I thought this was a bit of cool news I heard from the MSDN flash newsletter, Silverlight Streaming free service has now added a new feature. You can now let it add advertising to your videos and then get paid when your users click on it. This is very similar to other ad services out there but its just another avenue available to you when using the Silverlight Streaming service to host your video content. They provide 10GB of free hosting for streaming video for silverlight. Learn more by going here http://silverlight.live.com/

I did a recent talk on Custom Controls to the local user group in Chicago and I thought I would re-iterate those points here. The silverlight control model is very important to the collaboration efforts between designers and developers. First lets understand the difference between Custom Controls and User Controls.

1. User controls is very similar to movies in flash. User Controls is how visual elements and development code is separated into modules, developers understand the concept of classes or objects and the reason for object oriented development, user controls are very similar in nature except its physical visual elements along with UI type code tied to it. Additionally user controls are great for visual and code reuse among the application it belongs to, but that doesn't mean its only useful when it is reused. User Controls are just as valuable in scenarios that exist singularly in an application as well as reused in multiple places.

   

Above is an application I recently demoed at Riapalooza, its a simple Image viewer that you may have seen in flash. The best first hierarchy breakdown of user controls for this application would be the viewer on the right and the remote that controls the viewer on the left. Its important to note that these types of breakdowns of user controls should be identified in the early stages of design/development. I am of the opinion that as designers come up with the wire frames, a meeting between designers and developers should be created to hash out exactly how these types of breakdowns will occur. Both parties should have a say in the module breakdowns because its the essence of the organization both on the visual level as well as the development level of the project.

For developers, there is alot of power in user controls. They can be very control like, if your familiar with ASP.net user controls, Silverlight's use of user controls is very similar. A user control can have its own properties, it can behave very similarly to custom controls but I will point out the differences below.

2. The next concept of the control model is the key element to the power of collaboration to silverlight/WPF. We will start by defining custom controls. Custom Controls is similar to user controls except with two physical differences. Custom Controls define some sort of functionality, and attached with that functionality is a default look through templates. The default look can be modified by designers very heavily, again through templates. Custom Controls are controls that can be reused across multiple applications and quite honestly should only really be considered when its theres a need for reuse. Custom controls should be used when extending functionality of existing controls or to create new functionality all together, an example would be drop downs, menus, tree views, and more. The bottom line is, its the essence of a control.

Now I don't for-see designers going out and creating custom controls, so you're probably wondering where this powerful collaboration takes place. The model that makes up custom controls is the same model that is used in the controls you see in your existing toolbox, like the button, check box, scrollbar, slider, etc. The concept is that developers can take an application and after understanding how the application should be broken out as defined in user controls can jump right into development. They can approach the project by developing the application... not focusing on the design aspects of the project but in it functionality. They can develop the application with existing controls in the control library or custom controls and develop out a majority of the application and only use the functional pieces.



Lets look at my application example again, since we have a design goal in mind the developer can look a the design from a functional perspective and build the entire application functionally. It doesn't have to be arranged perfectly as I show here, I arranged the functional pieces so you could see them related to the actual application. The entire application could be completely developed using these functional pieces. Events could be wired up, states and parts could be created, the entire application could be working functionally. And then the designer using the new tools in blend such as the Visual State Manager can then transform these functional controls, like a button and a slider and a scrollbar and transform them into their own custom designs.

The best relation I can make here is that its very much like components in flash, except my past experiences with components in flash has been customizing a components look is not an easy task. And building components is not exactly easy to do either. Silverlight revolves around this model and to customize and create is the very essence of what makes development and design work better together. To understand more check out the links I listed in my previous blog post for CD2.

  

Today will be the first meeting of the Chicago Designers & Developers User Group. I have the honor of speaking at the first meeting on Silverlight 2's control model. My goal of this presentation is to give the group a primer to user controls, custom controls, templating, and most importantly showcase the new visual state manager. I wanted to provide everyone with a large set of resources for the topics discussed.

1. I think anyone who follows the bleeding edge of siverlight would agree, the best resource for detail explanations of custom controls and the parts/states models would be from one of the Project Managers to Silverlight, Karen Corby. She has a four part series to discuss the matter in extra detail. Check it at at:

• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/11/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-1-of/
• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/18/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-2-of-4/
• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/23/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-3-of-4/
• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/25/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-4-of-4/

2. The next best source would be a recent visitor to Chicago, Tim Heuer who co-presented with Corrina Barber. Tim's blog has a great article showcasing the Visual State Manager at http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/06/04/silverlight-introduces-visual-state-manager-vsm.aspx.

3. Silverlight's own website has multiple video sources that show how to do different things in silverlight including a growing controls section... always keep the silverlight.net site in your favorites, check it out at http://silverlight.net/Learn/videocat.aspx?cat=2

4. Adam Kinney, a technical evangelist for Microsoft based out of the campus in Redmond. Adam has promoted, along with many others two new silverlight control contests. Learn more about them at http://adamkinney.com/blog/344/default.aspx

See you at CD2!

I usually blog on whatever it is I have been interested in at that specific moment or whatever it is I have been playing with. For the most part I have spent my time varied on 2 separate non-related fields both interesting in their own way but nothing I wanted to blog about until I got far enough along. That said, instead of leaving my blog empty and waiting I would give a little insight to those things.

The first was I wanted to create a fun game in silverlight 2, specifically I targeted Desktop Tower Defense because I enjoyed the concepts of the game from Warcraft 3 and I had ideas to kind of take it to my own creative avenue. Nothing really interesting to note in the idea, but what was interesting was developing the logic and the AI. I decided to go down the road of using the path finding algorithm A* for how I would get the mob from one side of the map to the other side of the map in the most efficient way possible. What was interesting about that was the reality of the situation. I took a c# example built for a windows form and used it directly in silverlight... no modifications were needed except the final draw path which was simple. I made a few test cases and as I get farther along I will blog about them and share my experiences. I just found it cool that I did not have to recreate the idea from the ground up from the developers perspective and it goes to show how much of the base .net framework is available in silverlight. Lastly I would comment that I was impressed with the overall speed of things.

The second thing I have been working on has been in preparation for the CD2 meeting on Wednesday. For the most part I have decided to cover the Visual State Manager and describe the Silverlight control model... specifically what is a Custom Control vs a User Control and what that means to the designer/developer. After that I would unveil and demo the VSM in action to the state and parts model. Now the VSM is very powerful, but my first impressions of playing with it were difficult in some cases. I had the idea of what I wanted, I understood how I wanted the different states to act but the overall problem I ran into with VSM was that it appears that the State groups are not managed Hierarchical which I found very frustrating from a designer's perspective. So there are some caveats to using VSM, but I will say the tool still has some power to it and it should fit alot of common cases. This is not a deep dive discussion on Wednesday, only a primer to whats new to Silverlight 2 Beta 2 but I will definately attempt to cover how to really make these models and conepts work for you at a later time.

I will add the real meat of my presentation and a slew of sources just before my presentation on Wednesday, so check back soon. I hope to see you at CD2UG, if you dont know what I am talking about and your in the Chicago area, check out http://www.cd2ug.org. See you there.

*EDITED* I had some feedback that that the video version of the tornado was running into a slight issue with the Firefox 3. The silverlight team is aware of this issue with media elements and is looking into it. If you are not using Firefox 3 and want to see the demo check it out at http://www.coreysportfolio.com/tornado.html.

I was going back to some of the demo's I had done in silverlight 2 beta 2 and decided to remake the tornado demo. When I was into flash this demo was the coolest demo of its time... I decided to push the envelope with Silverlight 2 and this time to add o the cool factor I made the circling particles have a background fill of the butterfly video. I realize that there is very little practical use for this demo, but who cares it was fun to do and fun to see.

I am providing the source, but the source does not include the video brush.

Source: Tornado.zip (635.71 kb)