So I came across this interesting little write up on using the command pattern in WPF, in the article is also a link to a separate article on understanding events.   If you’re not using these techniques in your Silverlight or Flash apps, you’re really missing out and you should try to learn how to use them.  Especially in the internet app world these patterns are very important for decoupling your sender and receiver.  Its good practice not to tie a button click for example directly to whatever is receiving it.  I’m glad to see this being used more in the Silverlight/WPF community

So Microsoft had the Silverlight Camp back in November and had released some great videos on getting started with Silverlight.  See them here.

It has been announced that Microsoft will be releasing the next beta of Silverlight (2.0) in Q1 of 2008. This Beta would support a Go-Live license that would enable developers to begin building and deploying Silverlight 2.0 applications.

Some of the new .NET specific features in the next public Silverlight preview will include:

• WPF UI Framework: The current Silverlight Alpha release only includes basic controls support and a managed API for UI drawing. The next public Silverlight preview will add support for the higher level features of the WPF UI framework. These include: the extensible control framework model, layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, and control template and skinning support. The WPF UI Framework features in Silverlight will be a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in last week’s .NET Framework 3.5 release.
• Rich Controls: Silverlight will deliver a rich set of controls that make building Rich Internet Applications much easier. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for core form controls (textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc), built-in layout management controls (StackPanel, Grid, etc), common functionality controls (TabControl, Slider, ScrollViewer, ProgressBar, etc) and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, etc).
• Rich Networking Support: Silverlight will deliver rich networking support. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for REST, POX, RSS, and WS* communication. It will also add support for cross domain network access (so that Silverlight clients can access resources and data from any trusted source on the web).
• Rich Base Class Library Support: Silverlight will include a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). The next Silverlight preview release will also add built-in support for LINQ to XML and richer HTML DOM API integration.

So I was reading Tim Sneath’s blog post about Silverlight v.Next getting rebranded to 2.0.  He goes into some new features and leaves out a few surprises.  Anyway, it looks like with this release they’re really trying to get Silverlight and WPF more consistent so its easy to build desktop apps that are easily portable to Silverlight.  They haven’t released anything yet so I can’t get very detailed but here’s a brief…

Adding the Common Language Runtime, Base Class Libraries, Dynamic Language Runtime, the UI Frameworks, DRM, etc.  The UI framework is supposedly the kicker (extensible control framework, two-way data binding, templates, styles, all the standard controls (TextBox, ScrollBar, CheckBox, RadioButton etc.), multiple layout containers (Grid, StackPanel, Canvas)), so we’ll see what they’ve been up to soon.

Blogged with Flock

This is the silliest promotion I’ve seen yet.

Here is a cool example of manipulating 3d objects using small barcodes.  But what’s really cool is that you could probably do this with Papervision and Flash as well.

A very cool XBAP written by Eric Sink. Eric wrote this pretty cool application using WPF 3D support, and recommends people pickup 3D Programming for Windows by Charles Petzold.

I just got a copy of 3D programming and I’m dying to read it.

Whoa! Finally… Microsoft has released Silverlight. And not only does it run again on my mac (it broke when I updated to Safari 3 Preview), but the install was super easy. They’ve also released 1.1 Alpha for developers, announced a version for Linux called Moonlight is coming soon, and released a video encoder Expression Encoder.

The Deets:

• Built-in codec support for playing VC-1 and WMV video, and MP3 and WMA audio within a browser. The VC-1 codec is a big step forward for incorporating media within a web experience – since it supports very efficiently playing high-quality, high definition video in the browser. It is a standards-based media format that is implemented in all HD-DVD and Blueray DVD players, and is supported by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, XBOX 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Windows Media Centers (enabling you to encode content once and run it on all of these devices + Silverlight unmodified). It enables you to use a huge library of existing video content and provides access to the broad ecosystem of existing Windows Media tools, components, vendors and hardware.
• Silverlight supports the ability to progressively download and play media content from any web-server. You can point Silverlight at any URL containing video/audio media content, and it will download it and enable you to play it within the browser. No special server software is required, and Silverlight can work with any web-server (including Apache on Linux). We’ll also be releasing an IIS 7.0 media pack that enables rich bandwidth throttling features that you can enable on your web-server for free.
  Silverlight also optionally supports built-in media streaming. This enables you to use a streaming server like Windows Media Server on the backend to efficiently stream video/audio (note: Windows Media Server is a free product that runs on Windows Server). Streaming brings some significant benefits in that: 1) it can improve the end-user’s experience when they seek around in a large video stream, and 2) it can dramatically lower your bandwidth costs.
• Silverlight enables you to create rich UI and animations, and blend vector graphics with HTML to create compelling content experiences. It supports a Javascript programming model to develop these. One benefit of this is that it makes it really easy to integrate these experiences within AJAX web-pages (since you can write Javascript code to update both the HTML and XAML elements together).
• Silverlight makes it easy to build rich video player interactive experiences. You can blend together its media capabilities with the vector graphic support to create any type of media playing experience you want. Silverlight includes the ability to “go full screen” to create a completely immersive experience, as well as to overlay menus/content/controls/text directly on top of running video content (allowing you to enable DVD like experiences). Silverlight also provides the ability to resize running video on the fly without requiring the video stream to be stopped or restarted.

Check it out!!

Celso Gomes is an interactive designer working at Microsoft who has come up with Nibbles: a series of “snack tutorials for hungry designers” that cover the use of Expression Blend to build WPF and Silverlight content. The site itself is a stunning example of Silverlight, with faded animations and transitions and accordion bars: it makes my own work seem feeble by comparison. Make sure you check it out – it’s inspiring…