Some great controls coming to Silverlight 2
I love how Shawn Burke of the Controls Team starts his latest post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/09/17/control-freak.aspx
A little personal mea culpa from Shawn to start off the post, hopefully it's a sign that he'll post more often in the near future.
There's some great news in this post, first that there will be some controls coming soon, a partial list:
DockPanel WrapPanel ViewBox Label HeaderedContentControl Expander TreeView NumericUpDown AutoComplete Accordion For those of you who aren't familiar with Shawn, he was the lead on the AJAX Control Toolkit team which provided some great controls for ASP.NET AJAX. What makes me most excited about this is that these controls are being developed "out of band" meaning that we won't have to wait for the next release of Silverlight to get even more controls to use. They will be released on CodePlex with source code at varying levels of completeness, and you'll be able to get the early bits if that's how you roll.
I know there's at least half of the controls above that I'm dying for so I can't wait to see them.
Taking up a PDC personal challenge
Adam Kinney, Silverlight evangelist, has posted http://adamkinney.com/blog/362/default.aspx that he's going to try to post once a day until PDC 2008. I'm excited to see this, since one of the major complaints lately for the Silverlight developer base is that they're not hearing enough from the mother ship. Personally I feel that one of the major issues to why Microsoft hasn't got the word out lately is that one of their top voices has been silenced changing diapers:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/02/quick-update.aspx
Anyway, I think it's a great idea to try to post once a day until PDC, and I'll try to do it too. I challenge some of the other bloggers out there to do the same. One person I don't have to challenge is Dave Campbell of Silverlight Cream http://geekswithblogs.net/WynApseTechnicalMusings/Default.aspx and if you haven't subscribed to his blog yet, it's the easiest way to keep up to date on what is new and cool in the Silverlight community.
I have some really interesting (ok well they're interesting to me) projects going on right now, and I'll be blogging about those in the near future.
I'll be at PDC myself and I'm really excited to be going, hope to meet you if you'll be there.
By the way, this post doesn't count, I'll have another post up soon.
Google Chrome and Silverlight
Anyone who has installed Google Chrome and tried to view a page with Silverlight content has probably seen that it doesn't work too well. The control refresh is choppy or doesn't work at all, or only work if you move the browser window around.
Microsoft's official stance is that they don't officially support beta browsers with Silverlight (Firefox 3 had issues when it was in beta). What's concerning is that given Google's track record, Chrome may be in "beta" for years. Google uses the "beta" term to make users more forgiving of the warts and other issues with their offerings until they're completely rock solid.
I was worried that this may set up a bunch of finger pointing between MS and Google about whose issue it is, and no progress would be made, but it seems that a fix has been checked in to Chrome for the issues Silverlight was having with it. You can see the check-in details here:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=248
So hopefully we'll see a new release of Chrome soon that has this fix in it.
Silverlight design from a Flash artist's perspective
On Friday, Microsoft launched a new site, Project Rosetta, in answer to a common question, namely how does a Flash designer get started with Silverlight?
Project Rosetta is a site dedicated to helping designers and developers build applications in Silverlight while taking advantage of skills they already know.
If you're a Flash designer or developer, why not take some time and have a look at what Silverlight has to offer? At worst, you'll have a better understanding of the differences between the technologies and can argue why Flash is a better choice. At best, you'll have another skill that you can market making yourself more valuable.
I've also been following Shine Draw, an interesting blog where Terence Tsang does a different project in each post and implements the same effect in both Flash and Silverlight. It gives a great opportunity to see what you're familiar with and see the other side's equivalent. He's really cranking these posts out so definitely take a look.
Dealing with nested folders (filesets) in Silverlight Streaming API
A couple of weeks ago I started working on being able to upload Deep Zoom image sets with my client side classes that call the Silverlight Streaming API. I'm not quite ready to release a new version of the library and the sample app, but I wanted to share some of what I had learned so far which could help others out.
First I tried to just specify the full path including all of the nested folders for the file name when uploading, and I was getting errors. It turns out that you need to explicitly create each sub-fileset using the MKCOL command before you can upload files to it. Once I did this, it was pretty straightforward to upload the files into these filesets.
This brought about another problem. When getting a list of files in a fileset using the GET command, you'll actually get ALL files that are in the fileset and any filesets under it, but what you don't get is a list of sub-filesets. In order to get these and only files at the current level, you need to use the PROPFIND command instead of GET. You can read more about PROPFIND here:
http://www.webdav.org/specs/rfc2518.html#METHOD_PROPFIND
It turns out that the Silverlight Streaming API implements the full WebDAV API even though this isn't well documented at this point, so it's helpful to read up on all of the methods available at http://www.webdav.org
If you really need an easier way to upload Deep Zoom images now, drop me a note and I'll give you an early version of my next code drop of SLSExplorer, it works but it needs a bit more work.
Big thanks to Remy Pairault and Eron Wright of the Silverlight Streaming team for their help in getting this working.
Tampa User Experience Users Group First Meeting September 10
The Tampa User eXperience User Group will have its first meeting next Wednesday. The presentation will be MS Ajax Client Script 101 by Jay E. Kimble. 
We will be meeting at Answers Systems (4029 Tampa Road, Oldsmar, Fl 34677... right next to the Oldsmar Fleamarket).
Pizza and drinks will be supplied, so come on out. One lucky winner will walk away with an MSDN Premium subscription!
No web site yet, but go to Jay's blog here if you plan on coming and let him know:
http://theruntime.com/blogs/jaykimble/archive/2008/09/03/tux-tampa-ux-is-next-wednesday-sept.-10th-at-630pm.aspx