During my Building WPF Applications in Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend webcast on Wednesday I mentioned that Expression Blend is part of your MSDN subscription. There was some confusion in the Q&A around what level. According to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/aa718657.aspx, Expression Blend & Web show up in Visual Studio 2008 Professional with MSDN Premium and above.
Thanks to everyone who attended my 4 HOUR Virtual Earth workshop at the GIS-T conference. The files I promised are available below:
Hosting Virtual Earth in WPF demo
All my demos require Visual Studio 2008 because I use features of the .NET Framework 3.5 in places. I still need to clean/package up my Virtual Earth, WCF (REST), SQL 08 spatial demo. Stay tuned here. I will try to get it out some time this week.
Don’t forget to check out the Virtual Earth JavaScript Intellisense Helper to make your life easier when doing VE dev in Visual Studio 2008.
I am excited to have Pete Brown, WPF & Silverlight MVP, present this Silverlight webcast next week! Pete is by far the most knowledgeable Silverlight developer I know outside of Microsoft. He’s probably the most active person on our internal Silverlight forums:). I don’t know many Microsoft folks, other than those in the Silverlight product group, who have as much Silverlight experience as Pete. You definitely don’t want to miss this one!
Abstract
Silverlight gets high marks for its ability to deliver rich media, animation and graphics in cross-platform, cross-browser way. Did you know, however, that Silverlight is also a great platform for developing Rich Business Applications? Join us for a talk about how to use Silverlight for applications ranging from desktop-like line of business applications through to data visualization and BI. We’ll talk about the new features in Silverlight 2 that help business application developers, and discuss patterns and practices around their use. Learn how you can leverage your .NET skills to build browser-based rich business applications.
When
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
2:00P-3:30P EST (11:00A-12:30P PST)
Register at this link:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032369910&Culture=en-US
Thanks to everyone who attended! You can download the deck here and the demo code here. As always, if you missed it, you should be able to view a recording within 24 hours by following the original registration link. I have also add the recording link to my list of recorded webcasts here.
Are you interested in using Silverlight in SharePoint? If so, you will definitely want to check out the Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint. It’s chock full of samples that show you exactly how to do it! There are 6 samples including the obligatory Hello World WebPart, how to interact with SharePoint lists, call WCF services, create custom field types, etc. My favorite is "SilverlightPart" which gives you a generic WebPart for displaying Silverlight 1.0 XAML & JavaScript files or Silverlight 2 .xap files. Each sample has a code walkthrough, setup instructions, a video demonstrating the sample, and the source code available for download. I had a bit of trouble getting my SharePoint VPC configured so the Blueprint would work. Patrick Tisseghem has a nice description of what you need to do here. Part 6 in his post has a link to download a screencast where he walks you through the configuration step by step. I highly recommend the screencast. Watching it will most likely save you time and headache:).
Thanks to everyone who attended! You can get to the decks and code from here.
NOTE: Even thought this is a WPF session, the focus is on tooling (i.e. VS2008 & Blend). Silverlight 2 developers who want to understand the future tooling experience for Silverlight should attend this session. In fact, the UI I created during the session is the EXACT SAME UI I will be using for my upcoming Silverlight 2 talks.
Join us to learn how to build Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications with the help of the new WPF designer in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. In this session, we focus on the construction of a real-world application demonstrating how to get the best out of the designer’s capabilities. Learn the basics of building WPF applications in the Visual Studio 2008 WPF designer, have a clear view on when you should work in XAML code and on the Visual Studio design surface to build your WPF application, and see how you can use Microsoft Expression Blend in conjunction with Visual Studio 2008 WPF designer. This session has a heavy focus on Visual Studio 2008, with a light focus on Expression Blend. The target audience for this session is developers.
When
Friday, March 14, 2008
2:30P-4:00P EST (11:30A-1:00P PST)
Register at this link:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032369774&Culture=en-US
We’ve officially released! If you’ve been paying attention to the project, you might have noticed that there was a release on March 3, 2008. I know a few of you have been paying attention because there were 58 downloads before we released the latest version:). We held off on announcing the release because there was a last minute fix and we wanted to use MIX as a way to kick off the release. If you aren’t familiar with the project, see my first post here. The purpose of this project is to make the Virtual Earth developer experience better by fully enabling JavaScript Intellisense for the Virtual Earth Map Control inside of Visual Studio 2008.
I want to take a moment to thank the community for the HUGE outpouring of support for this project. I announced the project on a Tuesday morning. By then next day, we had 11 people volunteer to help develop the remaining pieces. By Friday, we had our first release complete. That is 4 days start to finish. In reality, it was only 3 days since I spent most of the first day refactoring and setting up the project so multiple devs could work in parallel. I am still in awe of how fast this release came together. I never imagined we’d get a working solution in the hands of Virtual Earth developers so fast. The credit goes to the community! I coded VEMap & VEAltitudeMode. Almost everything else was done by community devs. Of the 11 devs on the project, there were really 4 folks who coded the majority of the classes & enumerations.
Since we were able to able to get this project done so fast, it turns out we were able to use MIX as a way to create more awareness for the project. Chris Pendleton used it in his Developing Applications with Microsoft Virtual Earth session. You can watch his session, and all the other MIX sessions 24 hours after they happen at the conference at http://sessions.visitmix.com/.
You can get the latest release straight from the codeplex project at https://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=VEJS&ReleaseId=11338. Please download it, use it, and tell us how we can make it better through the codeplex project at http://www.codeplex.com/VEJS. We already have a set of works items we are thinking about for the next release. Let us know what we’re missing.
Details here.
Thanks to everyone who attended. A big thanks to Vlad for presenting. The downloads for the webcast are here.
Gold Coast 