Another example of Silverlight used in the US Government

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Adam Kinney just published a Channel 9  interview about another use of Silverlight in the US Government:

U.S. Army using Silverlight for Resourcing Troops

“Dan Hickman from ProModel tells the story of converting their Predictive Troop Resourcing application for the U.S. Army from a Windows Forms application to a Silverlight-based application. Reusing existing .NET code, working with familiar controls from IdeaBlade, and helping to get Silverlight on the approved browser plug-ins list for the Army; ProModel was able to build the application in a very short amount of time.”

I just watched it myself.  Worth watching…

Hidden gems in the gaming starter kit

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Yesterday I blogged about the SketchFlow starter kit and how great I thought it was.  Well, last night, I went ahead and tried the Venture into Gaming with Behaviors in Expression Blend 3 starter kit from:

http://adamkinney.com/Blog/4-Expression-Studio-3-Starter-Kits-available-for-download

Much to my surprise, this felt more like a Blend 3 Fundamentals through Building a Game.  To understand what I mean, here are the individual modules in the kit:

01_BLN03SP1EN720_Organizing_and Importing_Assets into_Expression_Blend

02_BLN03SP1EN720_Creating_the_Game_Interface_Using_Expression_Blend

03_BLN03SP1EN720_Understanding_Layout_Containers

04_BLN03SP1EN720_Creating_a_User_Control

05_BLN03SP1EN720_Adding_and_Applying_Behaviors

06_BLN03SP1EN720_Adding_Game_Walls_and_Creating_Animation

07_BLN03SP1EN720_Animating_Controls_with_the_Visual_State_Manager

08_BLN03SP1EN720_Working_with_Texts_and_Embeding_Fonts_with_Expression_Blend

09_BLN03SP1EN720_Adding_Audio_Resources_to_a_Silverlight_Game

10_BLN03SP1EN720_Publishing_and_Testing_Your_Silverlight_Game

If you are looking to warm up to Blend a bit more through a video walkthrough + hands-on-lab kind of approach, then I’d definitely recommend this kit.  If you already understand these concepts, then you might want to skip this one.  On the other hand, it is kind of fun to see how easy it is to build a simple game with the skills you already have.

The biggest nugget for me was the module on Behaviors.  If you haven’t looked at Behaviors, then GO DO IT NOW.  Here’s a good post on behaviors:

http://team.silverlight.net/announcements/product-feature-highlight-expression-blend-3-ndash-behaviors/

“A Behavior is in essence a reusable piece of interactivity that can be applied directly to user interface elements in Expression Blend.”

I don’t remember where, but I saw someone describe Behaviors as "ASP.NET AJAX Control Extenders for Silverlight/WPF."  Not a bad way of describing them if you are familiar with the concept of ASP.NET AJAX Control Extenders.

Once you have wrapped your head around Behaviors, you’ll want to check out the following two links to download more:

http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/site/search?f%5B0%5D.Type=Tag&f%5B0%5D.Value=Behavior

http://expressionblend.codeplex.com/

In general, http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com is a great resource.  There are all sorts of useful things to download there including Art/Design assets, Web Templates, Samples, Themes, Behaviors, Code Snippets, Tools/Addins.

Get up to speed on SketchFlow FAST

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SketchFlow is a feature of Expression Blend 3.  If you aren’t familiar with SketchFlow, then you should check out:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/SketchFlow_OverView.aspx

“SketchFlow revolutionizes how quickly and efficiently you can demonstrate your vision for an application. It provides an informal and quick way to explore, iterate and prototype user interface scenarios, allowing you to evolve your concepts from a series of rough ideas into a living and breathing prototype that can be made as real as a particular client or project demands. This rapid, iterative and cost effective approach to prototyping allows you to concentrate on what matters most, being creative and building the best solution for your client, on time and within budget.”

Digging into SketchFlow has been on my TODO list for quite some time.  In many ways, I am glad I hadn’t gotten around to it.  A week or so ago, Adam Kinney blogged about:

4 Expression Studio 3 Starter Kits available for download

One of the starter kits is on SketchFlow.  I just finished it.  If you want to get your head around SketchFlow fast, then this is the resource for you!

Windows 7 RTM: Get your apps ready!

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I’m sure you’ve heard that Windows 7 has Released to Manufacturing (RTM):

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/22/windows-7-has-been-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/21/when-will-you-get-windows-7-rtm.aspx

(MSDN subscribers get it on Aug 6th)

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/07/22/our-next-engineering-milestone-rtm.aspx

The next step is to make sure your apps are ready for and take advantage of Windows 7.

Yochay has a great post on guiding you through ensuring you are ready:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/archive/2009/07/23/is-your-application-ready-for-windows-7-rtm.aspx

Prism Visual Studio Templates (including MVVM)

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Prism is:

“The Composite Client Application Guidance is designed to help you more easily build modular Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight client applications.”

What most people find, once they take the time to dig in to Prism, is that it is MUCH more.  Prism has guidance on how to build an app that targets both Silverlight & WPF, has some plumbing that makes MVVM easier in Silverlight apps by providing a basic commanding implementation, etc.  However, the learning curve to get proficient with Prism can be a turnoff for some.  Even once you “get it,” you then realize that there is a fair amount of Visual Studio solution/project setup just to get to the point of being able to start building your parts of the application.  The good news is that David Hill has just released some templates for Visual Studio 2008 to make the basic setup for your Prism based apps much easier:

http://blogs.msdn.com/dphill/archive/2009/05/29/prism-quick-start-kit.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/dphill/archive/2009/06/15/prism-quick-start-kit-update.aspx

I just went through the walkthrough in the first link.  Here is what you get after the “Prism Shell” and “Prism Module” templates:

image

You get the skeleton of a basic composite application using MVVM.  I think this is a big time saver.  I will definitely be keeping an eye out as David evolves the templates / quick start kit.

UPDATE: I was so excited to share my discovery of David’s work that I forgot to add a few more helpful resources I have found:

Code Snippet for Prism DelegateCommand

A code snippet to quickly write Prism commands

WEBCAST: Microsoft and IDV Solutions at Work for the Enterprise

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Jerry asked me to help spread the word.

“…

Visual Fusion from IDV Solutions combines with Bing Maps, SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies to create a visual mashup platform, empowering organizations to unite data from otherwise incompatible sources – enterprise data stores, Web feeds, spreadsheets and more – into rapidly-built, interactive and collaborative applications that provide a single view of the data.

Join the Microsoft Bing Maps team, IDV Solutions and Directions Media for a complimentary webinar that discusses how the Bing Maps and Visual Fusion technologies can help you plan, predict and respond quickly, plus efficiently manage and analyze the overwhelming amount of data that flow through your agencies and departments on a daily basis.

…”

Details here.

SnagL: Visualizing Government Data using Silverlight

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My job at Microsoft is to focus on developers building software for the U.S. Government (directly or indirectly).  When talking to folks about Silverlight, I get asked quite often whether it is being used on U.S. Government networks (including classified networks) all the time.  You can imagine, due to the potential sensitivity of the customers/question, this is hard to answer other than “Yes, in many places.”  That’s why I am excited to have published an interview with Berico Tailored Systems about their product called SnagL.  Here is the interview description:

SnagL, from Berico Tailored Systems, is a thin client collaborative link analysis tool, which can be integrated with any existing tool or data repository.  Advanced analytics, like clustering and ranking, enables users to intuitively navigate massive amounts of data through a thin client in a web browser.

SnagL is used by U.S. Government customers to help visually analyze, determine relationships in, and make decisions based on data.  Watch the interview with members of the team to learn about the product, see a demo of it in action, and how it uses Silverlight to deliver compelling data visualizations that go beyond what you might expect from a browser based application.  The team also gives you a history of their early adoption of Silverlight, evolution of SnagL, and how Silverlight enabled them to “see things you wouldn’t normally see just looking at the data.”  They also talk about how Silverlight gave them a level of performance and visualization in the browser unmatched by their previous approaches.  Finally, the team shares their excitement to start incorporating capabilities coming in Silverlight 3.

You can watch the interview at http://tinyurl.com/Ch9SnagL.