Using Silverlight in your next casual gaming
Audience: Developer
It should be no surprise that the popularity of online gaming continues to increase. Our desire to be interactively entertained makes casual games a great outlet for the increasing time we spend on the Internet. Traditionally, Adobe Flash has been the platform of choice for casual games, but that’s about to change. Lets talk about how you can build your own casual game in Silverlight. Do you have a favorite way to integrate sound, or check for two sprites colliding? How about controlling movement or loading game boards. Lets discuss how we all can leverage the power of the Silverlight framework, to build amazing games.

My animation was really simple, I wanted the text to start out as white old for a few milliseconds then fade into my dynamic color. My first tendency was to just create the Storyboard procedurally, but did not want to lose the “blendability” of my control. Then it dawned on me how simple the solution was. Just name the second KeyFrame.

All to often we forget that we can give virtually any XAML node an x:Name and the framework will create a private reference to the element.

<SplineColorKeyFrame x:Name="destColor" KeyTime="00:00:00.3000000" 
      Value="{StaticResource GemColor}"/>

Once we have named our node, in the corresponding code behind we can simply reference any property from that element.

destColor.Value = Color.FromArgb(255, 10, 10, 10);

Presenter: Scott McAndrew, Director of Strategy, Terralever
When: Tuesday, November 18, 2008, 2:00pm Eastern (11:00am Pacific)
Duration:  60 minutes
Includes Live Q&A

As the world of marketing continuously changes, organizations of all sizes must take a critical eye on where their prospects and customers get information about the industry, your brand and how they make buying decisions on the web.

Customers and prospects want to be reached with new marketing tools that involve the use of social networking sites and Web 2.0 technologies. Bottom line: businesses that have online marketing strategies have an edge over the competition.

Join Scott McAndrew, a strategic marketing guru with Terralever, an interactive marketing agency who’s clients include Red Bull, NBA, Facebook and Microsoft. In this webinar, Scott will help lay out your Marketing Playbook with the 7 Online Marketing Methods that will give you competitive advantage and change the way customers find you online.

During the webinar you will learn:

• Key challenges facing marketers today–and how to navigate the many options out there for you
• Tools you can start leveraging today in Social Media and Social Networks to build a community of brand advocates
• Demystifying vertical search. What is it? And how B2B, B2C and niche marketers are seeing benefits
• What’s possible–what is the benchmark
• How to measure, test and mature your online marketing program
• And much more

• Module 1: Getting Started – Architecture / framework
• Module 2: Movement and collision detection
• Module 3: Design – Sprites, boards and dialogs
• Module 4: Animations and sound
• Module 5: Initialization and Deployment
• Module 6: Advanced concepts (Physics, Multiplayer, Optimization)

Make sure to check out the article at http://www.microsoft.com/expression/news-press/newsletter/

Code: Game.zip

• How I Use Social Media to Make Real Money
• New Media Interchange Meetup
• Using Web 2.0 Tools in Education
• Improving Your Online Video
• How to strike a balance between sharing information freely and making a living using New Media
• The Strange and Wonderful Adventure of NewsGangLive Social Media… The Impact On You And Your Business
• 5 Reasons Your Podcast Sucks
• Building a podcast from the ground up
• Bottoms Up Leadership- Why are the most effective organizations leaderless?
• Developing Community Around Your Podcast
• Video on the Net: what should you be sending through the pipes?
• Getting Big Media Coverage Using Social Media
• Video on the Net: what should you be sending through the pipes?
• Exergaming: Health Outside the XBox
• So you want to make money with your podcast? Now what?
• Podtaint: Fame in the New Media World
• Saving the World with Social Media
• Intro to Lighting for Video
• Resident Feminist: Alice in the Wonder of Web 2.0 Technologies
• Is Video Conversation Going to Thrive or Fade Out?
• What’s involved in going from blog to book?
• Starting it up Quick- How to start a startup and not make the classic mistakes quickly.
• More than podcasting: It’s a Many-to-Many Media World
• Real World Example: How to record and edit a remote tape sync show
• Left brain, Right brain, Cyber brain…How to get clear on your specialized topic for fun and profit!
• Healing Arts & New Media
• Web Marketing from Overwhelm to Clarity – Building a Foundation to Monetize Your Web Business

JavaFX is a powerful client technology for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs) with immersive media and content across the multiple screens of your life.

JavaFX technology features a high-performance declarative scripting language, JavaFX Script, for building and delivering the next generation of rich Internet applications for desktop, mobile, TV, and other consumer platforms. To bridge the gap between user experience design and programming logic, JavaFX technology will provide a suite of tools and authoring solutions that enable unprecedented collaboration between designers and developers.

Upcoming features of JavaFX 1.0
2D Vector Graphics

• Geometric Shapes
• Strokes with various styles and colors
• Paths and Curves

2D Effects

• Alpha blending and Compositing
• Gradients and Fills
• Transformations
• Texture mapping
• Clipping and Masking
• Anti-aliasing

Media

• Native audio codecs
• Native video codes

I am excited to download the SDK and see how it works.

Along that same line, I read that the anticipated Google mobile phone could be the first phone to be based on the JavaFX Mobile phone operating system. If this is the case, then we should all be paying attention to where this platform is headed.

“Nobody in their right mind will use SilverLight on the internet for a long time…..Until a user can just go to a page with SilverLight and use it, just like Flash, SilverLight won’t see the light of day on the Web….”

As one might imagine this response got me thinking, is making a user install a plugin a barrier to Silverlight adoption in the development community?  Now certainly as a Silverlight MVP I am a bit biased, but there is no way anyone can convince me that the preexistence of a 4.6MB plugin has anything to do with developer adoption.

In my day job I manage a team of developers, mostly .NET but a few experts in Flash and Flex.  Not to long ago I asked one of my senior Flash developers why he was so willing to learn Silverlight for a game project.  His response was “Why would I not want to learn another tool that makes me even more marketable”.

Bravo!  Silverlight isn’t about hunting down Flash in a global attempt to make it extinct. It’s not about one framework being better then the other.  Its about choices.  Choices push competition and competition pushed technology.   Sure Microsoft might have its own agenda, but Silverlight gives developers and interactive sites a choice. If I had the time and energy I would love to learn every programing language on every platform.  Boy would I have choices.

On 08-08-08 Silverlight 2.0 will be the technology used to broadcast over 2000 hours of the 2008 Summer Olympic games.  If the last Olympics can predict anything, then NBC should expect over 4 billion television viewers in August.  If even 10% watch some Olympics online,  you are looking at 400 million Silverlight installs.  I think it is fair to say that is a pretty nice jump on Silverlight market saturation.

This f8 Terralever was selected by Red Bull as one of only a handful of launch partners that would have the opportunity to integrate Facebook Connect (announced  during the keynote) with some of their properties.  As you can imagine were were very excited about this opportunity, and more excited about what Connect will mean to all of our clients.

For those unfamiliar with the announcement, Facebook connect gives  external website the ability to integrate Facebook users  directly into there site.  This integration, allows a site to extend its user bases from those that already exist, to any of the over 100 million Facebook users.  With this integration a site instantly has access to customizing content based on that users profile, and even more important, that users entire social graph. Imagine the possibilities.

So what does this mean to Red Bull?   Below you we see a screen shot of a new and exciting interface that the team at Terralever has created for www.redbullusa.com. This interface leverages connect as a way to change the way in which users view content.

The team at Terralever did an amazing job at producing this example.  In just a few weeks we took four disparate sites (surfing, skating, skiing, and snowboarding), and aggregated each sites content and comments, into Red Bull USA.  The really cool part is that using Connect, we can now allow users the ability to read and comment on content they may never have stumbled upon.  Look for this to all go live some time this summer.