Misc

As we have recently announced, a hot book on data-driven applications with Silverlight - Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook was expected to hit the market. The book is now out and there is a 20% price discount available exclusively for SilverlightShow community with promo code SShow20Net.
 
We are talking to one of the book authors - Gill Cleeren, Microsoft Regional Director for Belgium - on what we should expect from the book and how it will help you build better and faster data-driven Silverlight solutions.

MIX10 in Las Vegas is over. The reflections on the event and discussions on news announced there, however, will keep being a hot topic over the next few months.

What were the most significant announcements made at MIX, best sessions and demos, most useful and entertaining social events - find out from SilverlightShow live reporter at the event Cigdem Patlak. Cigdem got the Community Vote award at SilverlightShow Eco Contest.

Q. Cigdem - first, thanks for being SilverlightShow live reporter at MIX! The community showed great interest towards your mini notes (day1, day2, day3) from the event, you also made a couple of very interesting interviews (interview with Adam Kinney, interview with Laurent Bugnion) with key speakers at the event.

The Silverlight Tour is one of the most intensive courses in Silverlight 4. It takes just 4 days to learn and experience the ins and outs of design, development and server-side programming with Silverlight.

We talk to one of the course organizers in Canada - Laurent Duveau - on why should a person invest in attending this course, and what s/he should expect to achieve through it.

Q. Laurent – the Silverlight Tour announced a draw giving one free pass to The Silverlight Tour in Vancouver, May 3-6, 2010 to a member of SilverlightShow Community.

We talk to the First Runner-up in SilverlightShow Eco Contest Levente Mihaly on his impressions from the Eco contest, the application he submitted in the contest, and his expectations towards MIX10. Though unexpected circumstances prevented him from attending MIX, he is looking forward to watching the MIX sessions online.

Meet the First runner-up Levente Mihaly!

Q. Levente - please introduce yourself for those of SilverlightShow community who haven't had the chance to meet you.

A. I'm from Hungary, studied Computer Engineering/Science at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, finished Msc.

Next in our series of interviews with SilverlightShow Eco Contest winners is the Community Vote winner Cigdem Patlak. We talk about her expectations for MIX, sessions she would be most willing to attend, people she would like to meet there, and of course - how it feels to be a community winner in such a competitive and challenging contest!

Meet Cigdem Patlak!

Q. Cigdem - please introduce yourself for those members of SilverlightShow community who haven't had the chance to meet you.

A.

The 3 winners in SilverlightShow Eco Contest are already getting packed for MIX10 in Vegas! Before they fly away, we catch them to talk about their expectations for MIX, sessions they would be most willing to attend, people they would like to meet there, and of course - how it feels to be a winner in such a competitive and challenging contest!

Meet the Grand Prize winner Daniel James!

Q. Daniel - please introduce yourself for those members of SilverlightShow community who haven't had the chance to meet you.

1. Introduction

Silverlight 3 is already a fact and along with it a new version of Expression Blend has been released. One of the changes in the Expression Blend that makes me a deep impression is that the new Blend has been made more approachable for designers. Beside the behaviors, Photoshop and Illustrator importers, the new Blend 3 makes a huge step in the direction of making better user experience. This step is the SketchFlow. The SketchFlow is a new set of tools for Expression Blend to create sketches and prototypes of interactive content and applications.

The official release of Silverlight 3 is already a fact and at Silverlight.net you can find the latest files for download. For more information on how to get started with the new Silverlight 3, pay a visit to our Get Started page.

With the official release there are a lot of changes that will affect in some way the Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 Beta applications. As the list of changes is pretty long, I will overview only the most interesting of them, but to be fully intact with the new release and to convert your application as fast and easy as possible, be sure to read this breaking changes document, provided by the Silverlight SDK team.

1. Introduction

The use of Deep Zoom Composer for creating deep zoom source files is often inconvenient.

For example, one guy has his online shop with thousands of high quality product images and after the release of Silverlight Deep Zoom technology he decided to use it. Surely he can’t decompose his images using Deep Zoom Composer, because due to the amount of existing site images it would take too much time.

And this is not the only case when you want to dynamically generate multi scale image tile source for high quality images without any other preparations.