On monday we (Sebastian and André) hold three sessions concerning Silverlight and Expression Blend 3 at WebTech Conference in Karlsruhe. It was exciting for us to come together with interested particpiators and colleagues.

So if you want, you can download or watch the slides of our sessions here (in german):

Download Sample

Download Samples

Download Samples

If you have further questions or suggestions don’t hesitate and feel free to contact us at any time.

For those who missed the Xtopia conference in Berlin last year here is the good news: Steffen Ritter organized an Xtopia Roadshow through Germany! It’s about the newest Microsoft technologies, i.e. Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8 and WPF. Better yet, it’s free – but limited to 100 participants for each event. So hurry!

Here are the events (in German language):

Termine und Veranstaltungsorte
(Der Link führt jeweils direkt zur Anmeldung)

• 07. April 09, München
• 14. April 09, Karlsruhe
• 17. April 09, Hamburg
• 11. Mai 09, Köln
• 12. Mai 09, Berlin
• 20. Mai 09, Frankfurt

And here is the line-up, which is really excellent:

Themenübersicht
(Reihenfolge der Sessions und Inhalte können sich kurzfristig ändern)

• UX@Microsoft: Was kommt denn da um die Ecke?
  User Experience Evangelist Clemens Lutsch nimmt Sie auf eine Reise in die neuen User Experience-Welten von Windows 7 mit, natürlich mit einem Abstecher in die faszinierende Welt von Surface Computing und Multitouch. Und er beantwortet die Frage ob und wie man seinen Computer anbrüllen kann (und sollte!), damit dieser zukünftig vernünftig darauf reagiert.
  Referent: Clemens Lutsch, Microsoft Deutschland GmbH, http://blogs.msdn.com/clemenslutsch
   
• Das deutsche RIA Forum
  Im deutschen RIA Forum diskutieren über 2.500 Mitglieder das Thema Rich Internet Applications in allen Anwendungsbereichen und über alle Plattformen hinweg. Kompetent und neutral bietet das Forum einen hervorragenden Anlaufpunkt zur Diskussion der Vorteile der Technologien, der Business Values, zur Firmenvorstellung sowie auch als Jobbörse rund um Rich Internet Applications, Webdesign und Webentwicklung.
  Referent: Raju Bitter, Deutsches RIA Forum
  http://www.xing.com/net/ria
   
• Barrierefreies Webdesign mit Expression Web 2 und kostenlosen Profivorlagen
  Expression Web 2 verfügt über umfangreiche Methoden zur Gestaltung von barrierefreien Websites – CSS-Profi Vladimir Simovic hat in Zusammenarbeit mit Microsoft Deutschland eigens für Expression Web 2 eine Sammlung kostenloser Vorlagen für Expression Web 2 entwickelt, mit denen auch Nicht-Profis Websites gestalten können, die sich durch gute Unterstützung wichtiger Funktionen für den barrierefreien Zugriff auszeichnen, damit Ihre Website wirklich für jedermann zugänglich ist.
  Referent: Vladimir Simovic, perun.net webwork GmbH
  http://www.perun.net
   
• Internet Explorer 8 – Die neuen Features und was sie für Webentwickler bedeuten
  Referent: Oliver Scheer Microsoft Deutschland GmbH,
  http://blogs.msdn.com/olivers
   
• Mit Microsoft Silverlight Next Generation Rich Internet Applications entwickeln
  Silverlight ist ein schlankes Browser-Plug-In für Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) für alle gängigen Betriebssysteme, alle gängigen Browser, und für Devices/mobile Geräte.
  Referent: Oliver Scheer Microsoft Deutschland GmbH
  http://www.microsoft.de/silverlight
   
• Medienübergreifendes Design – Layouts direkt aus QuarkXPress ins Web mit Silverlight
  Referent: Matthias Günther, Quark
  http://8.quark.com/de
   
• Silverlight als plattformübergreifendes Frontend für Unternehmensanwendungen – ein unabhängiger Praxisbericht
  Referent: Ludwig Neer CAS Software AG
  http://www.cas.de
   
• Holen Sie mehr aus Ihrer Webseite heraus mit der Windows Live API für Webdesigner- und entwickler
  Referent: Frank Maenz Microsoft Deutschland GmbH
  http://messenger.live.de/webservices
   
• PC-WARE der IT-Dienstleister für Agenturen
  Optimale Lizenzmodelle für jede Firmengröße: Agenturen, Freelancer, Entwicklungs- und Designfirmen
  Referentin: Sandra Liebe, PC-Ware
  http://www.pc-ware.de 
   
• So sieht die Wirklichkeit aus: Silverlight und WPF in der Praxis
  Silverlight und WPF sind die neuen Technologien von Microsoft um faszinierende Online- und Offlineerlebnisse zu gestalten. Von der platformübergreifenden Webanwendung über HD-Videowelten bis hin zu intuitiven Benutzeroberflächen für Desktop-Anwendungen. In dieser Session berichten führende Agenturen aus der deutschen Designszene frei und unzensiert über ihre Erfahrungen mit Silverlight und WPF. Zugesagt haben bereits Ergosign (Karlsruhe) und Pixelpark AG (Köln), UID (München) und Syzygy (Frankfurt).
  Moderation: Clemens Lutsch, Microsoft Deutschland GmbH
  http://www.ergosign.de, http://www.pixelpark.de, http://www.syzygy.de, http://www.uid.com 
   
• Sehen heißt verstehen!
  Wie Webdesigner und Webentwickler mit Microsoft Visio die Planung, Entwicklung und Pflege von Websites und Webanwendungen vereinfachen und das Reporting und die Überwachung der Server und Zugriffe nahezu in Echtzeit visualisieren können.
  Referent: Florian Müller Microsoft Deutschland GmbH
  http://www.sehen-heisst-verstehen.de 

Of course, SnipClip will attend the roadshow, in Munich. So drop us a line if you participate, too! For further information about the roadshow visit Steffen’s blog.

André is not only an expert on OpenSocial, but also on Silverlight (yeah, that’s the reason why he is working at SnipClip ;)). And so he publishes also articles about Silverlight, as a road trip around the world:

• Der Start in Las Vegas
• Weiter geht’s in Redmond
• Nächster Halt: Palo Alto
• Welcome to Amsterdam

Read them and have a good time!

Martin

Recently, I had to deal with a challenging Silverlight 2.0 problem, namely trying to make a synchronous web service call from the UI thread. I made some interesting discoveries which I’d like to share.

The best solution I found to this problem was a knowlegde base article from Daniel Vaughan: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/SynchronousSilverlight.aspx

Daniel writes:

… you may have heard that synchronous web service calls are not possible in Silverlight 2 … Well, in fact, they are. In this article I’ll show you how to perform synchronous web service calls, and introduce you to some types that make performing synchronous calls with generated channel proxies a breeze.
…
Some readers may initially protest that synchronous web service calls have no place in a principally GUI application, because it risks blocking the UI thread, leading to an unresponsive UI etc. And while I agree that it’s critical not to block the UI thread as to maintain an application’s responsiveness, I do believe there is a legitimate case for synchronous web service calls on non-UI threads.

In our case the solution was even much more simple.

To be able to explain it, I first have to describe our problem. We wanted to use the following procedure:

• loading of additional assemblies during our application startup
• which are dependent from both a configuration placed within a config file and some content read out from a database
• where the database content is retrieved as an Xml stream by calling a web service
• and the stream is read out with a .NET XmlReader for performance reasons

Unfortunately we had to switch between parsing the Xml and loading the assemblies. Because of using the XmlReader, this could only be done, if the assemblies were loaded synchronously. Our solution was, to load the Xml stream into a XDocument object and parse it with LINQ each time we needed some information to load an assembly, instead of parsing it on the fly with the XmlReader.

This solution had also a drawback, since using an XmlReader instead of an XDocument and LINQ is more performant. However, in our case we could make some changes to the config file, so we were able to load several assemblies concurrently, which saved us more time than we lost using the XDocument object and LINQ.

As soon as the opportunity arises, I will also give Daniel’s solution a shot an blog about my experiences.

Until then, hang in there!

Here is a list of events we will participate as speaker or audience in 2009:

Web Montag, Augsburg, 26. January

• Martin Szugat: Virtuelle Güter und Social Gaming

Web Montag, Munich, 9. February

• (Hm, do not know yet whether to repeat my session from the Web Montag Augsburg)

Challenges and Opportunities 2009, Munich, 18. February

BASTA, Darmstadt, 23-27. February

• Sebastian Schmitt: Stolpersteine in Silverlight 2.0
• André Wussow: Silverlight 2 – Warum muss Visual Basic im Firefox-Browser laufen?
• Martin Szugat: XML in der Praxis und in .NET

Webinale, Berlin, 25-27. May

• André Wussow: Mobile Tagging
• Martin Szugat: virtuelle Güter – reale Gewinne
• Martin Szugat: Startup Day

Meet you offline in 2009 ;) Until then, have a good time!

Martin

Here it is, our interview with Anke from the German dot.net magazin at the BASTA! conference about Silverlight in the Social Web and, of course, about SnipClip:

This morning I discovered on the web magazine create or die the first announcement of what me and my developer teammate André are currently urging for: the beta version of Silverlight 2 Mobile, which is scheduled for the first quarter of 2009.

If you want to know, which additional features the mobile version will have and which of the current Silverlight 2.0 features will be cutted, you can read a detailed article about the announcement on The Register.

We will keep you up with the latest news about Silverlight Mobile.

Until then, hang in there!

This Tuesday, Microsoft released what we’ve all been waiting for: the final version of Silverlight 2.

Of course we were prepared and already had migrated our Silverlight application to the Release Cancidate 0. And we were lucky: there have been no changes made to the Silverlight API, that would break our code. However the installation of the Silverlight 2 RC1 SDK brought some problems and a solution along, which I would like to share:

After the first time I installed the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the Blend 2 Service Pack 1, Visual Studio told me that the Silverlight debugger component had not been installed. So I uninstalled the Silverlight Tools (but not the Blend 2 Service Pack) and reinstalled it. My reward was another strange error thrown by Visual Studio: The Silverlight 2 SDK has not been installed. So I went on not only uninstalling the Silverlight Tools but also the Blend 2 Service Pack and only reinstalled the Silverlight Tools again. And this time it worked. I was able to compile and debug our Silverlight application successfully. Afterwards I installed the Blend 2 Service Pack again and still everything worked.

Sometimes, software can show strange behaviours. If my experiences helped you installing the Silverlight Tools on your machine, I would be glad, if you let me know this via a comment.

Hang in there and don’t let software get you down!

Great news this morning (in Germany):

This evening we published the first public release candidate of Silverlight 2.
There are still a small handful of bugs fixes that we plan to make before we finally ship. We are releasing today’s build, though, so that developers can start to update their existing Silverlight Beta2 applications so that they’ll work the day the final release ships, as well as to enable developers to report any last minute showstopper issues that we haven’t found internally (please report any of these on the www.silverlight.net forums).

Via Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available – ScottGu’s Blog

This morning, Martin came across with a cool Silverlight Deep Zoom Application called Deep Zoom Obama.

It was developed by Donovan West for a Silverlight 2 (beta 2) Article Competition. The application shows in an impressive way the power of Silverlight and Deep Zoom, especially the smoothness of the zoom. For those of you who want to try it out: zoom into Barack Obama’s left eye, there you’ll find a picture in high resolution which loads smoothly and almost immediately. Unfortunately you’ll need to have the proper Silverlight 2 (beta 2) client installed to run it on your computer.

For me as a developer the associated blog article was even more interesting. Donovan West describes therein stepwise, how he built his Deep Zoom project. We’ve also been discussing several times, if we should integrate some Deep Zoom feature into our project. Examples like this are very encouraging. I will let you know, as soon as we made a decision.

Until then, hang in there!