Scott G. didn't keep us in suspense too long! He spilled the beans this morning about some of the new features coming for Silverlight - now dubbed v2.0.

With these improvements, it seems it will be viable to create full data-centric applications using Silverlight. And it looks like by first quarter 2008, a go live license will be available!

Goodbye, cruel AJAX/HTML/CSS/DOM/JavaScript world!!!

As Scott Guthrie notes, an updated version of the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha is now available. If you are moving to the RTM release of Visual Studio 2008 and were previously using the Betas to do Silverlight 1.1 Alpha development, this is what you will need to to support the Silverlight project templates in RTM.

I think with this missing piece, I am finally ready to move my Silverlight development out of my virtual machine... although there is still at least one missing piece - Astoria - and according to this post, it looks like that won't be available until early December. 

But what really has me anxious is Scott's comment, "The next public preview of Silverlight will include a ton of new runtime features..." Come on Scott, don't be a tease!!! Please indulge us. :)

My "coding for fun" time has been very scarce the past month because of some "coding for money" projects :) But I did have a little time to finally play with the Farseer Physics engine and create a "Sort the Foobars" game:

The object of the game is simply to get the ugly, zombie looking foobars into the left pen and the happy, healthy looking foobars into the right pen. Even though this is a very simple example, it shows how Storyboard animations (such as the Foobar's expressions) can be mixed with more complex animation supplied from the Farseer Physics engine.

If you haven't checked out Farseer yet, here are some great links to get started:

The Farseer Page on Codeplex

A Group of Demos by Bill Reiss (who ported Farseer to Silverlight)

A Nice Demo by the Farseer XNA Creator, Jeff Weber

It's awesome that Virtual PC Images for Visual Studio 2008 Beta are made available. When I played with the Visual Studio 2005 Beta, I installed directly on my main development machine and it left some unwanted artifacts which later caused problems.

But here is something that has bit me a couple of times when using the VS2008 VPC's for Silverlight Development. If you happen to find that you can't bring up any Silverlight applications in the Internet Zone, keep in mind that there are some things disabled under Windows Server 2003 for security reasons that you must re-enable.

Here is what you need to tweak:

1. Go to Tools/Internet Options
2. Select the Security Tab
3. Select Custom Level
4. Under ActiveX Controls/Run ActiveX Controls and Plug-ins, Select Enable
5. Under Script ActiveX Controls marked safe for Scripting, Select Enable.

Those of you like me that have been starving for Data Entry type controls for Silverlight 1.1 Alpha will be happy to know, there is yet another option!

ComponentOne has released an Alpha version of their "Studio Enterprise Silverlight Toolset" (codename Sapphire) which appears to have some very compelling data entry controls including basic stuff like buttons and containers and even advanced stuff like TreeViews and a DataGrid!!

This is the stuff that C1 demo'ed at REMIX07 last month (loved their lab coats and dry humor by the way).

Wow, even though I could only attend Day 1 of REMIX07, it was a very charging experience.

First, thanks to everyone who attended my "Silverlight for Casual Games" talk. You can download the slides and demos here:

SilverlightForCasualGames.zip

It was an advanced talk, and I know I lost some people in the later examples, but I did get a lot of positive feedback!

It was kind of surreal having a "backstage pass" to the speaker's dinner on Sunday night. I literally rubbed elbows with Miguel de Icaza as we sat down to eat. And across the table from me were none other than Brad Abrams and Seema Ramchandani, PM on Avalon. Ugh, if only I could anticipate situations like this and have a bunch of intelligent questions ready! But I did learn from Miguel what kind of performance issues they are running into with Moonlight, and that it would be possible to port Moonlight to the Wii some day. And I also got great insight from Seema on just what drawing performance tricks Silverlight does (and does not do) under the covers. Seema posted a subsequent blog post with a great tip on seeing whether or not your code is causing redraws. I did not have my full "Silverlight Wish List" ready for Seema, but I did come up with a few items :)

I also had a chance to meet Bill Reiss, of Dr. Popper and Farseer Physics fame, and had some great conversations with him centering around using his physics engine with Silverlight Path objects, performance, and other great stuff.

And I had great conversations with Chip Lemmon, who is a Virtual Earth guru, centering around Birds-eye imagery and other VE technology.

Thanks to everyone who attended my "Advanced Animation and Input with Silverlight" presentation at Code Camp 8! I actually had a good turnout for my talk, despite being scheduled against the noted Richard Hale Shaw (ha, thanks Chris!)

You can download the slides and demos here.

I'll be doing a few Silverlight talks in the coming weeks at these events in the Northeast. REMIX looks especially cool so if you're in the area come and check 'em out!

CNY .NET Developer Group
9/5 (TONIGHT!) at 6:00pm "Playing with Silverlight 1.1"

Code Camp 8: Rise of the Silverlight Surfer
9/29 - 9/30 "Silverlight: Advanced Animation and Input Techniques"

REMIX07
10/8 - 10/9 "Silverlight for Casual Games"
UPDATE: You can use the following RSVP code, RM07EXTB, to save $100 off the registration fee!

I was excited today when I learned from Scott's post about a Microsoft/Novell partnership to provide support for Silverlight on Linux.

Not because I want to run my Silverlight apps under Linux, nor do I expect there to be a huge user base of Linux users accessing my Silverlight apps. Although all that is very cool.

I am excited because I think this acknowledgement of Moonlight will be the beginning of "Silverlight Everywhere." Since the Moonlight source code will be available for coders to port to other platforms, look for Silverlight coming soon to your Wii or iPhone!

You have to wonder how long before Microsoft makes Silverlight Open Source as well... It seems to only make sense since the competition did so earlier this year.

I'll be giving a few Silverlight talks in the coming months, the first of which is for our local CNY .NET Developer Group. And I was thinking, I really need something a bit more data oriented than the games I have been working on... Something with a web service and LINQ, something showing JSON going over the wire, something with.... BEER!!!

And so was born Andy's Fridge. This is a mini (right now anyway) beer database that uses a Web Service with SQL Server back-end. If the web service is unavailable, a cached Xml file is used instead.

One of the neat dynamic things about Andy's Fridge is that the labels are stored as image Url's in the database and loaded onto the bottles at runtime, so you have kind of a beer mashup. The database is very simple - only one table in fact. And yeah, I need to add more beers so if you have any favorites let me know so I can both sample them and add them to the DB.

I don't want to give too many details away, you will have to come to one of my talks for that! But in the meantime, feel free to snag the code and take a look.

And no, beer isn't the only thing I keep in my fridge. I have mustard and ketchup too.