Gary Pretty's Blog » Silverlight

Christmas Presents App for Windows Phone 7

Gary Pretty — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 22:30:18 +0000

I have been incredibly busy the last few months and some of the things I have been working on are applications for Windows Phone 7.

Today saw the publication of the first of my applications to the Windows Phone 7 marketplace, Christmas Presents.

Christmas Presents is a simple but effective application that will allow you to manage all of your Christmas shopping, ensuring that you stay on top of which presents you need to buy, who they are for and how much you are spending.

Currently features include

- A summary including the overall budget, remaining spend and a countdown to Christmas.
- Individual budgets for each person.
- Mark presents as purchsed and then wrapped.
- Shopping list displaying all presents that haven’t been purchased yet.
- Currency automatically matches your phone settings.

If you have the Zune client installed you can see the Christmas Presents app page here.

Below are some screenshots of the application. Please comments and let me know that you think and what features you would like to see included in future versions.

Summary Screen

People List

Person Details

Shopping List

Again, please comment and let me know what you think and what features you would like to see in future versions.

Bing Silverlight Control with the Bing Web Service Application

Gary Pretty — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:35:03 +0000

After reading Carl Dickinson’s post on Mando Group Labs about the Bing Silverlight Control, I wanted to give it a try myself.

I decided to set about using the Bing Silverlight control to display available hotels from LateRooms.com. LateRooms.com have an affiliate scheme that exposes the availability of hotels via XML feeds (you do need an affiliate ID to use the feeds but this could easily be replaced by any other similar feed).

You can view the sample app I have created here (note: LateRooms has mostly UK hotels so probably best trying a UK location, e.g. “Southport UK”).

To create the app I create added four controls to my page;

Bing Silverlight Control – This is obviously the main focus of the app.
A text box and a button to accept a location from the user and start the request to get the hotels.
A list box to display a picture, the name and the first line of the address for each of the hotels.

Once the user enters a location into the text box and clicks the button the following happens;

The location entered by the user is sent to the Bing Geocode web service and providing it can find a match it returns the lattitude and longitude for the location.
This map is then centred on this location.
Finally the newly returned coordinates are used to get a list of available hotels from the LateRooms XML feed. This list is then iterated through and a pin for each hotel is added to the map and the list is then bound to the list box.

Finally I added an event handler to the selection changed event of the list box to re-centre the map on the coordinates of the selected hotel.

There is plently more that could be done with this app, not least making the UI a little more attractive, but I wanted to just get a feel of how easy it was to implement some basic Bing maps functionality in Silverlight.

If you are interested to see the source code to the application let me know and I can post it. Right now I am off to try some more experiments!

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Technorati Tags: bing, Silverlight

The Silverlight Masterclass!

Gary Pretty — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:30:27 +0000

The Silverlight Tour comes to the UK – and it’s called the Masterclass!

This 3 day hands-on training with both designer and developer tracks looks awesome and (uniquely) has two expert trainers per course.

Currently scheduled in London, Manchester, and the Midlands for June, all courses also come with the chance to win an xbox 360, and Silverlight Spy licences!

Early bird discount of £100 if you book in May, and if you are a member of #SLUGUK or #nxtgenug there are additional discounts to be had.

Full Details are here: http://silverlightmasterclass.net

In addition bbits are holding a raffle for a free ticket for the masterclass. To be eligible to win the ticket (worth £1095!) you MUST paste this text, including all links, into your blog and email Ian@bbits.co.uk with the url to the blog entry. The draw will be made on June 1st and the winner informed by email and on http://silverlightmasterclass.net

Technorati Tags: Silverlight, training

Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Link Post

Gary Pretty — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:35:21 +0000

With the recent announcements regarding Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7 Development, I thought I would share a few links to some sites I have found useful, both recently and in the past when starting to work with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 dev using Silverlight.

Windows Phone 7 Dev

WP7 Panorama App �
http://blogs.claritycon.com/blogs/design/archive/2010/03/30/building-the-elusive-windows-phone-panorama-control.aspx

Twitter App Receiving Push Notifications on WP7 �
http://skeevs.com/blog/?p=35

Push Notifications Types and a Tutorial �
http://blogs.claritycon.com/blogs/design/archive/2010/03/30/building-the-elusive-windows-phone-panorama-control.aspx

Building a Flickr App�
http://skeevs.com/blog/?p=4&cpage=1#comment-16

Bing Location Programming on WP7 �
http://www.earthware.co.uk/blog/index.php/2010/03/writing-a-bing-maps-location-aware-application-for-windows-phone-7-series/

Windows Phone 7 Icon Pack �
http://www.sevenforums.com/news/74137-windows-phone-7-series-icon-pack.html

General Silverlight

Silverlight 4 – A guide to the new features �
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx

Getting Started with Silverlight and Blend �
http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/getting-started-silverlight?oid=hom20371

Silverlight UI Controls�
http://www.silverlight.net/learn/tutorials/controls-cs

Silverlight Data Binding �
http://www.silverlight.net/learn/tutorials/databinding-cs/

Visual State Manager �
http://www.silverlight.net/learn/tutorials/stylestemplatesvsm-cs/

Intro to Behaivours�
http://www.kirupa.com/blend_silverlight/introduction_behaviors_pg1.htm

Technorati Tags: Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WP7

Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 Beta 2 Download Available

Gary Pretty — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:21:37 +0000

Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 Beta 2 has now been released to members of MSDN, with a public download available from Wednesday.

Beta 2 brings many improvements to the table, including improvements in Sharepoint, WPF, ASP.NET, WinForms, as well as improvements to the core IDE and testing tools. I saw some of these IDE improvements at an event with Scott Gu in Manchester a couple of weeks ago and they look pretty cool.

Visual Studio now comes in several flavours, namely Premium, Professional and Ultimate and the good news is that TFS 2010 comes out of the box with all three. Apparently it only takes 20 minutes to setup source control, bug and issue tracking and automated build with it.

Finally, another great piece of news is that this release also ships with a Go-live license, so this can be used for production projects if you wish

If you are a member of MSDN and want to download the beta now, you can get it from here.

For more information on the release visit Scott Gu’s blog where you he has started a series of posts on the new features in 2010 Beta 2.

Have any of you been using Beta 1? Will you be using Beta 2? What do you think of the way 2010 and .Net 4.0 are shaping up?

Technorati Tags: .NET 4.0, beta 2, visual studio 2010, vs2010

Silverlight Coming to Mobile

Gary Pretty — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:41:36 +0000

Ok, so this is not exactly a surprise to many people, but as posted on the Expression team blog, the Silverlight team have announced that Silverlight will be integrated into Windows Mobile 7, the reboot of the mobile OS from Microsoft.

According to the Silverlight team, they are totally commited to having Silverlight work on all mediums, from desktop PCs, TVs and mobile devices.

This comes at a time when Flash is likely to appear on more and more mobile devices soon, but with the success of Flash Lite…well…not really being a success, it remains to be seen how well the next wave of Flash mobile will be accepted. It certainly looks like Silverlight might have the upper hand here if things continue as they are.

There has been talk about Silverlight coming to the mobile platform for some time, with a lot of people for a while, myself included, expecting it to arrive in time for Windows Mobile 6.5, which is due for release in around a month. However, 6.5 is only an interrim release until the complete overhaul that is Windows Mobile 7 is released.

So, are you excited about seeing Silverlight on mobile devices? do you think it will be a good thing or a bad thing? or could you not care less?

Technorati Tags: mobile, Silverlight, Windows Mobile

Scott Guthrie – Manchester – September 2009 – ASP.Net 4.0, MVC, Silverlight 3, VS 2010

Gary Pretty — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:22:37 +0000

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice Presedent and all round .Net Guru is coming to Manchester, UK, later this month to talk about what’s new with Visual Studio 2010, ASP.Net 4.0, Silverlight 3 and upcoming improvements to the MVC Framework!

Seating for this event, entitled Guathon 2009, is very limited and as such you can only join the wait list at the moment, but I have been lucky enough to secure a place at what promises to be a fantastic workshop.

The announcement on the event home page over at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper also has a funny section of “things you might not know about Scott Gu”, such as;

When Scott Guthrie throws exceptions, it’s across the room.

All arrays Scott Guthrie declares are of infinite size, because Scott Guthrie knows no bounds.

Scott Guthrie doesn’t have disk latency because the hard drive knows to hurry the hell up.

Scott Guthrie writes code that optimizes itself.

Scott Guthrie can’t test for equality because he has no equal.

Scott Guthrie doesn’t need garbage collection because he doesn’t call .Dispose(), he calls .DropKick().

For the rest of this amusing list and more info on the event or to add yourself to the wait list, visit the event home page.

Technorati Tags: ASP.Net, ASP.NET MVC, scott gu, scott guthrie, silverlight 3, visual studio 2010

Expression Web 3 Released

Gary Pretty — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:39:47 +0000

Expression Web 3, part of Expression Studio from Microsoft has now been released and is available for purchase / download.

MSDN license holders should find Expression Studio including Expression Web 3 available for download now from the MSDN web site, whilst everyone else can take advantage of free trials (the Expression Web 3 trail can be downloaded here and is around 122mb) and upgrade offers, where appropriate.

Expression Web 3 brings some exciting stuff to the table to improve on the already popular Expression Web 2.

Amongst the most notable features are;

Brand new look and feel to match the darker style seen in Expression Blend 2.

Image used taken from Expression Web site from Microsoft. Coptright Microsoft.

SuperPreview – allowing you to view your pages / sites in multiples browsers and examine and resolve any cross browser compatibility issues with your designs.
SnapShot Preview – A browser preview that automatically updates side by side with your design / code, meaning that you do not have to load the browser everytime you make a change to see what it will render like.
Image used taken from Expression Studio Web Site from Microsoft. Copyright Microsoft.
Silverlight and DeepZoom support – You can now embed Silverlight movies as well as DeepZoom movies into your pages using Expression Web 3.
Improved FTP Publishing and Site Management – Expression Web 3 now claims to upload and sync your sites with your remote server faster than before, uploading multiple files at once. It now also boasts improved site management which should make switching between sites and saving associated settings a breeze.
Internet Explorer 8 Support – Support for IE8 now comes with EW3 allowing you to target web sites for this browser.
Expression Design 3 Included – The graphical editor from Microsoft, Expression Design is now included with Expression Web.

Also released as part of Expression Studio 3 are the new versions of Expression Blend, Expression Encoder and, as already mentioned, Expression Design.

I have only just installed the new version of the studio, but will post some follow ups of anything interesting I think would be worth sharing.

Below are some links to pages for Expression Web 3 and Expression Studio 3;

Expression 3 Web Site

Expression Web 3 Trial Download

Expression Web 3 Product Information

Let me know your thoughts on the new versions….

Technorati Tags: expression studio, Expression Web, expression web 3

Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 Uk Lunch Event in July

Gary Pretty — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:01:54 +0000

UPDATE: Expression Web 3, Sliverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3 have now been released, which you can read about in my post, “Expression Web 3 Released” here.

I received an email this morning inviting me to an exclusive launch event for Silverlight 3 and Expression 3.

Unfortunately I am out of the country, but the launch event is being held by Microsoft on July 22nd.

In the words of the invite, the event is to “celebrate the UK launch of Silverlight 3 and Expression 3” and will feature a keynote speaker in the form of PP&T General Manager, Ian Ellison-Taylor of Microsoft in Redmond.

So, it looks like we will be seeing the launch Expression 3 and Silverlight 3 on or around July 22nd 2009.

Technorati Tags: expression 3, Microsoft, silverlight 3