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Daily News Digest 5/30/2012

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 14:32:04 GMT

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Wednesday, May 30th, 2012:

Missed yesterday's news digest? Check it out here!

Subscribe to our Daily News Digest RSS Feed to receive a summary of all SilverlightShow news!

Visual Studio Live! Redmond - just 3 days to sign up super early-bird and save $400

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:49:02 GMT

Visual Studio Live! is coming to Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond this August!

Join developers, software architects and designers for 5 days of unbiased and cutting-edge education on the Microsoft platform. With 60+ sessions lead by industry experts and Microsoft insiders, you will walk away from this event having expanded your .NET skills and the ability to build better applications. Learn more on the event »

Hurry-up, there's just 3 days left to sign up super early-bird for this event - register before June 1st and save $400 off the Best Value package.

Expect soon at SilverlightShow - interviews with some of the most appreciated speakers at the event!

SilverlightShow is the Social Media Premiere Partner for Visual Studio Live! Redmond and will be sending one SilverlightShow member to this conference for free. More information to be revealed soon!

Stay in touch with us (via RSS, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn) to be among the first who'll learn about the start of our contest.

Online Version of SilverlightShow May Newsletter Available!

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:34:38 GMT

All interesting and most valuable news on SilverlightShow from the past month were thoroughly digested and sent to all our members. For the non-members, you can now find our May newsletter online, too. Check it out!

See what you will find in our May issue:

If you like to get delivered our monthly and webinar newsletters straight to your inbox, please register at SilverlightShow and make sure to enable the newsletter option in your member profile.

Missed an earlier newsletter? Check all of them out!

Silverlight Metro Charms

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:10:27 GMT

Read original post at Steven Hollidge's Blog

Here’s a quick example of a Silverlight application with a Charms style menu from Windows 8.

The menu slides in and out as the user moves the mouse over the right hand side of the screen. When displayed the menu holds ImageButtons that when clicked, display a UIMessage to the user.

Why isn’t my Sterling database persisting between application loads?

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:44:29 GMT

Read original post at Dean Willson's Development Cube

I’m using Sterling, a NoSQL database for .Net, Silverlight, and Windows Phone, to persist some data in a Silverlight 4 application. The intent is to persist it using Isolated Storage. It was obvious that the data was temporarily persisting because the stored data was available on multiple different views in the application.

The 256MB device difference which isn't documented

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:39:48 GMT

Read original post at Matt Lacey's Blog

The 7.1.1 SDK update allows us to support and detect devices with only 256MB and there are a few noted points of things to avoid on the 256-MB devices. Recently I've discovered another one.

32Bit image support!

256-MB images only support displaying images at 16 Bits Per Pixel. For most cases this isn't a problem, but if you're using gradients it may be.

An Address Book Application Made in MVVM For Metro Style App in Windows 8 Part 2

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:25:58 GMT

Read original post by Santosh Pathak at The Code Project

This is the second part of the article on using an XML file as a data source in Windows 8, check the previous article HERE

In the previous series we saw how to create a basic layout of our application using MVVM. We hooked up the buttons of our "View" with our "ViewModel". Now we need to connect our "ViewModel" with our "Model".

A "Model" is a representation of your data. Its a simple "class" which represent a single data entity. In our app, we will use our "Contact.cs" class that we built in earlier post.

The Making of Bandinos–a game for Windows Phone

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:21:44 GMT

Read original post by Petri Wilhelmsen at Digitalerr0r Blog

My new Windows Phone game Bandinos was just released and I thought it was a good time to write another Making of Guide for those of you who are interested in how the game was created.

Setting up Team Foundation Services on Windows 8

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:17:28 GMT

Read original post at Surf4Fun Blog

I am going to make use of Team Foundation Services. There appears to be few problems, but nothing that can’t be overcome with procedural efforts. Now this is different then Team Foundation Server, which is working quite nicely Windows 8.

Move Your WP7 Apps Links to the Marketplace

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:13:36 GMT

Read original post at Shawn Wildermuth's Blog

Recently @WieserSoftware mentioned to me (on Twitter) that my Windows Phone 7 App page was using the old, outdated Zune links. I made the change last night and wanted to explain how to do it in case anyone is confused.

There were two versions of the old links. Some were prefixed by "zune:" and others were linking to social.zune.net (which redirected to a "zune:" link). In both of these cases, you'll want to direct them to the marketplace instead. The key to this is your app id.

Flash is on Windows 8, but that's just part of the story

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:09:26 GMT

Read original post by Woody Leonhard at InfoWorld

The Windows 8 watch cabal was aghast late last week when the Winunleaked.tk site posted screenshots of Adobe Flash running in Internet Explorer 10 on the "no add-ins" Metro side of Windows 8. The sighting was confirmed by Paul Thurrott on his WinSupersite with screenshots of the "immersive" IE10 running a Flash animation.

Yet Another Podcast #66–Chris Sells

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 30 May 2012 10:10:25 GMT

Listen to this podcast at Jesse Liberty's Blog

Talking with Chris Sells about Win 8, his history in the business, his new job at Telerik and much else.

Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 15:44:46 GMT

Product Description

A step-by-step book and eBook guide to creating and running scalable Silverlight 4 Enterprise Applications on the Windows Azure platform

This book and e-book details how enterprise Silverlight applications can be written to take advantage of the key features of Windows Azure to create scalable applications
Provides an overview of the Windows Azure platform and how the different technologies can be integrated within your enterprise application
Examines ways that distributed asynchronous systems can be created to allow scalable processing
Learn from a distinguished author with tips, tricks, and hands on experience to create scalable enterprise Silverlight applications that run on the Windows Azure platform

In Detail

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop.

Microsoft Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform.

Silverlight allows you to integrate with Windows Azure and create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Windows Azure.

This book shows you how to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Windows Azure.

Integrating Silverlight and Windows Azure can be difficult without guidance. This book will take you through all the steps to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on the Windows Azure platform. The book starts by providing the steps required to set up the development environment, providing an overview of Azure. The book then dives deep into topics such as hosting Silverlight applications in Azure, using Azure Queues in Silverlight, storing data in Azure table storage from Silverlight, accessing Azure blob storage from Silverlight, relational data with SQL Azure and RIA, and manipulating data with RIA services amongst others.

What you will learn from this book

Understand federated authentication and how it can be used with your enterprise's on premise Active Directory, or integrated to allow logins through Google, Yahoo, LiveId, or Facebook
Learn the components that make up the Azure platform and know which components to use in each of your applications
Understand how to partition your relational database into shards to improve scalability and performance
Discover how to use frameworks such as WCF RIA Services to speed up the development of your line of business applications
Learn how to configure your development environment quickly by using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer
Deploy your enterprise applications onto Windows Azure servers
Use AppFabric caching to improve the performance of your applications
Understand what Azure Storage is, how it compares to SQL Azure, and when to choose one over the other
Expose your data via OData to allow Silverlight, javascript, and other web enabled technologies to access and query your data

Approach

This book is a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to obtain the necessary toolset to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Azure. The book also covers techniques, practical tips, hints, and tricks for Silverlight interactions with Azure. Each topic is written in an easy-to-read style, with a detailed explanation given and then practical step-by-step exercises with a strong emphasis on real-world relevance.

Who this book is written for

If you are an application developer who wants to build and run Silverlight Enterprise applications using Azure storage, WCF Services, and ASP providers, then this book is for you. You should have a working knowledge of Silverlight and Expression Blend. However, knowledge of Azure is not required since the book covers how to integrate the two technologies in detail.

Buy from:

Daily News Digest 5/29/2012

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:38:30 GMT

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Tuesday, May 29th, 2012:

Missed yesterday's news digest? Check it out here!

Subscribe to our Daily News Digest RSS Feed to receive a summary of all SilverlightShow news!

Slides for Tomorrow's 'Prism & WCF RIA Services' Webinar. Join Us and You Can Win!

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:06:23 GMT

Tomorrow (May 30th, 2012) at 10 am PST (check your local time) we'll be hosting another SilverlightShow webinar: Prism and WCF RIA Services - Two Great Toolkits That Work Great Together.

Register for free here!

Guest presenter in this webinar will be Microsoft Regional Director and Silverlight MVP Brian Noyes.

During this 60-70 minutes session Brian will give a quick overview of what Prism is and what its feature set includes. He'll do a very quick review of what WCF RIA Services does,and will focus on how you can build a Silverlight Prism application and factor your functionality into modules while still making the RIA Services functionality available in multiple modules.

To get a clue on what else will be covered in this live session, take a look at the webinar slides:

Download the slides (.ppt/.pptx)

As usual, we have some small prizes for our webinar attendees and supporters:

Join our post-webinar survey! Three of you who submitted useful and constructuve feedback on this webinar will get a free copy of Working with Prism 4 ebook or another ebook of choice from the 25+ titles on SilverlightShow Ebook Shelf.

Tweet this webinar and win an ebook from Packt Publishing! 2 of you who tweeted the webinar using tag #webinarsilverlightshow will win a free ebook, choosing between Microsoft Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook or MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF. Tweet Now!
All live attendees of this webinar get 15% off on Telerik RadControls for Silverlight suite or one of their Premium or Ultimate Collections. (email asena.woodward[at]telerik.com to get your special code, use the email of webinar registration)

All ebook winners will be announced on May 31st, 2012.

See you at the webinar!

SilverlightCream Top 5 News for Week May 21-27, 2012

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 13:56:39 GMT

Let's take a quick look and see which are the most popular news from our fellow site SilverlightCream.com for the past week. Thanks to Dave Campbell for providing the below stats!

Top 5 SilverlightCream news for May 21-27, 2012:

Dave is also the man behind WindowsDevNews.com. Check this site and make sure to bookmark it!

Performance tips for Metro style XAML apps

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 13:35:51 GMT

Read original post at Microsoft Download Center

This paper provides performance tips for metro style XAML apps. It provides guidelines for developers to improve performance of their apps in the scenarios most important to users. It assumes that you know basic XAML programming in C#, C++, or Visual Basic.

Metro Walkthrough: Creating a Task List with a ListView and IndexedDB

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 13:32:09 GMT

Read original post at Stephen Walther's Blog

The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can work with data in a Metro style application written with JavaScript. In particular, we create a super simple Task List application which enables you to create and delete tasks.

Here’s a video which demonstrates how the Task List application works [...]

Microsoft's Smart Decision for the Windows Phone Marketplace

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 13:28:38 GMT

Read original post by Dan Rowinski at ReadWrite Mobile Blog

From a theoretical perspective, there is really not all that much of a difference between Windows Phone and Android.

Both operating systems were created by well-established technology giants. Both are licensed to multiple original equipment manufacturers to provide a variety of devices. Both have regulations about how the OS can be used to access the platform’s application stores. But this is where Microsoft and Google diverge. While Android is a Wild West that orbits around Google, the search giant does not directly control much of the ecosystem. For Windows Phone, everything originates with Microsoft.

.NET 4.5 WinRT: Get custom attributes from enum value

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 11:21:22 GMT

Read original post by Matthias Jauernig at Mind-driven Development Blog

Currently I’m very busy in creating a bigger Windows 8 Metro app for managing private financial data. I’m creating the app with the WinRT/.NET 4.5/C#/XAML programming model of Windows 8 and my first experiences are good. Of course, in the Windows Consumer Preview and VS11 Beta there are some nasty bugs when creating apps, but altogether it’s quite nice.

Controlling caching of BitMapImage under WinRT

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 11:03:54 GMT

Read original post at Ian Walkers' Blog

By default Bitmap Images are cached by WinRT with no intervention required by the developer. Often times this is a good thing but there are some occasions where this is undesirable. Although there doesn’t appear to be any obvious control in the API reference I have found that adding a dummy querystring to the BitMapImage source filename reference does the trick and also can offer precise control over the length of caching required (if any).

Your first DirectX 11 Metro application using SharpDX

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 10:50:30 GMT

Read original post at Rodrigo Díaz's Blog

Since Microsoft has decided that “XNA is mature enough” and Shawn Hargreaves has moved to Windows Phone, it looks like we won’t see a version 5 that supports Metro-style applications. The only alternative for graphics programming is using pure DirectX 11 now that it has been merged in the Windows core (no more separate DirectX SDK downloads, yay!) and Microsoft is going to actively promote it (Visual Studio 11 includes a nice node-based shader editor).

Being productive in the background – background tasks

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 May 2012 10:20:53 GMT

Read original post by Hari Pulapaka at Windows 8 App Developer Blog

In my previous post (Being productive in the background), I explained the Windows 8 background model and how your app can be productive even when it’s not on screen in a power efficient manner. In today’s post, I will talk about background tasks and how your app can run code in the background even when it is suspended. I will describe two common scenarios with example code that show you how to run your own app code in the background; downloading POP email every 15 minutes with a lock screen capable app and how any app can do work in the background when the device is on AC power.

Daily News Digest 5/28/2012

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Mon, 28 May 2012 14:53:10 GMT

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Monday, May 28th, 2012:

Missed our latest news digest? Check it out here!

Subscribe to our Daily News Digest RSS Feed to receive a summary of all SilverlightShow news!

A Tweet Away from Winning Free Ebooks by Packt Publishing

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Mon, 28 May 2012 13:12:36 GMT

'Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.' said Margaret Fuller. And we agree!

That's why SilverlightShow and Packt Publishing are giving away to 2 of you free ebook copies of both the books "Microsoft Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook" and "Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration".

How to enter the raffle? It's simple and easy:

tweet either of the above books using hashtag #packtbook
include a link to the respective book in your tweet

All tweets should be done by 11:59 pm PST on June 6th, 2012.

The 2 winners will be randomly picked and announced on Thursday, June 7th.

Good luck!

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