Whilst there have been some excellent demos out there and Im thinking Hard Rock here, this is undoubtedly the best so far and demonstrates what Silverlight will be fantastic for
http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/
This is RIA at its best.
Straight of the back of the deepzoom announcement capabilities of Silverlight to comes photozoom.
PhotoZoom is a site created by mslivelabs and incorporates the DeepZoom technology. Don’t expect a full blown flickr site here, this is a demo obviously, but it demos beautifully the possibilities of DZ on a photo site.
So if you don’t know what DZ is or have seen PZ then pop along to my album I created here. Use the Mouse Wheel to zoom and left mouse to grab and move the canvas.
http://photozoom.mslivelabs.com/Album.aspx?alias=BinaryJam&album=1&lc=2057
For those who really have no clue as to what DZ is here is a description nicked from MS. Note Seadragon is the original name.
Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.
Tells you loads that don’t it. Essentially you stitch a whole bunch of photies together creating a huge photo I mean really really huge, then the processor rips it apart into tiles. Those tiles are loaded dependant on viewpoint and zoom level. So instead of downloading some 10 billion pixel image only the viewpoint tiles are loaded each zoom level being a image scale of the original until you get right down in it. Apparently this only produces 1.33 times the original file size but massively reduces the download size. And it looks really cool too.
Found this on the interweb.
http://www.cynergysystems.com/blogs/page/rickbarraza?entry=connecting_to_the_wii_control
It’s a video of some chap whose created a Minority Report interface using
WPF
.NET
WiiMote
Fancy Custom pair of gloves (with leds in the fingers I reckon)
A piece of string
It’s quite impressive, It uses Brian Peeks .Net library for interaction with the WiiMote.(Other Article in case your websense blocks it).
Then using the custom hardware (gloves) can control the items on screen. The Wiimote can track up to four infra-red LED items at a time, the rest is all software.
This should be possible in Silverlight 2.0 as well.,
**UPDATE** : reading the forums its unlikely this is the case. Silverlight reacts to the keys and the mouse specifically, people are saying the sway silverlight is built, is that is is not possible.
Technorati tags: Silverlight, WPF, Wiimote
As the RC1 has been released I had five minutes spare to ensure they worked in RC1.
Here are the links
PhotoViewer. : The stand alone version of the WebPart project I do the testing and enhancements on first, its easier to see when I have messed it up here.
**Update** Moved to codeplex.
Currently in a laughable state of development, try it you will see.
Silverlight Photo Viewer WebPart : The Sharepoint Portal version of Photo Viewer. Coded as an Installable WebPart. This means that if installed on a portal level then any user on any portal are can jsut drop this on and it displays from the default Image Library list. This needs some work to make it work “MySite” cos it explodes at the moment, also I need to try it on Sub Sites of MySite and WSS Sites. This should work on Sharepoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 as all 2003 webparts should (mostly).
Silverlight WebPart Template : A Really Simple Webpart project that implements a button that says click me. It has mouseover anims and fullscreen and thats it. What’s special about this is that the webpart is coded to allow multiple instances of this part on the same page. The photo viewer code is based on this. This should work on Sharepoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 as all 2003 webparts should (mostly).
Would really like to hear if you implement this and what you think and what improvements could be made. I know of a few but I’m interested in your opinions and there should be a lot considering how many downloads there have been lately.
Now I’m sure you’ve read about the new release candidate for Silverlight and the alpha refresh. But don’t forget that there is also an update to blend.
Many of the developer sites are quoting the RC but forgetting about blend. Now because they think that blend is a designer tool its being highlighted in the the designer channels but believe me as a developer you need blend I would not want to try to design animations in xaml. I like to see what I’m doing and pick colours and gradients not code them (unless of course that’s what’s required).
So don’t forget get the new blend as well as silverlight runtimes and sdks.
Jay Kimble has an article on his Silverlight conversion and he manages to explain exactly what I had in mind when I said ‘….does anyone else think that Silverlight is “DHTML applications”…’
My comment was squarely aimed at those developers who suffered through the DHTML Application architecture introduced in VB6 (but you could frig it in VB5). In this architecture you could, by having an activeX on the page, control and access the DOM. It didn’t catch on due to compatibility problems with other browsers, but I tell you some times it was just great, when we created an “Ajax” web application back in IE4 having the speed of compiled code on your side to do the calculations and then manipulate the DOM and not have to worry ourselves with error handling Jscript, which just didn’t handle errors at all back then was marvelous.
Silverlight gives you all this again but cross browser and cross platform in a much better development environment than VB5/6. In fact Jay is so excited by this he states it twice and in big fonts. So in case you missed it here it is again here,
“Now we’re going to talk to the browser’s DOM directly from Silverlight replacing JavaScript with C#. (And then debug it from Visual Studio!)” .
Long live DHTML Applications (redux).
Technorati tags: Silverlight
The great thing about wordpress or any other decent blogging engine is that it gathers stats. Stats on visits, stats on click thru’s but most important and most interesting is the stats on referrers ! This can be search engine terms, I’m sorry to say that I have no interesting search referrers like Rory but the Silverlight posts have lead me to an interesting site and better still he has a link to mine !
Pete Brown has a lovely example of Silverlight animation that’s just so pretty called balloons. Can you tell what it is yet ? This is done in Silverlight 1.1 and he goes into detail on some of the problems he has had in creating this and what things are lacking in Alpha.
So take a look at this and his other posts all are pretty interesting, I know I will.
Technorati tags: Silverlight
One of the first things I looked for was animation along a path, I found some demos for WPF that did this and tried to do them in Silverlight. Fell at the first hurdle. Silverlight does not have this functionality, yet at least. Why Silverlight does not have this in Alpha or beta, along with some rudimentary controls, auto-scaling with that view window thing I do not know. But path animation missing? if your taking on flash you’d better get this sorted.
But for now I found this, Jaime Rodriguez has a tool to create motion path animations, well almost it creates key frames for the animation based on an equivalent WPF project that you can then cut and paste the xaml.
So for now this is great but MS hurry up and get some more features in, in under a 100k please.
Here is the link
Sorry to labour the project now, but I thought it might be handy for anyone who wants to modify the look and feel of the Sharepoint/Silverlight photoviewer that its a little hard to do in a 2003 project. So I thought I’d release the normal Silverlight “Blend” project so a designer can do a proper job on it.
Source Code can be found here
This is a Silverlight beta project.
UPDATE : ** RC1 SOURCE **
Technorati tags: Silverlight, photoviewer
Well that’s a long title but I think you get the idea of what this post is about.
Building on top of my web part template I thought I ought to do something useful that I could share. So Combining the ability to peruse lists from a webpart and mangling this into Silverlight I made a webpart Image Library viewer.
Now this is pretty rough and ready the xaml is from the VB school of design, “Grey Blue and Boxy”, but get a designer on the case and your away. It contains elements of a jscript Control. The photos at the bottom scroll left and right and are added dynamically. This is a good use of the CreateFromXaml but using the “true” option for the namespace scope, which is better than find and replace of the video library example. It does full screen by clicking the little grey blue square (see what I mean about design) which is taken from the video library sample and doesn’t scale to exactly 4:3, again I don’t have time to investigate, it involves pencils and math’s and I’m a bit busy.
The webpart itself looks specifically for a list called “Image Library” one of the default lists created by portal sites. This can be changed so that you could have a toolpart selection. It relies on the list being an Image Library list. If the list is not there it blows up I haven’t spent long on this making it bomb proof.
If there are no pictures in the image library it resorts to displaying text in the webpart that the list is empty, not some custom display in the Silverlight part.
RSS Feed