Silverlight Games 101 Blog moved and new content
Just a quick note in case you used to follow the Silverlight Games 101 blog on Silverlight Rocks that we’ve shut down the Community Server based Silverlight Rocks site and now I’m hosting the Silverlight Games 101 blog here:
http://www.bluerosegames.com/silverlight-games-101/
I’ve started updating the old posts to Silverlight 2 RTW and instead of editing the old posts I’m creating new posts that reflect the changes. For those not familiar with Silverlight Games 101, it’s a beginning Silverlight game development blog, and I’m currenty stepping through how to create an Asteroids clone.
You can also subscribe to the RSS Feed here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SilverlightGames101
On a related note, the forums that used to be hosted at Silverlight Rocks have been replaced with forums here:
http://forums.bluerosegames.com
These forums include discussions on Silverlight and XNA game development.
Any decent free Flex development environments out there?
I’m not trolling here, I really want to know. I’d like to do some simple samples on here comparing Flex and Silverlight but I don’t want to do it bad enough to spend $249 on it. I know there is a free trial, but I’d like to compare apples to apples in this case and use a free environment for both.
Any suggestions?
Scott Guthrie gives a glimpse at Silverlight 3
One of the best places to get some teasers about new functionality coming in Microsoft technologies is Scott Guthrie’s blog. In the unlikely case you aren’t subscribed already, here is what he had to say about Silverlight 3:
Next year we will ship our next major Silverlight release -- Silverlight 3.
Silverlight 3 will include major media enhancements (including H.264 video support), major graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration), as well as major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls). Note these are just a small sampling of the improvements - we have plenty of additional cool features we are going to keep up our sleeves a little longer. ;-)
And here’s the entire post:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/16/update-on-silverlight-2-and-a-glimpse-of-silverlight-3.aspx
MSDN DevCon Orlando After-Event Social on December 11
These days for me, the best part of any conference or event is who I get to meet. One of the best places for this are the socials after the event or in the evenings. Joe Healy has announced (you do read his blog don’t you?) that he is holding a raffle for a limited number of spots to a social event after the MDC in Orlando on December 11. Meet the speakers, Microsoft representatives, and influentials.
Details are on Joe’s blog here:
http://www.devfish.net//FullBlogItemView.aspx?BlogID=613
I'm speaking at the MSDN Developer Conference in Orlando
The MSDN Developer Conference (MDC) is coming to a city near you. There are 11 cities hosting an MDC event:
http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/start.aspx
The MDC is like a "Best of PDC” event, and will have some great content. I’m honored to be included in the list of presenters for MDC Orlando on December 11. It’s $99 to attend, a lot cheaper than PDC and you don’t have to go all of the way to Los Angeles. Hope to see you there.
Silverlight Streaming updated to Silverlight 2 RTW (Finally)
Well I don’t know what took them so long, but now you can load Silverlight 2 RTW apps from Silverlight Streaming. Here is my Stack Attack game running there:
http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/66997/StackAttack/iframe.html
I’ll update my “dogs” photomosaic DeepZoom soon.
Creating a Mesh-enabled Silverlight web app is easy
So with the tokens I acquired at PDC to try out the Live Services framework, I was able to create a Mesh-enabled Silverlight application. It still needs some work, such as storing high scores in the Mesh, but you can see Dr. Popper running on the desktop in this screenshot as a Mesh-enabled app:
Pretty cool, and it only took a couple of hours, it only took that long because I was having a brain malfunction and forgot that I needed the tech preview version of Mesh running on my desktop instead of the release version. Pretty exciting stuff. I hope that it doesn’t take too long to open up the tech preview to more people than just those at PDC.
Offline Apps in Silverlight?
I’ve just returned from PDC and I’m starting to recover, what a huge amount of information in a few days. I also met some great people, from Microsoft and others. With many of the sessions available online, it really has turned the need to go to conferences into more for the social aspects and less for seeing the sessions. I’ll be catching up on sessions I missed that were going at the same time for days.
The most interesting announcement to me was that you will be able to write mesh enabled web applications that run “outside the browser” and can run in an offline mode. These can be written in Silverlight or in other web technologies. You can think of this as similar to Adobe’s AIR platform.
So how does it work? It’s actually pretty clever. I’ll do my best to explain how I think it works bet I may get some of it slightly wrong technically.
When you install the Live Mesh client on your machine, you get the Live Mesh runtime and you also get a process that you can communicate with locally that proxies your Mesh requests to the Live Mesh Server. This is the process that the Mesh enabled application talks to to get the XAP file and any data it needs. This process handles HTTP requests just like the server in the cloud does. By talking to a local server, the application can work without a connection to the internet.
Now for the outside the browser part. It’s technically not outside the browser since the applications run in a process that hosts a browser control which I would guess is the Internet Explorer control on Windows, and would probably be a Webkit based control on Mac.
I have some ideas already about how to use this new technology and I think it will make for some really interesting possibilities. Think of it as social networks for applications.