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René Schulte posted this Silverlight 4 demo about augmented reality with Silverlight 4.

In this short blog post I want to present a demo I've actually made last week. Unfortunately I had no time to work on it since then. This demo is a proof of concept for doing Augmented Reality with Silverlight 4 and the built-in webcam API.
I use the open source Augmented Reality library NyARToolkitCS and implemented the necessary interfaces to make it work with Silverlight. The NyARToolkitCS library is a completely managed version of the well known ARToolkit.

René Schulte haspublished some ready to use code for JPEG encoding and decoding of the WriteableBitmap.

In the comments of my Silverlight 4 EdgeCam Shots blog post "marcb" asked me how to convert the WriteableBitmap to a byte array to save the snapshot in a database. I thought the answer might be also useful for others.

Matthew Casperson presents the Flixel game engine ported to Silverlight 3.

Flixel for Silverlight is a port of the popular Flixel ActionScript game library to Silverlight 3. Most Flixel games will eventually be able to be converted to Silverlight simply by converting the original ActionScript syntax to C#.

Currently the port uses the WriteableBitmap class to replicate the Flash BitmapData functions, however I hope to use SilverSprite in the future, which will have the added benefit of making Flixel compatible with XNA.

Inspired by Bill Reiss's article on WriteableBitmap, Cameron Albert wrote a Silverlight tiling map control.

Bill Reiss posted an interesting article and code the other day concerning the WriteableBitmap class and some extension methods. I downloaded the code and wrote a tiling map control using the WriteableBitmap class for my multi-player role playing game.

One place where additive blending is useful is with particles effects. Particle effects look more natural and impressive when using additive blending. Here is an example of using additive blending with particles. The particle emitter follows the mouse.

In this next post René Schulte has extended the WriteableBitmap with some specialized methods for various shapes including a fast ellipse rasterization algorithm.

Last week I've released the second part of my WriteableBitmap extensions methods. I've added DrawLine() methods and presented a sample application that showed that the WriteableBitmap line-drawing methods are 20-30 times faster than the UIElement Line class.

A stable and fast line-drawing algorithm is the basis for most shapes like triangles, rectangles or polylines in general.

In this example Paul Yanez demonstrates how thumbnails could be dynamically created by using DispatcherTimer thereby eliminating the need to click.

In the previous example “Creating thumbnails of video frames with WriteableBitmap in Microsoft Expression Blend 3″ the user was able to create thumbnails by clicking on the video display.

I'm currently preparing a couple of new talks for TechEd Europe, which takes place next month in Berlin. One of the talks is entitled "Cool Graphics, Hot Code: Ten Visual Effects to Make You the Envy of Your Peers." In it, I plan to present techniques for producing eye-popping graphics and visual effects in Silverlight 3. I've been writing new code samples and revising existing ones. And thanks to Silverlight 3's WriteableBitmap class, I was able to make a dramatic improvement to a sample that I originally wrote for Silverlight 2 (and before that, for Silverlight 1.0).

It has been a long long time since Terence Tsang last posted a Flash vs Silverlight comparison. And now that he is back, he introduces the Blur Animation Effect.

The effect is simple, the star icon in the application will follow your mouse position. While star icon is moving, the residue image will fade out steadily. Traditionally, this kind of effect is done by creating a lot of instances with different opacity. The consequence of this method is that it will consume you a lot of computer resources and hence limiting the level of effect.