Search

Source: Synergist

Entrants had 59 days to recreate one of the watches from BALL Watch USA with Silverlight using Microsoft Expression Blend 4. Once the entries were submitted, we had a panel of judges rate the watches on visual accuracy, functional accuracy, and the innovative usage of Silverlight.

I create value converters so often in my Silverlight and WPF development, that I created a C# item template that I use over and over in Visual Studio.  I’ve posted the item template to the Visual Studio Gallery so you can use it too.  The Visual Studio Gallery is integrated with Visual Studio 2010, so you can install and start using the template right from Visual Studio.

We have just released an update to the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework to include the following new features:

• Support for Windows Phone 7
• Support for the Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework 2.0
• Support for Webtrends for Silverlight 4, WPF, and Windows Phone 7
• Added support for Google Analytics for WPF and Windows Phone 7
• Fixed numerous issues identified by the community

Since Expression Blend 4 and Visual Studio 2010 support both Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, the new installer adds behaviors for both versions of Silverlight.  Since the Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework player and the IIS Smooth Streaming Client require Silverlight 4, behaviors to support those controls are available for Silverlight 4 only.

Recreate one of the Ball watches in Silverlight 4 using the new Expression Studio 4 – entirely in vector graphics – no images or video.  The entries will be judged on visual accuracy, functional accuracy, and the innovative usage of Silverlight features.

I get the question all the time about how to get started – now we have an amazing collection of resources.  Are there any resources that I’ve missed?

Built by Location3 Media an interactive marketing company, Silverlytics is a multitenant Windows Azure-based analytics service that uses Microsoft Live Labs Pivot for its data visualization.  All of its data is collected from Service Oriented Analytics behaviors in Silverlight applications.  I’ve been using it to track anonymous usage data from the SketchFlow Presentation that I used in my presentation at Mix about the framework. 

It was actually very easy – I just had to add a few #if statements to the code to create the kit which is now available on the CodePlex site.