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One of the developers from one of my media customers asked me how they would implement the thumbnail preview while scrubbing in a Silverlight video player.  He was turned onto the idea from seeing that feature in the Netflix Watch Instantly Silverlight player. 

I thought that would be something that others could use, so I decided to use Silverlight Media Framework player to demonstrate it.  It turns out that Expression Encoder has the capability to create thumbnail images from a video during encoding.  You can use this capability to just create images of a video at regular intervals. 

We have recently been doing quite a bit of Microsoft Surface work, and its made me rethink things around the importance of motion graphics in ria (Silverlight / WPF / Flex etc). This came up while working on the surface in the same room as Andy Trice, we were discussing how some of the motion graphic tricks we use on the surface are just as valid in WPF and Silverlight yet rarely used. When working with the surface you think allot more in the motion graphics mindset, as that part of your goal is for user to walk up and feel drawn in to touch the table. Below is an example of some of these approaches in a Silverlight 2 application.

The Quadra team has published their Silverlight Dialog control. Some of the features it has are templated xaml, sizeable/user resizeable, support for absolute/relative positioning and so on. You may download the demo and the source code or just see the demo online.

Tim Greenfield has a post about reusable Silverlight border control with a header. This is a fun and useful UI control and Tim suspects that many developers out there are writing it over and over again. It’s not included in the framework, toolkit, or any of the open source libraries, so Tim decided to share it and save everyone a little work.

Nick on Silverlight and WPF has a post in which he presents a couple of command helper classes for Silverlight & WPF. The Command class he shows will give you a quick and easy way to define commands and ways to invoke them: keyboard shortcuts, context menus, toolbars, etc. 

Ronnie Saurenmann from the Swiss MSDN Team has published an article called “Silverlight White-labeling: "Dynamically" downloading and applying styles from a web server”. There are cases where your Silverlight app will be hosted or displayed on different web sites. Naturally it comes with the need to adapt some of the visuals to the target web site. Classics are colors, fonts and images. See Ronnie’s step by step in order to learn how to accomplish this in Silverlight 2.

Adam Kinney is so excited to find that Silverlight 3 sessions are announced for MIX09 . In his post you will find some of the session titles and descriptions.

Tim Heuer has posted about the Amazon S3 publishing plugin for Expression Encoder. The Expression team has developed a publishing plugin to have the content upload to Silverlight Streaming services (which is a free service). With this type of plugin, in just one click you can have encoded, player output, and upload with ease. 

Alex Golesh has written the introduction or as he call it “the teaser” to his series of articles about Silverlight in the Mesh and the “Cloud”. For quite some time Alex has been investigating the Azure Services and Live Framework. After gaining some experience, he decided to build simple project - Content Store – to share with you how to build the next generation of applications.

Jaime Rodriguez has the third part of his XAML guidelines series. He actually presents some drafts to the guidelines,because he wants to see your feedback first and then he’ll publish the final version, taking your opinion into consideration.

Mike Ormond has a post about creating 3D models for WPF. He thought it might be useful to share the 3D models he has created. Mike has uploaded the XAML files for each of these models for your convenience.

Corey Schuman has a piece of work on how to animate a clipping area in Silverlight. In order to do this you have to define the Clip property of an object with RectangleGeometry or EllipseGeometry and then animate properties on the geometry. Follow the process of animating together with Corey.

Jeff Wilcox has written the article “NUnit & the Silverlight unit test framework”. In this short guide Jeff will talk about updating NUnit to build for Silverlight and about wiring up test projects. At the end of the post he gives a download with everything you need to get started.

Mike Snow has posted a little tip. He shows how to disable HTML DOM access from your Silverlight application. You can do this through the parameter called EnableHtmlAccess.

Mike Taulty has continued his last post about adding Silverlight Mesh enabled web application with the article “Live Framework SDK - Inviting Others”. He wondered what will happen if he wanted to make the used data available to another person. See what’s the answer and learn what "shared data story" is. Mike has also added a few screencasts to Channel9 around the Live Framework/Mesh. They're pretty introductory but might be helpful if you're looking to start out with Live Framework and want to save some time by re-using some of what Mike has already tried to figure out about the SDK.

Lee has made a good work on his project “Multiple selection ListBox”. He gives a sample implementation using checkbox. The sample involves changing the datasource. His own version is made by using ToggleButton and styles, and without changing the datasource.

Mike Ormond has published a post named “Expression Encoder SL 2 MediaPlayer Templates and SL Streaming”. If you wonder why you can’t publish from Expression Encoder 2 to Silverlight Streaming using one of the new SL 2 media player templates, the answer is that the “Publish to Silverlight Streaming” plug-in doesn’t yet support this. Find out how to avoid this error.

Tamir Khason has just published an article that refer to some nifty WPF time savers he is using for everyday development. Now he wants to share those code pieces with you.

Dan Wahlin has a new post for the Visual Studio magazine. It is about using the Visual State Manager in Silverlight templates. By using the VSM, you can add many different effects into your Silverlight 2 applications.

Pete Brown invokes you to subscribe to the Expression Newsletter. According to him, Expression Newsletter is a great but sometimes overlooked resource for Silverlight and WPF developers. It covers the Expression suite as a whole, but always has good content for Blend, Design and folks writing applications for WPF and Silverlight using VS2008.

Silverlight Toolkit launched – check out all the articles, samples, demos and comments about the Silverlight Toolkit release.

News from the PDC08 - Part 2 – check out also what’s new from the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference.

Silverlight Bugs and Workarounds – Here you can see a list of some bugs and how you can work around them.

Expression Encoder 2 SP1 and IIS Smooth Streaming – Check out what is new about the Expression Encoder.

Currently Silverlight 2.0 application are not supported by Silverlight Streaming. Silverlight Streaming will be upgraded shortly to Silverlight 2 RTW. More details here.