Silverlight Write & Win Contest

Silverlight 2 ContestSilverlight Write & Win Contest was carried out for the second time. It is a interesting contest. You only have to write an article about Silverlight (application, control, game, web services, Blend, design, example, problem solution, etc). The first contest was organized by Michael Sync. Now, SilverlightShow take this initiative. They really did a great job in the organization.

I took part in the first edition, so I decided to write an article for this one, too. And I got it! I won the third prize, which looks like this:

  • Telerik – RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Developer Subscription and Source Code License ($999 value). This license includes all 23 Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls, a Gold Support Package and free product updates for a period of one year. The winners will also receive complimentary licenses for Telerik RadControls for Silverlight
  • SilverlightShow – $100 in Amazon Gift certificate or cache

Cool, right? The one who get the first prize is Alexey Zakharov with his article – Virtual earth deep zooming.

SilverlightShow announced that they intend to organize another contest, so I am waiting for it.

Silverlight Version 2 RC0 Released

Good news for the Silverlight fans – the first Silverlight release candidate is released. Note that this is not the final runtime, it is developer only. It is released to let developers get into the changes and reform their Silverlight beta 2 applications. There are some breaking changes between Beta2 and this RC. You can take a look at this great article for most of them. As such, you can only use the RC for development right now – you can’t go live with the new APIs until the final release is shipped (which will be soon though).

You can download today’s Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here.  Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1.  You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support.  If you don’t already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here. Continue Reading…

Timer vs. DispatcherTimer in WPF

Have you ever wondered what is the difference between Timer and DispatcherTimer in WPF / Silverlight? In this post I will try to explain you the little difference. Timer generates recurring events in an application. DispatcherTimer is a timer that is integrated into the Dispatcher queue which is processed at a specified interval of time and at a specified priority. Timers are not guaranteed to execute exactly when the time interval occurs, but are guaranteed not to execute before the time interval occurs. This is because DispatcherTimer operations are placed on the Dispatcher queue like other operations. When the DispatcherTimer operation executes, it is dependent of the other jobs in the queue and their priorities. Continue Reading…

Silverlight & PHP

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 enables significantly improved interop with SOAP based web-services. Web service proxy class end-point URLs can now be configured without recompiling applications. Visual Studio also now has a new “Silverlight-enabled WCF Service” project item template that you can add to ASP.NET web projects to publish services to clients.

It is uncommon to use Silverlight in conjunction with PHP, but sometimes you may need this. In this post I will show you how easy it can be using Silverlight SOAP based web-services support. Actually it is really very simple. All we need is a PHP web service. Than we just add a Service reference to our Silverlight app, and voila.

There are a few ways to create a PHP SOAP web service. In this example I will use NuSOAP library. The NuSOAP project is hosted by SourceForge. NuSOAP is a group of PHP classes that allow developers to create and consume SOAP web services. It does not require any special PHP extensions. The current release version (0.7.3) of NuSOAP supports SOAP 1.1 specification. It can generate WSDL 1.1 and also consume it for use in serialization. Both rpc/encoded and document/literal services are supported. Continue Reading…