I had a great time time at the Auckland Web Meetup last week, I have been skimming through the comments… the fact that 120 people came along was really quite impressive.
The day of my presentation I thought hard about whether to do any slides or just straight in with the WPF and Silverlight demos. I chose to do 10 minutes of (wooly)slides (some of you will recognise them from my brightstar presentation)… talking to Matt from Cactuslab after the session he said I really only needed to show this slide to set the scene.
I was kicking myself because I ran out of time to show BackgroundMotion.com but if you are interested take a look here.
Glen Barnes will be posting a link to the video presentations from the night on his blog soon but in the mean time I thought I’d show you one of my demos from the night. In the demo I use Expression Blend 2 (26mb), notepad (you could alternatively use TextEdit and this SDK if you are a Mac user), together to create video with reflection. I have extended that demo to include Silverlight Streaming so you can see the result of the demo hosted on the web on us.
Here is the source code for the project (6kb) minus the video… or with video (12 MB).
Sit back and enjoy the 7 1/2 minute ride 😉
Double click on the video to play full screen, once full screen single click to “unpause”
function CreateSilverlight(){Sys.Silverlight.createHostedObjectEx({source: “streaming:/15799/GearsTutorial”,parentElement: GearsTutorialWrapper});}
var GearsTutorialWrapper = document.getElementById(“GearsTutorialWrapper”);
CreateSilverlight();
And the Silverlight application that we create in the presentation is online here.
On the topic of fullscreen I see that Robert has commented on this as a security concern. I talked about this with Robert on the night but I didn’t specifically call out that a Silverlight control can only enable full-screen mode in response to a set of user-initiated actions and that when in full-screen mode, with no shell showing, you can use the mouse on the canvas provided by the application, but can’t enter keystrokes with the keyboard. IMO this reduces the risk for the user considerably.
Juha also posted about the event on the computerworld site. Actually Rob O’Neill (editor of computerworld) came up to me after my presentation and said he needed to take back what he wrote last week about Microsoft not innovating 😉
As for Robert’s presentation I do want to make a couple of comments. I kept my mouth shut on the night but I am a little concerned about a few of the things that were presented in FF3 that could become blockers to this stuff being implemented in IE vNext.
The <CANVAS> tag… yes this looked great implemented but I’m concerned by this article in Wikipedia…
“Intellectual property over canvas
On March 14, 2007, WebKit developer Dave Hyatt forwarded an email from Apple’s Senior Patent Counsel, Helena Plotka Workman[7], which stated that Apple reserved all intellectual property rights relative to WHATWG’s Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, Section 10.1, entitled “Graphics: The bitmap canvas” (sic)[8], but left the door open to licensing the patents should the specification be transferred to a standards body with a formal patent policy. This caused considerable discussion among web developers, and raised questions concerning the WHATWG‘s lack of a policy on patents in comparison to the W3C‘s explicit favoring of royalty-free licenses.”
In general, we’re all for standards and are working hard in the standards bodies now. However, some of the key players in this game don’t appear to have the same IP concerns (or attendant liability risk) that we do.
According to this guy… Ogg (the open source video format that Chris presented) still carries potential risks, because there is no guarantee that it doesn’t infringe someone’s patents. I’m sure we are all aware of what is happening with MP3 even though in many cases it was correctly licensed!
If you missed out on my presentation last week and want to see Silverlight in action come along to the Auckland .NET user group meeting this Wednesday night at Microsoft. I’ll have some training DVD’s and copies of Visual Studio “orcas” beta 1 to give away.
Hope to see you then.
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