Get Ready for Silverlight 2 Beta 2
Saturday, June 7, 2008
We are down to the last hour that we have to live without Silverlight 2 Beta 2. I’m sure that many of you are wondering what you can do to help pass the time. Well you can get your computer prepared for the new bits by following a few simple rules: First, be sure to uninstall all of that old beta 1 crap from your machine. That includes any beta 2 builds that you may have been lucky to get.…
Why Silverlight?
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Today I was pointed to an essay by W. Daniel Hillis titled “Richard Feynman and The Connected Machine .” This essay started off with a phrase that I wish I could say, but never will get a chance to, “One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman.” Start an essay like that an I am hooked. Most of the essay is about Mr. Hillis starting a company that was building a massively-parallel-processor computer.…
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
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!…
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.…
Silverlight SEO
Sunday, March 16, 2008
So you’ve downloaded the SDK, and you finally installed Visual Studio 2008. You crack it open and get your “Hello World” project running. Now you are ready to dive head first into a complete Silverlight site. Getting buy-off from the various organizations will be your first hurdle. They are interested in how well the site will perform in the search engines. You don’t really care about that because you want to be able to have a stronger fidelity between what your designer has created and what you can deliver to the web.…
More on Silverlight SEO
Sunday, March 16, 2008
In my last post I described a method of building web sites that have the ability for search engines to crawl the site. This is important in Silverlight because traditionally all of the content within a Silverlight site is contained within the XAML. With the method described, all the content is still in the HTML. The question remains, though, why do I care? The first and most obvious answer is: if you don’t how will anyone ever find your content?…