Silverspine Technology
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
I have devised architecture for developing websites that allows for search engine friendly Silverlight web sites. The current guidelines from Microsoft for Silverlight search engine optimization (SEO) is that they are working with search engines to help them index XAML files, but with Silverlight 2 bundling those XAML files into a XAP file those search engines will have more work than they bargained for to index this new breed of rich interactive applications.…
SilverlightSEOAccessibilitySilverSpinesilverlightseoaccessibilitysilverspine
When to use Canvas
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
On a Microsoft internal discussion list Dave Relyea gave a very well described reasoning of when to use a Canvas: The usage of Canvas elements in controls and layout containers is an anti-pattern and should be avoided. Unless you have some sort of user drawing/design/charting surface or something where thinking in any terms other than X and Y is unnatural, you should not be using a Canvas anywhere. Canvas always returns 0,0 for its desired size in MeasureOverride.…
Sometimes Analytics Suck
Saturday, May 10, 2008
I recently added Microsoft Analytics to my site. I wanted to see just how few people read this site. In general I’m surprised that there are actually a few of you out there. My other web site does a bit better, but that’s usually because either someone is looking for a lame character from a TV show, or they’ve linked from a radio station in Florida. Either way you may have been faced with this Security Warning pictured at the right.…
Installing Silverlight Part 2
Thursday, May 8, 2008
I recently blogged about using navigator.plugins.refresh() to help make the installation experience a happier one for people on Firefox and Safari. Well according to Jamie Rodriguez on his blog , this will be baked into the next version of the silverlight.js file. This will be great. Rather than building your own script to check every 5 seconds if Silverlight has been installed, you can rely on Microsoft doing it for you.…
Installing Silverlight
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
If you have been to a web site that is using Silverlight chances are you’ve seen the medallion that asks you kindly to install this tiny little piece of software. If you have and you skipped it, shame on you. Go find a site that forces you to install Silverlight and do it. I’ll wait… Here’s one for you to try. Now the install is fairly painless except for one part.…
Server Unleashed on Silverlight Spotlight
Friday, May 2, 2008
The Server Unleashed web site that I built has been added to the Silverlight Showcase on silverlight.net . Granted I submitted it, but still it is pretty cool to see something that I worked on listed on this site. I have recently finished the second update to the site and hopefully it’ll be going live soon. There will be at least one more major update and that will be for the content regarding Hyper-V!…
Command Prompt Candy
Thursday, April 24, 2008
I’m known for having a console that looks a little strange. I prefer the red font on black background. Although I’m trying a super dark green background with green font at work. My home system looks like this: The problem with it is that I’m getting pretty bored with the font itself. Today I switched to Lucinda Console as it is the only other font allowed in the settings. Then I got home and I found this blog entry from the IEBlog.…
Analyst Predicts Silverlight Adoption Expected to Triple
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Evans Data predicts that in the next 12 to 18 months Silverlight will triple its market share: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Silverlight-Adoption-Expected-to-Triple/ The problem with this article is that it doesn’t specify if that means that the 2% market penetration will triple to 6% or if they are talking about the number of Silverlight enabled sites will triple in the next 12-18 months. The driving case for the tripling will be the developer tools. Although a lot of people are having issues with the first release and the beta releases of Expression Blend and Expression Encoder, look for the released second version to add a much needed level of stability and clean code output.…
Difference in Margin Between HTML and XAML
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The Margin attribute of XAML elements acts different than in HTML. There are still the three ways of describing this information. The first way is simply, make all sides the same. These are identical in HTML and XAML (except that margin is capitalized in XAML). HTML XAML margin: 10px Margin=“10” XAML only allows you to work in pixels. So you do not need to mark the 10 wit"uo"uot; as you do in HTML.…
Paragraph Elements are not for Spacing
Thursday, April 17, 2008
A friend of mine just launched a new business venture called StackOverflow . Jeff will be doing what he does best, and hopefully that will mean that we can contract him out to help us from time to time. The reason I’m blogging about it here is his web site was clearly just thrown together to get it up on the web. For someone who spends his day finding new ways of dampening the sound on his Rock Band drum kit , I would think he’d be a little bit more 21st century (or even Web 2.…