mix09 10k entry

I’ve authored an entry for the Mix09 10k Smart Coding Challenge called Verdant. It’s an experimental game idea where the player influences the growth of plant vines to collect as many rain droplets as possible.

Contest entrants are limited to 10kilobytes of source code and resource files, so like many others, I was constantly budgeting features, making lots of trade off decisions. It was a very enjoyable exercise, because I ended up cutting all my grandiose ideas like explanatory tooltips, sprite animations for the plants, keyboard input, background music, and lots of nice-to-have game mechanics like power ups and penalties, all of which would’ve been way over budget.

My thanks go out to Adam Kinney and crew for putting the contest together and making that weekend much longer and more enjoyable.

attachedbindings for silverlight

Today I released a small pet project of mine on Codeplex, called AttachedBindings. It’s a library for Silverlight which attempts to bridge the feature gap of Bindings between Silverlight and WPF. It contains an attached behavior that implements a form of ElementName Binding between two FrameworkElements.

Here is a simple example, which shows a Calendar control that changes opacity when Slider.Value changes.

<e:Calendar ab:AttachedBinding.Binding=
    "TargetProperty=Opacity, ElementName=OpacitySlider, Path=Value"/>
<Slider x:Name="OpacitySlider" Minimum="0" Maximum="1"
    SmallChange="0.1" LargeChange="0.1" Value="1.0"/>

Enjoy!

Disclaimer : Thanks go to Neil Mosafi, his ElementNameBinder was first on the scene. I reasoned an Attached Behavior with a custom TypeConverter would be easier to use, and I was able to make some optimizations along the way.

identitymine showcase

I’ve been privileged to work at IdentityMine at a time when some truly amazing interaction design and end-user experience work has been happening, but it’s always been difficult to showcase that work to others. This is usually because of contractual obligations, but it’s also a logistics problem. Silverlight work is much easier to disseminate; simply install the plug-in and go to a site with good content, but WPF and particularly Surface have more difficult hurdles to get around in order to have others experience work that IdentityMine has done.

To resolve some of this, IdentityMine has set up some good quality videos on a Vimeo channel, which includes our official Reel.  Below is the Surface Promo. Special thanks to Kurt for setting this up!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

survey of silverlight markup

So I just read Robby’s fantastic and informative post discussing the state of 3d support in silverlight and I had one nitpick clarification I wanted to point out. Some context; in his post he discusses markup in silverlight within the “‘Real’ 3D Frameworks” part, stating

Unfortunately, Silverlight doesn’t yet have the parser extensibility required to make these APIs markup friendly. For now, at least, the 3D API may be compatible with WPF in code, but there’s not a good markup story.

This isn’t exactly true. Silverlight supports custom TypeConverters, which would allow the xaml parser to convert custom type markup to objects. This is just a case of Kit3D hasn’t yet ported those over, for things like Vector3D using a Vector3DConverter.

The xaml story for silverlight is pretty strong, over all. In addition to TypeConverters, you can use XmlnsDefinition in silverlight, so that you can map several namespaces to a single schema Uri providing a more natural usage of namespaces in your xaml. The only thing that silverlight is really lacking is MarkupExtensions, which incidentally I think will be added in a future release, based on the fact that the MS.Internal.IMarkupExtension interface exists in System.Windows.dll.

[Updated 8.5.2008]
Hey Robby, Turns out I was wrong about XmlnsDefinitions. Yes the attributes exist in silverlight 2, but the XamlParser does not respect them. As Mark has informed me, this is a feature that will be added after Silverlight 2 RTM. On the plus side, TypeConverters definitely work. 🙂

silverlight 2 beta 2 maintenance release

A maintenance update to silverlight 2 beta 2 was released via Windows Update today, bumping the runtime version number from 2.0.30523.6 to 2.0.30523.8.

From the KB Article:

This update improves stability, media streaming, and the auto-update component. This update also improves support for Mozilla Firefox 3.

I’m still hopeful that Silverlight 2 RTM will have a Trigger construct of some kind. But I’m convinced ElementName bindings, Data Template Selectors, and Markup Extensions won’t come until 2.5 or 3.