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...

I'm pretty often asked the question "Can I use real (as in coming from a database) data in my Silverlight application?" the answer is “of course”, although this requires a lit more work than any other technology (WinForms, ASP.NET, WPF) you could use. The reason for that is, that as you probably already know, Silverlight runs on the client, so you’ll need a way to move the data from the server to the Silverlight Client application. There are a number of ways you can achieve that... read more

There were quite a few questions on my last Silverlight talk about Silverlight support in various Linux Distros. Well today I read that a first source code release was made publicly available in order to encourage developers start playing with it. To try out Moonlight, you have two options: Media codecs: you must do your own build from source code. No-media codecs: we provide one-click addins for Firefox that will install with no effort. Firefox addins are available from http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight. Source code for Moonlight...

Yesterday I had the chance to talk at a DotNetZone event about Building Rich Internet Applications using Silverlight 2.0. It went very well, people seemed to have an active interest on this new Technology and anxiously looking forward to build real word applications (like this healthcare one announced yesterday by Tim Sneath) with it. My session was quite long (2.5 hours - thankfully no one slept during it ;-)) so I had the chance to talk about almost all of Silverlight's features and give a lot of demos, after all events like that, where you speak to developers, is...

Quite a few people came to me on Microsoft's Launch 2008 event, asking me how someone can work with Silverlight to present video content. So in case you haven't already seen it, here is a Screencast, I've put together, showing off a few of Silverlight's features combined with Ajax. Currently it's only available on Greek, sorry for those of you not speaking Greek.

Microsoft announced a bunch of cool new features in Silverlight 2, in this year's Mix  conference. One of the most exciting new features is the Deep Zoom one. Deep Zoom allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.  The simple zooming interface allows users to explore entire collections down to specific details in extreme close-up, all with fantastic performance and smooth transitions. What you probably won't know...

You must all have seen by now the popular “Turning the Pages” British Library application. It's probably one of the most impressive WPF applications, one that has been developed by Microsoft in partnership between the British Library and Armadillo Systems. "The British Library have digitized the pages of fifteen of their most valuable works and created Turning the Pages, a browser-based WPF application that allows you to interact with these books in a virtual environment from the comfort of your home. You can open a book on your desktop and by clicking on a page,...

Working at DOL press organization gave me the opportunity to work in cooperation with Microsoft and NY Times with a number of new technologies in order to enhance the reading experience of a user. What saddens me is that these were never publicized, for various reasons I won't go into at this post. Well today I've noticed two new applications that look a lot like the ones I've developed so I thought why not share those instead and give you a glimpse of what's the future in reading. ...

December's edition of the Greek PCMagazine is out and in it you'll find my latest article on how to develop lean - mean web mashups, even without having to write code, for your web site using Microsoft Popfly. So if you're interested go grab it at your local news stand.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak in front of a large audience about Microsoft's Live Services, available to developers, in a Microsoft hosted event called "The Next Web Now". Although I had to write this presentation twice, as I lost my first one with my stolen laptop, and had to prepare the second one in just a few hours, I was glad to do it as I always enjoy speaking and communicating with other developers. In general I believe it went well, even with all the computer related problems Panos' laptop had ;-). The event's sessions were video recorded so they're...

Working with popfly for the 2007 elections silverlight graph gave me a fare ground of understanding on using and developing with Popfly. So I thought why not  share this by making my first official screencast. I'm glad to say that it's now complete and you can see it from here: Video: Create Rich Web Content Using Popfly I need to apologize for the video quality, but this was the only way I could publish it. I'm still looking though for other places where I could post the high quality screencast (If you know a place please contact me). So stay tuned...

My friend Panos wrote today about Nikhil Kothari's Facebook.Net framework (hosted at Codeplex) as well as Steve Trefethen's starter kit as various tools you could use to develop Facebook applications using .Net. I'd like to add to those The Facebook developer toolkit that evolved from the Microsoft - Facebook partnership. Although this download comes from the Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions product line (as you may notice) nothing stops you from using it with Visual Studio. Furthermore (if you're willing to play with cutting edge technology ;-) you could give Popfly's Facebook blocks (which are products of the same...

Once the Greek elections 2007 Silverlight graph was ready, it was really simple putting it to a sidebar gadget. So I've built one and upload it to live gallery (in http://gallery.live.com). The approval process though will take some time and my guess is that it won't be approved in time for the elections this afternoon, so I might as well post it here... Thus if you're looking for a way to have one or more election result graphs right in your Vista desktop you can download the Greek elections 2007 from here, just rename it to Election2007.gadget and install...

I recently developed a couple of custom popfly blocks in order to create a popfly mashup (you'll learn more about it this weekend ;-)). During development I spent quite some time figuring out why although I was making changes to my blocks, these changes weren't instantly reflected on my mashup. Then it stroke me, popfly mashups use the latest opened block version. Any changes made to a block after mashup was closed won't be reflected on it. This can be troublesome for someone that has developed his own blocks as you'll have to open and save all mashups that use...

It's been four months since I received my Popfly invite but haven't really been able to do anything on it due to lack of time. Looking for Silverlight applications yesterday though I happened to bump into it and remembered that I already had an account so I decided to check it out. Well it seems that a lot have changed since the last time I've used it although the project is still in its Alpha phase. First of all the user interface is completely revamped. It now loads up much faster and resembles more an office application than a...

I rarely have the time to read a 10 page article or watch a full length Webcast, I usually prefer nuggets when I want to discover new technologies and explore hot developer topics since they only last 10-15 minutes. So if you're into Silverlight here's a list of nuggets so that you can catch up: Silverlight Streaming : Silverlight Streaming is a hosted service at http://streaming.live.com/ which provides developers and content creators the ability to host Silverlight content on ... Silverlight - Linking Silverlight and ASP.NET Projects : With Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 it is possible...

As always this time of year I begun thinking on all the things I want to read, listen, view and code during my summer vacation free time, even though I never get the chance to do all the things I plan to ;-). So I've already bought my PSP extra memory (2GB) and plan to fill it with podcasts, webcasts and videos so I can watch on my free time. Technologies and products that I'm especially interested this summer include : Silverlight, WPF, WCF, Visual Studio 2008, Astoria, Jasper, Linq, .Net 3.5, C# 3.0 etc. I've already begun searching for those but...

If your interested in incorporating all or some of the new cool Windows Live technologies in your web site then you'll find Windows Live Quick Applications very useful. Currently there are two samples available Contoso Bicycle Club (code) which Connects membership organizations with the content, information and communities they care about using Rich media experiences, Sharing and storage, Communication, Find and locate (maps) Windows Live Technologies. and Contoso University (code) which is intended as a University sponsored site for students and staff to connect with the university events and social organizations. This demo uses quite a few cool things, like the Contacts...

I know that many of you will argue on the need to put all these technologies to work together, after all they are intended for different sides of the Internet cloud (ASP.net on the server, Ajax on the server & client and silverlight on the client). My experience though has shown that nothing is carved in stone when it comes to software development. Imagine for example that you have a nice GridView control (ASP.NET) containing data that you need to update without refreshing the whole page (Ajax) and at the same time display a nice graph of these data using an...

As promised I've created a silverlight video of my interview at Microsft's innovation day event. I've used clackerzone's super Live Writer addin that enables you to encode (uses Expression Media Encoder) and upload your video directly from Windows Live Writer with a few simple steps. var livewriterapp0Wrapper = document.getElementById("livewriterapp0Wrapper"); CreateSilverlight(); Enjoy...

  For those of you interested in finding out what silverlight really is as well as develop silverlight applications... bits & bytes Get silverlight Telerik RadControls – 3d virtual rooms using control based framework DLR & IronPython Silverlight developer reference “poster” Forums – installation, troubleshooting Electric rain harmony (coming summer 2007) – flash to silverlight converter Silverlight 1.0 Beta QuickStarts Silverlight 1.1 Alpha QuickStarts Silverlight 1.0 QuickStart Using Blend 2: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93839 New Silverlight Online Documentation: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=88945 New sites Main Microsoft site.  Community site.  Mix conference experiences & demos Getting started with silverlight - Scott Guthrie demos how to build an app from scratch "How Do...