Silverlight Centrally Managed Content
Sunday, March 16, 2008
In my previous posts about creating a Silverlight site that plays well with search engines I have only focused on SEO and SEA. There are a lot of other benefits to this model and I hope to map them out in a few posts. The difficulty is in finding out where to start. The main crux of this idea came from the Server Unleashed site that I was working on at the time has a separate HTML version of the site.…
Silverlight Accessibility and Portability
Sunday, March 16, 2008
What’s the big deal with having your content in a separate file anyway? Beyond SEO and the single responsibility principle there is what I consider to be the single most important reason: Accessibility. When I write about accessibility I really am talking about 508c compliance. If the person viewing your web site is hard of sight or cannot see at all then your site is worthless to them. I won’t go into the legal reason of why your sites should be accessible (search “Target accessibility web site” to know more about that).…
Localizable Silverlight
Sunday, March 16, 2008
In my previous post I discussed Silverlight SEO, and the strategy I’m using to enable search engines to crawl my sites. Even though most of my site is in Silverlight, search engines are able to crawl it because the content itself is actually in the HTML of the page. Then I transform it using some basic JavaScript. At McCann Worldgroup one of the most important tasks is making a site easy for subs to localize.…
Tim Sneath's 50 Silverlight Applications
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Tim Sneath posted a blog entry titled “From A to Z… 50 Silverlight Applications ” Now I am really excited about Silverlight, but with the customers that I have to support I have to be realistic when it comes to developing solutions. Microsoft has stated that Silverlight 1.0 will be released this summer. For those of you new to Microsoft product development that means it will be released probably in October or November.…
Silverlight Enter the Breaking Changes
Thursday, May 24, 2007
One of the dangers of using pre-release software is the breaking changes that inevitably come along before the final version. The number of breaking changes between WPF beta 1 and WPF beta 2 were enough to discourage me from continuing on that platform until release. Actually I still haven’t had a chance to get back into it, but I will. Joe Stegman of Microsoft has posted the first of what I’m sure will be many breaking changes for Silverlight.…
Silverlight Sidebar Gadgets in Vista
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
At Mix07 I asked the question, Can we write gadgets for Vista using Silverlight? The answer is yes, but nobody knew how to do it. Well Charles Sterling has a post today on his blog describing how to do it. Check it out here: http://blogs.msdn.com/charles_sterling/archive/2007/05/14/writing-a-windows-sidebar-gadget-in-silverlight-dead-simple.aspx
Death to AJAX?
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Lately there’s been a slew of new technologies promising to kill AJAX once and for all. Those technologies include Silverlight, Flex, and JavaFX. The problem with this theory is that all three require the user to install a plug-in. You cannot expect that a user will have your plug-in installed, and you shouldn’t expect the user to install your plug-in just because you tell them to. Personally I dislike Flash web sites.…
Mix07 Day 1-Session 1
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Building rich web experiences with Silverlight. This session was presented by Joe Stegman. Joe is an excellent presenter and I’ve attended many of his web casts including the Digital Black Belt series that helped prepare people for security issues with web site design. Joe was presenting Silverlight to us using the go-live loving beta of version 1.0. He made it clear that he would show us some of the stuff the Scott demonstrated in his keynote, only using the now-defunct-yet-not-released-yet version 1.…
Mix07 Day 1-The Keynotes
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Today was the first full day at Mix 07. It started this morning at 9:30 with a keynote address from Ray Ozzie who said this about following in Bill Gate’s shadow, “There will never be another Bill Gates.” Ray also gave the high level vision of what Silverlight really is. It isn’t a Flash competitor, even though it will compete in that space. It’s really the third wheel assisting apps that cannot decide if they are desktop applications or web applications.…
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You Just Can't Escape Silverlight V1.1
Thursday, May 3, 2007
From the Silverlight V1.0 Beta SDK, “[The] Silverlight 1.0 Quick Starts - Implemented with Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, the quick starts provides an easy way for developers and designer to get up to speed on creating web experiences with Silverlight 1.1 Alpha.” Um… no. The Silverlight 1.0 Quick Starts should be implemented in Silverlight 1.0 and should get developers and designers up to speed on Silverlight 1.0 Beta. Wow, if they are so in love with 1.…