Wade Wegner

Taste of Chicago benefits from Windows Azure and Silverlight

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As a native Illinoisan, I know that the Taste of Chicago is a big deal!  It is the largest outdoor food and music festival in the world, and is attended by more than 3 million people each year.  If you like food and music, this is a festival for you!

This past year, the City of Chicago needed to quickly build out an interactive map for the event – and when I say quickly, I mean it.  They needed an interactive mapping experience built and deployed in less than 10 days.  To help make this a reality, the City of Chicago turned to a very capable Microsoft partner, West Monroe Partners (WMP), for assistance. 

The challenges here were pretty clear:

• Build an interactive and immersive website in less than 10 days.
• The website needed to scale massively for the event, but once the event was over they wanted to scale the infrastructure down.
• WMP wanted to leverage their existing skills and tools.

WMP proposed the following – an immersive Silverlight Deep Zoom experience running on Windows Azure (if you’re not familiar with Deep Zoom, take a look at the Hard Rock memorabilia site).  You can still visit the Taste of Chicago interactive map – check it out:

The Windows Azure Platform – which I’ve discussed many times on my blog – is Microsoft’s cloud platform.  It is comprised of the following: Windows Azure, an operating system as a service; SQL Azure, a fully relational database in the cloud; and .NET Services, consumable web-based services that provide both secure connectivity and federated access control for applications.

The City of Chicago’s decision to go with Silverlight and Windows Azure provided a host of very tangible benefits, including:

• Fast, cost-effective development
• Immediate customer satisfaction
• Increased agility
• Dynamic user experience

In fact, this is broken down in detail in the Taste of Chicago case study with WMP and the City of Chicago.

Additionally, Erik Brown – technical lead at WMP – spoke to Microsoft about their experience building the interactive map in Silverlight and on Windows Azure.  I definitely recommend you take a look:

A really great story about how a capable partner can leverage innovative technology to not only dazzle a customer, but provide a valuable service for millions of users.

I hope this helps!

Updated Silverlight Hangman Application

It only took me two or three months, but I finally updated my Silverlight Hangman application.  It was originally written an earlier version of Silverlight 1.1 alpha, and I hadn’t taken the time to update it.

The only things I had to do was switch out the Silverlight.js file and change the value of “Hidden” to “Collapsed” for the “Visibility” property of objects.  Otherwise I was able to use the same files in the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio 2008.

(Darn, I bet when Visual Studio 2008 is released soon I’ll have to update it again!  Oh well!)

Enjoy!

MSDN Masters Series Event: Silverlight

Last Monday, three of us from Statera (Troy Hall, Colin McGraw, and myself) presented on the topic of Silverlight at the first MSDN Masters Series presentations in Denver, CO.  This event was hosted by Joe Shirey, an architect evangelist for MSFT, and was geared towards technical folks at the 200-300 level.

We presented the following three sessions over the course of four hours:

1. Programming Silverlight (Wade Wegner)
2: ASP.NET, AJAX and Silverlight (Colin McGraw)
3: Silverlight and Media (Troy Hall)

We had a good healthy attendance, and it is my hope that the topic was received well by the audience.

As promised, here are the slides from the presentation:

1. MSDN Masters Series – Programming Silverlight.pdf
2. MSDN Masters Series – ASP.NET, AJAX, and Silverlight.pdf
3. MSDN Masters Series – Silverlight and Media.pdf

Additionally, Colin has provided the source code for the Photo Site he demonstrated in his talk:

- PhotoSite_VS2005WebSiteProject.zip

And lastly, here’s a slide deck I used for a "non-technical" discussion of Silverlight:

- Silverlight Intro.pdf

I hope you find these useful.  Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Setting up a Silverlight development environment

This weekend I spent some time playing with Silverlight and Orcas.  Needless to say, I am very impressed with both.  Here’s a sample Hangman application I created in about three hours.

I thought I’d go ahead and document the steps I took when I setup my development environment.  I’ll try to come back here and update the content, so that it stays pertinent as updates are released.

Setting up a Silverlight development environment

1. Make sure to read everything you can on Silverlight, as well as the Get Started Silverlight page (I’ve listed a number of good blogs at the bottom of this post).
   
2. Install Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Beta (for Windows).  This is the runtime that’s required to experience Silverlight applications.
   
3. Install Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha (for Windows).  This is the runtime that’s required to experience Silverlight applications written with .NET.
   
4. Reboot.
   
5. Install Microsoft Visual Studio codename “Orcas” Beta 1.  Soon to be Visual Studio 2008, this is the next evolution of Visual Studio 2005.  It’s pretty sweet.
   
6. Reboot.
   
7. Optional: Install Microsoft MSDN Library for Visual Studio codename “Orcas”.  Watch out – during the installation of the MSDN Library, it took about five minutes for it to complete this step.  Be patient, and let it finish.
   
   
8. Reboot.
   
9. Install Microsoft ASP.NET Futures (May 2007).  This provides you with ASP.NET controls for Silverlight.
   
10. Install Expression Blend 2 May Preview.  This is a design tool that allows a user to interact with Silverlight.  Note: this is different from Expression Blend that can be found on MSDN.  Make sure to get this download.  Also, Tim Heuer pointed me to http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/products/download.aspx?key=blend2maypreview, which provides a product key and longer trial (180-day evaluation).  Note: when I went to install Expression Blend 2, I was only given two choices: Vista, or Windows XP.  My development VM is Windows Server 2003 Standard R2.  I chose Windows XP, and haven’t had any problems.
    
    
11. Install Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for Visual Studio codename “Orcas” Beta 1.  This is an add-on that allows you to create Silverlight applications using .NET.
    
12. Download Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Beta Software Development Kit (SDK).  This is a zip file that contains documentation, samples along with templates for Visual Studio, and has also a “Go Live” license that enables building commercial applications.  I unzipped it to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\SDKs.
    
13. Download Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Software Development Kit (SDK).  This is another zip file that contains documentation and samples Silverlight Web experiences that target Silverlight 1.1 Alpha.

That should be enough to get your environment up and running.  Once that’s complete, watch this Silverlight walk-through: http://silverlight.net/quickstarts/silverlight10/xaml.aspx.

Here are some good Silverlight blogs I’ve found (send me email, or leave me a comment, if you know of more): 

• Tim Heuer – Method ~ of ~ failed
  
• Tim Sneath – Musing of a Client Platform Technical Evangelist
  
• Silverlight Blogs
  
• Mike Ormond’s Blog – In my world, things would be simpler than this …

Also, here are a few interesting posts:

• Porting to Linux
  
• Google Gears and Silverlight
  
• Why Silverlight is important
  
• Strategy behind Silverlight

I hope someone finds this useful!  Leave a comment if you’ve developed something cool, so that I can check it out!

Updates to the Hangman application

I had no idea that this game would be so popular!  Despite the crappy graphics, it’s been referred half a dozen times, and received almost 300 unique hits in the last 24-hours.  Pretty amazing!

Here’s the link to Hangman.  Give it a try.  Here’s the original Hangman announcement.

There have been a few updates to the original program, including:

• Includes the definition of the word; calls a .NET web service that parses a web response from Dictionary.com (please let me know if you find problems!)
  
• Tracks statistics (e.g. total times played, won, and lost); so far we lose a LOT more 
  
• Frees the man from the noose if you win

Yes, they’re all silly little updates, but hopefully it increases the enjoyment of the game.

Here are a couple screen shots with the updates.  The first one shows what happens when you die, err, lose.

This next one shows what happens when you win.  Doesn’t that look a lot more pleasant?

This sure is fun stuff to play with.  Now that I feel more comfortable with Silverlight and WPF, there are all kinds of things I’d like to write.  It’s a shame I’m not more artistic.

Anyone out there have some mad artistic skills that would like to team up with me?

Best of luck!