Announcements

I was working with one of the web application localization. I was searching with couple of translator's available with the web. The most popular of them are

1. Google Translation Service

2. Bing Translator Service

I tried using the Google API for the web and it was pretty good. Then in recent times I came across Bing translator and tools link in them gave me the way to implement the Bing API. Bing is making a revolution in the search engines and so I liked to use that here.

Following URL's are referred for this.

Silverlight 3 was just announced on MIX09 – I’m sure you are all pretty excited about the new features included in this release. There is a lot to talk about – offline support, styling, binding, controls, media, animation, graphics, etc.

This article aims to give you a brief overview of the new features as well as links to in-depth articles explaining the details.

Let’s start by organizing the new features in groups:

DataBinding

• Element to Element Binding – enables property binding to CLR objects and other UI components via XAML.

Gizmox released its Visual WebGui development environments' version 6.3.3 as a further stabilization of the 6.3 Ajax & Silverlight framework/platform for developing and deploying RIAs.

Visual WebGui allows you to develop and deploy web applications using WinForms methdologies as well as an easy migration path from desktop applications to the web. It also allows to create multi presentation layers from the same code base and to choose between presenting in DHTML or Silverlight.

Download Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 ( including the Silverlight 2 RC0 runtime ).

And the latest Expression Blend.

First we should point out this release is intended to be used only from developers to begin migrating their existing code to RTW. The applications build with the tools will run only on the Silverlight 2 RC0 Developer Runtime an not on the Beta 2 runtime. Also the full version of Silverlight 2.0 will have the same features as RC0 i.e. more functionality won't be added from this release until the final.

New features

• New controls
  • PasswordBox, ComboBox, MessageBox and ProgressBar.
• Improvement in controls
  • Improved accessibility and UI automation
  • Updated look and feel
  • IsEnabled and IsEnabledChanged added
  • Exposed virtual methods for On* events on Control e.g. OnGotFocus, OnKeyDown, OnKeyUp, OnMouseEnter etc.
• CompositionTarget.Rendering event allows per-frame callbacks for physics and custom animation.
• Networking
  • Support for HTTP requests on background threads.

While digging into templating and styling of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 controls, I came into a situation where the event for MouseLeftButtonDown was not triggered when I click on the control. I created a sample project and in the Page.xaml I added the following:

<StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" 
MouseLeftButtonDown="StackPanel_MouseLeftButtonDown">
     <TextBlock Text="Antonio Moreno" Height="22" FontSize="16" />
          <Grid>
               <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                    <ColumnDefinition />
                    <ColumnDefinition />
               </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                    
               <TextBlock Text="AMoreno@hotmail.com" Grid.Column="0"/>
               <TextBlock Text="(5) 555-3932" Grid.Column="1"/>
          </Grid>
</StackPanel>

 As you can see from the xaml, I have a StackPanel and an event handler for MouseLeftButtonDown event.

Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components - powered by Microsoft^® Silverlight^™. With Visifire you can create and embed visually stunning animated Silverlight Charts within minutes. Visifire is easy to use and independent of the server side technology. It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML.

Take a tour of beautiful charts in Gallery

Design your own chart in minutes using Chart Designer.

On June 13, 2008 in the Microsoft Reston Technology Center, join AIS, Cynergy and Microsoft for the first Silverlight TechFest. This is a full day event focusing on Silverlight and Expression. We'll build a full application showing key parts of the process both on the UI side with the designer/developer relationship, and on the back end with WCF services and and business logic. I'll be doing the afternoon session on Silverlight and WCF.

Here's the official blurb:

Microsoft TechFest – Building Rich Interactive Web Applications with Silverlight and Expression

You are cordially invited to join us in a full-day event for developers and designers.

I have been fairly quiet for the last few months, and one of the reasons is that I have been working on a Silverlight 2 application, showcasing some future thinking for rich UI in the healthcare space.

The Microsoft Health Common User Interface: Patient Journey Demonstrator is the result of work from a very small team based here in the UK, and we think, is a great example of a Rich Internet Application demonstrating an LOB scenario, but using the power of Silverlight to provide beautiful, meaningful ways of representing incredibly complex data.

The blurb from the site...

The Expression team has released an update to Deep Zoom Composer.

Among the improvements (see screen shot):