.NET Rocker

An der GUI & Design-Konferenz in Nürnberg durfte ich heute zwei Vorträge zu den Themen “Controls in WPF/Silverlight designen und entwickeln” und “Hardwarenahe Programmierung in WPF/Silverlight mit Pixelshadern” halten. Bei Ihnen als Teilnehmer möchte ich mich an dieser Stelle recht herzlich für das grosse Interesse und die Aufmerksamkeit bedanken. Ich hoffe, es hat Ihnen gefallen und Sie konnten das ein oder andere für die Praxis mitnehmen.

Zum Runterladen der versprochenen Slides klicken Sie bitte einfach auf einen der beiden Vorträge:

• Controls in WPF/Silverlight designen und entwickeln
• Hardwarenahe Programmierung in WPF/Silverlight mit Pixelshadern

Viel Spass damit. Falls weitere Fragen auftauchen oder der Code zu den kurzen Live-Demos gewünscht ist, genügt eine kurze Mail an mich. Schreiben Sie mir auch, falls Sie individuelle Trainings oder Consulting im Bereich WPF/Silverlight benötigen: Mail an Thomas

Cheers,
Thomas

The Silverlight Firestarter-Event The Keynote of the Silverlight Firestarter Event has just ended. It started with a great business-application built by SAP, before Scott Guthrie mentioned Silverlight 5 the first time. Scott said Microsoft has implemented about 70% of the uservoice features requested by the community here http://dotnet.uservoice.com/forums/4325-silverlight-feature-suggestions

After all the “Silverlight is dead” debacle, Scott mentioned that Silverlight is a key technology for Microsoft. Microsoft thinks that HTML5, Silverlight and WPF are the technologies for buildung apps of the future. After a fantastic doctor demo in 3D where a 3D-Scott was used, Scott said, there are two things to remember after the Firestarter-Event: “"I’m really ripped and Silverlight 5 is too ".

Silverlight 5 Beta will be released in the first half of 2011 (Source: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/future/). Final Release will be shipped at the end of 2011 (PDC 2011? Maybe as compensation for PDC10 for the silverlight-community ).

Silverlight 5 contains tons of new features. Here are the features for media and applications mentioned in the keynote. Let’s start with media.

Media

• Hardware Decode – Videos can now be decoded by using the GPU. So your CPU can do other stuff in the meanwhile.
• TrickPlay – You can speed up the videos you look with silverlight. Especially good for watching webcasts faster.
• Powermanagement – Less battery is used when you’re watching a video. Also no more screensavers can jump into when the video runs
• Remote Control – support for remote control devices to control videos from your couch.
• IIS Media Services 4.0
• Smooth Streaming for Silverlight, iPhone and iPad. There’s a new feature that allows streaming to any platform via the browser. So a video can streamed to Silverlight or to e.g. iPhone or iPad.
• Low Latency Live Streaming

Applications

• Data Binding Debugging – set breakpoints on Data Bindings directly in XAML. The debugger stops there and you can watch the locals
• Custom Markup Extensions – create your own Markup Extension. Especially good for MVVM
• RelativeSource now has FindAncestor-functionality from WPF – Load data e.g. from your UserControl out of a Binding in a DataTemplate.
• Binding in Setters of Styles – allows you easy skinning of your application.
• WCF & RIA Services
• WS-Trust Support
• Windows Azure Support – you can use Azure Tablestorage via WCF RIA Services
• MVVM-friendly DataSource
• End-to-End support for Complex Types – you can now create complex types in your Entity Data Model and use them via WCF RIA Services
• Low latency Networking
• Text and Printing
• Text Clarity has been improved
• Multicolumn Text Flow
• Character tracking and Leading
• Full OpenType support
• Vector PostScript printing – yeah, that seems to be a fantastic feature for business-applications. Printing in Silverlight 4 is bitmap-based and so very slow. I’m sure the vector-based PostScript-printing will be faster and allows you to create larger documents on client-side.
• Pivot-Element – special element that allows you a fantastic view of data in your business application. Drill down the results and have quickly and animated views. Awesome feature. Works fantastic with Sharepoint and can already be downloaded for Silverlight 4 from www.silverlight.net
• Graphics
• Fluid Layout Transitions
• 3D Support – there’s a complete 3D-API in Silverlight 5 allows you to do 3D-stuff in the browser.
• Immediate mode graphics api. Allows you to directly draw to the screen
• Out of Browser
• Multi Window Support
• P/Invoke – call
• Enterprise Group Policy Support – have in-browser-applications talking to office etc. Inside browser apps are trusted by an enterprise group policy.
• Test and Perf-Tools
• Automated UI Testing – simulate what the user does in the app. Coded UI to generate, record and execute a test. Already available with Feature Pack 2 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ff655021.aspx)
• Improved Profiling support
• Memory
• CPU
• Thread contention

There will also be a 64bit runtime of Silverlight.

Find more to the new features on http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/future/.

Cheers,
Thomas

Book your ticket now to get an early bird

On February the 7th there’s a fantastic conference in cologne about mobile devices and mobile applications., the Beyondtellerrand mobile. Beyond Tellerrand is a mixture of English and German. “Tellerand” means the edge of a plate. Don’t just look at the mobile devices and applications with the blinders like a horse, look over the edge of the plate and get new ideas, check out the new possibilities and jump on the train of the mobile world.

Find all informations about the conference on http://www.beyondtellerrand.com.

I’ll give a talk at the beyondtellerrand-conference about creating Services for mobile devices based on OData and the Cloud. Connect to them via Windows Phone 7 or Android or any other plattform. There are great and famous speakers there, and I’m very pleased to give a talk beside those big players. Find some of them below:

Laurent Bugnion – Director of UX Integration Development for IdentityMine and “the” MVVM-Expert, Author of the “english” Silverlight 4 Book.

Jens Franke – freelance Senior Interactive developer building web-, mobile-, dekstop-apps and author.

Saban Unlü – CEO of netTrek.de and developer/consultant. Author of numerous books about Flash.

…

So go and grab your ticket know. I’m looking forward to meet you there.

Thomas

It has been quiet here for some weeks. After I had finished my Silverlight book I just enjoyed the unfamiliar free time I had on Saturday and Sunday. I just used it for hanging around with my family and friends. Now I’m back in the optimum of work-life-balance. I’m going to start a series of blogposts about building apps with Silverlight for the Web and for Windows Phone 7 in the mid of december. So I hope you’re looking forward to that.

With this post I want to inform you about the GUI&Design-Conference. The conference about GUI and Design has a lot of experts and great sessions to offer. I think it’s a special and great conference that you shouldn’t miss as a UI-Developer or –Designer. It would be great to see you there.

I’ve two sessions. One about Pixelshader-Effects in WPF and Silverlight and one about developing and designing Custom Controls in WPF and Silverlight. Find the conference-website on http://www.gui-design.ppedv.de/ or just click on the image below to join it.

Looking forward to see you there.

Thomas

Nach anfänglichen Schwierigkeiten mit dem WLAN – wahrscheinlich ein defektes WLAN-Kabel – hat der Upload nun endlich geklappt. Anbei finden Sie die live programmierten Demos und die Slides zum Vortrag. Viel Spass damit und Happy Coding.

Slides und Demos.

Hallo liebe Teilnehmer der WPF 4.0-Session. Anbei finden Sie die Links zu den Slides und zu den live programmierten Demos des Vortrags. Viel Spass damit und bis morgen zur Silverlight 4.0 Session.

Slides und Demos

Exactly two years after the first release of the WPF-book the second edition is available since some days. Find more details about the content and where you can order it on http://www.thomasclaudiushuber.com/wpf.

The Silverlight-Book has also been written and is currently running through the process of reading, testing and printing. It will be in stores on 28th of August. Find more information about the Silverlight-Book and where you can order it on http://www.thomasclaudiushuber.com/silverlight.

I hope you like the books and you can master the “programming-challenge” of your wpf- and silverlight-projects with the knowhow you got from the books.

Cheers,
Thomas

This weekend I’ve to finish the second edition of my WPF-book. Luckily it’s going to rain tomorrow. But I’ve almost done it. This evening I’ve just ported a small sample for Animation Easing Functions from WPF to Silverlight. It was easy, all I had to do was using a PathGeometry instead of the not existing StreamGeometry to draw the lines of the functions. Use the fun-sample below to play around with these easing functions. You’ll get the code of this version with my upcoming german Silverlight-Book in August. So have fun, Cheers Thomas.

After Visual Studio has been released on Monday this week, Silverlight 4 is also available since Thursday. I’ll have to speed up my book-writing. As many of you know, I’m writing on a second edition of my WPF-book to .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. I’m also writing on a Silverlight-book (about Silverlight 4.0). Below some details of the two books.

The WPF-Book:

I’ll finish the update of my WPF-book till end of April, so it’ll be released in June. There are many new things in it, like a section to the Model-View-ViewModel-Pattern, Multitouch, the new Controls DatePicker, Calendar and DataGrid, Animation Easing-Functions, VisualStateManager, Windows 7 Taskbarintegration, Pixel-Shaders and much more. Of course there’s also a new version of the FriendStorage-Application that is using new features and controls, like e.g. the DataGrid:

FriendStorage now also has integration into the Windows 7 Taskbar. So you can iterate through the friends via the Buttons shown in the Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail. Also recognize that the image of the current friend is also displayed as overlay-image on the Taskbar-Button

You find the second edition of my WPF-book here on amazon.de

The Silverlight-book

I’ll write on the Silverlight-book till end of June, so it’ll be released in August. I hope you’re looking forward to it. I gave and will give my best that it’s a great resource to all professional Silverlight-Developers and those who want to become one of those. In May I’ll show the contents of the Silverlight-book on my homepage. I’ll also blog here. For now I can say that there’s a FriendStorageOnline-Application in the Samples with Login/Registration and CRUD-Operations via WCF Ria Services. A logged-in User can create Friendlists and insert data as usual. The app looks like this:

The Silverlight-book is also already on amazon here. But keep in mind that there could be a change in pages (some more up to 1000) and so maybe also in price. I’ll post more information about the targeted pagecount in May, then you’ll also see some details of the contents.

Ciao,
Thomas

The Mix has started some hours ago, and here it is, the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate. Now you can move your development-environment from Visual Studio 2010 Beta to RC. There are also updates to WCF RIA Services, a WCF RIA Services Toolkit etc. Find everything you need here:

http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/

There’s also a fantastic post from Tim Heuer about the changes in the Silverlight RC here:

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/03/15/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-rc-mix10.aspx

Another great thing is that Silverlight 4 is THE technology for Windows Phone 7. So I think I’ve to sell my iPhone and buy me a new Mobile with Windows Phone 7 on it. If you want to start developing Mobile-apps with Silverlight, also go to Tim Heuers blog: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/03/15/get-started-with-silverlight-for-windows-phone.aspx

So have fun with the new release. I’ll go downstairs in my dark room now and finish up my Silverlight 4.0 book. It’ll take a while. For now I can say if you like my WPF-book, you’ll love that Silverlight book for sure.