Silverlight 2 lays a great foundation for building line of business applications, but there is still a good chunk of grunt work when it comes to validation and workflow... but what if you had all of the power of XAML and the .NET framework _and_ the ease of rapid development like the Client/Server tools of the 90's gave us?

Well, it looks like Microsoft is hard at work to make this happen! Check out this Sneak Preview from Jamie Cool, recorded at PDC 2008, where he shows off a future set of project templates for Silverlight business app development:

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC11/

You might want to fast-forward about 30 minutes into the talk, where Jamie starts talking about "Silverlight Futures." Here are some interesting points from the video:

• Jamie uses a prototype Silverlight template to add a new "Silverlight Business Logic Class" to a web project, and then instantly use that class from the Silverlight project (without adding a web service reference).
  
• He uses an "ObjectDataSource" class to bind results from a Business Logic class to a DataGrid...And add sorting and paging... with no code!
  
• He shows a DataForm control and by setting a DataContext property, gets instant default validation type checking and feedback
  
• By adding MetadataType attributes to a server-side class, the Silverlight client automatically picks up those validation changes on the client - so by writing the validation logic in one place, it carries out to both client and server.
  
• He makes a single SubmitChanges() call to synchronize changes on the client to the server.
  
• He uses something called a "Frame" control and StackPanel to create a navigation workflow --- including Browser History!
  
• He adds a Login control to immediately generate a Login screen, and then uses an attribute on his business logic class to lock down access to data based on role.

Here is the session summary for Jamie's talk:

Silverlight Futures: Building Business Focused Applications
What if you could develop your solutions with the ease pioneered by Microsoft Office Access, deploy them like an Internet application, and take advantage of the power of Microsoft .NET? Learn about an exciting new technology that is all about making business applications for RIA (Rich Internet Applications) much easier to build. In this session, hear how we've made n-tier application development as simple as traditional 2-tier, provided application level solutions to developers, and how we're doing all of this with the same .NET platform and tools on both the client and server.

The Physics Helper for Blend and Silverlight contains several user controls which allow you to draw objects in Expression Blend 2, and have those objects translated directly into Physics objects using the Farseer Physics Engine. This can be a great timesaver for creating games, as it is traditionally difficult to line up underlying physics bodies and geometries with your Blend artwork.

Intro Video

Watch this short video to see how easy it can be to design physics using Blend 2, Silverlight, and the Physics Helper controls:

LAUNCH VIDEO (please give the video a few moments to display)

Download

PhysicsHelper is now on CODEPLEX!

Download from Codeplex (includes source and demos below)

Enter Feedback/Discuss on Codeplex

Demos

These demos were created with minimal or no coding using the Physics Helper (click images to launch demos):

What's New in Beta 1

1. The algorithm to determine UIElement boundaries is greatly improved (based on Johnathan Porter's boundary detection algorithm he introduced in Physics2D.NET)

2. You can now nest PhysicsJoint controls inside UserControls. This is very handy for creating game characters that need joints for arms, legs, etc. Just be sure to (a) use a Canvas layout inside your UserControl, and (b) give you UserControl a name when placing it into your main Canvas. See the RagDoll Demo for an example of this.

3. The PhysicsController now has a MousePickEnabled property which automatically allows manipulation of objects with the mouse. This is handy for testing/debugging your creations.

4. Various other API changes and improvements

Known Issues

1. Dynamically adding objects through code isn't as clean as I'd like (see the RagDoll demo code for an example of dynamic adding). The issue is that UI elements need to be drawn to the visible screen before their boundary can be determined. So the temporary hack is to have a timer to "wait" for the element to be displayed.

2.  If you rotate or otherwise transform an object in Blend, the object will lose that rotation when running, and the Boundary determination will be incorrect.

3. As always, there is room for refactoring and redesign, but you can surely do some fun things with Beta 1 :)

What's Coming

UPDATE 10/18/2008: Physics Helper is now available on Codeplex! You can submit feeback and enter discussions on the Codeplex forum. If you would like to contribute to this project and are familiar with Farseer, Blend, and Silverlight, please let me know!

I'm half wondering if the marketing folks had an itchy trigger finger, but according to this Press Release, Silverlight 2 is officially released!

However, at this time the Silverlight home page, and Scott Guthrie's blog have no reference to the official release.

At any rate, I'm guessing that today is the day :) So if you have some Silverlight Beta 2 or RC0 code out there, go get it ready for RTW!

UPDATE 10/13/2008: Oops, I should always read the fine print. At the bottom of the press release, it says:

Silverlight 2 will be available for download on Tuesday, Oct. 14, at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight. Customers already using a previous version of Silverlight will be automatically upgraded to Silverlight 2.

I had a question in the previous blog post about how to get started with Silverlight Game Development. Here are a bunch of resources to get you started...

1.       My Blog (shameless plug) has some good resources:

a.       Simple 2D Game: Silverlight Rocks! Is an asteroids clone which demonstrates basic sprites in Silverlight, collision detection, etc. This game was initially written for Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, so beware that there is some “junk in the trunk.”

b.      Scrolling and Sprites: Destroy All Invaders is a scroller and source code download is provided. This too was originally a 1.1 Alpha game so some refactoring is in order.

c.       Physics:  The Polygon Physics Demo also provides source code and shows how you can use the Farseer Physics engine to provide great physics effects. Also, the Physics Helper, although in early stages, I believe will make Physics Games much easier to develop using Farseer.

d.      Media Elements: I tried to compile a list of some media resources for audio effects and artwork.

e.      Presentations: I’ve done some presentations for ReMIX, TechEd, and various code camps and user groups which are on this site. The samples and slides can be useful. Silverlight 2 Animation, Advanced Animation and Input, Silverlight for Casual Games.

2.       Farseer Physics Engine: What’s a great game without physics? Unless you’re a math genius and want to code your own, take a look at Farseer, created by Jeff Weber and ported to Silverlight by Bill Reiss. You can get lots of help on the discussion board.

3.       Silverlight Games 101: Bill Reiss has a great series of articles on beginning Silverlight Game Development.

4.       Silverlight Tips of the Day: Mike Snow centers most of his blog posts on Silverlight around game development. These are quick reads, but great information provided.

5.       Chris Cavanagh’s Blog has some Physics samples and other great Silverlight resources.

6.       Cameron Albert has a blog with some good game dev info, including info on Farseer Physics and scripting.

7.       Article Series: Developing a Casual Game with Silverlight 2: This new series of articles by Joel Neubeck looks to be very promising!

8.       Silverlight Cream: Dave Campbell keeps a fantastic, daily blog entry of what’s new in Silverlight. Even though this isn’t specific to game development, there is a ton of useful info bubbling up from this blog and it’s a must read!

9.       Silverlight Games: It’s good to see what other Silverlight game developers are coming up with. Mashooo is maintaining a long list of Silverlight Games. Also the Community Gallery on Silverlight.net has many games, lots with source provided.

Got any more? I know I've forgotten some, so let me know and I can add the links into the list.

Woohoo! Hook Shot took first place in the TeamZoneSports Silverlight Game Programming Contest!

I threw this game together fairly quickly using Visual Studio 2008, Silverlight Tools, Expression Blend, and the Farseer Physics Engine. Most of the media elements were drawn out by me in Blend, but I did use some public domain media from various sources, which you can read about here.

Check out all of the contest winners and entries

Play the Game

Read more about Hook Shot

Check out some other stuff I created with Silverlight

While porting a Silverlight 2 Beta 2 app to RC0, I suddenly found my newly converted app would just terminate shortly after load. No exception messages, no JIT debugging, just death. The end result is that a blank area is left where the Silverlight application is supposed to be rendered. After setting breakpoints all over the place, I found that the Application_Exit event was being hit, but the Application_UnhandledException event was never being fired.

If this happens to you, I would recommend checking your Style definitions. In my case, I had a ListBoxItem style defined in my App.xaml, with a Foreground property. This property was fine in SL B2, but causes the nasty crash in SL RC0:

       <Style x:Key="ListBoxItemStyle1" TargetType="ListBoxItem">

            <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="#FF000000" />

            <Setter Property="Template">

                <Setter.Value>

                    <ControlTemplate TargetType="ListBoxItem">

                        <Grid x:Name="Root">

                            <ItemsPresenter  />

                            <ContentPresenter

                        Content="{TemplateBinding Content}"

                        Foreground="{TemplateBinding Foreground}" />

                        </Grid>

                    </ControlTemplate>

                </Setter.Value>

            </Setter>

        </Style>

ScottGu announced last night that Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0 is now available - and the final release is not far off!

This update has lots of bug fixes and some breaking changes, and is a developer-only release (end users will not receive this update). So this gives developers some time to get Silverlight 2 Beta 2 applications ready for the official release of Silverlight 2.

Here are a couple of notes on new things to look for in this release...

HitTest has moved to VisualTreeHelper

Prior to Silverlight 2 RC0, the code to do a hit test on a point within an element looked something like this:

List<UIElement> hits = path.HitTest(ptTest) as List<UIElement>;

In Silverlight 2 RC0, we now use the VisualTreeHelper class (this is more like WPF) to do a Hit Test:

List<UIElement> hits = System.Windows.Media.VisualTreeHelper.FindElementsInHostCoordinates(ptTest, path) as List<UIElement>;

Blend now Handles Font Embedding

The Silverlight runtime includes only a handful of fonts, but you can add fonts into your Silverlight XAP to extend the number of available fonts in your application.  Note that you need to be careful with licensing on any fonts you embed, as this forum post explains. 

In prior releases of Blend and Silverlight, the process of adding these fonts was manual. But Blend now includes functionality to automatically add a font to your application. I'll post more on this in the future...

Thanks to everyone who attended my "Silverlight 2 Animation Techniques" talk at Code Camp 10 in Waltham, MA. As promised here are the goodies from the presentation:

[DOWNLOAD THE DEMO CODE]

[DOWNLOAD THE SLIDES]

This talk showed how we can create animation in Silverlight using:

• Simple Storyboard Animation
• Custom Storyboard Animation
• Physics
• Visual State Manager

I think the crowd most enjoyed this "practical" use of physics in a Silverlight business application :)