Windows Live Writer ?

I just noticed the BETA of Windows Live Writer and downloaded it. IT offers a WPF UI to your blogger aacount, actually it can post to bunc of BLOGS like WordPress, Blogger, Community Server and, of course Live Spaces (http://livecom.spaces.live.com/).

I find it usefule, you can try it also ;)

More Silverlight

You can view the working example of Hello World with MouseEventHandler here:
http://staykov.net/silverlight/TestPage.html
The XAML file is here:
http://staykov.net/silverlight/Page.xaml
(But I think you will have problems to open it with IE, so just try with Mozilla)
What I like is, that you do not any special hosting to publish silverlight app ;) (well, the Hello World one ;) )
Also, good to mention - if you seek for design time support of silverlight app you must go for Microsoft Expression Blend 2 May 2007 Preview - the only one so-far IDE which supports design-time editing for SilverLight.
Looking forward to see you again!

User Interaction with Silverlight

Let's do a simple user interaction with silverlight.

I will take the example code from the previous post and add some extra attributes to the TextBlock Elements:

I have added the "x:Name" attribute, which will identify the textBlock in the code-behind file.

And also I have set the style of the cursor. I personally think that when there is some interaction with user, one should be reminded for that!

The next is simple MouseEventHandler in the code-behind file:

A simple "state" remembering variable and we are changing the text of the text block every time the user clicks on it.

Hello World with Silverlight

OK, let's begin with the hello world! :)
All we need to do (after installing the Silverlight tools for Orcas and Silverlight 1.1 Alpha) is to create a new project "C# -> Silverlight project".
The project template will create for us several files:

1. Page.xaml
1.1. Page.xaml.cs
2. Silverlight.js
3. TestPage.html
3.1. TestPage.html.js

The first one - Silverlight.js is Javascript required for the silverlight client.
Page.xaml is the Silverlight canvas itself - the project that we will work with.
TestPage.html is the HTML client page that will host our Silverlight control.

Let's go deep into it.
The Page.xaml. XAML stands for eXtensible Application Markup Language, and is pronounced "Zammel", was introduced with Microsoft.NET Framework 3.0 as the User Interface definition language for the next generation of applications. It is a normal XML file, and can be edited with any text-editing tool (we will use better than text editing). The empty project file will look like this:

That's right - we have Page.xaml.cs and this is the "code-behind" file.

Well, we can simply add one TextBlock element to this canvas:

^textblock color="#cc0000">Text="Hello World" FontSize="15" FontWeight="Bold" />

So at finally we have the following XAML code:

See you later on.

Getting Started with Silverlight

There is an old Chinese curse saying "May you live in interesting times" (if you are interested go here). I think the are of Internet is really interesting time ... what will happen next ?
Silverlight the new product of Microsoft, that I think will blow away the FLASH, but it will take some time, of course.
In order to be fully equipped for creating silverlight projects you must have the VS Codename Orcas Beta 1, Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, and Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for Visual Studio codename “Orcas” Beta 1.
At first I tried witht he tools, but had only the Silverlight 1.0 Beta ;) No success ;)
After some puzzling I finally understood that I must install the 1.1 Alpha in order to begin develop Silverlight applications with VS Codename Orcas.
Well, there is also a way to develop Silverlight application with VS 2005 and you can find more info here.
I hope to begin a series of SilverLight articles.
Looking forward for the next ;)

Kalteswasser Multimedia

I did not believe an IT Company with German origins should fail to pay its dues to sub-contractor... until now!
I used to be an outsourced IT Consultant, Software architecture designer and developer for "Kalteswasser Multimedia" office in Sofia, Bulgaria. After almost an year of cooperation, always delayed payments, problems with project management, they finally failed to pay more than 40% of a delivered, fully functional and LIVE module.
It seems that having Bulgarian office has influenced too much on professional attitude and business relations of that German company.