Silverlight

MIX09 recap: plenty for developers, designers

It’s sometimes hard at a conference to see the forest for the trees. With two-hour keynotes and session after session, it’s not easy to keep perspective on what’s big and what’s ancillary. And so, now that I’m back in Boston and recovered from the redeye, here’s my take on last week.

Most of the action was concentrated on the first day of MIX09: the biggest highlights were two new features in Blend Expression 3, SuperPreview and SketchFlow — but Silverlight 3 and Web App Installer also raised some eyebrows. On the other hand, the official launch of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday was a bit anticlimactic.

SuperPreview is Microsoft’s answer to a problem that has dogged Web developers for about as long as they’ve been around: browser incompatibilities. SuperPreview lets designers see how two browsers render a given page by viewing the comparisons side by side or overlaid. The tool can also send HTML to a server and get the rendered image back, letting designers compare browsers that aren’t installed on their computers. That’s useful for comparing different versions of Internet Explorer, for instance, or even seeing how IE on Windows compares to Safari on a Mac.

Selecting a component in one browser preview highlights that component in the other browser’s rendering, letting developers quickly hone in one problem areas. But for now, SuperPreview only shows developers where the inconsistencies are; it doesn’t tell them how to fix the problems.

You can download SuperPreview as a standalone from Microsoft.

SketchFlow, the other new feature in Expression Blend 3, lets designers quickly prototype UIs by defining a flowchart that describes an application’s screens. You can also assign behaviors to buttons that can change a screen’s state or transition to another screen, giving clients a good sense of an application’s flow without you having to write any code.

One nice touch in SketchFlow is that Microsoft has included a new “wiggly” theme for controls that makes them look hand-drawn. That should help cut down on clients that don’t understand the difference between a prototype and a finished product: SketchFlow prototypes look more like drawings on digital napkins than software applications. On the other hand, SketchFlow projects are full-fledged Expression Blend applications, so you can use them as a starting point when you’re ready to write the real program.

So far, SketchFlow is see-don’t-touch: Microsoft had plenty of demonstrations throughout the week, but the bits aren’t shipping yet.

I’ve already talked about Silverlight 3 and the Web App Installer in my coverage of the MIX09 keynote, but they’re worth a quick mention here. Silverlight 3 includes lots of eye candy as well some important tools for developers. For instance, you’ll be able to write one data validation method that will run on both the client and the server. Microsoft also complemented the new Silverlight preview with improvements to the IIS Media Pack, including DVR-type pausing and playback of live streams.

The Web App Installer is a quick and easy way to deploy Web applications to your server, including applications not built on ASP.NET. The installer takes care of dependencies, so installing WordPress will automatically download and install PHP on your Windows server, too.

If there was one disappointment last week, it was the unveiling of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday. It’s not so much that IE 8 is a bad browser — although it still lacks the extensibility that FireFox’s extensions provide — but the browser has already been in beta for months. The most exciting feature for designers is IE 8’s Developer Tools, which we’ve already seen. The buzz seems to be giving IE 8 the Vista treatment: blogs are calling its launch a failure and arguing that it hasn’t brought enough to the table to quell Firefox’s steady gain on the market.

Microsoft’s open source projects may help it sell software

If you’re linking to outside JavaScript code in your Web pages, you’re probably (hopefully!) aware that there are certain security risks. Microsoft’s Scott Isaacs talked about the problem at a session at PDC 2008 and said there are essentially two ways most sites handle this threat: some ignore it and hope for the best, while others bring in IFrames — which have their own problems, like clickjacking.

The problem remains unsolved, but one approach Microsoft is trying is a new technology called Web Sandbox, which it announced at PDC. The Web Sandbox is a server-side program that retrieves outside scripts, transforms them to make them secure and embeds them directly to the HTML. You can see Isaccs’ complete talk explaining how to use Web Sandbox on Channel 9.

Which brings us to today’s news: Web Sandbox is now being released as open source, under the Apache License 2.0. What’s interesting here isn’t just that Microsoft is continuing its overtures into OSS, but that it’s continuing to do so primarily on the Web front. Two of its other major flirtations with open source have been its support of jQuery and its release of the code for its business-oriented Silverlight controls.

I don’t think anybody is accusing Microsoft of being altruistic, so I won’t bother making the case that this is an obvious example of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” But it seems to me that Microsoft’s open source strategy hinges on being open on the Web and sticking with proprietary software everywhere else. Pricing for Windows 7 hasn’t been released yet, but I’m guessing it’ll cost more than Ubuntu.

That two-pronged approach makes a lot of sense. The Internet has always been free to use, and if people aren’t going to pay for your software, you may as well give away the source. Desktops and enterprise apps, on the other hand, still provide major sources of income for software vendors.

For Microsoft to stay relevant as a software company, it has to continue to attract top developers, both to itself and to the ISVs who develop for Windows. Playing nice with OSS on the Web may help Microsoft keep up with the cool new upstarts so that it can continue to make money where there’s money to be made.

Obama’s inauguration will be streamed with Silverlight

When millions of eyes tune in to see president-elect-but-about-to-be-President Obama’s inauguration at noon on Tuesday, Microsoft will be working behind the scenes. The Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) will be streaming the Obama inauguration live using Silverlight, Microsoft announced today. The stream will be available at the PIC’s website.

The inauguration will be the biggest event that we know of to be broadcast using Silverlight 2 since it came out of beta in October. This announcement is good news for Microsoft, given that MLB announced in November that it would be switching from Silverlight back to Adobe Flash.

Microsoft executives have donated heavily to the inauguration: Bill Gates and Steve Balmer each gave $50,000 for the event, and other executives also donated five-figure sums. Microsoft also donated to the Obama campaign heavily during the election, giving it $2,124,186 — over twice what it gave to the McCain campaign, according to opensecrets.org. Most of that money came from individuals, so it doesn’t look like the company overtly bought what will likely turn out to be a huge surge in Silverlight downloads. But with Adobe not even appearing on opensecrets.org’s “heavy hitters” list, I can’t help but wonder if Microsoft’s generosity helped it get this event.

Silverlight 2 UI communicates through WCF

John Papa shows onstrate how to build a Silverlight 2 UI that communicates through WCF to interact with business entities and a database.

According to John, in his article on MSDN Magazine Web, the business logic, entity model, and data-mapping code can be consumed by any presentation tier. 

He’s created the WCF services to be consumed by a Silverlight 2 app, set up the server hosting the WCF services to allow cross-domain invocation, and more. 

Silverlight 2 UI communicates through Silverlight - MSDN Magazine Web

Silverlight 2 Hands on Labs released

Microsoft has released the Silverlight 2.0 lab so you can program this innovative technology while working in a safe, supportive environment. Some of the labs include: Basic Concepts, Concepts in building Connected Applications, Building Reusable Controls, Exploring the Integration between Silverlight and its browser host, and Dynamic Animation. All tutorials need Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Runtime, Visual Studio 2008 Tools and Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK installed.

You can also find out about new Silverlight Essential Training with how to add video, animations, and interactive features such as drag-and-drop functionality.

Lang.NET Day 3 considers, Ruby, Moonlight, Cobra

Ruby was first at bat on Day 3 of the Lang.NET in Redmond. Wayne Kelly and Jon Lam both presenting. Jon Lam’s IronRuby session was a status update on where the project stands, and how Lam’s Microsoft group intends to get to 1.0. He said his group has debugging and stack back-traces working. In his Day 3 report, blogger Ted Neward comments that the time is ripe for a Ruby spec to appear.

Miguel de Icaza talked about Moonlight, how it happened, where it is today, and where it can go, according to a blog post by none other than John Lam. (Moonlight is an implementation of Silverlight for Linux.)

Among interesting elements uncovered as informal stand-ups during the event was Cobra, which is described as an imperative, object-oriented general-purpose language that runs on .NET and Mono. In a single language, it seeks to combine clean syntax as found in Python and Ruby, as well as static and dynamic typing, while exhibiting run-time performance akin to C# and C++. No small task! A nod to Harry Pierson for his link to Cobra.

Lang.NET shows Iron Python with Robotics Studio, JScript on DLR

Microsoft’s Lang.NET Symposium 2008 got up and running yesterday. C# father Anders Hejlsberg talked about C# 3.0 features, IronPython guru Hugunin discussed the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and IronPython, and Pratap Lakshman from the JScript team talked about the new managed implementation of JScript, codenamed Managed JScript.

Hejlsberg, as reported by blogger extraordinaire Ted Neward, told the assembled language heads that the conventional divisions of language types (into categories) covering the functional, the object-oriented, and so on will break down in the years ahead.

IronPython high priest Jim Hugunin did a demo that mixed Microsoft Robotics Studio code with IronPython running on the DLR. Hugunin’s creation, IronPython, was recently updated as IronPython RC 1.1.1 on CodePlex.  Hugunin created Jython, a Java version of Python.

IronPython 1.0 was debuted in September 2006. The latest release candidate is described as a minor update focused on bug fixing. Hugunin’s team has fielded IronPython 2.0 Alpha 1, as well. This is the first release of IronPython built on the DLR, and targeting version 2.5 of Python.

For his part, Pratap Lakshman provided an overview of the managed Jscript implementation originally discussed at MIX07.  JavaScript on top of the DLR became a reality as part of Silverlight 2.0 (then known as Silverlight 1.1).

Surprise guests at the symposium were Java specialists John Rose and Charles Nutter, who discussed Java’s increasing support of new languages on the JVM.

Planned Day 2 discussions at Lang.NET 2008 include Eric Meijer on Volta, Paul Vick on Visual Basic and Karl Prosser ”Powershell Plus. ”

.NET reference posters: Great things come in large packages

Posters make good conference swag, but they don’t always fit into the suitcase. Fortunately, many of Microsoft’s greatest hits — .NET Framework namespaces, Visual Studio 2008 and 2005 keyboard shortcuts, Silverlight 2.0 Developer References and so on — are available for download on MSDN.

Chris Bowen recently did the world a favor and compiled the most recent .NET reference posters in a single blog entry. As he admits, “I didn’t realize just how many until I searched for ‘poster’ on MSDN downloads.” (For the curious, 22 posters pop up in the search results.)

Bowen points to numerous useful .NET posters, including the aforementioned Namespaces and Silverlight references, keyboard shortcuts for C# 3.0, C++ 2008 and Visual Basic 2008, BizTalk Server 2006 charts and Microsoft Office 2007 features.

Meanwhile, one comment from Bowen’s entry points to the Developer Readiness Program, a South African .NET technology training company. DRP offers dozens of reference posters, with particular attention paid to SharePoint 2007, Team Foundation Server and the .NET 3.0 technologies. In addition, TFS posters are available in Spanish and Portuguese in addition to English.

Nearly all these .NET reference posters are rather large, so go find yourself a nice color printer if you intend to redecorate the walls of your cubicle.

Silverlight to power NBC’s Summer Olympics Web site

On the face of it, Silverlight and sports Web sites complement each other nicely. In fact, Silverlight is a part of both MLB.com and NBA.com, the respective sites for North America’s major baseball and basketball leagues. There’s also WWE.com, the site for World Wrestling Entertainment. (Insert debate about professional wrestling as a sport here.)

The RIA framework gives these sites embedded video, real-time statistics and, for those purchasing tickets, 3D diagrams that show users where to find their seats and how close to the court or field they will be sitting — features without which few diehard fans could survive.

So Microsoft’s announcement that NBC Universal will use Silverlight 2.0 to power its 2008 Summer Olympics site is not a huge surprise.

Nonetheless, it is impressive, especially given the scale. The site will feature 3,000 hours of live and on-demand video coverage, Soma Somasegar indicates in the above blog entry. Each video will contain quite a bit of metadata, too, ranging from player bios to maps of the venues where the event is taking place.

One point of interest here, which Somasegar did not address, is performance. NBC Olympics can expect massive traffic as the Olympics go on. (Games run Aug. 6-24, with the opening ceremony beginning Aug. 8.) It will be interesting to see how Silverlight 2.0 handles what very well could be millions of requests from viewers across the globe.

Mind you, any Rich Internet Application would face that kind of scrutiny, but Silverlight is the proverbial new kid on the block — and you can bet Microsoft wants it to end up like Mark Wahlberg and not Jordan Knight.

Jackass 2.5, first Web-only studio film, powered by Silverlight

Just in time for good tidings of comfort and joy, Jackass 2.5 has hit the browser.

Aficionados of Steve-O, Johnny Knoxville and their whimsical shenanigans can take in the third installment of this cinematic wonder that is Jackass free on Blockbuster.com from today (Dec. 19) until Dec. 31. It marks the first time a full-length, studio-backed film has appeared free on the Internet. (The film offers footage left on the cutting room floor after the final edits were made to Jackass Number Two — hence the 2.5 in the title.)

Viewing the movie requires two things — 17 or more years as an inhabitant of Earth and the Silverlight Media Player.

Silverlight, for those just joining us, marks Microsoft’s foray into wide world of the Rich Internet Applications. Demonstrations of Silverlight in action have popped up at numerous Microsoft shows in the last few months, and can be seen at sites as varied as World Wresting Entertainment and the city of Cerritos, Calif., which streams public meetings live on the Web.

This, though, will give that wide world a chance to see how Silverlight handles full-length features — not to mention outrageous, painful stunts that you absolutely, positively, under no circumstances should try at home.

If you’re interested in watching Jackass 2.5 — you know, as a demonstration of the power of Silverlight — first make sure your boss isn’t coming around the corner and then click here. Consider yourself warned.

And we would be remiss in not linking to the press release from Limelight Networks, the content delivery network that partnered with Microsoft and Blockbuster to bring such an important film to the digital masses — so here it is.