Getting Started With Silverlight and SharePoint 2010

One of the cool features of SharePoint 2010 (currently in beta) is that you can set it up on a Windows 7 machine. This means that as a SharePoint developer you no longer have to run a Server OS. To get started I downloaded the SharePoint 2010 Foundations beta from here . You will also need Visual Studio 2010 which you can download from here . To setup SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 you need to follow this guide which explains how to configure the setup process to run on Windows 7 (it is only one change to an xml file). Make sure you install all the prerequisites which I won’t list here (they are listed in the guide). It will still install even if you don’t, but you will get errors when you try to configure SharePoint (voice of experience here)

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Getting Started With Silverlight and SharePoint 2010

New MSDN Article on RIA Services Published

I saw Maurice de Beijer recently published a good introduction article on .NET RIA Services.

ObjectSharp Presents ‘Silverlight on the Silver Screen’ – July 9

Last year ObjectSharp took Toronto by storm with the blockbuster hit Visual Studio 2008 at the Movies . That was so 2008. This July, the much anticipated SQL comes to a theatre near you (assuming you live near John and Richmond in Toronto). Silverlight on the Silver Screen will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you see the beauty that is XAML data binding. See Sith Lord Barry Gervin use the Force to move Silverlight apps out of the browser. See Dave ‘Binary Dump’ Lloyd take debugging t

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ObjectSharp Presents ‘Silverlight on the Silver Screen’ – July 9

Silverlight and WPF: The XAML Continuum - Mike Taulty

I saw that Karl had been busy on the plane and had written this post around sharing code between WPF and Silverlight and so I wanted to flag that up here.

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Silverlight and WPF: The XAML Continuum - Mike Taulty

Silverlight MVP, and why I love Silverlight

When I first became an MVP in January 2008 there was some questions as to what bucket Silverlight would fit into. After all, it was brand new; the only versions people were using publicly were Silverlight 1 and the Silverlight 1.1 alpha – it would be three more months before Silverlight 2 beta 1 went live, even though the name was changed from 1.1 to 2.0 well before then. At the time, I had access to some early bits through a program and Microsoft, and was just beyond impressed with what I saw coming in Silverlight 2 . The lead at the time wasn’t sure if the competency should be ASP.NET or Client App Development. My strong dislike of html+javascript made me lean away from the asp.net competency. Luckily, we chose correctly and I, and many others, became Client App Dev MVPs with an unofficial focus on Silverlight. The number of times I have been this excited about a particular software technology is a pretty short list: The first time I heard music come from a computer (after school in 7th grade with a C64 in the rather empty computer lab) My first time seeing my sprite moving across the screen on a C64 (7th grade in the computer lab during recess. I wish I had saved that graph paper) The first time my custom interrupt hooks did something in DOS (on my 286) although I don’t remember what the hook did. Surface (but at 15k a pop and no way to play with it, that waned) When I first had a managed code app running in the browser (Silverlight 1.1 alpha) with graphics and animation (no sprites, though) There was a pretty big gap there were software development for me just became a bit mundane; it became a job and fell away from my hobbies. Sure, I did a little bit of coding for fun for my web site and for things like Rhino 3d add-ins , but I wasn’t up until 3 every morning pinned to the computer coding away for fun (even if it’s work!). The Silverlight story and my interest in it just keeps getting stronger. It is no exaggeration to say that Silverlight has rekindled my love of software development and UI design. Back to the MVP story. Shortly after I was renewed this year, Microsoft introduced a new MVP area and made Silverlight official. Bill Reiss was the first MVP to move to the new Silverlight competency; he’s done a ton of work in Silverlight, especially in the gaming area. Originally I thought I’d need to wait until January 2010 to move to the new area, but yesterday, I received notification from Justin Angel that I am now a Silverlight MVP! I’ll miss a little of the breadth that is assumed with Client App Dev competency (after all, it includes WPF , Windows Forms, and in some minds, Surface), but the deeper focus on Silverlight will help me make more of what I do every day. After all, there’s no C64 MVP so I had to pick another technology that I love Congrats to all the other newly-named Silverlight MVPs, especially Laurent Bugnion, Richard Costall, Page Brooks, Chad Campbell, Jeff Prosise, and Dave Campbell.

Silverlight 3 Links from the Reston DevDinner

Thanks again to Marc Schweigert for hosting last night’s DevDinner in Reston. My blog is at www.irritatedVowel.com/Blog and you can follow me on twitter , or message me on twitter via @pete_brown. Below are demos I used and links I mentioned or wanted to mention. Tons of good Silverlight links and information below, even for folks who didn’t attend the DevDinner. Introduction The “Hello World” demo with a web services was done on the fly. You can find similar examples at Silverlight.net For information on Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM), mentioned up front when I discussed best practices for real apps (not just demos) here are some links: Nikhil Kothari on MVVM with .NET RIA Services A basic MVVM implementation by Shawn Wildermuth (MSDN article) The original MVVM article Prism 2.0 – the Composite WPF and Silverlight Application framework Media Commodore 64 Emulator on CodePlex – MediaStreamSource / Raw Video demo Silverlight-based synthesizer – MediaStreamSource / Raw Audio demo Hanselminutes and Channel 9 shows on the emulator and synth Information on IIS Smooth Streaming Microsoft Expression Encoder Graphics World-Wide Telescope, Silverlight version Bouncing Plane / Gratuitous Graphics Demo . Note that to compile this, you’ll need the DirectX SDK. I also found that (at least on Win7 and the latest DirectX SDK) some of the shaders wouldn’t compile. You can take them out of the build script and just use the pre-compiled ones. Seema’s MIX09 Deep Dive into Silverlight graphics . Seema is the perf PM on the Silverlight team and always has tons of good nuggets in her talks. Themes for the Silverlight 3 Navigation template Developer Productivity The Microsoft IVC demo is not yet online, but will be soon. In the mean time, here are examples of charting, including some screenshots of the demo: Pie and bar chart styling in the Microsoft IVC Demo David Anson’s round up of Silverlight Toolkit charting posts , including several of mine and my Expression Newsletter article Silverlight toolkit on codeplex. Silverlight Toolkit MIX09 Presentation – Shawn Oster .NET RIA Services Part 1 MIX09 Presentation – Brad Abrams .NET RIA Services Part 2 MIX09 Presentation – Nikhil Kothari Online version of RIA Services demo app – Brad Abrams .NET RIA Services demo from the ScottGu Keynote at MIX09 What is .NET RIA Services – Brad Abrams Blog Post Out of Browser I did the Out of Browser demo from scratch. However, the C64 emulator linked to in the Media section supports out of browser. Mike Harsh’s Silverlight 3 Out of the Browser MIX09 Presentation

Debugging a Remotely Hosted Silverlight App

This question has come up in the forums a few times so I thought it would be worth a blog post. Most people are pretty familiar with debugging a Silverlight application running locally during development, but what people many times don’t realize is that you can also attach your debugger to a xap file that is hosted remotely. This MSDN article touches on this briefly, but doesn’t really go into details on how it works. The important thing to understand about Silverlight is that it runs the .NET code on the client machine, not on the server. The code runs in the browser process, so if you’re going to debug it you need to attach to that process. The one caveat is that the xap on the server must be the same as the compiled xap on your development machine. In other words, you can’t debug the remote xap after you’ve made changes locally and haven’t deployed them. As an example I will demonstrate remotely debugging the Twilight badge on my blog. First I open the Twilight.sln and since I’ve made a few changes in the last week I’ll deploy the latest xap file from my project to my server at http://blogs.sqlxml.org/wpfe/twilight.xap . Next, now that I am sure the xap file on the server has the same code as my solution, I can set a breakpoint on Line 36 (using version 1.5.2) where the Twitter javascript callback calls into Silverlight with the latest list of tweets: Now instead of hitting F5 to start debugging my application, I’ll open a new instance of Internet Explorer (or you could use Firefox to debug that as well) and navigate to my blog since that is where the xap shows up. Back in Visual Studio I click Debug –> Attach to Process and select the iexplore.exe process which is Internet Explorer (or firefox.exe if you’re debugging Firefox). NOTE: Make sure you click highlight iexplore.exe or firefox.exe and then click the Select button and choose Silverlight as the type of code you wish to debug. Once I click attach I can go back to my Internet Explorer window and hit refresh to force the breakpoint to get hit. If everything was setup correctly you should get taken back to Visual Studio where your breakpoint is highlighted and you can now step through your Silverlight code. So why is this useful? Well a lot can change in your application when you start hosting it on a real server instead of in your localhost. For one, you now have to access services running on the server and you are subject to a lot more security checks that were ignored on your localhost. So I find this to be a useful tool for troubleshooting things when they work locally but break once I deploy out to a server. One last thing, you can also set this up to remotely debug code running on the Mac . This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

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Debugging a Remotely Hosted Silverlight App