Announcements

Exactly 1 year after the release at Mix 07, Microsoft releases Expression Studio 2. The suite of tools for professional designers includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder.
It also works seamlessly with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, solving the age-old designer and developer workflow challenge.

Here are the most important changes that made it into this release of the Expression Suite:

Last year the Microsoft Expression team shipped a new suite of tools for creative professionals. This first release of Expression Studio marked a significant milestone in the history of development tools at Microsoft, delivering superior designer-developer workflow and providing designers a set of interaction design, graphic design, Web design, digital asset management and video production tools to deliver better user experiences on Windows and the Web.

I am pleased to announce, just one year later, the team has done it again with today’s release of Microsoft Expression Studio 2.

Just bought my tickets and booked my hotel to TechEd '08! Can't wait to see everyone in Orlando again this year!!

Here is my schedule:

Tuesday 6/3:    8:30am to 6:00pm - TLC Booth Dev Area

Thursday 6/5:   8:15am to 2:45pm- TLC Booth Dev Area

Friday 6/6:      11:30pm to 2:45pm - TLC Booth Dev Area

                         4:30pm to 5:45pm -  Chalk Talk

My Chalk talk is titled: "Tips, Tricks, and Techniques for Building a Great Microsoft Silverlight Application"

• I will demonstrate how to use all the latest set of controls for Silverlight 2 focusing on the ones that are not available to WPF.

Silverlight Streaming is a free service that Microsoft offers to the public. With the service users receive 10 GB free space that they can use to host video contents. Unlike the service provided by youtube.com, Silverlight Streaming does not add Microsoft logo or attach any commercial information to your video contents, and your contents can only be made available/visible to the public in your web applications. This service is great for individual users and developers, or even small businesses.

On April 9, I posted a link to my first interview on Sparkling Client. Today I'm happy to post a link to the second and final part of the interview.  Also, be sure to catch their terrific interview with Dave Campbell (Silverlight Cream).

The Microsoft Switzerland DPE Team yesterday ran an all-day hands-on lab on the subject of Silverlight 2 Beta 1 in Zürich. This blog post's purpose in life is to share the lab with you in case you want to try it for yourself to quickly get started with Silverlight 2.

Goal of the lab was to build a full featured Silverlight application from scratch that acts as a rich, interactive data-driven car-finder application, based on the Comparis Silverlight Challenge sample solution. This challenge runs until June 22, 2008 and will award the best Silverlight solution that implement new and creative ways to use a RIA to visualize automobile advertisements.

I know ScottGu already did a good sample showing integration with Digg and Silverlight, but check out what Jose did!

... (read more)

For all of you attending tomorrow's CMAP code camp, here's a sneak peek at what I'll be building in my 10:30 Silverlight 2 and Microsoft Expression session. The session is targeted towards developers, but anyone with an interest in Silverlight or Expression is welcome and encouraged to attend

The application has a server piece (the windows forms app) and, in this instance, two Silverlight clients in a chat, actually talking to each other over sockets.

One of the reasons I took my job was the amazing people I met during my interview. It turns out, however, that the place is crawling with talent; it doesn't seem likely that an organization that large would not have regressed to the mean yet, but the dev-div continues to astound me.

I'd like to start pointing out some of the people who, I speculate, will have a lot to offer the Silverlight Developer community. These will be random "sightings" as I go, of folks who are actively presenting information to the community but who you may not yet have run across,  but who you want to watch for.

I've just released an updated version of the Silverlight Spy. Updates include:

• statistics and resources views implemented
• preview tab UI interface implemented (preview functionality itself not available yet)
• minor updates to the XAML writer
• minor UI changes

Enjoy!