Online Advertising, Web Development & General Rantings

In the process of mastering the Silverlight 2.0 controls I’ve documented graphically the hierarchy of the controls. It’s a simple diagram that shows relationships. I’m using this to cement my understanding of controls, in particular when creating my own controls, where and what parents to inherit from.

I plan on extending and maintaining this overtime. Please send feedback on improvements to this diagram.

In this post I will take the login screen mockup and create a Silverlight layout from it. But before I delve into the screens let’s talk about layouts in general.

When building applications one of the hardest things to get right is the layout of controls and how they behave when the application resizes.

When designers create there mockups they generally create screens that are snapshots taken at a single point in time. Some of the more experienced designers produce multiple mockups that show the same application behaving as they’d expect when resized at the same single point in time. I prefer the multiple mockup process showing the effect of resizing but at the end of the day it all depends on what your designers/UX people are willing to do.

In this series of post’s I will rebuild the Windows Live Messenger as a Silverlight 2.0 application. This is going to be a great project to build using the Silverlight 2.0 stack as most of the components required for this application can be found in the new features of Silverlight 2.0 beta.

So why am I choosing to build Live Messenger in Silverlight 2.0 beta? And why messenger?

Messenger despite the simplicity of what it does is an extremely complex application. It has this social aspect to it that in its current state just does not take advantage of. The current Live Messenger can be so much more, and my goal is to build out messenger to realize it’s full potential. Using some new features in Silverlight 2.0 beta I feel like I can truly elevate Messenger above what it currently is to something truly amazing.

When I approach learning new technologies, such as Silverlight & WPF, the first thing I ask myself is “What problem is this new technology trying to solve!”. When I’ve found my answer to that first question I then ask myself “How is it solving this problem”. So let’s try to find out what problem Silverlight & WPF is trying to solve.

As promised my friend released the managed source code for Tweener.

I’ve personally been using this library and have a dozen or so demo’s that arn’t quite ready for release for another week BUT the demo’s Michael’s done are very informative and show’s off just how easy it is to use.

Check out his post and download it today… It’s for Silverlight 1.1, read my previous post, in the comments section, for javascript version. A version for Silverlight 2.0 will be launched soon after Mix08 .

 Good times ahead

[click on picture to be taken to his post for more details] 

[Click the picture to view the TED video of this amazing application] 

I can’t remember when I last felt this emotional. This application will truly change the world!

Now I have to wait till Spring 2008 to experience this….

Well done Microsoft Research and all those involved this is truly awe inspiring stuff!

I can sum up in 3 points why flash, to me, is amazing

1. Rich feature set - it’s currently at version 9, just imagine all the cool things that it must have because it’s 9 versions old. It’s had 9 versions to grow out it’s features, Silverlight has only had 1. [thanks Michael for making me reclarify this point]

2. Papervision - this open-source library exposes amazing functions that let’s you build truly captivating experiences in 2D & Fake 3D. Think Cover-flow :). If you don’t know about Papervision do a live search on it, this library is amazing.

3. Tweener - this open-source library let’s you build animations in a consistent way that is manageable. From experience a simple application may require hundreds of animations, one word comes to mind “Messy”. This tweener library brings order to this chaos! If you don’t know what tweener is do a live search for “flash tweener” and read up on it, it’s really amazing.

In my personal opinion if we Silverlight developers/designers are to build amazing, captivating applications we also need all 3 tools above.

So what is Microsoft doing regarding the 3 things above? I searched far and wide and this is what I found…