Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program I’m excited to announce a new program – WebsiteSpark – that Microsoft is launching today. WebsiteSpark is designed for independent web developers and web development companies that build web applications and web sites on behalf of others. It enables you to get software, support and business resources from Microsoft at no cost for three years, and enables you to expand your business and build great web solutions using ASP.NET, Silverlight, SharePoint and PHP, and the open source applications built on top of them. What does the program provide? WebSiteSpark provides software licenses that you can use for three years at no cost. 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web) 2 licenses of Expression Web 3 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers) Scott
20/20: Top 20 Programming Lessons I've Learned in 20 Years This post could be viewed as hard lessons learned for newly graduated college students, entry-level programmers, or advanced developers who just want a chuckle. I've been programming since I was 11 and I've loved technology and programming every since. There are some hard and easy lessons I've learned over time. As a fellow programmer, you may not have experienced these, but I'm offering them to individuals who are interested in learning more from my experiences. I'll be updating this as time goes on. Here are my most memorable lessons so far. Set a duration of how long you think it should take to solve a problem - C'mon, admit it! I hope this list of lessons learned have either inspired or provided a chuckle for some people.
Home | 31 Days of Windows 8 Expression Community The proliferation of rich interactive web applications across the cloud and mobile devices continues to create new opportunities for creative design and development. As these technologies evolve, Microsoft is committed to providing best-in-class tools for building modern applications. In support of these industry trends Microsoft is consolidating our lead design and development offerings — Expression and Visual Studio — to offer all of our customers a unified solution that brings together the best of Web and modern development patterns. Blend will continue to ship as a standalone tool with Visual Studio 2012, as part of a consolidated designer/developer offering. Blend for Visual Studio 2012 provides a rich design-centric environment for building Windows Store apps and Windows Phone apps. Expression Blend With Visual Studio 2012 we introduced Blend for Visual Studio, providing advanced design-centric capabilities for Windows Store apps and Windows Phone apps. Expression Web
Understanding Isolated Storage | Smart about (Smart -) Phones So far in my examples I allowed the user to input some information, but I’ve not done anything useful with that information. So, today I am going to use the phone’s own storage capacity, its Flash drive to store the information. In Silverlight applications I don’t get free access to the entire phone’s file system. The user is protected from portentous, malicious applications. And it does that by providing each application with its own personal storage area. That is called Isolated Storage. So, how do I store to and retrieve data from Isolated Storage? I am just creating a new project and I am going to add a few buttons and a textbox into the content panel: Now I am going to add some code to the event handler that is going to address the Isolated Storage. First I am creating a new instance of IsolatedStorageFile by creating a new variable called appStorage. With the next line (string fileName = “simple.txt”) I am just hard coding the name of a file. To be continued…
Training | Microsoft Expression Blend | Microsoft® Expression® The proliferation of rich interactive web applications across the cloud and mobile devices continues to create new opportunities for creative design and development. As these technologies evolve, Microsoft is committed to providing best-in-class tools for building modern applications. In support of these industry trends Microsoft is consolidating our lead design and development offerings — Expression and Visual Studio — to offer all of our customers a unified solution that brings together the best of Web and modern development patterns. Blend continues to ship as a standalone tool with Visual Studio 2013, as part of a consolidated designer/developer offering. Blend for Visual Studio 2013 provides a rich design-centric environment for building applications for the Windows Store, Windows Phone, WPF, and Silverlight. Expression Blend Try Visual Studio 2013 Expression Web The web is now about applications as well as traditional web sites, and this requires a new set of tools. Expression Design
Deep Zoom The following sample shows Deep Zoom in action. To try this example, click the plus (+) button or use the mouse wheel to zoom in. To zoom out, click the minus (–) button or use the mouse wheel. To reset the view, click the first square button. To reposition the image, drag it with the mouse. Run this sample Download this sample For an example of a Web site that uses Deep Zoom, see Deep Zoom example. Deep Zoom can be used in many different areas, but there are three key scenarios where Deep Zoom is particularly useful. Exploration of Very Large or High Resolution Images: A classic example of this would be zooming in on parts of a large map to see different levels of detail and then, using the mouse, moving your view around the map surface. Deep Zoom uses multi-resolution images to achieve a high frame-rate and fast open experience for even very large images. Deep Zoom uses spring animations, which gives users the impression of a smooth movement (pan or zoom) around image. Run this sample
Windows Presentation Foundation Pixel Shader Effects Library » Advanced Animation: Animating 15,000 Visuals in Silverlight Clarity Blogs In my last post I showed a quick summary of a graphic-intensive dashboard that I helped out with. I also mentioned that there are a lot of posts out there dogging SL and WPF rendering performance. But if we get creative with some of the built-in controls SL has to offer we can get some pretty good drawing perf. Procedural AnimationsWriteable BitmapsImage Blitting Out of the box, Silverlight and WPF have Storyboards and Timelines to animate objects on the screen. Procedural Animations Procedural animations are most commonly found in video games and are used to create complex visual effects. They way most procedural animations are implemented are with a simple a Setup and Update, Draw loop. In Silverlight we can setup our animations by hooking in to the CompositionTarget.Rendering event and then call ‘Update’ and ‘Draw’ each time it ticks. Here is a sample project you can download to wrap your head around how procedural animations in Silverlight. Download Base Project Best,