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My new Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7

Barak Cohen — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 17:50:00 GMT

The phone is here as well as the jury verdict. It is a good device.

I just got the new phone this week, and here are the 10 things I like about it:

Metro is a good UX paradigm, it is just a nice design
Email and Facebook interfaces are somewhat better then the original desktop/Web versions.
Office apps are actualy useful
It is so easy to get on various types of wifi networtks
Zune interface is nice and there is an FM radio
Integrated search works correctly
Browser can read bi-di text and is quite good. I thought I would miss some plug-ins, but I don't
There are many apps to choose from, and I already installed Netflix, Weatherbug, Level and several more
There is plenty of space on the device AND a place to add Micro SD memory (although I did not do it yet due to the issues around it)
The lock screen provides needed information

Overall, this is a very good device that IMHO is a good alternative to Android and iPhone. I wish MS had a better business model to generate revenue from this business.

Happy Holidays

Switching Gears in November

Barak Cohen — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:33:24 GMT

November brought a lot of change to my life: After 5 years in the Silverlight team (and a short stint dealing with cloud hosting that you will hear about in early 2011) I joined the Office engineering team, helping the team to deliver some great experiences in the next release of Office. Also, in November, I became a father for the 3rd time with a little girl that joined her bigger brother and even bigger sister. I am excited about these changes because it will allow me to experience new things, meet new people (literally in the case of my new daughter) and provide an opportunity for me to make a positive impact on people's lives and on our world (isn't that why we are all here?). You can expect me to switch gears also with my writing to focus on things that I encounter. I have not forgot my roots with developers, and I will try to continue to be of value to my readers. I promise.

Barak.

Microsoft Silverlight PivotViewer is available, Data Visualization will never look the same

Barak Cohen — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:10:00 GMT

last week Microsoft launched the Silverlight PivotViewer control that makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative and fun. The PivotViewer is a sibling of the Microsoft Pivot WPF application that enables users to explore structured data sets on the desktop. WIth the Viewer you can enable this amazing data visualization experience on your Web site and allow it to feed from dynamic data sets (as the example blow shows) . Implementing using a static data set uses a CXML file (XML file that has all the metadata) while implementign using a dynamic data set requires to implement a simple middle layer that creates this XML data dynamically from a data source.

Free download of Silverlight PivotViewer can be found here: www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer and you can discuss it with our team on: http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/68.aspx.

Create a virtual watch, get a real one

Barak Cohen — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:05:12 GMT

Ball Watch USA and Microsoft are teaming up to give you a reason to try the new Expression Studio 4 to build one of the Ball watches in Silverlight 4 like this. You can win one of the watches! Ball Watch Company has a line of beautiful railroad-inspired watches aimed at the adventurers that many of us aspire to be – their motto is “Since 1891, accuracy under adverse conditions.”

The new Silverlight 4 powered Bing Webmaster Tools shown at SMX

Barak Cohen — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:46:00 GMT

Earlier this week, the Bing team showed a complete revamp of Bing’s Webmaster tools at SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle. The Bing Webmaster team chose to focus on three key areas of interest to webmasters: Crawl, Index, and Traffic. Each area will offer detailed data going back as far as six months with dynamic charting capabilities, enabling webmasters to focus on the timeline trends that are most meaningful to them. The Tools are web-based, and basic functionality is available through most web browsers. However, to achieve the full potential of the Tools, a Silverlight 4 powered version is available. Silverlight enabled the Bing development team to provide a smooth, visual experience, enabling webmasters to better analyze important trends through connected visual data about their websites. Read more here: http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2010/06/09/an-smx-sneak-peek-at-the-new-bing-webmaster-tools.aspx

The Bing maps application store is getting closer with the new SDK from Bing Maps (and you can be there too)

Barak Cohen — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:27:18 GMT

As of yesterday, developers can download the Bing Map App SDK and start building, testing and submitting applications to Bing Maps to be featured in the gallery.

To access the Bing Map App SDK, login to Microsoft Connect at http://connect.microsoft.com/bingmapapps (you’ll need a Live ID, so make sure you have one). Download the SDK which comes with a Bing Map App template and start cranking away on your project in Visual Studio (note: the Bing Maps site was upgraded to Silverlight 4 - read more about the changes to Bing Maps). Once you’ve created your application, you can test it on the site itself. That’s right! The developer sandbox is the actual site. You simply need to go to http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/?developer=1&preview=1, click the map apps button and you’ll unlock our secret map app test tool.

Along with the SDK the Bing team also published new map apps from external developers – Weather by Weatherbug and EveryScape by Everscape.

And you can also win prizes by writing your map applications (by participating in the King of Bing Maps Challenge).

Check our more details in the Bing Maps blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=NewPost&WeblogID=5193

Expression 4 is released

Barak Cohen — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:14:24 GMT

Yesterday, at Internet Week New York we launched Expression Studio 4. This new version is shipping just 10 months after Expression Studio 3 and includes support for Silverlight 4, the .NET Framework 4, and interoperability with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010.

In this version we movined to a new SKU structure that aligns with the the new Visual Studio and MSDN SKUs. There are now three levels of Expression Studio: Expression Studio Web Pro, Expression Studio Premium, and Expression Studio Ultimate.

Expression Studio 4 Ultimate is available to download here: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/

Important Note: If you are developing in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7, please do not install the released version of Expression Studio 4. You must continue to use the Blend 4 Beta and Add-in Preview for Windows Phone. This Beta will be refreshed with each Phone SDK pre-release and will be unified with released Blend 4 in a service pack which will release when the Windows Phone SDK releases.

Enjoy.

Microsoft Silverlight for Symbian beta is available

Barak Cohen — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:56:00 GMT

As discussed at PDC last year, Microsoft is working with Nokia to make Silverlight available for Nokia’s phones.

Starting this week you can download the Silverlight for Symbian beta version runtime and tools from the Microsoft Silverlight for Symbian - Beta site.

This release is another milestone in our efforts bringing Silverlight to the leader in worldwide market share for smartphones, the Symbian platform.

With this beta release, developers can start targeting a broader range of devices using the same skillset and tools; specifically, this beta release performance profile is focused on media scenarios.

Also, since the Silverlight for Symbian bits are a subset of the desktop version of Silverlight, you can browse to mobile Silverlight implementation and the application will render correctly also on your desktop (which is useful for debugging).

Since this is still a beta release you may still run into performance issues or bugs. Please share your feedback with our team, we will listen.

The following resources will help you get started developing Silverlight applications for Symbian S60 devices:

Learn about Silverlight for Symbian: - http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/devices/symbian/
Download Silverlight for Symbian - Beta Developer Tools
Download Silverlight for Symbian - Beta (device installer, you will need a Nokia S60 device to install this)
http://betalabs.nokia.com/apps/silverlight

The Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework at Mix 2010

Barak Cohen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:04:00 GMT

We all want our applications and Web sites to be effective.

How does one know that the application is effective? How does one gather information about how the application is being used and interacted with?

Understanding this requires instrumentation (that is often done after the fact) and usually is a cumbersome process.

Well, at MIX you will hear how Silverlight empowers you to do this in a much easier way (It might actually blow you away).

My colleague Michael S. Scherotter is going to introduce and talk about the Silverlight Analytics Framework at MIX.

The Silverlight Analytics Framework is about to release next week (March 15 2010) on CodePlex as free open-source framework. The Framework is available for both in browser and out of browser Silverlight applications, is integrated nicely with the design experience in Blend and is supporting many analytic services it can report into.

The session on the framework will be on Monday 3/15/2010 at 2:00 PM at our Mix Conference in Las Vegas – it will be recorded and put up on the Mix site soon after so if you can’t make it, you can still learn about it.

From my experience, after you try this, you will never want to look back. Michael and team did some amazing work on this.

Barak

Silverlight official supports guidelines published

Barak Cohen — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:59:00 GMT

Many businesses are relying on Microsoft Silverlight and until few month ago, Microsoft did not have a clear support policy for Silverlight, well now we have it.

Silverlight is unique compared to other products in the sense it is serviced through new version releases (so new releases not only add functionality but also fix issues in previous versions). This allows Silverlight applications to continue to run correctly regardless of the runtime version.

The official languages is provided here: "Microsoft will continue to support all versions of Silverlight by shipping updates to the latest version of both Silverlight runtime and Silverlight SDK. Updates and new versions of the Silverlight runtime are backward compatible with web applications built in previous versions of Silverlight and will include the latest security enhancements, performance improvements, and product fixes. Previous versions that are still under support will be updated in the event the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) determines vulnerability has been found in Silverlight."

You can read the full details here: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifean45

Happy Halloween from the Silverlight team (and Archetype)

Barak Cohen — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:43:00 GMT

One of our favorite Vendors, Archetype (http://www.archetype-inc.com ) created this great Silverlight based Haloween greeting card.

You can carve your own pumpkin and send to your friends.

Try it, it is great (and is hosted on Azure): http://halloween.cloudapp.net/pumpkin/02a97183-d2c3-4b5f-a692-75c23da13703

It is fun on the Surface

Barak Cohen — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:11:00 GMT

just wanted to update you that the redesign of http://surface.com is now complete, offering a better experience for customers and partners. What you’ll find:

Improved layout and navigation with lots of Silverlight based content
Showcase of top deployments and partner activity
Easier steps to purchasing a Surface unit (I want one too)
Fast path to QuickStart and becoming a partner

The surface team is not done yet and you can expect to see more content coming along.

An important thing to know is that this whole site was built in two weeks. Great job by the Surface team.

Read more about Surface in their blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/surface/

Barak

Our friends at contentmaster launched a new Silverlight sample site at http://www.silverlighttoys.com.

Barak Cohen — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:55:00 GMT

Andy Yeckel and Umesh Patel own this. Try it out.

It has samples (http://www.silverlighttoys.com/Samples.aspx) and Tutorials (http://www.silverlighttoys.com/Tutorials.aspx)

Sample code never hurts.

Barak

Why don't you try a nice Silverlight game on Facebook?

Barak Cohen — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:04:00 GMT

Our dear friends in Plexipixel have created a nice Silverlight based game on Facebook. It is called Roshamboom! (http://apps.facebook.com/roshamboom).

Roshamboom! is inspired by David C. Lovelace’s extreme rock-paper-scissors concept called RPS-101. The RPS-101 (http://umop.com) game got a ton of web chatter when it was released back in 2007 because it took David over a year to concept the game and produce the 5000+ outcomes. The Plexipixel folks thought it would make an ideal (and silly) turn-based game for Facebook. Plus, it allowed them to practice some Silverlight skills. You can read more about the game here: http://plexipixel.com/blog/2009/04/roshamboom-how-it-came-to-be.html

Try it and let me (and the Plexipixel folks) know what you think.

Barak

Want to drive more users to use your Silverlight powered web app? This one is for you.

Barak Cohen — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 02:54:00 GMT

The Silverlight Installation Experience White Paper and Sample code is now published on Microsoft’s Download Center.

This paper provides an insight into the mechanism of authoring and designing a proper installation experience for Silverlight applications on Web pages.

The design incorporates feedback we got from focus groups and from our experience with many Web sites that have a sub-optimal installation experience for Silverlight.

The paper provides templates for Silverlight Web applications and Web media applications.

The templates are designed to:

· Be easy to localize

· Work on any browser and address incompatible Web browser configurations

· Be light weight

· Work with different form factors

· Being able to be customized using text only

· Leverage and be compatible with the code provided in the shipping Silverlight.js

· Support multiple controls

Please use this code in your Silverlight applications and improve the chances of your users who do not have Silverlight install, to go to your Web page, install Silverlight and use your application.

Have a nice weekend.

Barak

Silverlight Advertizing Creation Kit is now available

Barak Cohen — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:02:00 GMT

The Silverlight Advertising Creation Kit (SACK) is now available for download.

The SACK is targeting designers and ad creation agencies and discusses several aspects of creating ads using Silverlight. Step-by-step instructions are provided throughout so no previous knowledge of Visual Studio, Blend or Silverlight is required. Sample projects are also included for each of the sections. The following topics are addressed:

• Creating Polite Ads

• Tracking Actions (Event Handling)

• Ad synchronization

• clickTAG Support

• Expanding Ads

• Optimization Techniques

This document supplements the Silverlight Ad Publishing and Serving Guide, which specifies how to serve ads to a client page. The Silverlight Ad Publishing and Serving Guide is available for download here.

This is the great work of Dan Penn who is leading this space in our product team.

Barak

Silverlight 3 beta is here with some oomph

Barak Cohen — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:36:00 GMT

This week at MIX we revealed a beta version of Silverlight 3. This version addresses many asks we heard from you from your Silverlight 2 experience.

There are tons of new things (in a package simiar in size):

Media

Smooth streamign suppot (working with IIS media services)
More HD with H.264
GPU acceleration for video rendering and resizing (full screen HD is enabled by that)
Raw AV pipeline (you can write your own codec in managed code, if you are writing one, please let me know about it)
PlayReady DRM for VC-1 media

Graphics

Perspective 3D transform
Bitmap caching (improving speed)
Bitmap APIs
Pixel Shaders(GPU based)
Dynamic Styling and Theming
Improved text rendering (you will see more of that in the RTW release)

Application Development

Over 60 controls
Search SEO support
Data form controls
DLL Caching
Binary XML
Better data binding
Better Accessibility

Out of browser

Run your SL app on the desktop on Mac and Windows
Start menu and desktop icons
Sandboxed envinronment
Connectivity detection
Widnows 7 integration (touch)
No admin smooth installation and update

You can access the bits on http://silverlight.net

This is a great release and we have more good stuff in the pipe. Stay tuned.

Barak

Emergence of social networks for kids with Silverlight

Barak Cohen — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:12:00 GMT

In my last business trip I had the pleasure to meet the leaders of a small company that is betting big on Silverlight.

Shidonni is a collaborative that is targeting kids between the ages of 4-8 (way lower than other social networking sites) and is encouraging the concept of creation (kids can create their own interactive creatures), sharing (they can share them with their friends), interaction (playing games with their characters) and learning. Targeting kids of smaller age is interesting and possibly marks a trend. When I was 4 I was not interested in social network 9I did not know what they were), but my little kids certainly are more exposed to the digital world and this seems like an interesting approach for introducing kids to this virtual world in a safe manner.

Let your kid try it and let them know the reaction.

Barak

Happy New 2009

Barak Cohen — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:55:00 GMT

The year had just began and it is time to share some electronic greeting cards the design agencies we work with created, please share with your freinds and family.

View a sneak peak into the X-Files trailer with Silverlight

Barak Cohen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:51:00 GMT

Here it is: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/trailers/x-files/default.htm

Silverligth 2 beta 2 is available today

Barak Cohen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:59:00 GMT

As announced earlier this week in TechEd, Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is available today. Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has many new features and enhancement over beta 1. These include the following:

· UI Framework: Beta 2 includes improvements in animation support, error handling and reporting, automation and accessibility support, keyboard input support, and general performance. This release also provides more compatibility between Silverlight and WPF.

· Rich Controls: Beta 2 includes a new templating model called Visual State Manager that allows for easier templating for controls. Other features include the introduction of TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort, performance increases and more. Controls are now in the runtime instead of packaged with the application.

· Networking Support: Beta 2 includes improved Cross Domain support and security enhancements, upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications (“push” from server to Silverlight client).

· Rich Base Class Library: Beta 2 includes improved threading abilities, LINQ-to-JSON, ADO.NET Data Services support, better support for SOAP, and various other improvements to make networking and data handling easier.

· Deep Zoom: Beta 2 introduces a new XML-based file format for Deep Zoom image tiles, as well as a new MultiScaleTileSource that enables existing tile databases to utilize Deep Zoom. Better notification for sub-images enter the view is another improvement in Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

Silverlight 2 will be availble on download center and on http://microsoft.com/silverlight

MSN Toolbar is live and kicking

Barak Cohen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:40:00 GMT

A team of trail blaziers from MSN released last week the new MSN toolbar. This is the first commercial native Win32 application that uses Silverlight as its rendering engine. The chose Silverlight because of two reasons:

Small memory footprint: MSN toolbar is a browser plug in that needs to have a small memory footprint (mainly because new instances of it are running while the browser is open). Silverlight small footprint enabled that.
Rendring online content: the toolbar is used to render up-to date content and Silverlight provides the right architecture to deliver that.

Try it today on http://toolbar.msn.com/Overview.aspx?loc=en-us

To the customer, the toolbar provides a simple way to be up to date on today's news. It is also enhances the search experience.

Download and Enjoy.

PS. the toolbar is compatible with Silverlight 1.0 and with Silverlight 2 beta 2 (and forward).

Installing Silverlight became much easier OR Piotr is a hero

Barak Cohen — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:34:00 GMT

If you recall, until now when you installed Silverlight using the SDK Silverlight.js file, you could refresh the IE to view the content but needed to restart Firefox and Safari.

Well, thanks to Piotr from our setup team, things have changed dramatically.

You HAVE to read his blog post on this. It is simple and will make your customers happy.

New Microsoft.com video portal available

Barak Cohen — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:25:00 GMT

Video is becoming more and more relevant format to convey information these days. Microsoft released today a new beta video portal that is a single repository of videos that Microsoft creates for various purposes (marketing, education, training and more). You can search and embedd videos in your blog like this one:

You can expect to see much more video content spread in Microsoft portal to help our customers.

The portal is using the MSN Video hosting service in the back-end and obviously uses Silverlight for the video presentation.

Enjoy.

Tafiti is now powered by more Windows Live services

Barak Cohen — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:14:00 GMT

At MIX we released an update to the Tafiti projects that integrates more Windows Live services in it (specifically, presence and P2P messenger APIs that allow one to share search favorites with buddies). You can find the new Tafiti site here: http://tafiti.mslivelabs.com/Default.aspx. This site shows how WL Messenger APIs can allow sites to encourage interaction with peers. Find the project page on Code Plex here