and-workarounds.aspx

RPS in Silverlight

first of all I'd like to say that this is going to be a bit of a rant... second, it is my opinion that RPS in general is a giant hack. it is easier to just build your own security infrastructure from the group up then use RPS in my opinion...

That being said at times this has been a requirement. As far as using RPS it is not that difficult once you get past configuration and fairly straight forward to use in Silverlight. In my case I'm currentlying working on a project that shall rename unnamed where it was a requirement to use RPS.

RPS has this thing called a ticket that we pass around to make sure a user is logged in. We had this WCF services we needed to secure as well that the Silverlight application is talking to so we needed to get the ticket up on the client Silverlight app so it can be passed on the WCF calls todo authenication with live id. So once it was working ASP side all we needed todo was seriealize the ticket by using its token or RPS Token value and passing that as a parameter into our Silverlight application.

Then on the root of the app we save this RPS Token value to be used in authentication on the WCF calls.

Great. right?

Wrong...

this all worked fine and about a week in we the ticket type in test changed. one would think ok waht did we do wrong. apparent now we had to authenticate using type 2 in stead of type 3... WT...??? Some time later it changed to 4 and now we have to use 3 again. oh but we have changed anything about around the RPS Tickets? so what is up?

granted this was also a developement system and not hitting the 'live' live id system but still and another guy I know was working on a different project and they hit the same problem. As a joke I finally added this block of code:


StringBuilder WTFErrorList = new StringBuilder();
RPSTicket MyTicket = null;
for (int x = 1; x < 11; x++)
{
try
{
MyTicket= MyAuth.Authenticate(m_RPS_AppName, rpsTicket, (uint)x, propBag); // !!! WTF???
break;
}
catch (Exception E)
{
string WTFErrorMessage = x.ToString() + " WTF Error[RPSSupport::ValidateTicket] " + E.Message;
WTFErrorList.AppendLine(WTFErrorMessage);
WTFErrorList.AppendLine("m_RPS_AppName: " + m_RPS_AppName);
WTFErrorList.AppendLine("rpsTicket: " + rpsTicket);
WTFErrorList.AppendLine("");
Debug.WriteLine(WTFErrorMessage);
}
}
MyTicket.Validate( propBag );

The down side is this will never fly in production with all the code reviews but in got me over the humpe of figuring out what ticket type to use...

No Silverlight for iPhone

check out this post:

"Microsoft said it was probably not going to be putting its Flash competitor Silverlight on Apple's iPhone 3G, but said it was keeping a watchful eye on Google's Android platform, and said Silverlight might get onto T-Mobile's G1. "

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/microsoft-no-silverlight-iphone-maybe-g1/2008-10-14

Silverlight 2 Release

With much ado MS finally says it is releasing SL along with a SL controls pack...

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx

Looking forward to seeing this final drop as opposed to RC0. :)

Eclipse for Silverlight or is it the other way around?

I'm not sure I understand some one not working in VSTS and being one with the will of Microsoft but this is kind of cool and Silverlightish...

http://www.eclipse4sl.org/

Seattle Developer / Designer Interactive Group

check out the new Seattle D2ig (Seattle Developer / Designer Interactive Group) we are trying to put to gether. a little short on content but a cool idea we hope to have going shortly :)

http://www.seattled2ig.org/

Silverlight 3D...

Karim sent me this link to this guy that did this '3d' silverlight solution. here is only a video but its pretty slick...

http://www.innoveware.com/

speacking of 3d silverlight there are also a couple of related projects on codeplex. Faisal Khan a friend sent me a mini me version that does a puesdo 3d layout based on x, y and z. I'm playin with a wrapper class that will allow more complicated 3d effects but his View3D panel works well and we'll drop it into the hackingsilverlight library for our own little mini me 3d engine for Silverlight that not only for the book but we will use it for the project george that I'll talk about at some later point after the book is finished, completely.