journal

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 Mix 08 is this week and the rumor mill is flying around an off line version of Silverlight much like Adobe AIR.  Technically, Silverlight 2.0 is closer to the desktop version of WPF so the possibility is there.  Ryan Stewart in this article talks about the possibility of SQLite being in an off line version which is a bit silly.  Maybe Access Lite? :)  I don’t know, but I don’t think SQLite is going to even be considered. Personally I don’t think Microsoft has put any weight behind an offline version yet.  I think they’re so busy trying to catch up to Flash/Flex and the toolsets that they’re just not ready for an off line version yet.  Probably next year, but not this one.

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

Ryan Stewart has an article on RIA predictions for 2008.  Most are pretty good, I mean, this is coming from an Adobe insider and all. I’m not to sure about the whole Apple RIA deal.  Apple needs a major overhaul of their software platform in general.  The .NET platform really blows Apple clean out of the water and its starting to show in Microsoft’s overall growth.  If Apple doesn’t pull up soon, the XBOX 360/Zune space is going to shut the door on the AppleTV/iPod, and you bet that Microsoft is on their butts big time.  And one thing is exceptionally true, Adobe is underestimating Microsoft.  I personally know Microsoft is revamping their Expression suite big time, they were pretty upset about the first version and are taking the gung ho, take no prisoners approach to the next release.  Not saying that the first version isn’t impressive, but its unusable compared to Adobe’s tools.  One thing is absolutely for sure, we’re gonna hear and see some major movement in the RIA space from Adobe and Microsoft, because after all its the future of the web. 

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.

Every once in a while Microsoft comes out with something just crazy. Something that completely blows you away and reminds you that they’re not ACTUALLY working for Lucifer. Well anyway they made an announcement that they’re going to be making the source code available for a significant portion of the BCL, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, WinForms and WPF from day one. Eventually WCF, WWF and LINQ will be available too.

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.

Flash and HD (H.264) Video

Just recently Adobe made the announcement that they would be supporting the HD (H.264) video format in their latest Flash Player.  Little did anyone know though, that it was already in there.  It looks like they just didn’t tell anyone.  But the latest Flash player has been getting some serious video playback enhancements. According to Adobe, Flash Player 9, Codenamed “Moviestar”, is “hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback”.  In short, Adobe has added H.264 support which is being used in both Blu-Ray discs and Quicktime.  Adobe has also added (HE-AAC) or High Efficiency Advanced Audio Codec for audio playback.

A great example of the latest HD format can be found here, don’t forget to right click and select “Full Screen” on the flyout menu.

For alot more info on the new format, here’s a great resource…

Silverlight and VC-1

Silverlight on the other hand supports the HD format through VC-1.  Silverlight also supports WMA, WMV7-9 and MP3 formats. WMV9 is the Microsoft implementation of the VC-1 standard which ships in all HD-DVD and Blu-ray based hardware.    A good example of the HD playback is on this page, don’t forget to click the fullscreen button!

The HD wars have begun!

So both formats are competing for dominance which is great for competition.  Personally, I’m really glad to see Microsoft showing some initiative in the web space. I’ve always believed that Flash and now Silverlight have really bright futures on the web and now we have a great way to watch movies too!

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!!