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March 2009 - Posts

Silverlight 3's New GPU Acceleration

Another new and notable feature of Silverlight 3 is support for hardware acceleration. In Silverlight 1 and 2, all rendering was done in software, which meant that the performance of complex animations and video playback depended heavily on the capabilities Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 29, 2009 10:43 AM by jprosise | 6 Comments

Silverlight 3's New Element Data Binding

One of the improvements you can look forward to in Silverlight 3 is element data binding, also known as element-to-element data binding. Silverlight 2's {Binding} expression allowed you to specify the name of the property you were binding to, but not Read More...
Posted Friday, March 27, 2009 11:24 AM by jprosise | 9 Comments

Silverlight 3's New Local Connections

One of the features of Silverlight 3 that developers are going to love is local connections, which enable Silverlight control instances to communicate with each other. Local connections use a publish/subscribe mechanism to connect senders and receivers. Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 26, 2009 7:20 PM by jprosise | 6 Comments

Silverlight 3's New Animation Easing

Easing is a new feature of Silverlight 3 for dressing up animations. I've often told students and conference audiences that you can't simulate physics with simple linear animations (also known as "from/to" animations), and that you have to use key-frame Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 26, 2009 11:01 AM by jprosise | 3 Comments

Silverlight 3's New Pixel Shaders

Silverlight 3 is loaded with new graphical goodies, and one of the goodies I'm most excited about is pixel shaders. A pixel shader is an object that transforms pixels output from the rendering pipeline before they're rendered to the display surface. Silverlight Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 25, 2009 4:32 PM by jprosise | 8 Comments

More on Silverlight 3's Writeable Bitmap

One of the WPF features that I miss in Silverlight is VisualBrush. Among other things, VisualBrush makes it easy to generate simulated reflections. To create reflections in Silverlight, we typically declare a copy of all the XAML we want to reflect, use Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 25, 2009 12:04 PM by jprosise | 7 Comments

Silverlight 3's New Writeable Bitmap

Another of the exciting new features coming in Silverlight 3 is the WriteableBitmap class. Silverlight 2 had no API for creating bitmaps, but WriteableBitmap makes creating bitmaps on the fly easy as pie. In Beta 1, you can create bitmaps from scratch, Read More...
Posted Monday, March 23, 2009 10:17 PM by jprosise | 14 Comments

Silverlight 3's New Perspective Transform

One of the many, many new features coming in Silverlight 3 (and featured in Silverlight 3 Beta 1, which shipped this week) is the perspective transform. In the Silverlight MyComix viewer I built for Silverlight 1.0, I faked the 3D rotation of a comic Read More...
Posted Friday, March 20, 2009 7:29 PM by jprosise | 2 Comments

Mandelbrot and the Southern Fried Roadshow

I'm packing up my stuff to head for Atlanta tomorrow and speak at MSDN's Southern Fried Roadshow . If you attend, you'll get to see a demo that I just put the finishing touches on. It uses dynamic Deep Zoom (that is, Deep Zoom with image tiles that are Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 12, 2009 8:02 PM by jprosise | 2 Comments

Upcoming Appearances

Winter's almost over and I'm excited that the weather is improving. This time of year, I'm glad I live in the south because I'm ready for warmth. To satisfy my jet craving, I recently joined the Georgia Jets flying club. Georgia Jets boasts probably the Read More...
Posted Monday, March 09, 2009 10:37 AM by jprosise | 0 Comments