BuyDRM Showcases First Microsoft Silverlight DRM Solution for Live Smooth Streaming

Las Vegas, NV – April 20th, 2009 – BuyDRM, a Microsoft-licensed PlayReady DRM solutions and service provider, will unveil the world’s first Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS) Live Smooth Streaming content protection solution built on Microsoft Silverlight DRM, powered by PlayReady at the NAB conference on April 20, 2009. In a joint demonstration with Envivio, Inc., BuyDRM’s KeyOS rights management platform will provide Silverlight DRM support to the 4Caster C4 compression engine during NAB in booth #SL720.

IIS Smooth Streaming is Microsoft Corp.’s HTTP-based adaptive streaming solution that takes advantage of the Web’s existing HTTP infrastructure to bring superior performance and scalability to media experiences. With IIS Smooth Streaming, consumers get minimal buffering and faster start-up times, because IIS Smooth Streaming adapts the quality of the video stream in real-time, based upon the consumer’s changing bandwidth and CPU conditions.

“BuyDRM’s integration of PlayReady into its KeyOS solution enables strong protection, flexibility and control for content providers utilizing Silverlight for their offerings,” said Steve Sklepowich, group product manager for Silverlight Media at Microsoft. “BuyDRM’s offerings and Silverlight create new opportunities for content providers to monetize their content in a variety of models.”

“We are pleased to be the first to offer a live rights management solution that fully integrates Microsoft Silverlight DRM and IIS Smooth Streaming technologies,” said Christopher Levy, CEO and Founder, BuyDRM. “BuyDRM pioneered the use of Silverlight DRM technology for live and on-demand content. KeyOS provides the entire Silverlight DRM ecosystem including live and on-demand Windows Media and Smooth Streaming-format encryption, licensing and profile management, license delivery, geo-targeting and real-time statistics and reports, which will enable a broader array of media distribution opportunities.”

About BuyDRM:

BuyDRM, a division of Austin, Texas based NFA Group Inc., was founded in 2001 by Christopher Levy to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding pay media industry. Its flagship product KeyOS is both a service and solution, representing extensive research, development and practical use in deploying commercial digital rights management technologies. BuyDRM is a preeminent provider of Microsoft Silverlight DRM technology and a featured Microsoft partner, with more than 200 customers in the entertainment, enterprise and education industries. KeyOS was chosen by Streaming Media Magazine’s viewers back-to-back for the Reader’s Choice Award in 2007 and 2008

Contact:

BuyDRM – Media Relations
Jessica Sinn
Jessica@buydrm.com

All trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

For something completely different. Adventures in artistic expression. Or how to evoke a lot of grad school art projects in the mocking way.. Or bad independent cinema.

Anyhow check it out here:

NAB09 – Microsoft Releases IIS Smooth Streaming for True HD 1080p Video Delivery

Monday, April 20 2009 – By: slteam

This past month has been whirl wind to say the least! I’m so excited and amazed to see the support of our customers and partners on the blogoshere congratulating us on the advancements we’ve made within Silverlight 3 at MIX last month. We’ve made big leaps in video support by raising the bar for high-def consumer media experiences.

Highlights include: live and on-demand adaptive streaming (with IIS Smooth Streaming) including PVR-like functionality for pausing and seeking live feeds, better format support (including native H.264), a media pipeline that lets you plug in other third-party codecs, and GPU acceleration which improves full-screen “true” HD (1080p) playback. For a recap of all the goodness in media from MIX09, see Alex Zambelli’s blog post and Ben Waggoner’s blog post. Both provide great summaries with pointers to other resources and third-party press releases, including those from Akamai, Inlet HD and others.

At NAB this week in Las Vegas, we continue to make rapid advancements in media. With over 100k attendees expected, NAB is the 2^nd largest trade show in the country, and the biggest gathering for media and video professionals in the world.

Today at NAB, Microsoft is announcing the availability of IIS Smooth Streaming. Smooth Streaming is a feature of Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services, our HTTP–based Web server platform for delivering, monetizing and caching media. You can check out the amazing quality you get today from Smooth Streaming by visiting the IIS MS site.  You can get started today with on-demand Smooth Streaming, and expect our final release for Live Smooth Streaming in the very near future.

We also have broad industry adoption for Smooth Streaming, with both top customers and media ecosystem partners.  Key early adopter customers for Smooth Streaming include online retailers and broadcasters such as HSN, NBCOlympics.com, RAI, TV2, CTV and others. They will be able to deliver true 1080p experiences – early testing has shown that engagement times far exceed those using other non-adaptive streaming platforms, so the upside for content monetization is very encouraging. Stay tuned for more info here on our findings!

In addition to customer adoption, we have been working hard with the third-party ecosystem, across encoding ISVs, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and DRM ASPs to ensure seamless work flow for protected and advertising-based content. Here are the partners announcing their support for Smooth Streaming today at NAB:

• CDNs-  Akamai, AT&T, CDNetworks, Internap, Level3, and Limelight
• Encoding ISVs- Digital Rapids, Envivio, Grab Networks (Anystream), Rhozet, Telestream, Vbrick, ViewCast, Winnov
• DRM ASPs- BuyDRM, CDNetworks, Entriq, ExtendMedia, Ipercast, iStreamPlanet

See our NAB press release for all the details.

In addition to all the great customer showcases we now have with Silverlight, here are two very cool demos to check out at NAB in our booth:

1. Live Smooth Streaming Encoding demo featuring Akamai’s AdaptiveEdge for Silverlight together with the Inlet HD encoding platform.
2. Protected Live Smooth Streaming using Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady. Envivio worked with BuyDRM to make this happen.

Look forward to meeting you at NAB. Booth SL 720!

Steve

Click Here to Watch What’s New

9 our of 10 studies prove: Resharper make your your hair grow back, your dog come home (yes even if he died), your wife will love you again and your kids will listen to you.

OK perhaps it is not a country music song played backwards.

BUT your nuts to even think about wasting all that time not using it. For someone who knows it is people not tools that always win, this is my only exception in 20 years that I will stand behind.

Why stare at a keyboard for hours wondering how to navigate a nasty tangled refactoring you know you must do when you can do the right thing AND make the 5:30 train.

Me? I hit the shift-ctrl-space repeatedly and am shocked when nothing happens. Then I install it and life is good again.

ReSharper 4.5 Released

April 8, 2009

In This Issue

Introduction
Performance and Memory Usage Improvements
Solution-Wide Code Inspections

VB9 Support
Extended Naming Style Configuration
Other Enhancements

Introduction

ReSharper 4.5 is finally out, so your next productivity upgrade is just a mouse click away!

As announced, the new version features major improvements in performance and memory usage. After all, what is a productivity tool for if not for being agile, robust and responsive?

In addition to focusing on performance enhancements, we also added a number of intelligence features and improvements.

We’ve prepared a short Flash movie to introduce the new features in ReSharper 4.5. Get the hang of things in just a few minutes!

For users of older versions we have a ReSharper 3.0 vs. ReSharper 4.5 Comparison matrix.

However, if you believe a thousand words say more than a picture does, or even a movie, go ahead and read the descriptions below :)

Alex Morozov
NET product marketing manager 
JetBrains

Performance and Memory Usage Improvements

We have managed to make ReSharper load and work faster and more smoothly in general, particularly on big (and we mean BIG) solutions:

• Wall-time measurements of solution loading show 20 to 40 percent acceleration until the solution is ready for code editing.
• Web site loading time has also been reduced by a third.
• For instance, a certain mixed-language solution consisting of about 15 thousand classes now takes only 70 seconds to load, and this includes making every ReSharper feature available.

The list of significantly accelerated operations includes:

• renaming symbols
• finding commonly used symbols
• creating symbols from usage
• analyzing large XAML files.

We’ve also cut down the volume of memory resources required to analyze jumbo autogenerated code files, which should especially benefit those who work with ASP.NET and LINQ to SQL.

Solution-Wide Code Inspections

To enable you to detect unused non-private members on the fly, we have enlisted the help of our ever-improving solution-wide analysis. We have introduced a set of specialized code inspections that only work when you let ReSharper analyze your whole solution. They help you discover:

• Unused non-private declarations
• Unused return values of non-private methods
• Unaccessed non-private fields
• Unused parameters in non-private members
• Abstract or virtual events that are never invoked
• Unassigned fields
• Members and types that can be made internal instead of public

Look for these inspections in your code and on the Marker Bar, highlighted as warnings or suggestions. In addition, new code annotations are available that you can use to mark certain unused non-private types and members to prevent ReSharper from fussing about them.

VB9 Support – We can forgive this transgression (Damon)

Visual Basic .NET developers can now benefit from VB9 language support that includes implicitly typed local variables, object initializers, anonymous types, extension methods, lambda expressions, partial methods, and embedded XML. VB9 support is all around you, courtesy of new context actions, code completion, refactorings, and Parameter Info, among other supporting features.

Extended Naming Style Configuration

Now you can define custom naming style settings for different languages and symbols including:

• types
• namespaces
• interfaces
• parameters
• method properties and events
• static and instance fields, etc.

For every kind of symbol, you can configure one of five casing options, prefixes and suffixes, variations for different access rights, abbreviations to preserve, or enable naming inspections. As a result, you can precisely align the way ReSharper completes and generates code with your specific coding guidelines.

Other Enhancements

• Go to Implementation – This new navigation feature lets you jump from usage of a base type or member to any of its end implementations, bypassing intermediate steps in the inheritance chain.
• New and Improved Refactorings – ReSharper 4.5 has added Inline Field to its family of Inline refactorings. Rename refactoring now provides name completion, and some of the other refactorings were thoroughly refactored themselves, to make them perform faster.
• Native MSTest Support – Initially available through VstsUnit Plugin and then Gallio, MSTest support has finally made its way to being provided natively in ReSharper, on par with nUnit.
• Wider Cross-Language Capabilities – Quick-fixes and context actions work better in many cross-language scenarios: for example, you can extend a control written in VB.NET+XAML by choosing "create from usage" right from a C# usage. Add increased coverage for XAML and ASP.NET, and you get a substantial package of improvements.
• Smoother Language and Framework Support – Following the tradition of ReSharper 4.1, we have improved compatibility with F#, Compact Framework, Silverlight 2, and other languages and tools.

Grab your all-new productivity – download ReSharper 4.5 now at http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/download.

ReSharper 4.5 is provided as a free upgrade from ReSharper 4.0. If you own an older version, please contact us to check your upgrade availability at sales@jetbrains.com.

JetBrains Team

• Sergey
  Anchipolevsky

• Igor
  Alshannikov

• Alexander
  Anisimov

• Dmitry
  Avdeev

• Sergey
  Baranov

• Yury
  Belyaev

• Natalia
  Belyaeva

• Elena
  Bukreeva

• Bulenkov
  Konstantin

• Jana
  Charif

• Nikolay
  Chashnikov

• Alexander
  Chernikov

• Roman
  Chernyatchik

• Sergey
  Coox

• Sergey
  Dmitriev

• Ilia
  Dumov

• Kirill
  Falk

• Michael
  Gerasimov

• Sergey
  Golovachev

• Alexey
  Gopachenko

• Peter
  Gromov

• Michaela
  Hroncová

• Dmitry
  Jemerov

• Maria
  Khalusova

• Valentin
  Kipiatkov

• Cyril
  Konopko

• Anna
  Kozlova

• Mikhail
  Kropotov

• Eugene
  Kudelevsky

• Alexey
  Kudravtsev

• Olga
  Lobacheva

• Vyacheslav
  Lukianov

• Anton
  Makeev

• Egor
  Malyshev

• Maria
  Marakulina

• Kirill
  Maximov

• Sasha
  Maximova

• Irina
  Megorskaya

• Lucie
  Morawiecova

• Alexander
  Morozov

• Maxim
  Mossienko

• Ekaterina
  Musienko

• Ann
  Oreshnikova

• Eugene
  Pasynkov

• Vaclav
  Pech

• Alexey
  Pegov

• Eugene
  Petrenko

• Irina
  Petrovskaya

• Mikhail
  Pilin

• Julia
  Repina

• Elizaveta
  Revyakina

• Ilya
  Ryzhenkov

• Andrew
  Serebryansky

• Ilya
  Sergey

• Maxim
  Shafirov

• Tatiana
  Slavina

• Olesya
  Smirnova

• Konstantin
  Solomatov

• Oleg
  Stepanov

• Pavel
  Sher

• Ekaterina
  Shliakhovetskaja

• Oleg
  Shpynov

• Gregory
  Shrago

• Eugene
  Toporov

• George
  Udov

• Sergey
  Vasiliev

• Natalie
  Yaremych

• Yegor
  Yarko

• Timur
  Zambalayev

• Sergey
  Zhukov

• Eugene
  Zhuravlev

• Alexander
  Zverev

CORRECTION: If you got here from a link stating Silverlight 3 plays ‘Adobe’ video I have been wisely mentored to not spread confusion in that nothing here is Adobe owned. These are open standards. I meant ‘Silverlight 3 plays video standards commonly leveraged by Adobe’. Thanks Alex and John. In trying to write a catchy headline I just confused the issue. This is why I am a developer, not a writer (grin).

Things just got vastly more interesting on the RIA front, especially for HD Video and Digital Media in general. Why?

Adobe has no reason to ignore Silverlight now…They do that at their own peril and eventual harm.

Silverlight 3 beta is out.

Hardware Accelerated
Silverlight 3 H.264 AAC MP4  Video
Media Player

Oh and also Windows Media including the
latest Smooth Streaming from IIS 7.

Check out this video player demo in Silverlight 3 playing an HD format not before available to Silverlight (the first I have ever seen and believe me I looked hard)…

As long time advocates of domain-driven practice it should be no surprise that we prefer ‘Domain Specific Language’ approaches.

Of course now it seems obvious to everyone that these are the future. Sure there were many bumps in the road, but it is not even an interesting debate about ‘if’.

This article is so good from Martin Fowler we had to repost:

TIP: .NET Developer? Start learning the Oslo set of technologies, especially’ all things ‘M’. We pay tribute to ‘M’ in our demo Silverlight cube on Silverlight.net showcase.

DslMigration
dsl
4 February 2009
Reactions

One danger that DSL advocates need to guard against is the notion that first you design a DSL, then people use it. Like any other deice of software, a successful DSL will evolve. This means that scripts written in an earlier version of a DSL may fail when run with a later version.

Like many properties of DSL, good and bad, this is really very much the same as happens with a library. If you take a library from a someone and they upgrade the library, you may end up stuck. In essence DSLs don’t really do anything to change that. Your DSL definition is essentially a PublishedInterface and you have to deal with the consequences just the same.

This problem can be more prominent with external DSLs. Many changes to an internal DSL can be handled through refactoring tools (for those languages that have them). But refactoring tools won’t help with an external DSL. In practice this problem is less of an issue than it might be. An internal DSL with scripts that are outside the control of the DSL implementers won’t be picked up with refactoring. So the only difference between internal and external lies with DSL scripts within the same code base.

One technique for handling evolution of DSLs is to provide tools that automatically migrate a DSL from one version to another. These can be run either during an upgrade, or automatically should you try to run an old version script against a new version.

There are two broad ways to handle migration. The first is an incremental migration strategy. This is essentially the same notion that’s used by people doing evolutionary database design. For every change you do to your DSL definition, create a migration program that automatically migrates DSL scripts from the old version to the new version.

An important part of incremental migration is that you keep the changes as small as you can. Imagine you are upgrading from version 1 to 2, and have ten changes you want to make to your DSL definition. In this case, don’t create just one migration script to migrate from version 1 to 2, instead create at least 10 scripts. Change the DSL definition one feature at a time, and write a migration script for each change. You may find it useful to break it down even more and add a feature with more than one step (and thus more than one migration). They way I’ve described it may sound like more work than a single script, but the point is that migrations are much easier to write if they are small, and it’s easy to chain multiple migrations together. As a result you’ll be much faster writing ten scripts than one.

The other approach is model-based migration. This is a tactic you can use if you are using a Semantic Model (which is something I almost always recommend). With this approach you support multiple parsers for your language, one for each released version. (So you only do this for version 1 and 2, not for the intermediate steps.) Each parser populates the semantic model. When you use a semantic model, the parser’s behavior is pretty simple, so it’s not too much trouble to have several of them around. You then run the appropriate parser for the version of script you are working with. This handles multiple versions, but doesn’t migrate the scripts. To do the migration you write a generator from the semantic model that generates a DSL script representation. This way you can run the parser for a version 1 script, populate the semantic model, and then emit a version 2 script from the generator.

One problem with the model-based approach is that it’s easy to lose stuff that doesn’t matter to the semantics, but is something that the script writers want to keep. Comments are the obvious example. This is exacerbated if there’s too much smarts in the parser, but then the need to migrate this way may help encourage the parsers to stay dumb – which is Good Thing.

If the change to the DSL is big enough, you may not be able to transform a version 1 script into a version 2 semantic model. In which case you may need to keep a version 1 model (or intermediate model) around and give it the ability to emit a version 2 script.

I don’t have a strong preference between these two alternatives.

Migration scripts can be run by script programmers themselves when needed, or automatically by the DSL system. In order to run automatically it’s very useful to have the script record which version of the DSL it is so the parser can detect it easily and trigger the resulting migrations.

Microsoft “Oslo” Frequently Asked Questions

As a convenience I’ve posted the CTP assets for Visual Studio 2010.

You can find them here:

http://www.ny.proxydns.com/vs2010/

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit – November Preview

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including: C# 4.0, Visual Basic 10, F#, Parallel Computing Platform, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Data.

Prerequisites

The following software packages must be installed in order to complete the labs in this training kit. Items that are required only for specific parts ot the kit are indicated below.

Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0

Presentations

 

Overview of the .NET Framework 4.0

This presentation goes over the new technologies and enhancements being made in the version 4 release of the .NET Framework.

Overview of the Visual Studio 2010

This presentation covers is a high-level over of the value propositions for Visual Studio 2010 and a walkthrough some of the great features being added to the IDE.

This training kit will be updated with additional presentations in the future.

Hands-on-Labs

Visual Studio 2010: Office Programmability

In this lab you will see how new features in Visual Studio 2010, C# 4.0, and Visual Basic 10 make it easer to develop applications leveraging Microsoft Office. Additionally, you’ll see a number of other powerful features which speed other elements of Office development.

Visual Studio 2010: Test Driven Development

Visual Studio 2010 brings with it several enhancements to help cut development friction and enable the developer to focus on the task at hand: writing high-quality code. In the following exercises we’ll highlight several of the new features that the TDD developer can use to enhance his/her development cadence. Visual Studio helps your cadence by cutting the number of keystrokes to accomplish frequently performed tasks, speeds navigation through your solution, and enables you to use test frameworks other than MSTest.

Parallel Extensions: Building Multicore Applications with .NET

Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform (PCP) is providing tools enabling developers to leverage the power of Multicore processors in an efficient, maintainable, and scalable manner. Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework brings several important concepts into this toolset. In this Hands-On Lab, you will learn how to parallelize an existing algorithm by using the static Parallel helper class, create and run Tasks, use the Future<T> class to create and run Tasks that return a value and use Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) to optimize LINQ queries to exectue in a parallel environment

Introduction To Managed Extensibility Framework

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) allows developers to provide hooks into their .NET applications for extensions by first and third parties. MEF can be thought of as a general application extension facility. In this Hands-On Lab, you will learn how to define extensibility points for components, perform conditional binding and component creation and import extended assemblies while an application is running.

ASP.NET AJAX

In this Hands-On Lab, you will learn how to leverage new client-side templates to easily bind data to your UI, use the DataView control to render data on the client, extend the template engine by creating custom Markup Extensions, and declaratively instantiate behaviors and controls

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

ASP.NET Dynamic Data MVC allows developers to create web based applications that dynamically create pages based on the application’s data model. ASP.NET Dynamic Data MVC provides scaffolding and templates that are easily customizable and extensible to reflect the custom functionality required for a solution. In this Hands-On Lab, you will learn how to use Dynamic Data MVC to easily render data over forms and then to easily create your own views and enforce data validation.

Intro To Project "Velocity"

In this Hands-On Lab, you will learn how to install and configure Velocity, program against Velocity’s API and use Velocity’s SessionState provider with ASP.NET.

Intro To F#

This Hands-On Lab is comprised by the following exercises. Examine the basic F# types including tuples and functions. Discover how the "let" keyword allows values to be bound to identifiers. See that in F# functions are the same as any other value, and are handled the same way. Demonstrate how this allows advanced language features such as partially-applied or "curried" functions. Discover how F# lists are built and the power that can be achieved by F#’s "Head + Tail" approach. Demonstrate the powerful pattern matching and recursion capabilities of F#. Demonstrate the power and usefulness of discriminated unions in F#.

This is the first post covering techniques for both sending data into your Silverlight environment from ASP.NET as well as getting data out of Silverlight without resorting to a lot of new elements in your architecture. The goal is to use what you already have with the least fuss.

You may think you need to resort to ‘pushing’ all data from Silverlight into say a service using WCF but that is not the case in many scenarios.

For example, you may have activity which the user creates inside Silverlight 2.0 that results in visual elements you want to send out to ASP.NET for persistence in your ORM environment (where Silverlight has no involvement).

From ASP.NET to Silverlight 2.0

First, let’s quickly review the easiest way to pass information into your Silverlight control.

InitParamaters

Here is the on-line help:

If parameters are included, they are typically in comma-delimited pairs and are available as a dictionary object in a Silverlight 2 startup event. These parameters are not used in a Silverlight 1.0-based application.

If an action on an .aspx page causes a postback to occur, the Silverlight plug-in will start again with its content specified in the Source property. The current value of the InitParameters property is sent to the Silverlight plug-in. This enables you to change the InitParameters property before a postback occurs.

The Silverlight 2 application specified in the Source property can access the initialization parameters specified in the InitParameters property in the StartupEventArgs parameter of the Silverlight Application Startup event.

We will walk through an entire example of this, including some content that will make sense in how we can move data back out of Silverlight 2.0 to ASP.NET.

Code for this Scenario

We will be using a web UserControl (.ascx) as our control in this example, because as you will see, we need more than just the Silverlight control to make this work.

ASCX Host

<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="SilverlightInt.ascx.cs"
  Inherits="SilverlightInt" %>
<%@ Register Assembly="System.Web.Silverlight"

 Namespace="System.Web.UI.SilverlightControls"
    TagPrefix="asp" %>
<asp:Silverlight ID="SilverlightView" runat="server" 

Source="~/ClientBin/AspNetIntegration.xap"
    MinimumVersion="2.0.31005.0" />
<asp:TextBox ID="SilverOutput" runat="server"  

 Style="display: none"></asp:TextBox>

ASCX Code Behind

    public partial class SilverlightInt : UserControl
    {
        [Browsable(true)]
        public String InitialText { get; set; }

        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            SetSilverlightInitParamaters();
        }

        void SetSilverlightInitParamaters()
        {
            // Note: We need the client ID for later...
            var InitParams = new Dictionary<String, String>
                             {
                                 {
                                     "outputcontrol",
                                    SilverOutput.ClientID
                                     },
                                 {
                                     "InitialText",
                               InitialText ?? "Hello World"
                                     }
                             };

            SilverlightView.InitParameters =          

         InitParams.ToSilverlightInit();
        }
    }

You might notice the extension method ToSilverlightInit(). Here is the code:

 public static class SilverlightIntegrationExtensions
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Parse the dictionary into Silverlight format
        /// for InitParams
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="target">The target.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static String ToSilverlightInit(
             this IDictionary<String, String> target)
        {
            if (target == null)
                throw new ArgumentNullException("target");

            var stringBuffer = new StringBuilder();

            foreach(var kvp in target)
            {
                if (stringBuffer.Length > 0)
                    stringBuffer.Append(",");

                // Eliminate case sensitivity
              stringBuffer.Append(kvp.Key.ToLower()
                + "=" + kvp.Value);

            }

            return stringBuffer.ToString();

        }

    }

This is hosted in a normal ASPX page as follows (surrounding detail omitted):

  <form id="form1" runat="server" style="height: 100%;">
    <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">
    </asp:ScriptManager>
    <div>
        <asp:Image Width="300px" ImageUrl="Silverlight_Logo_2.png"
           runat="server" />
        <br />
        <asp:Literal ID="sentText" runat="server" /><br />
        <hr />
        <integrate:SilverlightInt ID="SilverlightInt1"
           runat="server"     InitialText="This is a Test" />
    </div>
    </form>

Here is what it looks like:

Silverlight Code for Initialization

 public partial class App : Application
    {
        public App()
        {
            Startup += Application_Startup;
            UnhandledException += Application_UnhandledException;
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
        {
            var PassedInArguments = e.InitParams;
            RootVisual = new SilverlightView(PassedInArguments);
        }

The interesting parts are that we are accessing the InitParams off the Startup’s ‘e’ object. This is a Dictionary<String,String> which is what prompted the ASP.NET design.

Also, we do not use a paramaterless constructor on the initial RootVisual. Instead this is the code:

Silverlight View

<UserControl x:Class="AspNetIntegration.SilverlightView"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">

    <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top"
       x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Gray">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="30" />
            <RowDefinition Height="30" />
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
            <ColumnDefinition Width="150" />
        </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

        <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center"       

     VerticalAlignment="Center"
             Grid.Row="0" Text="Inside Silverlight" />
        <TextBox LostFocus="SendResultBackToAspNet" Grid.Row="1"
          BorderThickness="2" BorderBrush="Black"               

  x:Name="initialText"  />

    </Grid>

</UserControl>

Code Behind

public partial class SilverlightView : UserControl
    {
        readonly IDictionary<string, string> _initParamaters;
        string _initialText =               

 "Nothing was Passed In - initialtext was empty";

        public SilverlightView(            

  IDictionary<string, string> passedInArguments)
        {
            _initParamaters = passedInArguments;
            InitializeComponent();
            Loaded += OnLoaded;
        }

        void OnLoaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            SetInitialText();
        }

        void SetInitialText() {

            if (_initParamaters.ContainsKey("initialtext"))
            {
                _initialText = _initParamaters["initialtext"];
            }

            initialText.Text = _initialText;
        }

        void SendResultBackToAspNet(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {

        }
    }

Notice the ‘SendResultBackToAspNet’ is empty.. That is coming next and is the tricky part.

Coming Next

The code will all be available for download and the much more interesting aspect of sending data back the other way will be presented.

Damon

Deep Zoom 3D over PowerPoint in SharePoint

Latest video production featuring a new revised build of the viewer.

This is fairly well known but I realized I hadn’t seen it blogged about (sorry if already covered).

Your likely used to doing this:

 public event EventHandler<AnimationImageEventArgs>
                AnimationImageClicked;

 private void OnClick(object sender, AnimationImageEventArgs e)
{

    if (AnimationImageClicked != null)

          AnimationImageClicked(sender, e);
}

No need for that null check. I for one tend to forget them in the bowels of my teams code. What is better then eliminating the issue!

This is a way to ‘always have one subscriber’ which you can consider a sort of ‘null object’ pattern implementation for delegates. Checking for null just sucks and I love this kind of ubiquitous removal of it.

The first person I saw doing this was Juval Lowy, the master craftsman for basically all things .NET but known recently for utter mastery of WCF in his books and at his firm IDesign. Highly recommend all his writing, code samples and thoughts.

public event EventHandler<AnimationImageEventArgs>
            AnimationImageClicked = delegate { };

private void OnClick(object sender, AnimationImageEventArgs e)
{

           AnimationImageClicked(sender, e);
}

Damon