Designer Silverlight

You can now check out all the MIX sessions, online.

 I attended the following sessions:

Bringing Your Data to Life with Windows Presentation Foundation - Anson Tsao

This is a great crash course to data binding in WPF.

Building Rich Internet Applications using Microsoft Silverlight Part 1 - Mike Harsh and Joe Stegman

Building Rich Internet Application using Microsoft Silverlight Part 2 – Mike Harsh

Good walkthrough  on building a basic Silverlight 2.0 application. You can get the files that accompany this talk at Mike Harsh’s blog. While attending these sessions, Mike and Joe repeatedly reccomended…

Creating Rich Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight 2 Controls – Karen Corby

This was possibly the most valuable session I attended. Karen Corby walks us through how to create custom controls in Silverlight. The result is mind-blowingly powerful… and it seemed not to difficult. I hesitate on saying that simply because I haven’t done it myself yet. I’m going to go back over it and walk myself through the whole thing with the source code that she has posted.

Nerd + Art : 10 Code Snippets to Empower Your Inner Artist – Nathan Dunlap and Robby Ingebretsen

Two of the guys from Identity Mine walk through some great code snippets that allow designers a little more freedom to do the work they need to do. You can get the Code Snippet Visual Studio 2008 installer file and some of the samples used in the talk from the Identity Mine website.

Developing Applications with Microsoft VirtualEarth - Chris Pendleton

Christ Pendleton walked us through integrating VirtualEarth into Internet applications. Pretty cool, although I’m not sure how much better than Google’s Maps/Earth API this is. It’s been a while since I’ve played with Google Maps, but I remember it being much easier than I thought it would be. Keep an eye on Chris’ blog, where he’ll be posting the code for the lab shortly (I’m told).

Have you heard about Deep Zoom?

No… it is not a porno filmed exclusivly with the Canon 5200mm mirror lens (although that would actually be kind of kinky), it is Microsoft’s new, dangerously named technology for taking huge pictures and making them completely zoomable over the internet through Silverlight.

“How huge?” you may ask. Well, I don’t know if there is a hard limit, but the biggest one I saw was 14 petabytes. 

Petabytes. With a “p”. 

Basically, take your bedroom, and fill it top to bottom with those nifty little 500GB external back-up hard drives. And you can see any part of that image almost instantly by simply zooming in on the part you want to see.

To see a demo, you can look at the Hard Rock memorabilia page.

Well, with proper thanks to Robby Ingebretsen, Microsoft has released the Deep Zoom Composer, which allows us normal people to make and implement these kinds of super-zooming interfaces.

I’ll be working on it in the coming weeks and I’ll let you know what I come up with.

My brain is out of town while I’m working on our MIX Show Off Entry. In the meantime, I need to post some links so that I don’t forget them. I suppose you can use them too, if you want:

• Overriding (or adding to) default event handlers
• Custom Searching Through an Observable Collection
• More on filtering through an observable collection
• Scott Gu’s .Net 3.5 Client Product Roadmap – They’re adding GridViews! And DatePickers! And Ribbons!
• David Kelly on Using the Silverlight 2.0 XAML Grid Element
• David Kelly on Using the Silverlight 2.0 XAML Stackpanel Element
• Bea Costa’s Monster Post on Dragging and Dropping DataBound Elements
• Josh Smith says that designers should be learning Blend because it’s freaking awesome. Designers respond that, while he’s not wrong, there are bloody no good books or blogs on the topic.
• Older post on making a glossy look for WPF applications.
• Scott Gu’s Monster Post on Silverlight 2.0 and Blend.

You’ll notice that there is a little bit of focus on Silverlight 2.0 here… That’s because it’s awesome. Keep watching, I’ll start blogging on it as I get into it more and more.