.NET Rocker

Thanks for joining my session at the .NET Developer Conference (DevCon) in Nürnberg today. As promised you find the slides of my session herer on my blog. Just click the download-link below.

download slides

Thomas

Yes, it felt like a very long time since the Firestarter-Event in December last year till now. As promised the Silverlight 5 Beta is available in the first half of 2011, and that’s now. Find the Links to the products below. Be sure to install SP1 of VS2011 first (you find that one here: VS2010SP1)

Silverlight 5 Tools
Dokumentation to Silverlight 5
Microsoft Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5

Have fun and enjoy.

Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund. Vielen Dank für den Besuch meiner Session diesen Morgen um 8:30. Wie versprochen stehen die Slides und die Live-Demo eine Stunde nach dem Session-Ende hier auf dem Blog zur Verfügung. Folgend die Links

Slides
Live-Demo

Falls es Fragen oder Anmerkungen gibt, immer wieder gerne. Einfach direkt per E-Mail an mich.

Thomas

I switched from iPhone 3GS to a Samsung Omnia 7 with Windows Phone 7. Windows Phone 7 has  a really great user experience, especially with a great display like my Samsung Omnia 7 has. I even like the user experience of Windows Phone 7 much more than the user experience of my iPhone 3GS. And the development of apps with Silverlight is totally awesome.

There are just a few things I miss from my iPhone:

• A navigation-app like Navigon or TomTom. I think there’ll be one in the near future. (German Telekom already has Navigon, but it’s an exclusiv app that you only get there)
• The “Maps”-Application.

The second one is very amazing. On my iPhone I was able to open the Maps-app, enter a street and streetnumber and the app displayed me the route to it from my current location.

The “Maps”-Application on Windows Phone 7 just displays my current location, it can’t display a route. Oh, I can hear you say “no, that’s not true, it can display a route”. You’re correct, but for some users the functionality is not there. And as I found out, it’s based on regional settings. Is this a bug or a wanted behavior? I don’t know. Maybe Microsoft can give a statement to that. For me it doesn’t make sense to show a different set of buttons for Switzerland than for Germany/US and other regions.

When you’ve set up your Phone with region German (Switzerland), in the maps-app you can just look at your location, but there’s no way to get a route to another location. When the region is switched to German (German), you can enter a route to another location. Let’s look at the screens.

Here is the screen with German (Switzerland) setting. Notice that there are just two Buttons in the ApplicationBar. One to jump to the current location (Ich) and one to search (Suchen). The latter one just opens Bing-Search with the current location.

When I now go to the settings of my Windows Phone 7 and set everything from Deutsch (Schweiz) to Deutsch (Deutschland), I get an additional icon as you see on the following screenshot.

The additional icon allows it to search an address to get a route. And that was what I wanted. You can check it out on your handy. Just go to the settings and set all region-based informations to Deutsch (Schweiz). There are three settings under region & language:

• Region Format
• System locale
• Browser- and search language

If you’re a swiss guy, set all to Deutsch (Deutschland): Now enjoy your Maps-App.

September last year I gave a talk at the BASTA-conference in Mainz about Silverlight 4 and WPF in .NET 4.0. I also gave an interview about Silverlight. You can watch it here: http://it-republik.de/dotnet/news/Einem-WPF-und-Silverlight-Experten-auf-den-Zahn-gefuehlt-057911.html

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

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.

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