DevDays 2007 Day 1 - ASP.Net highlights

Robin Paardekam — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 07:28:00 GMT

Day 1 of DevDays 2007 in Amsterdam RAI was a great success if you'd ask me. I have visited DevDays 2004 as well, and I remembered that I then found it very much like a big Microsoft commercial back then. This year however I really enjoyed the sessions by Scott Guthrie and Dino Esposito. I attended a lot of ASP.Net related sessions which really inspired me to add more Silverlight and AJAX components to my site(s). Also some information on when-and-how to apply LINQ was very interesting.

After this day I added some new bookmarks and RSS-feeds which may be worth viewing for you as well. Make sure that if you want to know more about Silverlight to view the posts on Scott Guthrie's blog on "Silverlight Airlines". That demo app. was really mind-blowing if you ask me. Now it's up to myself to create such rich user experiences. Somehow it always looks a lot easier when it's demonstrated... when trying to apply those tricks myself in my own applications, it always seems to be more difficult. :) As soon as some new Silverlight/AJAX page are live I will post it here so can give your honest opinion about it. Make sure to check out the following blogs to stay up-to-date about the most recent technologies:

Scott Guthrie's blog (check out his Silverlight postings)
Dino Esposit's blog (partial rendering using ASP.NET AJAX)

My first Silverlight animation using Expression Blend

Robin Paardekam — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:53:00 GMT

A few days ago I downloaded the May-preview of Expression Blend 2. I wanted to have a look at the Silverlight-options it offers. I was surprised to see that this download took not more then 26 Mb. After I installed it I had a first look at the darkgrey, industrial-looking interface. Except for the use of the grey colours it reminded me about Macromedia Flash. I played around a bit with Macromedia Flash several years ago and I guess that for designers who have experience using Flash, Blend will be very easy to use. It's quite intuitive once you get used to the collapsing panels and the lack of rightmouse-context menu's.

After previewing this 30-day trial of Blend 2 I decided to get the full-version of the current Blend version as well to create my first Silverlight application. I should have known that Silverlight is not an available projecttype in "Blend 1", it only offers projecttypes "Standard application (.exe)" and "Control Library". So if you want to create Silverlight animations you should have a look at the trial of Blend 2. I must admit that I did not have any difficulties creating animations using the timeline, but adding interactivity is a hurdle I have to overcome in the next few days. I think it has something to do with limited functionality in the preview: the controls-pane does not show any button-controls, where the "regular" version of Blend has a much more extended assetlibrary (one of those assets is the button control).

Additional information:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression (Expression-Suite website)
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6650604 (Webcasts regarding Expression products)

My first creation is attached to this post (it's a WMV-file, wrapped in a ZIP-file and it should show you a web-banner animation). I will probably work on some other Blend-projects in the next weeks so I will post those creations (or links to them) if it all works out well. Any hints on creating Silverlight projects are welcome!

Robin Paardekam : Animation

DevDays 2007 Day 1 - ASP.Net highlights

My first Silverlight animation using Expression Blend