MVVM Light Toolkit V3 Alpha 3 for WPF4/SL4

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

Laurent Bugnion just published MVVM Light Toolkit V3 Alpha 3 which support WPF 4 and Silverlight 4!

I published, yesterday a short post in French on my Tech Head Brothers portal about Silverlight 4 Beta, Drop Target et MVVM which shows the usage of this new version of EventToCommand combined with Silverlight 4 Drop Target.

Here is the post of Laurent

I just published the latest alpha version of the MVVM Light Toolkit. I will post more about the new features in this alpha version, but the most exciting is probably that with this release, the MVVM Light Toolkit works in Windows Presentation Foundation 4 and in Silverlight 4 (in Visual Studio 2010).

There is no automatic installer for this version yet, but I wrote a page describing how to install manually (it is as easy as unzipping a few files). All the features are also available for Visual Studio 2008 as usual.

The source code was also updated on the Codeplex website.

More documentation will follow soon so stay tuned. In the mean time, have fun with MVVM in WPF4/SL4!

Silverlight 3 RTM Released

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

Microsoft just released Silverlight 3!

You might download Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 from this page.

Overview

This package is an add-on for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 3. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1, and it provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic.
This download will install the following:

• Silverlight 3 developer runtime
• Silverlight 3 software development kit
• KB967143 for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
  and/or
  KB967144 for Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1
• Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
  and/or
  Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1

Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes:

• Visual Basic and C# Project templates
• Intellisense and code generators for XAML
• Debugging of Silverlight applications
• Remote debugging of Silverlight applications for Mac
• Web reference support
• WCF Templates
• Team Build and command line build support
• Support for cached transparent platform extensions
• Support for Silverlight 3 Out-of-Browser applications

Eclipse4SL – Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

This is an interessting video about the plugin eclipse4SL from Soyatec.

This plugin allows Eclipse / Java developers to build RIA with Silverlight and collaboration between Web Designers, .NET Developers and Java Developers.

Silverlight 2 is really released NOW!

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

Microsoft just released Silverlight 2 with all developers and designer tools:

And the surprise is that there is also some tools for Eclipse: http://www.eclipse4sl.org/

Read more on the Silverlight web site and on Tim Heuer blog.

Silverlight Planning Poker Timer

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

The other day I was searching for a small project to get started with Silverlight 2 development.

In my today’s works at Innoveo Solutions I am spending quite some time evangelizing about Scrum framework. I found some time ago the Planning Poker Timer by Aslak Hellesøy. That’s definitely looks like a great project to implement with Silverlight 2.

So my goal is as the following:

1. A full re-implementation of the Planning Poker Timer using Silverlight 2 and C#
• You can set a different time and precision in the URL. Use a precision of 10 to avoid distracting people
• Rings a bell and turns the screen red (unless you specify other colours) when time is up
• Make the colours start at blue, go red at 4 seconds and black at 0 seconds or use your imagination to let people know time is running out
• You can make the timer restart automatically at a certain time. Hitting the spacebar will also restart the timer (and make all of this text go away)
• Use it to keep folks focussed on time in other situations - like lightning talks, where you can use these settings
• Make the text bigger to fill the whole screen. This is CMD+ or CTRL+ in most browsers - or via the menu if you're using IE
2. Turn the Silverlight Planning Poker Timer to a Vista Gadget

So I fired up Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview and created a first very simple project with two TextBlock and used it in Visual Studio 2008.

After less than one hour I was able to:

• Set a different time and precision in the URL. Use a precision of 10 to avoid distracting people
• Rings a bell and turns the screen red (unless you specify other colours) when time is up
• Go full screen

It is really impressive at which speed you can start to handle a project in Silverlight 2 with some .NET backgound. It was really clever from Microsoft to give the same development environment on the client that you have on the server side.

Deep Earth - Nice usage of Virtual Earth and Silverlight Deep Zoom

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

This nice project is hosted on Codeplex  and you can have a demo on the following page. And for sure as all project on Codeplex you get full access to the source code.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 - Unable to start debugging!

An article by Laurent Kempé 6 Comments

Unable to start debugging! The silverlight managed debugging package isn't installed.

If you are facing this issue when you try to debug your Silverlight 2 Beta 2 application from Visual Studio 2008 just extract the silverlight_chainer.exe into a folder and run Silverlight.2.0_Developer.exe from the folder. You even don’t have to quick Visual Studio 2008 during the installation.

I was facing this issue in a little project I started to experience Silverlight 2. It is realted to my today’s great interest Scrum! Wait and see.

MSBuild and Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 SDK running in Team City

An article by Laurent Kempé 1 Comment

First you need to un-install the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 SDK from the build server! Then you can download the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 and extract it on the server, there you will find the file silverlight_sdk.msi, that will allow you to install Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 SDK.

Now if you followed my post MSBuild and Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 running in Team City, then you know about the issue:

Using MSbuild to build a solution in a command line doesn’t copy the Silverlight project output to the linked web project

This issue is still there so my fix is still in my MSBuild file.

Two Great news from Silverlight Streaming!

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

First if you are using Silverlight 2 Beta 1, you will be able to upload your video with pause and resume. Second they finally deliver a HTTP endpoint for videos hosted in Silverlight Streaming.

We will make with Mathieu a great use of those two features soon :-)

MSBuild and Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 running in Team City

An article by Laurent Kempé 1 Comment

If you want to integrate Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 in your Continuous Integration system, in my case Team City), it is better to read the readme of Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 SDK here.

The important part in our case is the following one:

Using MSbuild to build a solution in a command line doesn’t copy the Silverlight project output to the linked web project

We don’t have complete support for command line msbuild usage to build solutions with Silverlight projects which also includes 64 bits MSBuild support.

So basically I made a copy manually from the source of the Silverlight project to the output path of my MSBuild project:

Now my web application is compiled, deployed and works!