One of the projects we had the chance of working with a while back, but hadn’t gone live due to licensing and policy reasons, finally made it and is now publicly available at www.meteo.gr/bingmaps/. We had a lot of fun in this project as there were a few challenges we had to overcome, let me give you the insights on one of them to get an idea and possibly help your future Bing maps projects . The biggest challenge we faced was how we were going to draw Contours over the map. To that end we read the...

Back from my holidays and straight to work. Reading through my emails though, I came by one where one of my friends have noticed that I’ve neglected to post my Silverlight Out Of Browser Applications presentation content.  So with my deepest apologies here it is. < </iframe>

Since I’ve started talking about Sliverlight and analytics yesterday I thought this is probably the best opportunity to mention Silverlytics (Silverlight + Analytics). Built by Location3 Media an interactive marketing company, Silverlytics is a multitenant Windows Azure-based analytics service that uses Microsoft Live Labs Pivot for its data visualization.  All of its data is collected from Service Oriented Analytics behaviors in Silverlight applications.  The Windows Azure platform is perfect for web analytics because of its scalability and global reach while Pivot provides a very cool way to slice, dice, and understand the data.  Location3 Media is...

A common misunderstanding and argument I get, for not building web applications using Silverlight technology, is often, the lack of a way to keep stats of your application traffic. So I thought this worth a blog post in order to put a few things right and let people know that there is actually a solution they could use. This solution is Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework is a codeplex based open source Extensible Web Analytics Framework for Microsoft Silverlight Applications. It addresses the challenges of tracking Silverlight applications by enabling it in a number of scenarios like the...

I’m going to be speaking at the next DotNetZone event on a very interesting topic namely IoC (Inversion of Control) and on how using "Prism" and it's friend Unity (an implementation of IoC) from the Patterns and Practices team that can help in building Silverlight applications in a way that lends itself to testability and modularity. In talking with various colleagues and customers building business applications with Silverlight I find that Prism (and it's friend Unity) is frequently mentioned but not everyone has seen it or use it. So coming next Tuesday 15th of December 19.00 at MIC (Microsoft Innovation Center)...

DevDays 09 part 2 : Silverlight 3 See the light! If you're unable to attend catch the live stream (RSVP now!) starting at 9.30 AM GMT+2 Athens time. Online TV Shows by Ustream

If you’re into Silverlight/WPF development you’ll surely appreciate Karl Shifflett’s XAML Power Toys: http://tinyurl.com/karlpowertoys  Awesome (free) tool for WPF/Silverlight. XAML Power Toys Full Feature Set  includes Create ViewModel Class - from a VB.NET or C# code window, easily create a ViewModel stub that includes commands and exposed data class.  Optionally you can elect to re-implement all Model properties on the ViewModel. Create Silverlight DataForm For Selected Class - quickly create a DataForm complete with bindings that are easily associated with properties on the source class Create WPF or Silverlight DataGrid...

Yesterday, I had the chance to speak in front of an audience about how ready is Silverlight for your business applications at a Microsoft DevDay event. I really enjoyed it as I was mainly showing code and demos (did 7 demos in 1h.30m which is a personal record) instead of doing PowerPoint slides, and talked about a lot of new features coming up with Silverlight 3. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as me. If you didn’t make it, I believe there’s a video coming up later on (it really depends on Isavella ;-)). Till then you can take a...

It’s been almost a year since I last talked about Microsoft's Hosted Deep Zoom project. It then was a simple Ajax – silverlight enabled web application that enabled you to dynamically deepzoom and share your images. A lot have changed since then as I discovered today. To begin with, the project has been renamed to Deepzoompix and a lot of cool new features have been added making it a great way to show off your photos in a new and interactive way. Get started by importing your own photos and prepare to be amazed… Jellyfish Deep Zoom framework. This is a...

Most of the large control suite vendors have already started releasing their offerings for the Silverlight platform. One of those, namely divelements, has put together a couple of samples on what you can do with their controls. So if you are interested in building line of business applications in Silverlight such as an mail client, word processing, or something similar, check out http://divelements.co.uk/silverlight/. Furthermore divelements is offering a free set of simple but commonly-requested tools, including an HTML display control. This control allows you to embed HTML anywhere in a Silverlight application by simply specifying raw HTML to...